Reflections on Reality: The Three Natures and Non-Natures in the Mind-Only School: Dynamic Responses to Dzong-ka-ba's The Essence of Eloquence, Volume 2 Review

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(More customer reviews)The first volume is in four parts:
A historical and doctrinal introduction
A translation of the General Explanation and the Section on the Mind-Only School in The Essence of Eloquence with frequent annotations in the brackets, footnotes, and backnotes
A detailed synopsis of the translation
A critical edition in Tibetan script of these sections in The Essence of Eloquence
The second volume, Reflections on Reality, will:
Place reactions to Tsongkhapa's text in historical and social context by examining the tension between allegiance and rational inquirer in monastic colleges
Expand on the religious significance of the three natures of phenomena
Present Jonangpa views on the thoroughly established nature and Gelukpa criticisms
Explain the reasonings establishing mind-only as means to overcome basic dread of reality, and
Consider how Tsongkhapa and his commentators present the provocative issue of the relationship between the two types of emptiness in the Mind-Only School and compare how the topic of two emptinesses is debated today in America, Europe, and Japan, thereby demonstrating how the two forms of scholarship refine and enhance each other.
The third volume, Absorption in No External World, will examine a plethora of fascinating points on the three natures raised in six centuries of commentary through:
Identifying the teachings in the first wheel of doctrine,
Probing the meaning of "own-character" and "established by way of its own character,"
Untangling the implications of Tsongkhapa's criticisms of Wongchuk, and treating many engaging points on the three natures and the three non-natures, including 1) how to apply these two grids to uncompounded space; 2) whether the selflessness of persons is a thoroughly established nature; 3) how to consider the emptiness of emptiness; and 4) the ways the Great Vehicle schools delineate the three natures and the three non-natures.

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This is the second volume in Jeffrey Hopkins's valuable series on the Mind-Only School of Buddhism. Dzong-ka-ba (1357-1419) is generally regarded as one of the greatest Tibetan philosophers, and his "Mind-Only" discourse on emptiness is considered a landmark in Buddhist philosophy. In Volume 2, Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism, Hopkins provided a translation of the introduction and section on the Mind-Only School in The Essence of Eloquence. The present volume places this enigmatic and influential exposition in its historical and philosophical contexts. Reflections on Reality conveys the intellectual vibrancy of the different cultural interpretations of this text and expands the key philosophical issues it addresses.

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Absorption in No External World: 170 Issues in Mind Only Buddhism (Dynamic Responses to Dzong-Ka-Ba's the Essence of Eloquence) Review

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(More customer reviews)Absorption in No External World: 170 Issues in Mind Only Buddhism by Jeffrey Hopkins (Dynamic Responses to Dzong-Ka-Ba's the Essence of Eloquence: Snow Lion Publications) "This is without question the finest and most complete discussion of the renowned Mind-Only School and its Tibetan context." -Anne C. Klein, author of Knowledge & Liberation
"An exceptionally clear and detailed account of a central debate in Tibetan Buddhist scholastic philosophy."
-Matthew Kapstein, University of Chicago
This book examines a surfeit of intriguing issues raised in six centuries of Tibetan and Mongolian debate and commentary concerning the first two sections of Dzong-ka-ba's (usually transliterated; Tsong-kha-pa) The Essence of Eloquence, the Prologue and the section on the Mind-Only School. By providing vivid detail, Jeffrey Hopkins reveals the liveliness of Tibetan scholastic controversies, showing the dynamism of thoughtful commentary and stimulating the reader's metaphysical imagination. In the process of examining 170 issues, this volume treats many engaging points on Great Vehicle presentations of the three natures and the three non-natures, including how to apply these to all phenomena, the selflessness of persons, and the emptiness of emptiness. It concludes with a delineation of the approaches through which the Mind-Only School interprets scriptures.
This stand-alone book is the final volume of a trilogy on Mind-Only that Hopkins composed over the last twenty-two years. His heavily annotated translation of these sections in Dzongka-ba's text is contained in the first volume, Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism, along with a historical and doctrinal introduction, a detailed synopsis of the text, and a critical edition. The second volume, Reflections on Reality: The Three Natures and Non-Natures in the Mind-Only School, provides historical and social context, a basic presentation of the three natures, the two types of emptiness in the Mind-Only School, and the contrasting of Shay-rap-gyel-tsen of the Jo-nang-ba order of Tibetan Buddhism.
In this volume Hopkins presents opinions on crucial issues from twenty-two commentaries on Dzong-ka-ba's The Essence of Eloquence, considered by his followers to be so challenging that it is called his steel bow and steel arrow, hard to pull but powerful when one succeeds. The careful analysis with which these scholar-yogis probe the issues provides an avenue into patterns of thought that constitute the environment of the text over this long period of intense interest to the present day. Hopkins' lively style draws the reader into the drama, revealing horizons of transformative meaning,
This book identifies the teachings in the first wheel of doctrine and probes the meaning of "own-character" and "established by way of its own character." It untangles the implications of Dzong-ka-ba's criticisms of the Korean scholar Wonch'uk and
treats many engaging points on the three natures and the three non-natures, including (1) how to apply these two grids to uncompounded space; (2) whether the selflessness of persons is a thoroughly established nature; (3) how to consider the emptiness of emptiness; and (4) the ways the Great Vehicle schools delineate the three natures and the three non-natures and presents the approaches through which the Mind-Only School interprets scriptures.
The aim of this study is to bring to life scholastic controversies in order both to stimulate the metaphysical imagination and to show the non-monolithic excess of examination by the followers of a seminal figure in the Tibetan cultural region.
Hopkins annotated translation of these sections in Dzong-ka-ba's text are in the first volume of this series, Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism. It is in four parts:
1.a historical and doctrinal introduction
2.a translation of the General Explanation and the Section on the Mind-Only School in The Essence of Eloquence with frequent annotations in brackets, footnotes, and backnotes
3.a detailed synopsis of the translation that re-renders the text, with additional information, in more free-flowing English
4.a critical edition in Tibetan script of these sections in The Essence of Eloquence.
The second volume of this series, Reflections on Reality: The Three Natures and Non-Natures in the Mind-Only School, presents an introduction to and analysis of many facets of volume one. It places reactions to Dzong-ka-ba's text in historical and social context by examining the tension between allegiance and rational inquiry in monastic colleges and the inter-relationships between faith, reason, and mystical insight. Hopkins develops the religious significance of the central doctrine of the Mind-Only School, the three natures of phenomena by examining in detail the exchange between the Bodhisattva Paramarthasamudgata and Buddha in the seventh chapter of the Sutra Unraveling the Thought concerning the three wheels of doctrine and the three natures documents the markedly different view on the status of reality presented by the fourteenth-century scholar-yogi Shay-rap-gyel-tsen of the Jo-nang-ba order as well as criticisms by Dzong-ka-ba and his Ge-luk-ba` followers. Hopkins fleshes out Tibetan presentations of the provocative issue of the relationship between two types of emptiness in the Mind-Only School and how the topic of two emptinesses is debated today in America, Europe, and Japan, thereby demonstrating how the two forms of scholarship refine and enhance each other (these discussions continue in the three Appendices in this volume). Hopkins demonstrates the types of reasonings established by mind-only practitioners as means to overcome a basic dread of reality.
Dzong-ka-ba was a genius at creating consistency in systems of thought, but sometimes he provided only brief expositions and at other times only suggested his views. Scholars of the Ge-luk-ba sect-like others following a founder's words-have been drawn into the complex problems of extending his thought into those areas that he did not clearly explicate and into re-thinking what was clear but did not manifest the presumed consistency. The working premise is that Dzong-ka-ba's The Essence of Eloquence, though carefully crafted, is subject to the highly creative strategy of "positing his thought as long as consonance with the corpus of his work is maintained. The attempt at resolving apparent contradictions itself fuels increasing interest in the topics, this being a central reason why the Ge-luk-ba system of education, centered around scholastic debate, has been so influential throughout Inner Asia.
Although the superfluity of issues raised in The Essence of Eloquence is susceptible to being laid out in a linear run like a table of contents, (this being shown in the analytical outline after the table of contents in this volume) the only way a reader can react to the multi-sided style of confronting these points is to be within the perspective of the system being considered. Juxtaposing different parts of a treatise and examining their cross-implications, Tibetan monastic textbooks manifest a basic procedure of bringing the whole treatise to bear on a single part, thereby coaxing the participant into developing the worldview of the system. In this way, the overriding context of exposition involves the ramifications of every part (or at least many parts) of a text; the only way for the reader to adjust to this environment is to form the worldview.
Because the exposition moves from issue to issue in a format of confrontational challenges that are episodic, it can at times seem even disjointed, but monastic students learn to live from within a system by being led-in twice-daily debates-to react inside its viewpoint to a plethora of problems. The center of the process, never communicable in words, is the wholeness of the world-view from within which the student learns to live. Like debaters in a monastic college, we also can experience this only by confronting issue after issue, major and minor, in lively embroilment and with hope that the larger perspective will dawn. With this in mind, Hopkins addresses 170 such focal issues in this book.
Tibetan and Mongolian commentators employ various strategies for getting at the meaning of a text by:
dividing the text into sections
providing a synopsis of the topics through an elaborate outline
exploring the range of meanings of particular words
placing an issue in a larger context
extracting issues for extended analysis
juxtaposing seemingly conflicting assertions
finding internal and external evidence to resolve contradictions manipulating meanings so as to create coherence
raising a parallel concern from another context
exposing terminology hardened over centuries of use to analysis of historical development.
These modes of analysis, like those employed by scholars throughout the world, expose knotty problems and resolve seeming or actual contradictions.
Texts are not viewed in isolation as if they live outside of the situation of their culture; they are related to a body of literature and knowledge in such a way that the study of a text is a study of the world. Also, the context provided is not just that of the culture contemporary to or preceding Dzong-ka-ba's text; often, views of scholars subsequent to the text are similarly juxtaposed because the aim is to provide a worldview relevant to the reader's present situation, a comprehensive perspective that makes use of whatever is available. Beyond this, points peripheral to central topics often take center stage such that they provide a wide cultural context for more important issues-the context imbedding the reader in an all-encompassing worldview. These scholars, even when working on small issues, draw on a reserve of...Read more›

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This book offers a fascinating exploration of how provocative issues about reality are refined and debated by Tibetan scholar-practitioners.

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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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