This panel explores how diverse contemplative traditions have articulated the interconnected concepts of “life” and “awareness” in forms beyond the human being— including animals, plants, elementals, and materials. In bringing attention to how these concepts are engaged in contemplative discourses and practices, the panel advocates for contemplation as a site in which ecological epistemologies and ethics are formed, metabolized, and transmitted. Panelists include scholars working across Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and South American Indigenous traditions, representing methods in text criticism, historical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and autoethnographic practice. We aim to convene a diverse range of perspectives on the boundaries of sentience in contemplation in order to open contemplative studies to a pressing future horizon: How might contemplation animate moral concern for beings typically excluded from “the circle of regard”?
Indian nondual philosophies are particularly amenable to reconfiguring our conceptions of sentience and insentience. Or rather, one might suggest, with the 9th -10th century Kashmiri Hindu Tantric philosopher Somānanda that “insentience simply does not exist.” For this paper, I suggest that this idea, that “insentience simply does not exist” is actually taken up as a contemplative practice, specifically insofar as it was helpful for allowing a practitioner to attain a glimpse into a higher state of enlightenment, an experience of nonduality. Moreover, I suggest that even as this nondualist Pratyabhijñā philosophy entails that everything is ultimately sentient, what allows us to make practical, heuristic distinctions between what we, in ordinary life, think of as sentient and insentient derives from a grammatical formulation, where being sentient is tied to a first-person perspective and being insentient is tied to the third-person expression.
This paper examines an idiosyncratic account of “effortless natural freedom” (bad med rang grol) in a Tibetan Buddhist Great Perfection tantra, The Pearl Garland (Mu tig ’phreng ba). The text advances a provocative cosmovision in which bodies, sensory faculties, and inert material elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—are said to be primordially and effortlessly “free” (grol ba). Inverting conventional Buddhist soteriology, where freedom names release from saṃsārainto nirvāṇa, this chapter presents freedom not as the culmination of the path but as its precondition, extending even to those forms of existence Buddhism traditionally characterizes as bound, or “marked” by suffering. The tantra accordingly presses a philosophically probing and practical question: If everything is already free, why practice at all? Through close reading of the chapter and its twelfth-century commentary, the paper analyzes its proposition of the freedom of non-living things, and considers its philosophical and environmental-ethical implications.
According to Rumi, all cosmic beings are in love; that is, not only the animate but so too do the inanimate love. Far from being a sentimental view of the universe, however, this conclusion rests on cosmological, exegetical, and contemplative insights that deal with existential questions about spirituality and the perception of the other. Love is an esoteric matter that can be really perceived only through spiritual faculties. Therefore, to perceive the (human or non-human) other properly, one must first encounter one’s spiritual self. Only in becoming a spiritual lover/knower can one perceive empirically the spiritual life of the cosmos.
This paper considers the portrayed sentience of more-than-human beings, particularly elemental water beings, in early modern Kashmiri Rishi Sufi literature and cosmology. In this literature, the more-than-human cosmos is portrayed as animate and engaging with human interlocutors, especially Rishi Sufi masters. Much attention is paid to the springs, rivers, and lakes of Kashmir. These living waters are home to elemental water beings who have the capacity to serve as spiritual interlocutors. In this paper, I explore the contours and implications of this fascinating cosmology in which the more-than-human world is not only sentient but also permeated with beings and consciousnesses which enter into meaningful relationships with humans, implying the possibility of trans-dimensional spiritual lineages. This paper explores the unique Sufi cosmology of the landscape of Kashmir while also bringing Islamic and indigenous ecocritical perspectives to bear on a broader interdisciplinary conversation in the environmental humanities and studies of more-than-human sentience.
The comparative religious category of efficacious ritual singing coalesces from embodied relational practices spanning three autoethnographic ritual contexts: Hindu deathbed chanting; Jewish pre-burial recitations; and Shipibo Amazonian plant medicine songs. In each case, the human voice intentionally invokes and carries divine non-human agent(s) to help patients cross beyond the afflictions of illness and death, relying on deep relational alliances with the more-than-human world in order to effect much needed transformations. As these connections are strengthened and refined over time, contexts for reciprocity and care extend and expand within and beyond humanity.