Davey Tomlinson

What is the role of mental construction (vikalpa) in a buddha’s awakening? The Tattvasiddhi, a Sanskrit Buddhist tantric work from the 9th century, answers that it is essential. A buddha’s omniscience itself, the work argues, is savikalpaka: it essentially involves mental construction. This is a surprising response given what we’re taught to expect from Buddhist sources about the non-conceptual nature of awakening. In this paper, I make sense of this response as part of a larger movement among post-Dharmakīrtian philosophers to understand the ways perception and perceptual vividness are conditioned by habit. In doing so, I show that the Tattvasiddhi is an especially clear case of a reconditioning model of the path, and I juxtapose this with deconditioning models found in both tantric and non-tantric sources.

Dharmakīrti’s view of yogic perception (yogipratyakṣa) and mental cultivation (bhāvanā) has generated a good deal of discussion—in Dharmakīrti’s text tradition, in the works of its various critics, and in the contemporary study of Buddhist philosophy. It is discussed not infrequently in Buddhist tantric works, too. However, tantric authors’ appeals to yogic perception are at odds with Dharmakīrti’s intentions in important ways. In this paper, I show why this appropriation of Dharmakīrti on yogic perception might be surprising, and then I reveal a tantalizing thread of Dharmakīrtian thinking about cultivation that nevertheless runs through certain Sanskrit Buddhist tantric debates. What is most crucial about Dharmakīrti for these authors, I argue, is his reasoned defense of cultivation’s power: its capacity to fundamentally and irreversibly transform the practitioner’s cognitive, conative, and experiential habits. I develop this point with reference especially to a tantric treatise attributed to Śāntarakṣita, The Accomplishment of Reality (Tattvasiddhi).

This paper explores the philosophical stakes of eighth–twelfth-century Sanskrit debates about tantric initiation ( abhiṣeka ). I propose that three models of tantric initiation emerged in this period, in part in response to the Dharmakīrtian model of the gradual development of yogic perception. According to one, the true glimpse view, initiation gives a glimpse of precisely the experience of buddhahood, which is then made firm in post-initiatory practice. According to another, the exemplary glimpse view, the initiatory glimpse is only exemplary of what buddhahood is like. Post-initiatory practice is necessary to transform the practitioner's attitude toward that glimpse, which eventually results in an experience of buddhahood itself. Finally, others advanced a no glimpse view: only the experience of reality itself in post-initiatory practice can result in an experience of buddhahood. I explore these three views through a close engagement with some representative texts from the period.

Abstract:Ratnākaraśānti (ca. 970–1040) holds three conflicting positions: luminosity (prakāśa) is the ultimately real nature of consciousness; luminosity and appearances (ākāras) are identical; and appearances are false (alīka) because they are targeted by the neither-one-nor-many argument. But why is luminosity not false, too, given its identity with appearances? In response to this worry, Ratnākaraśānti develops a notion of identity (tādātmya) that lets him claim that, although luminosity and appearance are composed of the same stuff, they are not identical in every respect. On the basis of this, he limits the scope of the neither-one-nor-many argument such that it targets appearances but not luminosity. Other philosophers (and possibly Ratnākaraśānti himself) then further limit the argument's scope, showing that it also does not target experiences of pleasure (sukha) and, crucially for their buddhology, the innate bliss (sahajānanda) that characterizes the experience of buddhahood.