An online lecture by the world-renowned scholar of contemplative studies and East Asian religions, Brown University Professor Harold Roth

In a world that is fraught with all kinds of personal, societal and environmental challenges, how can we help to build psychological resilience in our students?

At Brown our answer is through the development of "Contemplative Intelligence;" this is the goal of the important new academic field we have pioneered at Brown: Contemplative Studies. In this lecture I will discuss the pedagogical structures of this new field, explain the intellectual rationale that is involved in our empirical exploration of "inner space," and present some of the results of cognitive scientific research on our students. I will also show the influence of our program in higher education and in the creation of a new society of scholars, the International Society for Contemplative Research. I will also point out how our pedagogical model draws deeply upon East Asian cultures and worldviews.

Harold D. Roth is professor of religious studies and founding director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. He is a specialist in Chinese philosophy and textual analysis, the classical Daoist tradition, the comparative study of contemplative experiences, and a pioneer of the academic field of contemplative studies, in which he created the first Bachelor’s degree program at a major research university in North America. He has written and edited nine books and more than 50 scholarly articles in these areas including Original Tao (Columbia, 1999), a translation and analysis of the oldest text on breath meditation in China, “Against Cognitive Imperialism,” (Religion East and West, 2008), a critique of conceptual bias in Cognitive Sciences and Religious Studies. He led the team of four scholars who created the thousand-page magnum opus, The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China (2010). This 139 BCE Daoist compendium was long considered the last great untranslated work of classical Chinese thought. Many of his philosophical writings were compiled in The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (2021). In 2021 he also published Manifesting Zen: Master Dharma Talks from Mt. Baldy by Kyōzan Jōshū Sasaki Rōshi, the Rinzai Zen master with whom he did intensive study and practice for 40 years.