Join Wendy Lochner on a Tour of Our Books in Asian Philosophy and Religion

Hi! Welcome to our virtual booth! I’m Wendy Lochner, and I acquire books in philosophy, religion, political theory, and animal and critical-life studies—not only in Asian studies, of course, but that component is a very important part of the list. You may be familiar with Stephen (Buzzy) Teiser’s series Columbia Readings of Buddhist Literature, the most recent volume of which, Readings of Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye by Steven Heine, is coming in June, or Bryan W. Van Norden’s wonderful Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. Although nothing can replace the engaged conversations we have at AAS, I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about a new and exciting book that your students will love, Steven Collins’ Wisdom as a Way of Life.

Collins, until his untimely passing in 2018, was a much-loved and greatly respected professor of Theravada Buddhism at the University of Chicago; he advised many of you there and mentored many others of you early in your careers. He had told me about this book in 2017, and unfortunately he didn’t complete the final text, so Justin McDaniel, a former student now at Pennsylvania, edited the most recent draft into the book that will be published in July. Students will love it; so many enter college life looking for answers about who they are and how should they live and learn and act—and a large number hope to find these answers in Buddhist traditions. Collins makes these philosophical questions come alive through the teachings of historical visionaries, who did not enforce a rigid body of rules but actively sought to understand how to live a worthy life. What’s really cool too is that he talks about Buddhist practices like meditation together with Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, as you can see in the short excerpt here, as if they were contemporaries talking to us today.

Also new since last year’s AAS is another volume in the Teiser series, Readings of Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice edited by Jonathan C. Gold and Douglas S. Duckworth, the first guide to what is arguably one of the classics of Indian Buddhism; A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India by Patton E. Burchett, an unprecedented historical study of devotional Hinduism; Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China, the first title in the new series Premodern East Asia: New Horizons, edited by Sun Joo Kim, Dorothy Ko, and Haruo Shirane; and Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources edited by C. Pierce Salguero, the companion to his highly acclaimed Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. I hope you enjoy exploring these innovative new books!