Davidson Lecture
Please join the College of the Humanities (Religious Studies) for a free public lecture by one of the world’s foremost Pali scholars.
In this lecture, Dr. Steven Collins situates Buddhist meditation in the larger context of spiritual practices and technologies of the self. He begins by noting that “the denial that there is an eternal, unchanging self does not invalidate ordinary language talk about self; ‘practices of the self’ refers to an area of mental/physical focus, not to an item of metaphysics.”
Collins is the Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the social and cultural history of Buddhism in premodern and modern South and Southeast Asia, and in Pali language and literature. Among numerous other works in the field of Pali Buddhist Studies, Prof. Collins is the author of Selfless Persons: imagery and thought in Theravada Buddhism, Cambridge University Press, 1982, and Nirvana: concept, imagery, narrative. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Dr. Steven Collins
Thursday March 6, 2014, 7:00 pm
303 Paterson Hall
Reception to follow
Sponsored by the Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Fund in Religious Studies