The Latin roots of the term _cognition_ pertain to knowing or recognizing. Although all world traditions engage with knowing and recognizing, use of this specific term and a related lexicon date from the medieval period (Chaney 2013). Cognition became central to Western philosophy when the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes proposed that the constitution of knowledge depends on methodic doubting, an act that in turn produces an experiential consciousness of existence: cogito, ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am” (Cottingham 1978). Anatomical study of the brain and the nervous system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries subsequently led to the founding of the subdiscipline of cognitive science, focused on the study of mind and mental processes. At the same time, Descartes’s intellectualistic privileging of the _res cogitans_ (the “thinking thing”) over the _res extensa_ (the “extended thing,” often understood as the body) was garnering criticism for its implicit segregation of mind from body. Indeed, inquiry into how the body “matters” in cognition had taken on urgency in numerous disciplines. In 1991, the Latin American scientist Francisco Varela merged biology and Western phenomenological philosophy with world “mindful” meditative traditions, including Buddhism, in the influential model of “embodied cognition.” In this...