Selfless Persons

Selfless Persons, published in 1982, is Steven Collins's study of the doctrine of not self in Theravada Buddhism. Its question is how a tradition that denies a permanent self can also operate a whole apparatus of moral responsibility, rebirth and personal continuity, and Collins answers it by reading the doctrine both as a philosophical position in the Pali texts and as an element in the social and imaginative life of the tradition that carried it. He draws on the sociology of religion as well as on textual scholarship, and he is careful to distinguish what the texts say from the uses the doctrine was put to. The book is usually described as the most influential elaboration of the no self reading and is a standard reference in that debate, which remains live.

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