Read Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition

Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition

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Description:Our project revolves around the popular and influential rNying ma or Ancient school of Tibetan Buddhism. Among other things, rNying ma is unique in emphasising ongoing revelation of new scripture. In rNying ma, Buddhist scripture is not merely something once heard from the Buddha in bygone times and passed down through the centuries: it is also something continuously added to in the present, through fresh revelations granted to qualified persons. These revelations are known as gter ma, meaning Treasure, a term related to the Sanskrit notion of nidhi.A widespread feature of the scriptures of Mahāyāna and Tantric Buddhism in India and China is that they appeared centuries after the Buddha's death, so that their idiom, language and imagery do not directly reflect the culture of the Buddha's time. We also know that they were often produced using variants of the Treasure system. A close examination of the later rNying ma Treasure system shows it to be carefully modelled on these much older Indian and Chinese precedents. So one of the interesting features of rNying ma is its continuing keenness for a revelatory system once widespread but now found nowhere else. While one might expect ongoing scriptural revelation to be innovative, rNying ma Treasure is in fact strikingingly conservative. Despite the colourful personalities of individual treasure revealers, and the sometimes dramatic public displays accompanying revelation, finished Treasure works are faithful to age-old tradition. They are also typically long and complex, filling many volumes with dense technical writing seamlessly harmonised with existing learning.How is this achieved? Are all treasure revealers geniuses like Mozart or Shakespeare, extemporaneously revealing perfect cultural artifacts of immense complexity? In a few cases, Treasure works may indeed be complex from the outset and produced through inspired genius, but more typically, they may begin as rather concise "root" Treasure texts, which expand over time, developed further by the visionary revealer himself, and often later by further lamas of the tradition. Our project is exploring these developmental processes.Treasure revelation thus brings us full circle back to the question of authorship in Buddhism. The very term 'author' can be misleading here, if used to mean a creative individual whose original output defines a work. Readers of Buddhist literature are familiar with its repetitions of phrases, sections, literary structures, and even entire chapters, across different texts, common even where they have ostensibly different authors. Some modern scholars denounce this as mere 'plagiarism', which for traditional Buddhism misses the point entirely. Others over-compensate in asserting originality, innovation, and sceptical inquiry within the literature, but they have also missed the point, because although such values do show themselves, they occur against an established backdrop of quite different literary norms.What are these norms? Firstly, Buddhist religious literature, including Treasure, is often (though not always!) collectively rather than individually produced: works may acquire the input of more persons than the nominal 'author' or 'revealer', extending backwards (and forwards) over time. Secondly, much is recycled, within a literary culture that normatively envisions contributors as tradents rather than innovators: in other words, producers of texts see themselves as passing on existing valued knowledge, rather than creating new knowledge from nothing, and this applies as much to visionary revealers of wisdom apparently taught previously by an enlightened buddha of a bygone age, as to scholars compiling the works of previous generations of lamas.Treasure texts can be substantially modified by other hands in subsequent re-publications, while still retaining their original authorial or revelatory attribution. Or modification can be generated more silently via the subtly transformative effects of memorisation: scholars memorise huge tracts of literature which they can access instantly at will, but which might re-emerge slightly transformed. So Buddhism can take authorial or revelatory attributions as conventional shorthand for a presiding spiritual authority in a given literary instance, rather than an individually creative literary agency. All this bears little resemblance to modern literary ideals, yet despite a vague general awareness of such differences, Tibetologists have never systematically addressed the issue, and we now have numerous detailed studies of works attributed to famous Tibetan authors or revealers, without further investigation into what such attribution might actually entail. A detailed analysis of Tibetan authorship is therefore called for.We are approaching this through minute examination of the literary processes found in the Dudjom tradition texts on the tantric deity Vajrakīlaya. In particular, we focus on the production...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition. To get started finding Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
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Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press

Release: 2015

ISBN

Description: Our project revolves around the popular and influential rNying ma or Ancient school of Tibetan Buddhism. Among other things, rNying ma is unique in emphasising ongoing revelation of new scripture. In rNying ma, Buddhist scripture is not merely something once heard from the Buddha in bygone times and passed down through the centuries: it is also something continuously added to in the present, through fresh revelations granted to qualified persons. These revelations are known as gter ma, meaning Treasure, a term related to the Sanskrit notion of nidhi.A widespread feature of the scriptures of Mahāyāna and Tantric Buddhism in India and China is that they appeared centuries after the Buddha's death, so that their idiom, language and imagery do not directly reflect the culture of the Buddha's time. We also know that they were often produced using variants of the Treasure system. A close examination of the later rNying ma Treasure system shows it to be carefully modelled on these much older Indian and Chinese precedents. So one of the interesting features of rNying ma is its continuing keenness for a revelatory system once widespread but now found nowhere else. While one might expect ongoing scriptural revelation to be innovative, rNying ma Treasure is in fact strikingingly conservative. Despite the colourful personalities of individual treasure revealers, and the sometimes dramatic public displays accompanying revelation, finished Treasure works are faithful to age-old tradition. They are also typically long and complex, filling many volumes with dense technical writing seamlessly harmonised with existing learning.How is this achieved? Are all treasure revealers geniuses like Mozart or Shakespeare, extemporaneously revealing perfect cultural artifacts of immense complexity? In a few cases, Treasure works may indeed be complex from the outset and produced through inspired genius, but more typically, they may begin as rather concise "root" Treasure texts, which expand over time, developed further by the visionary revealer himself, and often later by further lamas of the tradition. Our project is exploring these developmental processes.Treasure revelation thus brings us full circle back to the question of authorship in Buddhism. The very term 'author' can be misleading here, if used to mean a creative individual whose original output defines a work. Readers of Buddhist literature are familiar with its repetitions of phrases, sections, literary structures, and even entire chapters, across different texts, common even where they have ostensibly different authors. Some modern scholars denounce this as mere 'plagiarism', which for traditional Buddhism misses the point entirely. Others over-compensate in asserting originality, innovation, and sceptical inquiry within the literature, but they have also missed the point, because although such values do show themselves, they occur against an established backdrop of quite different literary norms.What are these norms? Firstly, Buddhist religious literature, including Treasure, is often (though not always!) collectively rather than individually produced: works may acquire the input of more persons than the nominal 'author' or 'revealer', extending backwards (and forwards) over time. Secondly, much is recycled, within a literary culture that normatively envisions contributors as tradents rather than innovators: in other words, producers of texts see themselves as passing on existing valued knowledge, rather than creating new knowledge from nothing, and this applies as much to visionary revealers of wisdom apparently taught previously by an enlightened buddha of a bygone age, as to scholars compiling the works of previous generations of lamas.Treasure texts can be substantially modified by other hands in subsequent re-publications, while still retaining their original authorial or revelatory attribution. Or modification can be generated more silently via the subtly transformative effects of memorisation: scholars memorise huge tracts of literature which they can access instantly at will, but which might re-emerge slightly transformed. So Buddhism can take authorial or revelatory attributions as conventional shorthand for a presiding spiritual authority in a given literary instance, rather than an individually creative literary agency. All this bears little resemblance to modern literary ideals, yet despite a vague general awareness of such differences, Tibetologists have never systematically addressed the issue, and we now have numerous detailed studies of works attributed to famous Tibetan authors or revealers, without further investigation into what such attribution might actually entail. A detailed analysis of Tibetan authorship is therefore called for.We are approaching this through minute examination of the literary processes found in the Dudjom tradition texts on the tantric deity Vajrakīlaya. In particular, we focus on the production...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition. To get started finding Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition

Dudjom Rinpoche's Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition

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