Path to the Middle: Oral Mādhyamika Philosophy in Tibet: The Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshey Tupden

Anne Carolyn Klein

State University of New York Press, Aug 30, 1994 - Philosophy - 303 pages

Does a Bodhisattva's initial direct cognition of emptiness differ from subsequent ones? Can one "improve" a nondualistic understanding of the unconditioned and, if so, what role might subtle states of concentration play in the process? In material collected by Anne Klein over a seven-year period, Kensur Yeshey Tupden addresses these and other crucial issues of Buddhist soteriology to provide one of the richest presentations of Tibetan oral philosophy yet published in English. Anne Klein's introduction to his commentary surveys oral genres associated with Tibetan textual study, and the volume concludes with a translation of the text on which Kensur bases his discussion of the "Perfection of Wisdom" chapter in Tsong-kha-pa's Illumination of (Candrakirti's) Thought (dbu ma dgongs pa rab gsal), translated here by Jeffrey Hopkins and Anne Klein.

About the author

Anne C. Klein is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Rice University. Her books include Knowledge and Liberation and Knowing Naming and Negation, and the forthcoming Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Path to the Middle: Oral Mādhyamika Philosophy in Tibet: The Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshey Tupden; SUNY series in Buddhist Studies
• Editor: Anne Carolyn Klein
• Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1994
• ISBN: 1438409273, 9781438409276
• Length: 303 pages
• Subjects: Philosophy / Buddhist