Matthew Vale from the theology department, Boston College will deliver a luncheon colloquium.

North Americans have heard much about “mindfulness” practice, and much of it is only indirectly derived from historical Buddhist practices. This talk introduces a quite different style of historical Tibetan Buddhist practice. These practices cultivate compassion by training in extending the scope of my self-identification: Just as a I now spontaneously identify as “I” only this body, I can train in identifying other beings’ bodies as belonging to my “I,” just as a mother and nursing infant spontaneously relate to one another as a part of a shared body, and as we, by habituation, can come to incorporate a tool or prosthetic limb into our felt body schematic. These practices’ premise is that our sense of “I” is not an inert datum, but a flexible field of appropriation which is skillfully (or unskillfully) generated by our habitual practices.