Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism

The book is organized around four major thematic movements. Part I, “The cultural and social setting of Buddhist thought,” examines the origins of rebirth, early Indian religious ideas, saṃsāra, karma, mokṣa/nirvāṇa, and the varieties of Buddhist discourse used to speak about self, person, and personality. Part II, “The doctrine of not-self,” analyzes the denial of self as “right view,” presenting arguments for anattā and showing how this doctrine functions in mental cultivation, the critique of attachment, the handling of speculative views, and the Buddhist language of emptiness. Part III, “Personality and rebirth,” studies the individual at the level of conventional truth, including terms such as attabhāva and puggala, and investigates how Theravāda thought explains personal continuity through images of identity and difference while maintaining that no permanent self can be found. Part IV, “Continuity,” develops the analysis further through the doctrines of conditioning, consciousness, temporal existence, evolving consciousness, momentariness, the bhavaṅga-mind, and river imagery. Across these chapters, Collins shows that Theravāda Buddhism constructs a sophisticated account of human existence in which persons function meaningfully at the conventional level, while ultimate analysis dissolves any claim to a fixed, enduring self.