Sur, D.

Dominic Sur

Dominic D. Z. Sur is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, teaching courses in world religions and Buddhism. Dr. Sur's recent publications include Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle: Dzogchen as the Culmination of the Mahāyāna (2017). He is presently working on a study of the rise of scholasticism and sectarian identity in eleventh century Tibet. (Source Accessed Jan 27, 2020)

Recent Publications:
- Constituting Canon and Community in Eleventh Century Tibet: The Extant Writings of Rongzom and His Charter of Mantrins (sngags pa’i bca’ yig). Religions (2017) 8, 40. doi:10.3390/rel8030040

Library Items

Book

Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle

Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo wrote this treatise in the eleventh century during the renaissance of Buddhism in Tibet that was spurred by the influx of new translations of Indian Buddhist texts, tantras, and esoteric transmissions from India. For political and religious reasons, adherents of the “new schools” of Tibetan Buddhism fostered by these new translations cast the older tradition of lineages and transmissions as impure and decadent. Rongzompa composed the work translated here in order to clearly and definitively articulate how Dzogchen was very much in line with the wide variety of sutric and tantric teachings espoused by all the Tibetan schools. Using the kinds of philosophic and linguistic analyses favored by the new schools, he demonstrates that the Great Perfection is indeed the culmination and maturation of the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle. The central topic of the work is the notion of illusory appearance, for when one realizes deeply that all appearances are illusory, one realizes also that all appearances are in that respect equal. The realization of the equality of all phenomena is said to be the Great Perfection approach to the path, which frees one from both grasping at and rejecting appearances. However, for those unable to remain effortlessly within the natural state, in the final chapter Rongzompa also describes how paths with effort are included in the Great Perfection approach. (Source: Shambhala Publications)

Sur, Dominic, trans. Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle: Dzogchen as the Culmination of the Mahāyāna. By Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo (rong zom chos kyi bzang po). Boulder, CO: Snow Lion Publications, 2017.

Sur, Dominic, trans. Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle: Dzogchen as the Culmination of the Mahāyāna. By Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo (rong zom chos kyi bzang po). Boulder, CO: Snow Lion Publications, 2017.;Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle;Dzogchen;The doctrine of buddha-nature in Tibetan Buddhism;Rong zom chos kyi bzang po;Dominic Sur; Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo;རོང་ཟོམ་ཆོས་ཀྱི་བཟང་པོ་;rong zom chos kyi bzang po;rong zom pa;rong zom paN+Di ta;རོང་ཟོམ་པ་;རོང་ཟོམ་པཎྜི་ཏ་;Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle: Dzogchen as the Culmination of the Mahāyāna;Rong zom chos kyi bzang po

Review

The Uttaratantra in the Land of Snows-Review by Sur

No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:

Philosophical discourse on Buddhist soteriology––theoretically coherent ways of talking, writing, and thinking about how to transcend suffering––is structured around the metaphor of “the path” on which a person may move along a spiritual trajectory that is, in the end, removed from the otherwise unavoidable suffering of conditioned existence. Within the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhism, “practicing the Buddhist path” means changing from an ordinary person naturally mired in suffering into an enlightened buddha, a being composed of perfect wisdom and compassion. At the heart of this idea is a paradox playing an important role in Buddhist intellectual history: if an ordinary being is conditioned by nature, and this conditioning constitutes a state of suffering, how is it that this conditioned state of bondage can transform into the unconditioned state of freedom and enlightenment of a buddha? Resolving the apparent contradiction at the heart of this essential Buddhist teaching is “buddha-nature,” a term used to describe the basic potential said to be inherent within all beings. It is our buddha-nature, then, that makes it possible to be transformed by the path from an ordinary person into an enlightened buddha.

Within Buddhist intellectual culture, philosophers have made good use of the ambiguities connected the concept of buddha-nature to foster one of the most important sites of philosophical discourse within the Buddhist religion. The premium on rational coherence in Buddhist philosophy means interested theorists must consider whether, and to what degree, over-emphasis on the distinction between the unenlightened being and the enlightened buddha evinces a unbridgeable gap; or whether over-emphasis on the immanence of enlightenment within an ordinary being—often spoken of in genealogical or genetic terms––collapses the foundational path/fruition distinction thus rendering the notion of the path meaningless. These issues have been central to Mahāyāna for more than one thousand years; and they form the backdrop to Tsering Wangchuk’s recently published study of the Tibetan reception and interpretation of one seminal Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist treatise on the topic, The Uttaratantra in the Land of Snows: Tibetan Thinkers Debate the Centrality of the Buddha-Nature Treatise.

Affiliations & relations

Utah State University · workplace affiliation