Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature is a philosophical overview of Tibetan Buddhist thought. Charting the different ways Buddhist traditions in Tibet configure the relationship between Madhyamaka and Mind-Only, Duckworth shows how these configurations inform the shape of distinct contemplative practices.

Investigation of the Percept is a short work that focuses on issues of perception and epistemology. Its author, Dignaga, was one of the most influential figures in the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition, and his ideas had a profound and wide-ranging impact in India, Tibet, and China. The work inspired more than twenty commentaries throughout East Asia and three in Tibet, the most recent in 2014.This book is the first of its kind in Buddhist studies: a comprehensive history of a text (...) and its commentarial tradition. The volume editors translate the root text and commentary, along with Indian and Tibetan commentaries, providing detailed analyses of the commentarial innovations of each author, as well as critically edited versions of all texts and extant Sanskrit fragments of passages. The team-based approach made it possible to study and translate a corpus of treatises in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese and to employ the methods of critical philology and cross-cultural philosophy to provide readers with a rich collection of studies and translations, along with detailed philosophical analyses that open up the intriguing implications of Dignaga's thought and demonstrate the diversity of commentarial approaches to his text.This rich text has inspired some of the greatest minds in India and Tibet. It explores some of the key issues of Buddhist epistemology: the relationship between minds and their percepts, the problems of idealism and realism, and error and misperception. (shrink)

This chapter puts Sellars' project of unifying his two images in conversation with that of understanding how the two truth, the conventional and ultimate truth, are related in Buddhism, and in Madhyamaka in particular.

This paper outlines a shift in the role of self-awareness from Yogācāra to tantra and connects some of the dots between Yogācāra, Pratyabhijñā, and Buddhist tantric traditions in Tibet. As is the case with Yogācāra, the Pratyabhijñā tradition of Utpaladeva maintains that awareness is self-illuminating and constitutive of objects. Utpaladeva’s commentator and influential successor, Abhinavagupta, in fact quotes Dharmakīrti’s argument from the Pramāṇaviniścaya that objects are necessarily perceived objects. That is, everything known is known in consciousness; there is nothing that (...) can be known outside or separate from consciousness. This aspect of Pratyabhijñā thought is shared with Yogācāra. While Utpaladeva drew upon Yogācāra epistemology to formulate a differential construction of objects, he departed from this theory to develop a distinctive monistic framework for the interpretation of subjectivity. By appealing to the ultimate reality of a singularly nonconceptual, transcendental subject rather than a plurality of conceptual particulars, Utpaladeva appropriated Dharmakīrti’s epistemological model while turning it on its head. That is, Utpaladeva critiqued Dharmakīrti in one context while he is indebted to him in another to establish the framework for his own absolute idealism, where everything happens in and through the absolute self that is Śiva. Utpaladeva extended the place of self-awareness in Yogācāra to formulate an absolute idealism that is the theoretic foundation for philosophical tantra. In this paper, I will chart a trajectory of this development, from Yogācāra to Pratyabhijñā, and show how a parallel development took place in tantric assimilations of Yogācāra in Tibet. (shrink)

Emptiness ( śūnyatā ) is one of the most important topics in Buddhist thought and also is one of the most perplexing. Buddhists in Tibet have developed a sophisticated tradition of philosophical discourse on emptiness and ineffability. This paper discusses the meaning(s) of emptiness within three prominent traditions in Tibet: the Geluk ( dge lugs ), Jonang ( jo nang ), and Nyingma ( rnying ma ). I give a concise presentation of each tradition’s interpretation of emptiness and show how (...) each interpretation represents a distinctive aspect of its meaning. Given that Buddhist traditions (1) accept an extra-linguistic reality and (2) maintain a strong tradition of suspicion of language with the belief that language both constructs and distorts reality, this paper responds to an issue that is not so much whether or not an inexpressible reality can be expressed, but rather how it is best articulated. (shrink)

