This book aims to expound, for both scholars and practitioners of Buddhism, the doctrine of the "
emptiness-of-the-other" (
shentong, to adopt the author's more-or-less phonetic method of rendering terms in Tibetan; a more formally accurate transcription would be
gzhan-stong), a Buddhist tradition of metaphysical reasoning that has its roots in Indian
tathāgatagarbha thought and is associated especially with the
Kagyu and
Nyingma lineages in Tibet. This tradition of reasoning, as the author claims, has been given little attention by Western scholars working on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism; they have focused on the
Madhyamaka schools in India and on their
Gelug and
Sakya inheritors in Tibet, and to a somewhat lesser extent upon Indian
Yogācāra. In so far as they have said anything about the
Shentong tradition or its Indian precursors, they have tended to dismiss it as heretical or not really Buddhist-often following in this the rhetoric of
Gelug polemics. Dr. Hookham's book is therefore a welcome corrective, being, as she claims, "the first book in a Western language to discuss at length the views of Tibetan
Shentong writers on the basis of their own works" (p. 5). (Griffiths, Review of
The Buddha Within, 317-18)
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