Reason and experience in tibetan buddhisml religion

And 80% of it to be an analysis of where and how he fits into concerns of this kind Doctor walks us through Mabja s view on several important concepts with frequent reference to the untranslated autocommentary to The Appearance of Reality He also makes a compelling argument that the mature view we associate as largely originating with Tsong Khapa vis a vis the relationship between valid cognition and conventional establishment owes a large debt to Mabja He also presents a translation of the largely incomprehensible root verses of The Appearance of Reality One minor criticism the many references to Ornament of Reason give page numbers only to the Tibetan edition he uses.

Book Reason and Experience in Tibetan buddhism beliefs

Mabja Jangchub Ts ndr first came to my attention when I stumbled across Ornament of Reason the complete English translation of his commentary to Nagarjuna s Fundamental Wisdom treatise which Doctor also directed Two things in particular struck me about that work first in comparison with other available commentaries on Nagarjuna s treatise it was refreshingly direct and stuck close to the root verses instead of following numerous highly speculative doxographical digressions of the kind that saturate Tsong Khapa s Ocean of Reasoning Second it represented a Tibetan interpretation of this seminal Madhyamaka work authored at a time that we hitherto have known very little about the time period after Atisha and before Longchenpa and Tsong Khapa when Chandrakirti was being assimilated and gradually elevated to a position of preeminence in the Tibetan monastic world Much light has been shed on this historical moment in recent years thanks to the work of Thomas Doctor and scholars like Kevin Vose whose historical study Resurrecting Candrakirti is one of the most interesting and exciting academic works on Tibetan Buddhism I have seen in the last 20 years In my review of Doctor s translation of Mabja s Ornament of Reason I noted that that book was marred by the complete absence of any biographical or historical information about the author Mabja whatsoever which would be understandable if the author were otherwise better known but Mabja has thus far been an extremely obscure figure in western scholarship When I learned of this present book I was eager to read it as a corrective to that omission I was unfortunately delayed for several years by not being able to justify the 150 expense for this slender work but when the price fell to around 50 I figured I could swallow it The pricing of academic books is and remains a systematic abuse of the taxpayers who actually fund the vast majority of the research that is the foundation for such works but I digress Unfortunately I did not enjoy this work as much as the other exciting volumes I ve mentioned Even for someone with my large appetite for complex philosophical ideas it is extremely dry and dense and to a large extent it re inscribes Mabja s story into the prolix and hairsplitting doxographical debates I was so pleased to find absent in Ornament of Reason If there is a single concept in the history of ideas that has spawned reams of compulsive verbalization than the Svatantrika Prasangika debate I have yet to encounter it The crux of the debate is this how a Madhyamaka views the structure of the logical arguments they use to establish the non inherent existence of phenomena carries some subtle implications regarding their actual ontological beliefs If for example one asserts that both parties in a debate share a common argument that can be expressed in the form of a syllogism then in some sense the commonly appearing basis of the argument must have some kind of shared establishment That s pretty much the whole of the issue in a nutshell and there is much of interest here but hardly enough to warrant the tens of thousands of pages that have been written on the subject In my view it s become the driver in a kind of scholastic mania that largely out of conviction of the epistemic validity of systematic expositions believes that hair splitting details capture something that is not only very real about what and how we believe but something that I guess is of vital importance I m not the first reader to suggest that the endless absorption in ideation diverts from the fundamental insight of Madhyamaka which if it says anything at all says that the world is beyond our capacity to accurately characterize it in terms of concepts As someone with a training in western philosophy I m also profoundly skeptical of the intensely speculative character of these analyses and how useful they are to anyone except academics I found about 20% of this book an illuminating analysis of Mabja s thought and not to the page numbers of his own English translation of that work That was not particularly helpful I would have found this book much interesting if Doctor had dialed it back a bit and written not just for specialists in his field I don t think many readers outside of a small circle of scholars will get too much out of this book but it did partially satisfy my curiosity about Mabja s life and work though a two page introduction to Ornament of Reason could have served the same purpose Thomas Doctor

Reason and Experience in Tibetan Buddhism: Mabja Jangchub Tsöndrü and the Traditions of the Middle Way (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism) By Thomas Doctor

0415722462

9780415722469

English

168

Hardcover

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Based on newly discovered texts this book explores the barely known but tremendously influential thought of the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Mabja Jangchub Ts ndr d 1185. Reason and experience in tibetan buddhismk beliefs This Tibetan Buddhist master exercised significant influence on the interpretation of Madhyamaka thinking in Tibet during the formative phase of Tibetan Buddhism and plays a key role in the religious thought of his day and beyond The book studies the framework of Mabja s philosophical project holding it up against the works of both his own Madhyamaka teachers as well as those of central authors of the later classical period The emerging account of the evolution of Madhyamaka in Tibet reveals a striking pattern of transformative appropriations This in turn affords us insights into the nature and function of tradition in Tibetan religious culture and Mah y na Buddhism at large Innovation is demanded for both the advancement and consolidation of tradition This ground breaking book is an invaluable contribution to the study of Tibetan philosophy It is of great interest to Buddhist practitioners specialists in Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism Reason and Experience in Tibetan Buddhism Mabja Jangchub Ts ndr and the Traditions of the Middle Way Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism .