Introduzione, edizione del testo tibetano e traduzione annotata del Madhyamakārthasamgraha attribuito a Bhāviveka.

This paper examines the role of pramāṇa in Jayānanda’s commentary to Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra. As the only extant Indian commentary on any of Candrakīrti’s works (available only in Tibetan translation), written in the twelfth century when Candrakīrti’s interpretation of Madhyamaka first became widely valued, Jayānanda’s Madhyamakāvatāraṭīkā is crucial to our understanding of early Prāsaṅgika thought. In the portions of his text examined here, Jayānanda offers a pointed critique of both svatantra inferences and the broader Buddhist epistemological movement. In developing this critique, (...) he cites at length Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā treatment of svatantra, and so comes to comment on the locus classicus for the Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika distinction. For Jayānanda, svatantra inferences are emblematic of the Dignāga-Dharmakīrti epistemological tradition, which asserts an unwarranted validity to human cognition. As such, Nāgārjuna’s philosophy admits neither svatantra inference, nor pramāṇa (as “valid cognition”) more generally. Instead, Jayānanda argues for Nāgārjuna’s “authority” (pramāṇa) as our prime means for knowing reality. Jayānanda’s account of authority offers a helpful counterbalance to the current trend of portraying Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka as a form of skepticism. (shrink)

Indian Buddhist sources speak of five sins of immediate retribution: murder of mother, father, an arhat, drawing the blood of a buddha, and creating a schism in the monastic community. This category provides the paradigm for sinfulness in Buddhism. Yet even these sins can and will, be expiated in the long run, demonstrating the overwhelmingly positive nature of Buddhist ethics.

In Buddhist texts authored in Indian and Tibetan traditions of scholasticism, one is regularly directed to check one’s understanding against “scripture and reasoning.” To date, however, comparatively little attention has been given to the usage of the latter term of this pair (Skt. yukti , Tib. rigs pa) in Indian Buddhist texts. Building on the work of Scherrer-Schaub, Kapstein and others, this paper discusses divergent glosses of the term yukti as found in Indian Buddhist texts. By highlighting continuities and discontinuities (...) in these accounts, the paper aims to stimulate reflection on the ways in which our assumptions regarding reasoning—and, by extension, what is to count as “Buddhist philosophy”—are represented in, and perhaps contested by, thematizations offered within the tradition. (shrink)

Although rhetoric is not a category of ancient Indian philosophy, this paper argues that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, 2 eighth-century Indian Buddhist philosophers, can nonetheless be seen to embrace a rhetorical conception of rationality. That is, while these thinkers are strong proponents of rational analysis and philosophical argumentation as tools for attaining certainty, they also uphold the contingent nature of all such processes. Drawing on the categories of the New Rhetoric, this paper argues that these Buddhist thinkers understand philosophical argumentation to (...) be directed at a universal audience of rational beings, where this universal audience is not an actual audience but a rhetorical one constructed through the author’s particular and historically contingent conception of what counts as rational. A reception theory of rationality is one that holds that the rationality of an argument depends upon its acceptance by a rational audience. When philosophers recognize the historically contingent nature of what counts as rational, they can embrace a reception theory of rationality that neither reduces the rational to mere opinion nor restricts it to a single, absolute, and timeless standard. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION: THE NAME MADHYAMAKA The Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism goes back to Nagarjuna, the great Indian Buddhist philosopher who is placed ...

The history of the Vedanta school is well known since the time of Sankaracarya on, and its prehistory before Sankara is quite obscure. However, from the time of compilation of major Upanisads to Sankara there is a period of thousand years, and the tradition of Upanisads was not lost; there appeared many philosophers and dogmaticians, although their thoughts are not clearly known. The author has made clear the details of the pre-Sankara Vedanta philosophy, utilizing not only Sanskrit materials, but also (...) Pali, Prakrit (Jain), as well as Tibetan and Chinese sources. In this respect this is quite a unique work. For this work the author was awarded the Imperial Prize by the Academy of Japan. Some sections of this work were already published in Indian as well as European and American journals in English. This work is a complete English translation of the entire book. The English translation was done with the financial aid by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the final touch was given by Mr. Trevor Leggett, the British writer, who is well-versed in Sanskrit as well as in Japanese. (shrink)

Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyavartani is one of the most important Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophical texts. Jan Westerhoff offers a new translation, reflecting the best current philological research and all available editions, and adds his own philosophical commentary on the text. His nuanced, philosophically sophisticated commentary explains Nagarjuna's arguments in a way that is both grounded in historical and textual scholarship and connected explicitly to contemporary philosophical concerns.

This thesis presents the translation and study of the twelfth section of Bio gsal grub mtha', an early fourteenth century Tibetan text composed by the bKa' gdams pa scholar, dBus pa bio gsal. Bio gsal grub mtha' as a whole represents a distinct sort of scholarly literature known as Grub mtha' that finds its roots in Indian siddhānta literature. Tibetan Grub mtha' texts set forth, as the name in translation reveals, the "established tenets" of various Indian, Tibetan, and occasionally Chinese (...) philosophical schools. The section of Bio gsal grub mtha' translated here presents the tenets of the Mādhyamika school of Tibetan Buddhism in general, and their fourteenth century bKa' gdams pa manifestation in particular. The central tenet of Mādhyarnika philosophy is that all phenomena are empty of self-nature. Even that which is discovered to be the ultimate emptiness - is also said to be devoid of any real self-nature. All phenomena are dependent-arisings, lacking reality, existing like dreams and magical illusions. These assertions are discussed in detail in the translation and in the second part of the introduction. Of special interest to scholars of both Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, however, is dBus pa bio gsal's classification of the Mādhyamika subschools. The early Tibetan Buddhist scholars took upon themselves the task of categorizing and inventing names for the various Mādhyamika "schools", and dBus pa bio gsal's classification represents the development of such thought to the fourteenth century. The introduction elucidates both dBus pa bio gsal's divisions of the Mādhyamika sub-schools and elaborates on earlier and later classifications set forth by Tibetan scholars. The investigation provides insight into both the tenets of the Mādhyamika school and the attempts of the Tibetans to arrange the previously unclassified Mādhyamika subschools in a manner that would render them more logical and accessible to themselves and to future generations of scholars. (shrink)