Steven Tainer

Tainer's initial training was in Western analytic philosophy, with a particular specialization in the philosophy of science.{{cn|date=April 2024}} He was pursuing a PhD in philosophy of science when he first became acquainted with Eastern philosophy.{{cn|date=April 2024}} Just before finishing his PhD, he decided to rededicate himself to the study of Eastern philosophy and contemplative traditions.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

Tainer has studied Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism with sixteen Tibetan, Chinese and Korean teachers, as well as a number of senior monks and nuns.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

Tainer began his study of Tibetan Buddhism in 1970, training in the traditional way with many Tibetan masters, mostly from the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on the Dzogchen or “Great Perfection” school. His primary teachers included Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche and Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche.{{cn|date=April 2024}} Upon the publication of Time, Space, and Knowledge{{sfn|Tarthang Tulku|1977}} in 1977, which he ghost wrote for his first instructor,{{dubious|reason=In the book itself he is credited as "manuscript editor", there is no support for the claim of "ghost writing"|date=April 2024}} Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, he earned an advanced degree in Tibetan Buddhist studies.{{cn|date=April 2024}} He was eventually named a Dharma heir of Tarthang Tulku,{{dubious|date=April 2024}} however he did not take up the position and decided to continue his study and practice independently. After a collaboration with Ming Liu (born Charles Belyea) in the 1980s, Tainer was declared a successor in a family lineage of yogic Taoism after eight years of training and retreat practice. In 1991, he co-authored a book with Ming Liu (Charles Belyea), titled Dragon's Play and together founded Da Yuen Circle of Yogic Taoism.{{sfn|Belyea|Tainer|1991}}{{sfn|Komjathy|2004|p=16}}

He first taught under the direction of his masters in the early 1970s.{{cn|date=April 2024}} Starting in the mid-1980s, he studied Confucian views of contemplation emphasizing exemplary conduct in ordinary life.{{cn|date=April 2024}} Tainer began teaching his groups in 1990.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

He teaches{{where|date=April 2024}} Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, with particular emphasis on Ch'an contemplation, the "Unity of the Three Traditions" in Chinese thought, Taoist yogic practice, Tibetan dream yoga,{{sfn|Ochiogrosso|1997}} and Indian Buddhist philosophy.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

Since 1995, Tainer has been a faculty member of the Institute for World Religions{{cn|date=April 2024}} and the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery.[http://www.berkeleymonastery.org/teachers.html Berkeley Monastery: Teachers] He has been involved in various interfaith councils and conferences. At a Monastic Interreligious Dialogue conference in 2001,{{cite conference

|url=http://www.monasticdialog.com

|title=Monastic Interreligious Dialogue

|year=2001

}}

Tainer is one of the founders of the Kira Institute.{{Cite web |url=http://www.kira.org/ |title=Kira Institute |access-date=2010-02-02 |archive-date=2010-06-17 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100617130024/http://www.kira.org/ |url-status=dead }} Through collaboration between Kira colleagues, including Piet Hut, he explores the interface between modern, scientifically-framed perspectives and matters involving human values. Between 1998 and 2002, Piet Hut and Tainer organised a series of annual summer schools, bringing graduate students from various disciplines together in order to engage in an open Socratic dialog, centred on science and contemplation.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

In 2024, Yuko Ishihara and Tainer published Intercultural Phenomenology: Playing with Reality,{{sfn|Ishihara|Tainer|2024}} which explores using play within "suspension of judgement", with roots in Western phenomenological and Eastern Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian disciplines, for first-person direct examination of experience.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

Tainer has long attempted to make the essence of Eastern philosophy and practice accessible and applicable to Westerners who lead extremely busy lives.{{cite journal

|url=http://www.natural-connection.com/resource/yoga_journal/dream_yoga.html

|title=Dream Yoga

|journal=Yoga Journal

|date=January–February 1997

|access-date=2010-02-09

|archive-date=2010-02-10

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100210055140/http://www.natural-connection.com/resource/yoga_journal/dream_yoga.html

|url-status=dead

}} He points out a particular issue with modern people starting with an isolated self:

{{quote|The starting point for these other traditions is the fact of connection. If you don't believe in connection to a larger Reality as a basic fact, then your agenda in life is to maximize personal values: creative impulses, reveries, daydreams, poetic musings. None of these have value to people who take all human existence as being about the issue of either enhancing the appreciation of connection or losing track of connection.}}

He also argues that this 'interconnectedness' is the basis of ethics: when we see the inter-dependency of all relationships, it is possible to implement The Golden Rule.{{Cite web

|url=http://intuart.com/dotcommune/words/meditative%20values.pdf

|title=Eastern Meditation in Western Psychology: Perspectives from Ethics and the Science-Religion Dialogue

|last=Binzen

|first=Nathaniel

|year=2008

|access-date=2010-02-09

|archive-date=2011-07-13

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110713050609/http://intuart.com/dotcommune/words/meditative%20values.pdf

|url-status=dead

}} Tainer describes his view on leadership:

{{quote|I am somewhat appalled by the notion that I have anything to say about being a leader, because I have spent so much of my life trying to avoid the leadership stereotype. It's a model that doesn't fit into what I am trying to do together with other people. There are many common teacher-student relationships that involve a "leader and led" logic. I try to avoid that.{{sfn|Lojeski|2009|p=28}} }}

