GEISSHUESLER • From Grounded Identity to Receptive Creativity 229 From Grounded Identity to Receptive Creativity Te Mythical-Historical Formation of the Nyingma School and the Potential of Collective Trauma Flavio A. GEISSHUESLER Flavio A. GEISSHUESLER is a historian of religions and expert of Indo-Tibetan tantra with a broad range of methodological, theoretical, and cultural interests. He earned two Ph.D. degrees in the history of religions from the universities of Virginia (USA) and Bern (Switzerland), and is currently the Khyentse postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). His work is thoroughly grounded in the theories and methods of religious studies, with a particular focus on the Italian School of the History of Religions. Reinterpreting the work of Ernesto de Martino (1909–1965), his research agenda promotes interdisciplinary studies that bridge textual-historical research on religions with contemporary theories from the cognitive sciences. Implementing such an interdisciplinary methodology, he is currently completing a book on meditation practice in the famous Tibetan Buddhist tradition known as the Great Perfection (rdzogs chen, Dzogchen). Te present article represents a piece of this larger project on meditation practices in this controversial mystical tradition. Specifically, by laying out the larger mythical-historical background, which is oftentimes underestimated in research on meditation, he argues that meditative techniques can only be understood if they are inserted within the specifc temporal and social horizons of their contemplative systems. E-mail: fgeisshuesler@gmail.com International Journal of Buddhist Tought & Culture Vol. 30. No.1 (June 2020): **–** Ⓒ 2020 Academy of Buddhist Studies, Dongguk University, Korea https://doi.org/10.16893/IJBTC.2020.06.30.1.*** Te day of submission: 2020.3.13. Completion of review: 2020.5.28. Final decision for acceptance: 2020.6.20.