Buddhology

Commonly referred to in Chinese by the term jinglu, scriptural catalogs constitute a specific sort of Sinitic bibliographical literature that deals primarily with texts accepted in East Asian Buddhist circles as authoritative in matters of religion. The role that these catalogs played in the history of the Chinese Buddhist canon has become the subject of various important studies, but still oft-neglected are the functional places that such texts filled in the sphere of Buddhist devotional practice. To try to redress the balance, this essay brings into focus a small but significant group of Southern Song (1127-1279) Buddhist monuments in the Sichuan basin. Not only do these monuments allow us a rare glimpse into the devotional uses and symbolic functions of scriptural catalogs, but they offer a vantage point from which to view at least a part of what premodern Buddhists in the Sichuan basin actually believed and practiced.

This research investigates the Mahāmudrā interpretation of the Eighth Karmapa Mikyö Dorjé (1507-1554), particularly regarding his text Recognizing the Blessings of Mahāmudrā (Phyag rgya chen po’i byin rlabs kyi ngos ’dzin). Drawing upon contemporary research, historical developments, and textual evidence, this work argues that the Eighth Karmapa’s Mahāmudrā thought can be understood as reaction, re-appropriation, and resolution. Though Mikyö Dorjé reacted to Sakya and Gelug critiques of Kagyü Mahāmudrā, and accepted that one could re-appropriate Mahāmudrā by incorporating aspects of sūtra and tantra onto the path of Mahāmudrā, he ultimately sought to adhere to the subitist tendencies of early Kagyü masters by resolving all conventional tensions of the ground, path, and fruition via a holistically non-dual union (Skt. Yuganaddha; Tib. zung ’jug). This demonstrates that both doctrinal eclecticism and upholding the transcendence of Mahāmudrā were pillars of Mikyö Dorjé’s thought, and that his theory of union provided rhetorical and philosophical consistency and justification for these views.

This research paper examines recent literature that reconsiders the notion of a person and its implications in relation to disjunctures occurring in early Buddhism between for example notions of not self and no self, the unanswered questions of the Buddha, and claims made by the Buddhist Pudgalavadins that there was a person. Doubt concerning a person highlights issues in relation to the formation of knowledge in the function of debates, where opponents of the Pudgalavadins in the Vijnanakaya implied they believed there was "a fifth basis for mindfulness, a basis for mindfulness of the sentient being.” Accounts of debates with Pudgalavadins, provided by their opponents from other Buddhist schools, underpin modern attempts to reconstruct the philosophical framework in which notions of a pudgala functioned in relation to the teachings of the Buddha. Their opponents claims have also led to assertions that the Pudgalavadins were heretical is reconsidered in recent literature, and the heuristic implications are considered. With the recent identification of a number of texts as Pudgalavadin in Chinese translations, outlines of positions they held have been reconstructed and interrogated. For example, Hurvitz (1967, p. 465-468) in his translation of a text which he seemingly did not realise was Pudgalavadin notes in a schematic of its outline, that although right mindfulness has four objects body (kaya), sensation (vedana), thought (citta) and dharma, a fifth mindfulness oddly is included as an action under right effort along with faith and non-abandonment.
Research questions highlighted in this project, include: is there a fifth mindfulness, towards what is it directed, and if there is, is it realisable in practice; what are various Buddhist theories of the person, and is this useful; what are the implications for heuristics concerning a person, emptiness, and dependent origination; do Buddhist methods of inquiry and philosophical proof constitute a form of mindfulness in contemplative practice, including as a search for truth to overcome doubt.

https://www.tibshelf.org/the-wondrous-light-of-lunar-nectar
Kunga Pelden was a twentieth-century yogin who resided around Dzogchen Monastery. He was a heart student of Orgyen Tendzin Norbu, himself a disciple of Patrul Rinpoche. He mostly spent his life in retreat and was a proponent of The Guru's Inner Essence, or Lama Yangtik, and the practices of the channels, vital-energies, vital-essences, and physical yogas of the Heart Essence of the Great Expanse, or Longchen Nyingtik. Kunga Pelden received Lama Yangtik, Longchen Nyingtik, and the physical yogas from Orgyen Tendzin Norbu and the practice of the channels, vital-energies, and vital-essences from Pema Tekchok Loden.

The Saṃskṛtāsaṃskṛtaviniścaya (“An Analysis of the Conditioned and the Unconditioned”) is a learned Buddhist scholastic work by an otherwise little-known paṇḍita, Daśabalaśrīmitra (c. late 12th to early 13th c., Magadha/East India). The original Sanskrit was hitherto thought lost; we could access the work only in Tibetan translation. This paper presents the only known Sanskrit fragment, (re-)discovered in the Cambridge University Library (Ms. Or. 157.2).

