Germano, D.

PersonType	Category:Professors
FirstName / namefirst	David
LastName / namelast	Germano
namemiddle	Francis
bio	David Germano is the Executive Director of the Contemplative Sciences Center. He has taught and researched Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia since 1992. In this context, he works extensively with each of the eleven schools at UVA to explore learning, research, and engagement initiatives regarding contemplation in their own disciplinary and professional areas. He is currently focused on the exploration of contemplative ideas, values, and practices involving humanistic and scientific methodologies, as well as new applications in diverse fields; he also holds a faculty appointment in the School of Nursing. He is one of the co-leaders of the Student Flourishing Initiative, a three-way partnership with UVA, the University of Wisconsin, and Penn State University, as well as the lead organizer of an international research community of scholars and translators specializing in the Great Perfection (Dzokchen) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. (Source Accessed June 11, 2019)
associatedwebsite	http://artsandsciences.virginia.edu/religiousstudies/people/dfg9w.html
languageprimary	English
languagetranslation	Tibetan
languagetarget	English
affiliation	University of Virginia; Tibetan and Himalayan Library; Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies
currentworks	Germano is currently returning to work on a fourfold set of works that constitute a comprehensive analysis of the Great Perfection Seminal Heart (rdzogs chen snying thig) tradition from its formation to its full expression in the fourteenth century with the corpus of Longchenpa, one of the greatest of all Tibetan Buddhist authors. This includes a translation of his major work, The Treasury of Words and Meanings (tshig don mdzod), a historical study, a philosophical study, and a literary study of the tradition. He is also working on a powerful cultural geographical system that is collaboratively publishing scholarship on historical and contemporary Tibetan and Himalayan places, communities, and cultural traditions across many disciplines, as well as fundamental scholarly resources – analytical data on places, maps, images, videos, bibliographies, and more. This publishing platform includes an extremely powerful Gazeteer, GIS-based mapping, and associated multimedia repositories. This includes working on a site involving the promotion of community-based tourism in Tibet, which aims to connection scholarly production of knowledge on Tibetan places and communities to actual benefit to the communities involved. Germano is also involved with coordinating others at a larger project at participatory knowledge production that enables Tibetans and Tibetan communities to be fully empowered agents in the global network of how knowledge gets produced about their own places and traditions. He is co-directing an initiative on the Tibetan Buddhist canon, which includes a detailed catalog, scholarly editions of the scriptures themselves, scans of the manuscripts, and scholarly summaries and analysis. This includes multiple editions of the Kangyur and Tengyur, but also ongoing work on the Nyingma Gyubum, and other collections of Tibetan Buddhist Literature He is directing the historical Tibetan Dictionary, which has built a powerful online platform for soliciting and publishing detailed historical studies of Tibetan words, including integrated citations of the usage of words in Tibetan literature. A new project which is not yet public involves the creation of sophisticated event management system for the documentation of Tibetan and Himalayan historical events.
phduniversity	University of Wisconsin-Madison
education	1992, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, BA, University of Notre Dame
IsInGyatsa	No
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Select Publications

