Although Candrakīrti has been a focus in the recent scholarly attention on conventional reality in Buddhist philosophy, the complexity of his discussions of the status of phenomenal world on the surface or conventional level has not been adequately explored. In cataloging the wide-ranging interpretations that Candrakīrti has offered, this paper identifies several clusters of connected ideas that are delineated here as dimensions of Candrakīrti’s conventional reality. It will be shown that his thoughts on the subject have divergent orientations, ranging from (...) commonsensical to technical. Thus, on the one hand, conventional reality represents the beliefs and consensus that ordinary people share about their world, while, on the other, traditional Madhyamaka, grammar, and Abhidharma discourses are used to provide linguistic and Buddhist doctrinal outlines of that same reality. The mobilization of available resources affords Candrakīrti several layers of articulation, as it does again for the eighth-century writers Jñānagarbha and Śāntarakṣita, who bring Dharmakīrti’s thought and Yogācāra philosophy to bear on the Madhyamaka theory of conventional reality. (shrink)

What texts did Buddhists of South Asia and beyond read? How did they read, interpret, and use these texts? This essay focuses primarily on the first of the two questions and examines in this connection instances of citation found in the early Mūlamadhyamakakārikā commentaries and in a related Tibetan work as evidence of the uses of Buddhist texts. The collected samples indicate two major shifts in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist textual practices. The first transition occurred in the sixth and seventh (...) centuries when Indian commentaries on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā began to cite scriptural passages with greater frequency, especially from the Mahāyāna sūtras. The example of Tsong kha pa’s Madhyamaka work represents a later trend in which Tibetan writers repeated sūtra passages previously cited in the Indian texts that were the main objects of their study and attention. What emerges here is the pivotal role played by the middle-period Indian Mādhyamikas. Writers such as Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti contributed very substantially to the collection of core scriptural citations that were deployed in the Madhyamaka texts. While some of the sūtra passages these Indian Madhyamaka authors used were circulated outside the circle of their own philosophical tradition, others appear to have been newly collected through their private reading experience. (shrink)

Aśvaghoṣa follows his scriptural sources closely in his narration of the story of the Buddha’s last journey leading to his nirvāṇa. The Buddhacarita and the Pāli Mahāparinibbānasutta mirror each other in their accounts of most of the places that the Buddha visited and the many events that took place during that journey. What the Buddhacarita and the Pāli sutta have in common also suggests that Aśvaghoṣa’s sources are already highly literary, even though the Buddhist poet transforms the traditional materials through (...) versification and literary embellishment. He also freshly designs occasional religious dialogs and philosophical meditation. Aśvaghoṣa’s literary accomplishments met with different responses outside South Asia. In China, the translation of the Buddhacarita was used as an authority and a source of information in erudite biographies of the Buddha, a Buddhist history, a Buddhist encyclopedia, and lexicographical works. In Tibet, where Indian literary classics were actively studied, interpreted, and used as literary models, the Buddhacarita has been surprisingly ignored after it was rendered by a lesser known Tibetan translator between 1260 and 1280. (shrink)