Nalanda wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 12:18 am
I'm glad I got 2nd opinion from you guys coz I was going to devote the next 7-9 years of my life into following his Mahayana studies curiculum.
One of his teachers, Suwanda Sugunasiri, attempted to run a cult out of a University of Toronto college. His articles are full of creative fabrications.
I am not saying Alex Duncan is tarred with the same brush, but that you should regard his posts as essentially the opinion of one person who is as fallible as you or me. The difference is that if we post on Dharma Wheel, we will quickly have someone point out if we have slipped up or missed something, or even contribute further, but relying on someone's blog, which does not have any critical comments or feedback, is quite shaky.
However, if you are sincerely interested in studying the Mahāyāna, his reading list is not a bad place to start.
Just a few suggestions:
To read the entire Pali Canon is a bit excessive if your goal is to study the Mahāyāna. There are good summaries like "In the Buddha's Words" which do a good job of distilling the essentials. Also, there are now many translations from the Āgamas out there, which sometimes earlier recensions than what we have in Pali, so it is worth looking into those.
As for the Mahāyāna list, rather than ignoring everything else and reading only Prajñāpāramitā, you might want to look at what Duncan suggested and compare it with what people suggested here. There are a lot of commonalities, especially the Navagrantha that I listed at first. Just note that for the Tathāgataguhya, he links to the Tathāgatagarbha sūtra, which is completely different. The Tathāgataguhya can be found in English
here.
While the Prajñāpāramitā is core to the Mahāyāna, if you are ignorant of the rest of the tradition, you will simply not be well informed. You should at least read through the other sūtras, even if you don't make a close study of them. And by a close study, I mean going through chapter by chapter and discussing them with a teacher (ideally who knows Sanskrit, and/or Tibetan, and/or Chinese) or with someone who has more experience studying Mahāyāna. Commentaries are useful for knowing how the tradition conceived of itself and its doctrines, but you will notice that they have limitations in comparison with studying the sūtras directly.
As for his Buddhist studies and western philosophy section, just forget it. It's completely out of date anyway. Buddhist studies as a field and Buddhist practice are different. There are too many ideas that have been posited in the books he has suggested that have by now been refuted, and those refutations, in turn, have been refuted, that if you are hoping to keep up with the scholarship you need to do it full time and that time is far better spent reading the sūtras directly.
Nalanda wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 8:55 pm
Also I love that you called out before that some Chinese Sutras are not Sutras. lol
Platform Sutra for example.
The problem is the translation of the word 經. This is just used to mean a classic work or book, like the Daodejing (道德經). It does not actually mean "sūtra." Because the early translators were attempting to translate by engaging in "categorising concepts" (格義 geyi), which involves matching non-Chinese concepts with native Chinese ones, like from Daoism and Ruism, later translators remedied this, so, there's a distinct difference between many (but not all) early translations and later translations. The actual transliteration of sūtra in Chinese is 修多羅 or 素呾纜, but since 經 became so established, it was not adjusted. So the Platform "Classic," is not a sūtra for that reason.
Can we rely on some notable sutras of East Asian Tradition / Pureland Tradition as sutras?
The Pure Land sūtras are among the earliest Indian manuscripts. They are in the same historical Indian strata as the Prajñāpāramitā, and are also essential to a thorough education in the Mahāyāna, so one ought not to neglect them.