The Logic of Emptiness and the Emptiness of Logic: The Creation of Tibetan Scholasticism

FAIN: FT-56238-08

Kevin Alan Vose
College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA 23186-0002)

This book project examines the generative philosophical issues that informed Tibetan scholasticism in the twelfth century. Scholasticism came to dominate philosophical inquiry and monastic education, forming one of the characteristic features of Buddhism in Tibet. Tibetan scholastics, like their medieval European counterparts, remain fundamentally committed to a knowable, rational universe yet insist that emptiness characterizes human beings and the world in which we live. This study utilizes several volumes from a recent textual find, the Collected Works of the Kadampa, previously believed lost in the Cultural Revolution. These volumes allow us to investigate Tibetan scholasticism's formation in the Kadampa Order, which became a model for all further Tibetan schools. This study of early Kadampa scholasticism will reshape our understanding of Tibet's development of Buddhist philosophical traditions and in turn pave the way for a broad narrative of Tibetan intellectual history.

Associated Products

Making and Re-Making the Ultimate in Early Tibetan Readings of Santideva (Article)
Title: Making and Re-Making the Ultimate in Early Tibetan Readings of Santideva
Author: Kevin Vose
Abstract: Santideva’s Bodhicaryavatara has long been celebrated, alongside Candrakirti’s Madhyamakavatara, for its explication of emptiness from the Prasa?gika-Madhyamaka viewpoint, set within a broader presentation of the Mahayana path structure. The kind of ultimate suggested in these texts, an ultimate that transcends thought and language, would prove to be a stumbling block for those early Tibetan Madhyamikas with strong commitments to the Buddhist epistemological tradition. Rather than accept or reject Santideva’s seemingly transcendent ultimate and the host of problems attendant on this view, early bKa' gdams pa scholars found a variety of ways to interpret it. How one interpreted Santideva’s ultimate, whether aligning with Candrakirti’s transcendent portrayal or with a logic-based model, in turn became a dividing line for a series of categories of Madhyamaka, including the well-known Svatantrika-Prasa?gika divide.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/9047
Primary URL Description: Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies
Access Model: Subscription for print copies; open access online after 60 months
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies
Publisher: Ferdinand Berger and Söhne

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