• Germano, David F. (2000-present, director), The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (www.thlib.org). Within this international project, I am the director and/or facilitator of multiple major collaborative projects involving technology in GIS research, language instructional materials, dictionaries, literary archives, ethnographic research and historical work. This is the largest international initiative in Tibetan Studies involving digital technology, multiple disciplines, and multiple institutions. See there for major Web publications involving Tibetan literature, music, geography, and other subjects. It is also leading efforts at integrating academic work with community services initiatives in Tibet. I am the primary person responsible for the Library’s structural design, social networks, and intellectual program, as well as being active in one way or another in almost every major project therein.
• Germano, David F. (2007). “Re-membering the Dismembered Body of Tibet: Contemporary Tibetan Visionary Movements in the People’s Republic of China.” An abridged version published in Defining Buddhisms: A Reader edited by Karen Derris and Natalie Gummer in the series “Critical Categories in the Study of Religion,” edited by Russell T. McCutcheon for Equinox Publishing.
• Germano, David F. (2007). “The shifting terrain of the tantric bodies of Buddhas and Buddhists from an Atiyoga perspective”. In The Pandita and the Siddha: Tibetan Studies in Honour of E. Gene Smith, ed. Ramon Prats. Amnye Machen Institute.
• Germano, David and William S. Waldron (2006). "The Arising of Ālaya: History and Doctrine". In The Buddha’s Way: The Confluence of Buddhist Thought and Contemporary Psychology in the Post-Modern Age, editor D. K. Nauriyal, Routledge Curzon Press.
• Germano, David F. (2005). "Atiyoga/Great Perfection". In Encyclopedia of Religions, Macmillan Reference USA.
• Germano, David F. with Gregory Hillis (2005). "Tibetan Buddhist Meditation". In Encyclopedia of Religions, Macmillan Reference USA.
• Germano, David F. with Gregory Hillis (2005). "Klong chen rab ‘byams pa". In Encyclopedia of Religions, Macmillan Reference USA.
• Germano, David F. (2005). “The History of Funerary rDzogs chen”. In the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, vol. 1 , www.jiats.org.
• Germano, David F. with Eveline Yang and others. "Tibetan Furniture Making: Traditions and Innovations" (2004): a documentary produced and exhibited at the "Wooden Wonders" exhibition, Pacific Asian Art Museum in Los Angeles, November 2004.
• Germano, David F. and Kevin Trainor (co-editors, (2004). Embodying the Dharma: Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia. SUNY. This volume of essays on Buddhist relic traditions across Asia is drawn from our four year seminar on the subject in the American Academy of Religions.
• Germano, David F. (2004). "Relics of the Living Buddha in Tibet". In Embodying the Dharma: Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia, editors David Germano and Kevin Trainor, SUNY.
• Review, of Goldstein, Melvyn (2003), The New Tibetan-English Dictionary of Modern Tibetan, Berkeley: the University of California Press. In Geolinguistics, vol. 29.
• Germano, David F. (2002). “The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library”. In the “In Brief” column of D-Lib Magazine (May 2002, www.d-lib.org). Republished in ACCESS (www.igroupnet.com).
• Germano, David F., co-editor (2002). The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism. Brill Press.
• Germano, David F. (2002) "The Seven Descents and the Nature of sNga' 'gyur: The “history” of rNying ma tantras". In The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism, Brill Press.
• Germano, David F. with Nathaniel Garson (2001) “The Rise of “Thematic Research Collections” in the study, teaching and transmission of Buddhist scriptures”. Journal of Electronic Buddhist Texts, Volume 3, December 2001, pp. 147-190. Published by Electronic Buddhist Text Institute, Seoul, Korea.
• Germano, David F. (2001) "Encountering Tibet: The Ethics, Soteriology and Creativity of Cross-cultural Interpretation". In the Journal of the American Academy of Religions.
• Germano, David F. with Janet Gyatso (2000). “Longchenpa and the Posessions of Dakinıs”. Tantra in Practice, edited by David White, Princeton University Press.
• Germano, David F. (1998). "Re-membering the dismembered body of Tibet: The contemporary Ter movement in the PRC". In Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity (editors Melvyn Goldstein and Matthew Kapstein); Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
• Germano, David F. (1997). "Dying, death and other opportunities". In Religions of Tibet in Practice (editor Donald Lopez), pp. 458-493; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Germano, David F. (1997). "Food, clothes, dreams and karmic propensities" In Religions of Tibet in Practice(editor Donald Lopez), pp. 293-312; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Germano, David F. (1997) "Preliminary practices: craziness, the elements and the letter Hum". In Religions of Tibet in Practice (editor Donald Lopez), pp. 313-334; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Germano, David F. (1994). "Architecture and Absence in the Secret Tantric History of rDzogs Chen". In The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 17.2, pp. 203-335.

Dzogchen is an advanced system of meditation techniques to reveal the innate state of perfection primarily, but not exclusively, espoused by the Nyingma Buddhist tradition and the Tibetan Bön tradition.

The Nyingma, which is often described as the oldest tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, traces its origin to Padmasambhava, who is said to have visited Tibet in the eighth century.

The Blue Annals

A system of esoteric thought and practice associated with the Nyingma tradition and equivalent to Great Perfection, it is considered as the pinnacle of the nine vehicles or paths one can follow to reach Buddhahood. The system focusses on the pure, luminous and empty nature of the mind as the ground reality which must be realised through the path of trekchö and thögal practice.

State University of New York