Together with Piet Hut, Tainer has explored two distinctive ways of knowing, science and contemplation and how they can be reconciled at the Princeton Program for Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. Hut and Tainer argue that scientific progress depends on insights from contemplative thinking, understood as reflection, thinking, and meditation. Such ideas are especially relevant to the movement in science and technology studies to bring greater reflexivity into scientific practice, making their goals to shift towards producing knowledge to serve public interest and social justice outcomes:{{Cite conference

|url=http://www.cspo.org/documents/ways_of_knowing.pdf

|first=Anne |last=Schneider

|title=Ways of Knowing: Implications for Public Policy

|conference=Annual meeting of American Political Science Association

|location=Chicago

|date=August 29 – September 2, 2007

|page=5

|access-date=February 9, 2010

|archive-date=September 20, 2008

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080920194054/http://cspo.org/documents/ways_of_knowing.pdf

|url-status=dead

}}

{{quote|What does it mean to really know something? Science has discovered an empirical and multi-generational way of obtaining verifiable knowledge in a limited domain of application. But what about areas traditionally assigned to ethics, and other topics not, or not yet, in the domain of what science studies? How do other ways of knowing address questions of 'what is' in the most fundamental sense? How can we approach contemplative traditions that in essence go beyond socio-cultural frameworks and beliefs and also explicitly emphasise seeing, learning, and hence knowing (vs. mere sensations or experience of one sort or another)? What is the relevance of explorations in these areas for human concerns, values, and modern life?{{sfn|Schneider|2007|p=6}} }}

The Time, Space, and Knowledge{{sfn|Tarthang Tulku|1977}} book, composed by Tainer in collaboration with Tarthang Tulku, is a completely original work,{{dubious|reason=he is credited in the book as "manuscript editor", not as a collaborative author|date=April 2024}} conveying ideas recognizable in Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen but with no Buddhist or Tibetan terminology. A core premise is that it is possible to study and realize the nature of the experiencing mind through exercises that stretch it, exposing its limits and tacitly held assumptions. Piet Hut describes this as empirical experimentation: "life as a lab".{{Cite web |url=http://lab.kira.org/lab/ |title=Life as a Lab |access-date=2024-02-08}} This approach, complemented by an emphasis on Play as inherent to Being and to Knowledge, guided both academic explorations (at the Institute for Advanced Study, Kira Institute, and others) and the practice-oriented Play as Being{{cn|date=April 2024}} (its name derived from Tainer's phrase "expressive play-as-Being"{{sfn|Tarthang Tulku|1977|p=305}}) Second Life-based community. The Intercultural Phenomenology book takes play as a major theme, along with a description of the historical roots of the "suspension of judgement" approach in Edmund Husserl's phenomenological Epoché as well as in Eastern meditation traditions.{{cn|date=April 2024}}

• Cognitive psychology
• Reality in Buddhism

{{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}

• {{Cite book

|first1=Charles |last1=Belyea

|first2=Steven A. |last2=Tainer

|year=1991

|title=Dragon's Play: A New Taoist Transmission of the Complete Experience of Human Life

|others=Xiao-Lun Lin (illustrator)

|publisher=Great Circle Lifeworks

|isbn=0-9629308-1-4

}}

• {{Cite book

|first1=Yuko |last1=Ishihara

|first2=Steven A. |last2=Tainer

|year=2024

|title=Intercultural Phenomenology: Playing With Reality

|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing

|isbn=9781350298286

}}

• {{Cite journal

|jstor=10.1525/nr.2004.8.2.5

|last=Komjathy |first=Louis

|title=Tracing the Contours of Daoism in North America

|journal=Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions

|date=Fall 2004

|volume=8 |issue=2 |pages=5–27 |doi=10.1525/nr.2004.8.2.5

}}

• {{Cite journal

|url=http://www.natural-connection.com/resource/yoga_journal/dream_yoga.html

|last=Ochiogrosso

|first=Peter

|title=Dream Yoga

|journal=Yoga Journal

|date=January–February 1997

|access-date=2010-02-09

|archive-date=2010-02-10

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100210055140/http://www.natural-connection.com/resource/yoga_journal/dream_yoga.html

|url-status=dead

}}

• {{Cite book

|first=Karen Sobel |last=Lojeski

|year=2009

|title=Leading the Virtual Workforce: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations in the 21st Century

|publisher=John Wiley & Sons

|url=https://archive.org/details/leadingvirtualwo0000sobe |url-access=registration |isbn=978-0-470-42280-9

}}

• {{Cite book

|author=Tarthang Tulku

|authorlink=Tarthang Tulku

|year=1977

|title=Time, Space, and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality

|publisher=Dharma Pub.

|isbn=0-913546-08-9

|url-access=registration

|url=https://archive.org/details/timespaceknowled00tart_0

}}

• {{Cite journal

|url=http://www.shin-ibs.edu/documents/pwj3-4/04TN4.pdf

|last=Tainer |first=Steven A.

|title=Studying "No Mind": The Future of Orthogonal Approaches, Special Section on "Buddhism and Cognitive Science

|journal=Pacific World Journal

|date=Fall 2002

}}

• {{Cite journal

|url=http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3297&Itemid=0

|archive-url=https://archive.today/20130202040106/http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3297&Itemid=0

|url-status=dead

|archive-date=February 2, 2013

|last=Yogis

|first=Jaimal

|title=Losing Everything Can Mean Finally Beginning

|journal=Shambhala Sun

|date=October 2008

|ref=none

}}

• [http://berkeleymonastery.org/ Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, Institute for World Religions]
• [http://waysofknowing.net/ Ways of Knowing]

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tainer, Steven}}

Category:American scholars of Buddhism

Category:Living people

Category:1947 births

Category:American Buddhists