Agenda

30th April 2024
Aula Baratto, Dorsoduro 3246 - Venice  2 floor

Practices of Being-With Animals: Motivating Responsibility on Planet Earth

Janet Gyatso
Harvard Divinity School

Institutional greetings 
Tiziana Lippiello Rector

Introduction
Francesca Tarocco Director of NICHE

Abstract:
Animal life constitutes an essential component of both our climate change crisis, and the possibility of continued flourishing of life on Planet Earth.  However, it is one thing to realize this point intellectually, another to actually implement what it will take to facilitate that flourishing, including the major changes and sacrifices that will be required of human beings.
This talk will explore a few focused practices – some coming out of Buddhist ethics -- for cultivating attention, recognition, and commitment to the perspectives and values of animal intelligence. Short video clips will illustrate what we can learn from the astonishing ethical powers of animals, as well as human practices to strengthen our discernment and commitment. And, hopefully, our animal intelligences.

Bio:
Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her 2015 book Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press) focuses upon alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies in Tibetan medicine in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. Her other books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet.
She has also been writing on sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism, and on the current female ordination movement in Buddhism. Previous topics of her scholarship have included visionary revelation in Buddhism; lineage, memory, and authorship; the philosophy of experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet. Her current writing concerns the phenomenology of living well with animals and related ethical issues and practices.
Gyatso was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2018. She was president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies from 2000 to 2006, and co-chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion from 2004 to 2010. She teaches lecture courses and advanced seminars on Buddhist history, ritual, and ideas, and on Tibetan literary practices and religious history.
In both teaching and writing she draws on cultural and literary theory, and endeavors to widen the spectrum of intellectual resources for the understanding of Buddhist and Tibetan history. She is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Committee on the Study of Religion, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. She is also involved in the development of a new track for the training of Buddhist lay ministers and leaders in the master of divinity program at HDS.

Participation in presence: Please fill in this form to reserve your seat, places are limited.

Participate online link below
ID: 886 1958 9738
Passcode: Niche2024