The Three-Year, Three-Month Retreat in Globalized Tibetan Buddhism: Early Findings and Ongoing Questions
September 18, 2025 | 12 PM CST
Presentation Description
Photo: Sign posted at Garchen Buddhist Institute (Chino Valley, AZ)
The communal three-year, three-month meditative retreat—during which a group of men or women remain sequestered from the world outside, doing ten or more hours of focused tantric practice each day—plays an increasingly vital role in the contemplative culture of Tibetan Buddhist communities all over the world. Building upon the textual research culminating in my recent monograph on the history of individual long-term meditative retreat, this is a trilingual fieldwork-based study of the communal three-year, three-month retreat. This presentation draws from ninety-five hours of interviews with seventy-five people at thirty-seven different retreat centers in France, Nepal, and the United States. After briefly addressing what we do and don’t know about the history of this practice in Tibetan religious culture prior to the 1960s, this presentation will convey some preliminary findings from my fieldwork and lay out questions that I still hope to explore. This talk will include observations of changes in the purpose and meaning of the three-year, three-month retreat as it has been taken up by Tibetan Buddhist communities in different parts of the world, as well as more speculative reflections on what these changes say about the place of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism as a globalized religious formation.
About the Speaker
David DiValerio is associate professor of Religious Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His most recent work, Mountain Dharma: Meditative Retreat and the Tibetan Ascetic Self (Columbia University Press, 2025), is an intellectual history of individual long-term meditative retreat in Tibetan Buddhism, based on retreat prescriptions written between the twelfth century and the early decades of the twentieth. He is also the author of The Holy Madmen of Tibet (2015) and translator of The Life of the Madman of Ü (2016).
The link to his latest book Mountain Dharma can be found here.