Steven Collins, Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravāda Buddhism Reimagined, ed. Justin McDaniel, preface by Dan Arnold, afterword by Charles Hallisey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 304 pp., $35.00 (paper).
摘要
A month before Steven Collins tragically passed away in February 2018, he circulated among friends and close colleagues the manuscript that has now been published as Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravāda Buddhism Reimagined. Among those colleagues was Justin McDaniel, who subsequently edited the text with the support of Collins’ wife, Claude Grangier. In a compelling and forthright introduction, McDaniel describes his editorial decisions and places Collins’ last work in relation to the scholar and the person that Collins was. The volume also contains a preface by Dan Arnold, Collins’ colleague at the University of Chicago, that helps to frame the significance of this final development in Collins’ long and illustrious career. And it provides a beautiful afterword by Charles Hallisey suggesting ideas about how to read the book and interpret it in light of Collins’ earlier work on Theravāda Buddhism, particularly his groundbreaking Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (1982) and Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities (1998). We are invited to see this last contribution as the third volume in a triptych of Collins’ principal monographs.
