Mathias Fermer. The Life and Works of Gong dkar rDo rje gdan pa Kun dga’ rnam rgyal (1432-1496) (གོང་དཀར་རྡོ་རྗེ་གདན་པ་ཀུན་དགའ་རྣམ་རྒྱལ་༼༡༤༣༢-༡༤༩༦༽གྱི་ལོ་རྒྱུས་དང་གསུང་རྩོམ་།). M.A. Thesis, Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, University of Hamburg, 2009. 415 pp.
From the Preface:
Gong dkar rDo rje gdan pa Kun dga' rnam rgyalGong dkar Kun dga’ rnam rgyal, alias Gong dkar rDo rje gdan pa or Grwa lnga rgyal po (1432-1496), was one of the great scholar-saints who lived in the religiously highly productive period of the fifteenth century. Today, his religious tradition, which had mainly flourished near its original home in the southern part of Central Tibet (dBus), is commonly referred to as the rDzong tradition (rDzong lugs), a lesser known subsect within the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. […]
PART I of this thesis gives a rough overview of the religious and political circumstances of Kun dga’ rnam rgyal’s time (chapter 1) and introduces the noble family lineage into which he was born (chapter 2). In PART II, I summarize this master’s life, beginning with an overview of previous modern research (chapter 3), followed by an account of his eventful life (chapter 4) and a discussion on the practice tradition that emerged from him (chapter 5). The next chapter is dedicated to Kun dga’ rnam rgyal’s writings, which will be provided in a composite catalogue of his works and a descriptive catalogue of those texts that have been available to me (chapter 6). PART III consists of the edition (chapter 7) and the translation (chapter 8 ) of the eleventh chapter of his main biography. The translated text gives an impression of how he was perceived as a religious teacher and provides a detailed list of his disciples. In addition, the final section contains several appendices.
Mr. Fermer’s thesis is an impressive piece of work; it won the 2009 Peter Lindegger Preis for graduate students of Tibetan Studies. Plans are, or were, in place to publish the thesis as a monograph. (Here I should disclose my own interest: I receive a mention in the Acknowledgements.)
Moreover, an e-text of the biography is available at Hamburg’s promising Sakya Resource Centre (sakya-resource.de/).
Was the Buddha’s physiognomy superhuman, or simply deformed? The extreme literal-mindedness of a new thesis on the thirty-two marks of a mahā-puruṣa bodes well for the author’s future career in Buddhist Studies:
It is plausible that the observation of most of these thirty-two uncommon physical attributes might well have been accumulated over centuries as a result of contact by observers with various afflicted persons.
A bit too much information follows:
We expect to be able to determine the plausibility of his physical variations based on current data available for congenital abnormalities, such as connective tissue disorders (Ehlers-Danlos and Marfan’s syndrome) to explain his skeletal features (his long reach, long digits and legs, pedal deformity), and acquired physical changes as with endocrinopathies, as one might see with acromegaly (large tongue and jaw) and Cushing’s syndrome (interscapular hump, soft skin, hair growth quality).
Here’s the citation — for completists only:
Bendz, Oleg. The Buddhalakshana. M. A. thesis, University of Toronto, 2010. [abstract / PDF]
A few months ago, fragments of a “ninth-century Khotanese MS” were posted on an antiques trading bulletin board in China without further information or comment. The images are of high enough quality to study; they are reproduced (without the necessary flipping, in one case) below.
Kiyokazu Okita. Purāṇic Vedānta: On the Issue of Lineage in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Sampradāya. PhD diss., Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, 2010 (Supervisor: Gavin Flood). 543 pp.
