Path to the Middle: Oral Madhyamika Philosophy in Tibet: the Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshey Tupden (Suny Series in Buddhist Studies)

"The work will be of use to scholars of Tibetan Buddhism and comparative philosophers of religion. Everyone in oral studies should read the introduction." --S. Jaffee

Does a Bodhisattva's initial direct cognition of emptiness differ from subsequent ones? Can one "improve" a nondualistic understanding of the unconditioned and, if so, what role might subtle states of concentration play in the process? In material collected by Anne Klein over a seven-year period, Kensur Yeshey Tupden addresses these and other crucial issues of Buddhist soteriology to provide one of the richest presentations of Tibetan oral philosophy yet published in English. Anne Klein's introduction to his commentary surveys oral genres associated with Tibetan textual study, and the volume concludes with a translation of the text on which Kensur bases his discussion of the "Perfection of Wisdom" chapter in Tsong-kha-pa's Illumination of (Candrakirti's) Thought (dbu ma dgongs pa rab gsal), translated here by Jeffrey Hopkins and Anne Klein.

"The text that is the subject of Professor Klein's study is one of the most important in the history of Tibetan Buddhism. Her innovative approach will make the work of interest not only to scholars, for whom it will be essential reading, but more generally to anyone interested in the Tibetan interpretation of emptiness." --Jose Ignacio Cabezon