Thich Chuc Thanh – Thursday, October 1^st, 5:00pm (Tucker 127A)

“Buddhist Monastic Life, Ethics, & Meditation”

Thich Chuc Thanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and head of the Dong Hung Temple (Buddhist Education Center of America) in Virginia Beach will speak about Buddhist monastic life, ethics, and meditation.

Julia Cassaniti – 5:00pm, Thursday, November 5^th  (Andrews Hall 101)

“Mental Training, Attention Practices, and Buddhist Cultural Models of Mind”

Prof. Julia Cassaniti (University of Virginia) is a psychological anthropologist whose research explores the relationship between mind, culture, and religion in contemporary Asian societies. Drawing on decades of ethnographic research in Thailand and across transnational Asia, she examines how social relationships, cultural beliefs, and religious practices shape experiences of health, well-being, emotion, perception, and reality. She is the author of Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community and Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia, and co-editor of Universalism Without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture. 

Dr. Matthew Sacchet – 12:00-1:30pm, Monday, November 30^th – Virtual Lecture; Zoom Link: https://cwm.zoom.us/j/3219998277

“Advanced Meditation and the Third Wave of Meditation Research”

Dr. Matthew Sacchet, Director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, will provide an overview of the history and evolution of meditation research across three waves. He will trace the field from early investigations of meditation’s clinical effects, through the rise of research on clinical mechanisms, to an emerging third wave focused on advanced meditation and meditative development. He will then highlight multidisciplinary examples of research within this new wave, including investigations of advanced meditative states, stages of development, and meditative endpoints associated with mastery of practice.