Hendrix College professor receives Fulbright scholar grant to explore Buddhist practices

by Talk Business & Politics staff ([email protected]) 481 views 

Hendrix College Associate Professor of Religious Studies Dr. William M. Gorvine has been selected as a 2020-21 Fulbright U.S. Scholar. He will use the funding to explore the relationship between traditional Buddhist practices and secular training in mindfulness and compassion.

Gorvine’s project will have him spending several months in India, working with Tibetan monastic scholars at Menri Monastery, where he has maintained connections with the community of monks for the past two decades.

“They were important contributors to the book project, and I’m excited to work with them again,” he said. His 2019 book, Envisioning a Tibetan Luminary: The Life of a Modern Bönpo Saint, is based on fieldwork conducted in eastern Tibet and within the Bön exile community in India.

Since his time as a Fulbright Scholar in India while a graduate student at the University of Virginia, when he also took an immersive pre-dissertation trip to Tibet, Gorvine has studied the living Tibetan minority tradition of Bön and its influence on broader contemplative practices.

For this project, he will examine key works that provide instruction and advice on contemplative practices that correspond to popular forms of secular mindfulness and compassion training. He will explore how certain traditional Tibetan materials connected with current contemplative approaches have the potential to contribute to and complicate practitioners’ understanding of their everyday endeavors.

Gorvine plans for this project to culminate in a new book that will highlight the ongoing influence of writer and teacher Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859-1934). The project will also involve Tibetan language work and original translation—meaning it will make some works available to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

“I hope this project will provide a course correction of sorts — a reminder that mindfulness practices have origins outside of the social sciences, which is where secular culture often places them,” Gorvine said.

The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields.

The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given more than 390,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and professionals of all backgrounds and fields the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.