Description

The University of Toronto / McMaster University Yehan Numata Buddhist Studies Program supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Uof T’s Centre for South Asian Studies, present a public lecture by Steven Collins.

The phrase ‘practices of the self ’ was introduced by the French thinkers Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot, to refer to ways of life in Hellenistic Greece and Imperial Rome (Hadot speaks of ‘spiritual exercises’) where philosophical discourse was engaged in not simply to produce changes in the ideas people hold, but more importantly changes in the character of those who held them. It is only a superficial paradox to speak of Buddhist practices of the self, given that all forms of Buddhism, including that found in the Pali texts which will be the subject of this talk, claim that there is no self outside the changing psychophysical processes which make up a lifetime and a series of lives in a sequence of rebirths. The talk will end with a consideration of the varied and heterogeneous practices called (in English) ‘Buddhist Meditation’.

Steven Collins is Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He is a Council Member of the Pali Text Society (London).