Some details from material kindly supplied by the author:
This thesis examines the issue of lineage in the Brahmā-Mādhva-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sampradāya. In the South Asian context, it is the idea of sampradāya or lineage which guarantees the authenticity and salvific efficacy of a religious community. […] The authority of a particular group is often based on a claim that the divine figure revealed the original teaching, and it has been transmitted generation after generation through the a succession of teachers and disciples. The idea of the four orthodox Vaiṣṇava sampradāyas, which correspond to four divine figures, became popular in medieval northern India
from around the 15th century CE. These divine figures were said to be Śrī, Brahmā, Rudra, and Sanatkumāra. […] Continue reading “Okita, ‘Purāṇic Vedānta’ (2010)”
Two dissertations on the eighth-century Śaiva author Sadyojyoti, both supervised by Krishna Sivaraman, have recently become available online at McMaster University:
Leon E. Hannotte. Philosophy of God in Kashmir Śaiva Dualism: Sadyojyoti and His Commentators. PhD Diss., McMaster University, 1987. Open Dissertations and Theses, Paper 2089. [abstract & pdf]
Wayne Andrew Borody. The Doctrine of Empirical Consciousness in the Bhoga Kārikā. PhD Diss., McMaster University, 1988. Open Dissertations and Theses, Paper 2073. [abstract & PDF]
For students of late Indian Buddhism, Sadyojyoti is a person of interest, given his advocacy of epistemes such as the sākārajñānavāda / nirākārajñānavāda dyad, which was already known to Kamalaśīla, as well as to some later Buddhist authors.
Hannotte’s dissertation was published by the National Library of Canada in 1989, and as F. S. kindly pointed out to me, Borody’s dissertation finally came out with Motilal Banarsidass in 2005. Nonetheless, it is handy to be able to freely access both dissertations.
A recent post on H-Buddhism from Dr. Hidenori Sakuma (佐久間秀範) questions the identity of two authors called Asvabhāva: one a commentator on the Mahāyānasutrālaṅkāra, another a commentator on Kambala’s Ālokamālā.
Not wanting to brave H-Buddhism’s shaky moderation — as seen, for example, in the oblivious reposting of Sakuma’s apparently private replies — I responded off-list. My main observation was this: the strong likelihood that the Ālokamālā belongs to a much later era of the Mahāyāna is reflected in the fact that only late authors cite it. Only tantric authors from the tenth century or later, such as Puṇḍarīka and Abhayākaragupta, know about the Ālokamālā. [Edited, 2011/09/23: ninth-century Āryadeva also knows about Kambala, though he refers to a different work.]
Moreover, there is the striking fact that it is cited by name by Śaiva tantric authors who were active in this period. Utpala’s Spandapradīpikā quotes Ālokamālā 141cd and 142, with a couple of variants, and the latter verse appears in Kṣemarāja’s commentary on the Spandakārikās, the Spandanirṇaya.*
The point here is not that this high-level form of Śaivism has such a profound intellectual debt to Buddhism that it must clarify its ideas through direct engagement with Buddhist authors. That is surely old news in this field, if rarely acknowledged in scholarship nowadays. Rather, I want to observe that the Ālokamālā is regarded as a vital tract in this particular period, and no earlier — certainly not in the fifth century, as posited by Chr. Lindtner (and repeated in Potter’s Encyclopedia). This date is probably about half a millennium400 years too early.
It could also be argued, perhaps by someone with more time and resources than myself, that the authors of the Mahāyānasutrālaṅkāra and Ālokamālā in some ways address themselves to different concerns which, it might also be surmised, are characteristic of different eras. The former is conscious of a threat from the Hīnayāna — a phenomenon which it defines with a particular clarity, seemingly lost on many scholars who have fretted about this term — and became a work of almost incontestable authority among Buddhists in India. The Ālokamālā, on the other hand, has other priorities, as did those late tantric authors who found a place for it in their own writings.
* Dyczkowski, The doctrine of vibration, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989, p.248, n.31. The verse numbers in the Ālokamālā are supplied by myself.
Theodore Benke. The Śūdrācāraśiromaṇi of Kṛṣṇa Śeṣa: A 16th Century Manual of Dharma for Śūdras. PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010. [abstract & official site / PDF]
From the abstract
“From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century C.E., a śāstra of a new type on the topic of Śūdras was composed and circulated among Dharmaśāstrins. […] Śūdradharma texts were one response of the Brahmin intellectual elite to the challenges to traditional dharma and dominance arising from the changing socio-economic conditions of Sultanate and Mughal India. They represent a shift in Dharmashastric discourse from the ritual exclusion of Śūdras as the sign of their social subjection to fuller integration into the Brahmanical fold. […] These śūdradharma texts were primarily concerned with the ritual life of Śūdras—the rites, sacraments, and forms of religious knowledge to which they were entitled in śruti and smṛti. But they also included expositions on the generation of Śūdra jātis according to the theory of varṇasaṅkara and descriptions of the ways of life and occupations of Śūdras. This is a study and translation of one of these texts, the Śūdrācāraśiromaṇi of Kṛṣṇa Śeṣa, among the most brilliant and eminent paṇḍits of late medieval Sanskrit, celebrated as both grammarian and poet.”
