This article presents an annotated critical edition of Vāgīśvarakīrti’s Tattvaratnāvaloka and its auto-commentary, the Tattvaratnāvaloka-Vivaraṇa, two major works of 11th-century Buddhist tantric philosophy. These texts examine various conceptions of the goal (sādhya) of the tantric path and contentiously position themselves as clarifying the nature of the fourth initiation (caturthā- bhiṣeka). This new edition, the second to be published, addresses numerous transmissional problems in both texts by evaluating the available evidence, comprehensively analysing textual difficulties, and proposing hypotheses for their resolution. The introduction highlights the significance of these works, clarifies Vāgīśvarakīrti’s textual corpus, and outlines the editorial methodology. This critical foundation enables deeper interpretive study of a seminal thinker and his intellectual contributions.
This paper discusses Buddhaghosa’s phenomenological descriptions of attaining the four arūpa (immaterial/formless) states (namely, “boundless space”, “boundless consciousness”, “nothingness”, and “neither perception nor non-perception”). As I argue, most of these attainments have a phenomenology that is entirely free of rūpa phenomena. I juxtapose Buddhaghosa’s descriptions of these states with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s discussion of the “bodily” consciousness that arises while the meditator is engaged in some of Buddhaghosa’s other contemplative practices. I do so with the aim of advancing our understanding of the diversity we can find in Buddhaghosa’s descriptions of consciousness. I also argue that the immaterial states, as Buddhaghosa describes them, are a particularly striking case of consciousness that fails to be “transparent” or “diaphanous”, in the sense of the contemporary debate that traces those terms to the work of G.E. Moore.
This article revisits the account of self-awareness (svasaṃvitti) in the Cheng weishi lun (*Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi, CWSL), an influential Yogācāra treatise traditionally understood as a compilation of positions drawn from a range of Indian authors, with Dharmapāla (fl. sixth century CE) serving as the leading voice. Through a close comparison of key passages in the CWSL with Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya and Sthiramati’s Triṃśikāvijñaptibhāṣya, the study argues for the viability of reading the CWSL independently of Ji’s commentaries. The article first traces the roots of mental reflexivity in early Buddhist and classical Yogācāra thought, showing that pre-Dignāga Yogācāra accepted a weaker form of mental reflexivity prior to the explicit theorization of self-awareness. It then analyzes the CWSL’s treatment of self-awareness, arguing that its fourfold model of cognition—consisting of the signaling aspect, the observing aspect, self-awareness, and cognition-of-self-awareness—constitutes an innovative extension of Dignāga’s epistemology, motivated in particular by the Three Natures doctrine. Furthermore, a comparison between the relevant sections of the CWSL and the corresponding sections of Sthiramati’s Triṃśikāvijñaptibhāṣya shows that Xuanzang drew directly on Sthiramati’s work, even though Kuiji’s commentaries misrepresents Sthiramati’s positions and, possibly, the compositional nature of the CWSL. The article concludes that, regardless of Xuanzang’s precise role in formulating the text, the CWSL should be recognized as a philosophically sophisticated synthesis that actively intervenes in contemporary Yogācāra debates.
The Upaniṣads present brahman as apara (conditioned) and para (unconditioned). According to Svāmi Saccidānandendra Sarasvatī (SSS), this distinction is solely a distinction of Upaniṣadic purpose and presentation: while the former is presented for meditation and the attainment of higher worlds, the latter is employed to understand brahman’s true nature. SSS argues that the two different sections demand two different methods of exegesis. The first—on aparabrahman—is to be taken as it is: it is similar to the karmakāṇḍa section of the Vedas, for it prescribes certain specific actions (meditations) in order to attain certain specific fruits. The latter, according to SSS, must be understood through the hermeneutical lens of adhyāropāpavāda (false-predication-and-subsequent-denial). SSS argues that the failure to discern correctly these different, critical exegetical methods as applied to different sections of the texts has led scholars—traditional and contemporary—to conflate them, and misconstrue Śaṅkarācārya’s framework of philosophy. In this paper, I analyze closely the parāpara distinction in Śaṅkarācārya’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya (BSB), and in the light of this analysis, I examine two Upaniṣadic sections to demonstrate SSS’s arguments.
The basic thesis of Haribhadrasūri’s Victory Flag of Non-One-Sidedness (Anekāntajayapatākā, c. 8th century CE) is that any real thing possesses contrary properties such as, in the first instance, existence and nonexistence. It is unsurprising, then, that both classical detractors and well-wishing modern proponents of the Jain philosophy of non-one-sidedness have often considered this Jain theory of non-one-sidedness (anekāntavāda) to tolerate or even embrace paradox and contradiction. As this paper shows, however, Haribhadra not only professes non-contradiction but in fact adheres to it in something quite like its Aristotelian form. Employing an ancient hermeneutical method that relativizes predicates according to analytical parameters (nikṣepas), Haribhadra maintains that contraries are compossible and indeed required to determine any real thing as what it is. Anglophone scholarship on contradiction and negation is leveraged to show how this reading problematizes some scholarly interpretations that saddle his theory with equivocation or triviality.