Buddhist theories of mind pivot between two distinct interpretative strands: an epistemological tradition in which the mind, or the mental, is the foundation for valid knowledge and a tradition of deconstruction, in which there is no privileged vantage point for truth claims. The contested status of these two strands is evident in the debates surrounding the relationship between epistemology and Madhyamaka that extend from India to Tibet. The paper will focus on two exemplars of these approaches in Tibet, those of (...) Śākya Chokden and Tsongkhapa. (shrink)

This paper queries the logic of the structure of hierarchical philosophical systems. Following the Indian tradition of siddhānta, Tibetan Buddhist traditions articulate a hierarchy of philosophical views. The ‘Middle Way’ philosophy or Madhyamaka—the view that holds that the ultimate truth is emptiness—is, in general, held to be the highest view in the systematic depictions of philosophies in Tibet, and is contrasted with realist schools of thought, Buddhist and non-Buddhist. But why should an antirealist or nominalist position be said to be (...) ‘better’ than a realist position? What is the criterion for this claim and is it, or can it, be more than a criterion that is tradition-specific for only Tibetan Buddhists? In this paper, I will look at the criteria to evaluate Buddhist philosophical traditions, particularly as articulated in what came to be referred as the ‘nonsectarian’ tradition. I draw from the recent work of Jorge Ferrer to query the assumptions of the hierarchical structures of ‘nonsectarian’ traditions and attempt to articulate an evaluative criteria for a nonsectarian stance that are not based solely on metaphysical or tradition-specific claims. (shrink)

Jamgön Mipam (1846–1912) is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Tibet.

Buddhist traditions understand emptiness in various ways, and two streams of interpretation, “self-emptiness” and “other-emptiness” , have emerged in Tibet that help bring into focus the extent to which interpretations diverge.1 In contrast to self-emptiness, other-emptiness does not refer to a phenomenon’s lack of its own essence; it refers to the ultimate reality’s lack of all that it is not. Rather than claiming the universality of self-emptiness , proponents of other-emptiness assert another way to understand emptiness with regard to the (...) ultimate . These two interpretations of emptiness—as ground and as groundless .. (shrink)

The culminating philosophy and practice for Buddhist traditions in Tibet is what is found in tantra, or Vajrayāna. Yet Tibet is unique in the Buddhist world in that it is a place where not only the traditions of tantra are practiced, but where the epistemological traditions of valid cognition and what came to be known as Prāsaṅgika‐Madhyamaka also took root. This chapter briefly surveys a range of ways in which Madhyamaka is represented in Tibet. Madhyamaka takes the place of the (...) highest philosophical view among Tibetan Buddhist sects, and seeing how different traditions formulate the view of Madhyamaka is an important part of understanding how these traditions relate to tantra and negotiate the relationship between Madhyamaka and Vajrayāna. Vajrayāna in Tibet is pantheist to the core, for, in its most profound expressions all dualities between the divine and the world are radically undone. (shrink)

Mipam (‘ju mi pham rgya mtsho, 1846–1912), an architect of the Nyingma (rnying ma) tradition of Tibet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, articulates two distinct models of the two truths that are respectively reflected in Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Buddhist traditions. The way he positions these two models sheds light on how levels of description are at play in his integration of these traditions. Mipam positions one kind of two-truth model as the product of an ontological analysis while (...) another model can be seen as resulting from a phenomenological reduction. He accommodates both models into his systematic interpretation, and for him, each one has an important role to play in coming to understand the nature of the Buddhist truths of emptiness and Buddha-nature. Since each model reflects a different style of analysis, or a different perspective on truth, his presentation reveals how neither model alone has the last word on the nature of what is and how it is experienced. This paper analyzes the means by which he lays out these two models of the two truths, and explores the implications of their integration in his philosophical works. A primary concern for Mipam, and a factor that guides his attempt to integrate these two approaches to truth, is his aim to both induce authentic experience and true knowledge on the one hand, and represent reality and the experience of it on the other. These competing and complimentary objectives are a central focus around which both styles of critical reflection, and both models of the two truths, revolve. (shrink)