Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universitaet Berlin
July - September 2014

The Tibetan Buddhist Tradition "The Great Perfection"

Currently, Eran Laish's research focuses on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition "The Great Perfection", with special emphasis on its distinct contemplative practices. As this tradition advocates a non-dual vision that challenges the division between worldly life and the state of freedom, it provides a set of unique practices that transcend the customary notions of intentionality, development and transformation. By inquiring the main aspects and the ways through which these practices were actually applied in the milieu of Tibetan Buddhism, he wishes to explicate the implications of those on our understanding of human consciousness and its experiential possibilities as reflected in meditative methods.

Eran Laish is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Jerusalem and a teacher at the department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has a Bachelor degree in cognitive science and a Master degree in Comparative Religion, both from the Hebrew University. His PhD dissertation focused on the relations between theory and praxis in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition "The Great Perfection". Other than that, he is also interested in the comparative investigation of Buddhist and phenomenological conceptions of selfhood, experience and being.

Eran Laish will teach a seminar within the Global Humanities Campus entitled Knowledge and Method in the Ancient School of Tibetan Buddhism.