Annlaug Tho. Selected Translations and Analysis of ‘Further Biographies of Nuns’. Master’s thesis in History of Religion, University of Oslo, Spring 2008. [URN & abstract / PDF]
From the introduction: “This thesis is a study of ‘Further Biographies of Nuns’ [續比丘尼傳] compiled by Master Zhenhua [震華大師] in the 1940s. I have selected three biographies from the Tang Dynasty, two from the Song Dynasty, two from the Yuan Dynasty, one from the Ming Dynasty, and four from the Qing Dynasty.”
* Royal, James F. Buddhism and the Production of American Cool. PhD Dissertation, University of Florida, May 2010. [PDF]
Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha Gautama
Today there is no shortage of people in the Western hemisphere who identify as Buddhist. At the same time, there is a remarkable absence of the Buddhist mainstream transmitted in Sanskritic texts and institutions in the West. Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to find anything like the pan-Indian tradition in your neck of the woods? More to the point, just how Buddhist are the icons of Buddhism which have sprung up in North America and elsewhere?
Such questions rarely receive the attention they deserve in the literature on self-styled Western Buddhism. Now, I am pleased to say, a new dissertation by James F. Royal* sheds light of unprecedented brilliance upon the Western milieu.
One of Royal’s main claims is that much of the Buddhist presence in the West is less about putting Buddhism into practice in a new context than about neutering and undermining it. Buddhism is made to align with the notion of cool, which Royal defines as:
a key guiding motif in the marketing of postwar and then post-Cold War consumer culture for middle-class America.
An ideology of renunciation becomes a quest for personal aggrandisement; ego-denial becomes ego-affirmation. This redefinition of Buddhism is enacted and encouraged by a number of high-profile media players:
American films and advertisements of the last 20 years have taken the religion as a sign of Otherness that itself seems to promote consumption and America’s technological lineage of control.
In his dissertation, Royal examines not only the teachings but the motives of such figures as:
…Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose use of Buddhism for capitalist-imperialist ends set the stage for the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. […] later uses of the religion, in 1990s film and 2000s advertisement, show a Buddhism that is more overtly procapitalist, a move that reflects America’s identity crisis in the post-Cold War, especially in its relationship with China, but also Asia generally.
While Royal also examines self-styled Buddhists who “ostensibly provided a critique of capitalism”, his overriding concern is to show how
the discourse of cool has tried to appropriate seemingly subversive elements back into the capitalist fold.
Although I have not yet seen Dr. Royal’s dissertation in full—an extract was kindly provided—I expect that it could become a landmark in our understanding of how Buddhism is made to appear in the West, and more generally, how it is subverted to carry out the ends of modern consumerism.
Abstract (part): One of the most remarkable facets of capitalism is its ability to incorporate disparate, even antithetical, systems into its ever-enlarging sphere of influence, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries as technology makes the world interconnected. To make such a transformation, consumer capitalism has employed a discourse of ‘cool’ to rein in potentially threatening figures and ideologies and bring them back into the circuits of consumption. Especially ripe for analysis is the incorporation of Buddhism, since the creed is the fastest-growing of the world religions in the U.S. The key moment for its mobilization, the 1950s, occurred during a period of escalating tensions with communism, in which a flourishing consumer capitalism was touted as the way to defeat the U.S.S.R. During this period, representations of Buddhism entered pop culture as a challenge to mainstream consumerism. Yet, now representations of Buddhism support consumer capitalism, for instance, in ads and films. Thus, this dissertation seeks to understand how seemingly antithetical discourses can promote the proliferation of capitalism, and how political and capitalist imperatives can motivate representations of a foreign religion. This dissertation examines postwar figures who have used Buddhism in their cultural productions, although it highlights writers from earlier periods who framed Buddhism for later adoption.
