Tibetan

It's not a great translation, but it's what we have in English.

But typically this comes from the Tibetan word che gom.

So gom means to familiarize the mind with something virtuous.

Che means to churn or turn or pull apart or investigate something, right? There's different ways to translate it.

And we merge that with what's called jokom in Tibetan.

So gom, again, same thing, familiarizing the mind.

Jok means to rest the mind, right? So what a lot of you are familiar with as meditation is more of what we would call jokom, like resting the mind in shamatha, in the present moment, in awareness.

It is certain that all the diverse characteristics of things are liberated into their own condition.

Look, ignorance is not a lack of knowledge in Tibetan.

Ma rig pa is the word.

Yes, we translate it as ignorance, but it doesn't mean what ignorance means here in the West.

Now the next generation who learns it in English

rather than

Tibetan, well, time will tell.

like clouds in the atmosphere that are self originated and self liberated.

This is our Halloween pop-up.

A little bit of an explanation about all the many, many words in Tibetan that translate into demon in English.

So to get started, Shuku kunduzomo

gombo'i

Depends on your point of view.

Then you have gecks and parches.

We count them as demons in Tibetan pantheon or mythology.

And yet they are not sentient any more than a pattern woven on a loom is sentient or a spider's web is sentient.

So there's this thing called Jokpak.

jokpa in Tibetan, it means placement.

And if you've listened to any of Rinpoche's teachings, you will often hear him speak about chegom and jorgom.

Gom means meditation, right? And placement and analytical meditation, chegom and jorgom, or jorgom and chegom.

So that jor, which doesn't sound like the jokpa, it's the same word.

It's just that in the Tibetan language, when there's two hard consonants together, they sort of roll across it within a raw sound.

So jorgom, it's actually jokkom, but they say jorgom.

It's the same joke.

David Germano History, Experience, and the Work of Contemplation A Way into the Work What changes when we stop treating a contemplative tradition as a single set of timeless instructions and start asking how its texts, practices, communities, and accounts of experience came together? That question is one useful way into David Germano's work.

It takes us from the literary history of dogchen to the language of effort, from theories of the unconscious to contemporary Tibetan poetry, and from digital libraries to the design of education.

Those may sound like unrelated interests.

Over the course of this program, we will look for connections without pretending they form one perfectly unified theory.

No claim about a visionary experience, an enlightened body, or an after-death process should be mistaken for an independently verified scientific finding.

Our main readings are Germano's 2005 essay on the funerary transformation of the Great Perfection, the 2006 chapter comparing Alaya Vinyana in Yogacara, and Dzogchen, co-authored with William S. Waldron and Germano's 2025 article on effort, effortlessness, and agency.

We also draw on the introduction and English translation of Chime's poem, Tales of Myself and Snow, produced with Tashi Dekyedbune, an essay on education written with Anil Chima, and Germano's early account of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library.

some other works will appear as reading recommendations rather than as texts we have fully examined that distinction matters a bibliography can tell us that a work exists it cannot substitute for reading it this course is selective and it will say where its coverage stops one why history changes the question imagine opening a shelf of books that all use the same name for a tradition it is natural to expect that they explain different parts of one system one book offers an opening view another gives detailed practices and another supplies the final interpretation the different pieces can seem to fit together automatically Germano asks us to slow down.