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.

This paper considers Jñānaśrīmitra’s defense of manifestation as the criterion of ultimate existence. In the first section, "Asatkhyāti and Adhyavasāya: making sense of manifestation as the criterion of the real", I show the way that, in response to Ratnākaraśānti’s Nirākāravāda, Jñānaśrīmitra argues for a sharp distinction between manifestation and determination in an effort to establish that the manifestation of something unreal is incoherent. The unreal, he thinks, is only ever determined; it is never manifest to consciousness, properly speaking. In the second section, “To be manifest is to be locked away in a single awareness-event”, I turn to one of the consequences of this view that Jñānaśrīmitra embraces: what manifests is only what appears in a single moment of conscious awareness. In the third section, “The scope of neither-one-nor-many: Jñānaśrīmitra’s Interpretation of PV 3.220–221”, I consider one of the problems this raises: how is it that an appearance with mutually opposed parts manifests in one and the same unitary moment of awareness? Jñānaśrīmitra solves this problem by appealing to the nature of manifestation and its distinction from determination: what is manifest, even if it is variegated, is nondual and indivisible; distinctions arise only on the basis of determination. I trace the details of this solution in the context of his discussion of an important pair of verses from Dharmakīrti. Finally, in the last section, “The marvelous nonduality of variegated awareness-events”, I turn to the surprising buddhological consequences of this solution.

The present book is true to its title. A collection of articles that stems from a symposium of the same name at the University of Hamburg in 2017, the authors here bring different perspectives to bear on the philosophical and historical relations between Buddhism and scepticism. Though this is relatively well-trodden ground, the insightful studies here shed new light on the matter. We find historical studies of the possible links between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism ; a defense of Nāgārjuna's philosophical scepticism as of the Pyrrhonian variety ; considerations of the role of sceptical doubt in less expected places, such as in Dharmakīrti's and Vasubandhu's...

The conflicting positions of the two early eleventh century Yogācāra scholars, Ratnākaraśānti and his critic Jñānaśrīmitra, concerning whether or not consciousness can exist without content are inseparable from their respective understandings of enlightenment. Ratnākaraśānti argues that consciousness can be contentless —and that, for a buddha, it must be. Mental content can be defeated by reasoning and made to disappear by meditative cultivation, and so it is fundamentally distinct from the nature of consciousness, which is never defeated and never ceases. That mental content is thus separable from the nature of consciousness is unimaginable to Jñānaśrīmitra, who argues that all mental content cannot be so defeated, nor can it disappear completely, and who concludes that Ratnākaraśānti’s commitment to this idea can be based on nothing but faith. Contra Jñānaśrīmitra, I will suggest that Ratnākaraśānti’s view is based not only on faith, but is also driven by a certain theory of buddhahood, the implications of which he is committed to working out. Because Ratnākaraśānti’s theory of buddhahood is developed in part in his tantric work, our understanding of his position benefits from our reading it in this context, wherein buddhahood and the most effective techniques for attaining it are explored.