Karmasiddhiprakarana

Golden Garland of Eloquence (Legs bshad gser phreng) is the famous Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita) commentary written by the influential Tibetan writer Tsong kha pa (1356-1419). It is Tsong kha pa's first major work, written before his better known works on Madhyamaka. It is greatly respected and much studied by all schools of Buddhism in Tibet.The Golden Garland supplements the two main Indian Perfection of Wisdom commentaries, Arya Vimuktisena's Vrtti and Haribhadra's Aloka, on which it is based. It explains the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras and earlier commentaries in detail, glossing difficult words and going into detailed explanations of difficult points. It introduces the reader to some twenty works by the most important Indian Perfection of Wisdom writers, and to the earlier Tibetan traditions of Ngok and Dolpopa, and the traditions of Buton and Nyaon. This translation makes available, for the first time in English, an example of the rich Tibetan Perfection of Wisdom commentarial tradition and will be of interest to both scholars and informed general readers alike. This is the third of four volumes.

Joseph Walser provides the first examination of Nagarjuna's life and writings in the context of the religious and monastic debates of the second century CE. Walser explores how Nagarjuna secured the canonical authority of Mahayana teachings and considers his use of rhetoric to ensure the transmission of his writings by Buddhist monks. Drawing on close textual analysis of Nagarjuna's writings and other Buddhist and non-Buddhist sources, Walser offers an original contribution to the understanding of Nagarjuna and the early history of Buddhism.

Selfless Minds offers a new interpretation of no-self metaphysics in Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosa-Bhasya. Monima Chadha reads Vasubandhu as defending not only eliminativism about self but also about persons, and illusionism about the sense of self and all kinds of self-representation. This radical no-self thesis presents several challenges for Abhidharma Buddhist philosophy of mind. Even if we then grant that there is no self, we are left with deeper questions about the sense of self or self-representations implicated in our ordinary everyday experience and thought about the world and ourselves. And if we grant that there are no persons, questions remain about the status of our person-related concerns and interpersonal practices. Selfless Minds answers these questions on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist. The first part of the book defends the hypothesis that we can salvage much of our experience and thought without implicating self-representations. The second part of the book examines the revisionary implications of the no-person metaphysics. Some of these seem unpalatable, if not downright absurd. This, she argues, give us reason to re-evaluate both the Abhidharma metaphysics and our ordinary person-related practices and concerns in light of each other by using some sort of wide reflective equilibrium. Selfless Minds is a contribution to cross-cultural philosophy that studies the nature of selfless minds from a place at the crossroads of different traditions and disciplines: philosophy in the traditional Buddhist and contemporary Western traditions, and contemporary cognitive sciences.

This unique study of the genesis and development of the earliest form of Buddhist self-defense practiced by Chuan Fa monks and mystics shows both the philosophical and physical basis of the skills developed and passed on to subsequent generations. This book seeks to reunite these concepts. Its teaching draws equally on the practices of North Chinese Chaan Movement Meditation Traditions and on the South Chinese Esoteric (Mi Chiao) School--both secret traditions rarely revealed to the general public. The material is presented so readers can understand that what we think of as a competitive sport is really a meditation mandala in action. Extensive appendices list the main Chinese dynasties, a chronology of Buddhist Sutras, a chronological record of scriptures, teachers, events during 1000 years of Indian and Chinese Buddhism, and translations of Bodhidharma`s texts including The Six Gates, Entering the Buddha`s Path, and the treatise upon the Bloodline Teaching of True Dharma.