I argue in this paper that:
1. The Buddha lived above and beyond the Vinaya rules he prescribed;
2. His sole moral guideline throughout his life, and that of his disciples before the Vinaya rules were formulated, is only the Dhamma that he had realized, i.e., the concepts enshrined in three suttas given in full in the account of events occurring during the earliest period of the monastic Order;
3. Those concepts were also the general framework in which the Vinaya was founded and developed, and based upon which Vinaya rules must be understood.

The concept of the Buddha began with the historical human Buddha, Gotama or Śākyamuni Buddha and underwent a dramatic development and reached its culmination with the formation of the tri-kāya theory. A careful observation of the various Buddhist knowledge systems that developed in ancient India and China clearly shows the systematic development of the Buddha concept. Thus, to have a clear picture of the evolution of the Buddha notion, it is a thorough significance to study how the Buddha was depicted in early Buddhist discourses and diverse biographical sketches of the other subsequent Buddhist traditions such as 1 E 4 3 Sarvāstivāda, Mahāsā ghika and Mahāyāna. Hence, this present paper attempts to understand the evolution of the ideology of the Buddha basically focusing on the early Buddhist discourse and assorted Buddhology of the other Buddhist schools.

The present paper edits and discusses the only known Sanskrit fragment of Daśabalaśrīmitra’s Saṃskṛtāsaṃskṛtaviniścaya, a voluminous encyclopaedia of Buddhist lore from ca. 1140–1150 CE. I argue that this three-folio fragment, which was found in the Cambridge University Library, is that of an excerpt from the aforementioned work. The text we have comes from the 29th and 30th chapters, dealing with various qualities of a buddha, most notably the so-called major and minor marks of a mahāpuruṣa. Most of the text is an excerpt of Abhayākaragupta’s Munimatālaṃkāra (1108/9 CE). I edit the Sanskrit fragment, its Tibetan translation, as well as the Tibetan translation of Abhaya’s work.

Maitreya is the future Buddha, the Buddha who will follow our present Buddha Śākyamuni. For more than two thousand years Maitreya (Pali: Metteyya) has been an inspiration for Buddhist devotees who look forward to his coming and aspire to meet him and receive his blessings and teachings. Their devotions have animated art, ritual, meditation practice, and literature across Asia. The Theravaṃsa of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia transmits a ‘Chronicle of the Future’ (Anāgatavaṃsa) in a bewildering number of recensions. Written in Pali, the ‘Chronicle’ is a paean of the golden future that Maitreya will inaugurate for those who practice sincerely. The present volume contains a study, a critical edition, and an annotated translation of a commentary on the ‘Chronicle’, the Amatarasadhārā, or ‘Stream of Deathless Nectar’ composed in Pali by the Sri Lankan elder Upatissa. An appendix gives the Pali Anāgatavaṃsa side by side with two fourteenth-century Tibetan translations. The volume is a significant contribution to research on Maitreya the future Buddha and to the study of the Pali manuscript culture of Thailand.

This book is a very good introduction written in a didactic way to the history of Pāli language, its grammatical features, and its style. But this book is not just that, since a new theory concerning the origin of the Pāli language is introduced. The book in its first three chapters is a very good primer for a student who is approaching the study of the Pāli language without previous knowledge of Sanskrit, but also linguistics in general.

This article focuses on the Catholic missions in Tibet
between the end of the XVII century and the beginning
of the XVIII century, with special regard to the mission
of Ippolito Desideri (1684-1733). The account of his
stay in Tibet between 1716-1721 is one of the earliest
descriptions of the history, geography, and customs of the
Tibetan people. Desideri’s knowledge of Tibetan buddhism,
although uncomplete and biased, remained unsurpassed
until the second half of the 19th century, and his
studies, rediscoverd after a long oblivion, can be considered
the first European tibetological works.

This article proposes the Socinians’analysis of the features of rational consideration of
content of religion. In this regard, the following issues are revealed: the meaning of «religion» and its correlates, the Socinians’interpretation of the of religion as a teaching, the relation of reason and of revelation as principles of religion explaining, the periods of formation of the religious history of humanity. The subject of analysis are principal texts of «Polish brethren», including «Rakovian catechism», J. Crellius and J. Szlichtingthe catechism, works of F. Socinus, Ch. Ostorodius, J. Crellius, J. Völkel, A. Wiszowaty. The effect of socinians teachings of religion in the shaping of those ideas and concepts that have gained acceptance in the European intellectual community of that time is also showed.