Steven Collins, "Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravāda Buddhism Reimagined" (Columbia UP, 2020)

New Books in Indian Religions · Mar 16, 2021 · 52m

This wide-ranging and powerful book argues that Theravāda Buddhism provides ways of thinking about the self that can reinvigorate the humanities and offer broader insights into how to learn and how to act.

Steven Collins argues that Buddhist philosophy should be approached in the spirit of its historical teachers and visionaries, who saw themselves not as preservers of an archaic body of rules but as part of a timeless effort to understand what it means to lead a worthy life. He contends that Buddhism should be studied philosophically, literarily, and ethically using its own vocabulary and…