Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravada Buddhism Reimagined

"In this wide-ranging and field-changing work Steven Collins argues that the study of Theravada Buddhism needs to separated from the rather dated and stagnant field of textual history and approached both "civilizationally" and as a "practice of the self." By civilizationally, he means that instead of seeing Buddhism as a set of "original" teachings of the so-called historical Buddha from the 5th century BC to the present, it should rather be viewed as an effort by many teachers and visionaries over time to make sense of what it means to lead a worthy life.

The purveyors of Buddhist philosophy did not consider themselves to be preservers of an archaic body of rules and ethical guidelines; they were designing a dynamic way of living and confronting human problems in a timeless way.

Using approaches to the very idea of the self promoted by Foucault and Hadot, he compares Theravada Buddhist ways of understanding and "practicing" the self to