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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Philosophy of religion
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The Lamp of Discernment - A Translation of Chapters 1-12 of Bhavaviveka's Prajnapradipa (Hardcover)
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The Lamp of Discernment - A Translation of Chapters 1-12 of Bhavaviveka's Prajnapradipa (Hardcover)
Series: Contemporary Issues in Buddhist Studies
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The Buddhist thinkers of medieval India addressed many of the
issues that are still central to Buddhist praxis in the present.
One of the most important of those thinkers is Bhaviveka, author of
the work known as the Prajnapradipa. Over several years, William
(Bill) Ames translated, carefully and precisely, the first twelve
chapters of that work, which he has compiled and revised for
consistency in this volume. The Prajnapradipa is a commentary on
Nagarjuna's famous, and in the view of many famously difficult,
Mulamadhyamakarika-Root Verses on the Middle Way. Central to all
Buddhist thought in one form or another is an understanding that
the common entities of our experience are transitory and,
therefore, unreliable as grounds upon which to base our own
happiness, satisfaction, security, and even our own sense of self.
As Ames explains in his Introduction, the Madhyamaka pursues this
insight further, asserting that all existing entities are lacking
in (empty of, sunyata) any "intrinsic nature (svabhava)." As
systematized by later Tibetan scholastics, the Madhyamaka school is
understood to have developed into two different forms, the
Svatantrika and the Prasangika, a textbook style simplification
that has had lasting influence. In this intellectual historiography
where movements require specific founders, Bhaviveka is identified
as the founder of the Svatantrika. Part of the neo-Romantic
rhetoric popular in the second half of the twentieth century was
that meditation practice was by itself capable of leading to full
awakening, or rather to an unimpeded, direct experience of the true
and the real. That view has become increasingly untenable, as
meditators have themselves attempted to understand the significance
of their own experiences. Those who have turned to the teachings of
the Buddhist tradition for that understanding are often confronted
by the (only) apparent difficulty of understanding emptiness. Ames'
translation of this key work of the Madhyamaka school can
contribute to untangling much of the confusion surrounding these
ideas.
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