Meditation on Emptiness Review

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(More customer reviews)This encyclopedic and gound-breaking work inaugurated a new era of Buddhist scholarship in the West and significantly raised the standard for the study of Buddhism. This book is based on Professor Hopkins' Ph.D. dissertation of the same name. Since writing this book he has gone on to supervise the scholarship of numerous leaders in the field of Tibetan Buddhist studies at the University of Virginia, such as Elizabeth Napper, Anne Klein, Joe Wilson, Daniel Perdue, Donald Lopez, Guy Newland, and Georges Dreyfus among others. Together these scholars have produced a body of work which gives us a context and a philosophical vocabulary with which we can plunge into the world of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. This is of immense benefit not only to scholars but to Buddhist practitioners as well. This book started it all. It is a work of amazing depth which plunges into the Tibetan exegesis of the Indian Madhyamaka meditation. This analytical meditation tradition is designed to induce, through meticulous analysis, a direct perception of the absence of the mental and perceptual distortions which are at the root of suffering. The core delusion under which all mind-posessing beings suffer is the belief that phenomena exist inherently, or independently of their causes and conditions, their parts, and their designation by a valid consciousness. The fact that they do not exist in this way is called emptiness. Indian Madhyamaka masters Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Chandrakirti, and Shantideva express this view in their works. Their analysis is picked up by great luminaries of the Ge-lug-ba tradition in Tibet, such as Dzong-ka-ba and his disciples. Professor Hopkins primarily focuses his exegesis on the practical instructions of Chandrakirti as they are espoused by Tibetan masters Jam-yang-shay-ba, Nga-wang-bel-den, and Jang-gya. It is said by some that an analytic approach to meditation is contrary to the non-dual nature of realization in the Buddhist tradition. Such a view loses sight of the fact that all of these reasonings are aimed precisely at giving rise to such a direct experience. Putting these reasonings into practice can be the basis of profound and transformative growth, but it is up to the reader to breath life into the tradition by bringing these reasonings alive for one's self. Professor Hopkins here gives us a monumental collection of reasonings as well as a supportive analysis of pertinent aspects of Buddhist philosophy and the philosophical history of the Prasangika-Madhyamaka position which can be a cornerstone of our practice as well as future scholarship. Few works before, or even since, can begin to match the ambitious nature of this work which, in my opinion, is fully realized. In this book we see the serious engagement with some questions of fundamental import continued in the West.

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In bringing this remarkable and complex philosophy to life, Jeffrey Hopkins describes the meditational practices by which the Buddhist ideal of emptiness can be realized and shows that, far from being merely abstract, these teachings can be vivid and utterly practical.

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Maps of the Profound: Jamyang Shayba's Great Exposition of Buddhist and Non-Buddhist Views on the Nature of Reality Review

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(More customer reviews)Maps of the Profound is a career-capping work for Professor Jeffrey Hopkins, who has worked with this text for decades. This book contains a short translation of the terse root verses of the late Ge-luk-ba doxographical work Great Exposition of Tenets by the quintessential Tibetan Buddhist scholastic author Jam-yang-shay-ba, followed by an enormous commentary unpacking the significance of each word.
The root text is one of the best known and most highly regarded specimens of the Tibetan genre of writing concerning the tenets of philosophical schools belonging to India. The endeavor of the work is to identify and refute both philosophical and innate misconceptions that cloud our perception of the true nature of all phenomena. This is done against a semi-historical background of analyzing the tenets propounded by various Buddhist and Non-Buddhist philosophical schools.
Jam-yang-shay-ba spends precious little time summarizing and discarding the tenets of non-Buddhist schools such as Samkhya and Vedanta before moving on to the so-called four schools of Indian Buddhism. Jam-yang-shay-ba presents these schools as presenting fundamental Buddhist truths on an ascending scale of precision, starting with the imprecise and misleading presentations of the "lower" Vaibashika school and winding up through the most subtle and refined understanding, found in the Prasangika-Madhyamaka school.
As I mentioned previously this work is only partially historical at best, because it does not endeavor to accurately state the positions of the schools of Indian thought (indeed, some tenet systems, such as the Svatantrika-Madhyamaka school, are wholely of Tibetan invention). The idea is instead to reconstruct different possible positions and use logical analysis with history as a sort of touchstone to identify and refute one's own misconceptions.
For this reason, this book says much more about Ge-luk-ba than the schools under analysis. We learn how the Ge-luk-bas interpret and utilize Dharmakirti, for example, in the chapter on the Sautantikas Following Reason, but many of the Ge-luk-ba interpretive positions regarding Dharmakirti are highly contraversial, such as their assertion that Dharmakirti accepted conventionally existent spatially extended objects.
This is not to say that we learn nothing about Indian Buddhism however, for the Ge-luk-ba scholarship is wide ranging, and this work in particular is encyclopedic to a degree rarely rivaled in the Buddhist canon.
The root text itself is relatively short - about thirty pages. Most of the book is a lengthy commentary pieced together by Professor Hopkins from a variety of sources, including Jam-yang-shay-ba's autocommentary, Nga-wang-bel-den's Annotations, and Dzong-ka-ba's Essence of Eloquence. Interestingly, Professor Hopkins also makes extensive use of the Sakya scholar Dak-tsang's Freedom from Extremes through Knowing All Tenets, which is highly critical of Dzong-ka-ba and frequently comes under attack in Jam-yang-shay-ba's work.
Anyone already familiar with the work of Professor Hopkins and his students will find a lot of familiar material in this translation. Nevertheless, this may be because this is the work Professor Hopkins has been working towards for many years. It is extremely valuable resource. Few will be the brave souls who read this work cover to cover, but it will serve the student of Ge-luk-ba as an vast and learned treasure-trove of interpretation and insight. It is a testimony to the astonishing breadth of persistence of Professor Hopkins' study, and his many decades of careful and meticulous study, that he was able to marshal the necessary resources to compile, edit, and ably translate this monumental work, and students of Buddhist philosophy are in his debt.

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In the Tibetan cultural region, schools of non-buddhist and buddhist Indian philosophy were systematized and compared in texts called presentation of tenets in order to get a handle on the plethora of philosophical systems inhereited from India.

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Buddhist Philosophy: Losang Gonchok's Short Commentary to Jamyang Shayba's Root Text on Tenets Review

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(More customer reviews)The collaborative translation and editorial effort of Daniel Cozort (Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Dickinson College) and Craig Preston (a private teacher of Classical Tibetan and Buddhist Philosophy in Ithaca, New York), Losang Gonchok's Short Commentary To Jamyang Shayba's Root Text On Tenets is an involved study by Tibetan writer Jamyang Shayba on the key differences between the major schools of Buddhist philosophy. Seeking to set the stage for an informed and reasonable dialogue between different manners of thought, individual chapters pay especial attention to "The Clear Crystal Mirror" and Losang Gonchok's attending views of a wide variety of schools. An in-depth study and technical study, Buddhist Philosophy is highly recommended for advanced students and academic scholars of Buddhism.

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Skims the cream of Jamyang Shayba's intellect, providing a rare opportunity to sharpen our intellect and expand our view of Buddhist thought.

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