Ox Herding

PeterC
Posts: 5190
Joined: Tue May 20, 2014 12:38 pm

Re: Ox Herding

Post by PeterC »

Russian wrote: Mon Mar 29, 2021 11:54 am
PeterC wrote: Mon Mar 29, 2021 10:39 am
Nobody really knows if this debate actually happened, if "the mahayana monk" (that's what he's basically referred to as) was a real person, a composite person or a strawman, or if the decision to affiliate with India was made on philosophical or political grounds. There are good arguments to think it was basically a realpolitik decision by Tibet dressed up as a fictional debate.

The harshest criticisms of the Chinese strawman in Tibet were made by sarma schools criticizing the kagyus. Forests have been wasted on books debating this issue. It was a bit of a waste of time then, as it still is now.
And here is what Professor Torchinov wrote: "It is clear from these three points that the real controversy was not at all between Indian and Chinese Buddhism (and not between the classical Mahayana and the teachings of the Chinese Chan school), as is usually believed. The scope of the Samya controversy goes far beyond this. This is a polemic between two trends in both Indian Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism in general, because the theses put forward by Heshan Mahayana reflected the positions held by many Buddhists in India itself (especially within the Tantric tradition; a little later, they will be fully represented in the teachings of the Mahasiddhas and the tradition known as the Maha Mudra). Its theoretical basis was undoubtedly the theory of the Tathagatagarbha (especially the position "our own Mind is the Buddha"), while Kamalashila followed his teacher to the teachings of the syncretic school of Madhyamaka swatantrika Yogacara, with its completely different understanding of both the structure of the path and the nature of the Buddha nature".
I think he’s begging the question a little. He seems to be identifying the Chinese position as what later Tibetan writers characterized Kagyu positions as. Their characterization was never a fair reflection of those positions, nor is it necessarily the same as the Chinese position in the debate, if there was a debate
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