Flavio Geisshuesler

Flavio Alessio Geisshuesler is a Swiss-Italian academic and writer. As historian of religions, he specializes in the study of meditation and other contemplative practices in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

Early life and education
Geisshuesler spent his childhood in Zürich, Switzerland. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Lausanne in 2008, where he majored in religious studies, focusing on Judaism and Indian religions, while studying Biblical Hebrew, Hindi, and Tibetan. In 2013, he obtained an received an M.A. from the University of Virginia. Afterwards, he earned two PhDs, one from the University of Bern in 2018 and another from the University of Virginia in 2019.

His 2018 doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Bern, is titled Crisis and Critique in the History of Religions: Ernesto de Martino (1908-1965) in Italy and Beyond. In 2019, he also defended a second doctoral disseration, Prisons of Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Study of Contemplative Practices in Great Perfection Buddhism, at the University of Virginia. As part of his research, he also spent several years living and studying in various parts of Asia, particularly in the Himalayan regions of India and Nepal.

Career
In 2021, he published a monograph on the life and work of Ernesto de Martino. The research project is based on 18 months of archival work in Rome, which was financed by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Geisshuesler also wrote a book on Tibetan sky-gazing meditation in the Dzogchen tradition, which is based on his doctoral dissertation and further expanded during his postdoctoral research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The fieldwork in Nepal was funded by a Fulbright–Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. His postdoctoral position in Israel was funded by fellowships from the Khyentse Foundation (2019-21), the Lady Davis Foundation (2020-21), the Azrieli Foundation (2021-23), and the Mandel Scholion Research Center (2021-24).

Throughout his career, has also taught courses at several universities, including the University of Virginia, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Bern, the University of Fribourg in 2021, the University of Basel in 2022, and the Sapienza University of Rome in 2023.

Bilingual in German and Italian, he has mastered English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Tibetan, Nepali, Hindi, Urdu, and Persian. He also reads Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Biblical Hebrew, and Russian.

In 2023, he was appointed as KF-Macready Senior Lecturer in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Sydney.

Research
Geisshuesler's primary research centers on the contemplative traditions of India, Tibet, and the wider Himalayas, particularly the Dzogchen or Great Perfection tradition. His most recent publication offers the first comprehensive English-speaking introduction to the Tibetan sky-gazing practice. The book's most important argument is that the Great Perfection was originally a pre-Buddhist indigenous Tibetan tradition that emerged in close contact with the early Bön tradition. He argues that Dzogchen once belonged to a shamanic cult centered on the quest for vitality, which involved the worship of the sky as primordial source of life and endorsed the hunting of animals, as they were believed to be endowed with the ability to move in between the divine realm of the heavens and the world of humans. The book also traces the historical development of the Great Perfection, delineating a process of buddhicization that started with the introduction of Buddhism during the time of the Tibetan Empire, intensified with the rise of new schools in the 11th century, and reached its climax in the systematization of the teachings by the great scholar-yogi Longchenpa in the 14th century.

Geisshuesler also published about other subjects, such as the Italian anthropologist and historian of religion Ernesto de Martino, the methodology of the cognitive science of religion, or the connection between collective trauma and the historical development of contemplative traditions.

Articles
Selected articles by Geisshuesler include: