Christian thought and Buddha-Nature

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TopicsChristian thought and Buddha-Nature

Topic: Christian thought and Buddha-Nature

Books

Book
Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature
This beautifully written work sheds new light on the origins and nature of Mahayana Buddhism with close readings of four well-known texts—the Lotus Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Tathagatagarbha Sutra, and Vimalakirtinirdesa. Treating these sutras as literary works rather than as straightforward philosophic or doctrinal treatises, Alan Cole argues that these writings were carefully sculpted to undermine traditional monastic Buddhism and to gain legitimacy and authority for Mahayana Buddhism as it was veering away from Buddhism’s older oral and institutional forms. His sophisticated and sustained analysis of the narrative structures and seductive literary strategies used in these sutras suggests that they were specifically written to encourage devotion to the written word instead of other forms of authority, be they human, institutional, or iconic. (Source: University of California Press)
Cole, Alan. Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Book
The Buddha Nature: Death and Eternal Soul in Buddhism
This text consists of a 1996 interview that Dr. Peter Michel conducted with the Dalai Lama in German and was translated into English later.
Dalai Lama, 14th, and Peter Michel. The Buddha Nature: Death and Eternal Soul in Buddhism. Woodside, CA: Bluestar Communications, 1997.

Articles

Article
Image-likeness and the Tathāgatagarbha: A Reading of William of St. Thierry's Golden Epistle and the Ratnagotravibhāga
In Book 10 of his Confessions Augustine marvels as he meditates on the qualities of the memoria in human beings:

Great is the power of memory, exceeding great, O my God—an inner chamber large and boundless (penetrale amplum et infinitum)! Who has plumbed its depths? Yet it is a poer of mine, and apertains unto my nature; nor do I myself grasp all that I am (nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum). . . . A great admiration rises upon me; astonishment seizes me. And men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the extent of the ocean, and the courses of the stars, and omit to wonder at themselves (et reliquunt se ipsos).

This concern with the memoria, and its function in the human mind, was to be one of the most important spiritual legacies Augustine would leave to the Latin, and especially monastic, Middle Ages. In fact, it would be possible to say without much exaggeration that the entire history of monastic spirituality in the Latin Middle Ages (at least until approximately A.D. 1200) is the record of the development of understanding of the power of memoria. A central reason for this is that memoria was described as a faculty that worked by recalling the human person to the knowledge and intuition that they were created in the image and likeness of God. Thus the words of Genesis 1:26–27 stand at the beginning of an entire spiritual tradition: "God said let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves. . . . God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." Augustine frequently exhorts himself, as in Confessions 7.10, to "return to myself" (redite ad memet ipsum). This was also the continual refrain of the Cistercian author of the twelfth century, William of St. Thierry, in his Golden Epistle, and it serves as one of the themes on which he builds this work. William's treatise, folloing in the path of Augustine, is a call to discover the image and likeness of God in the individual person.

      In the presentation to follow I would like to set out two spiritual traditions for us to consider: the image-likeness tradition based on Genesis 1:26 and developed by the Latin and Greek Fathers of the Church until approximately A.D. 1200, and the tathāgatagarbha teachings on Buddha-nature in Mahayana Buddhism, which flourished in India and then spread to Tibet and other parts of the Far East in the first six centuries C.E. I shall do this bby presenting two texts: the Golden Epistle of William of St, Thierry, and the Ratnagotravibhāga (third to fifth centuries A.D.), variously attributed to Saramati or Maitreya. My thesis here is that while the language and concepts used in these two treatises are different, and the two worldviews of which they are representative also vary widely, we can find nonetheless underlying themes that express central concerns of each tradition, especially concerning the brith of a basic nature in the person, and the inability of either sin or defilements (kleśa) to cover over that nature that is coming to birth. (Groves, "Image-likeness and Tathāgatagarbha," 97–98)
Groves, Nicholas. "Image-likeness and Tathāgatagarbha: A Reading of William of St. Thierry’s Golden Epistle and the Ratnagotravibhāga." Buddhist-Christian Studies 10 (1990): 97–117.
Article
Lying to Tell the Truth—Upāya in Mahāyāna Buddhism and Oikonomia in Alexandrian Christianity
Roger Gregory-Tashi Corless, in his essay "Lying to Tell the Truth", explores the use of intentional vagueness and obscurity in the texts of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and relates this to the intentional use of falsehood (or, perhaps better, nontruth) in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra. Both in second century Alexandria and in third century India, he suggests, one finds a self-conscious use of graded, hierarchically ordered sets of "false truths" as pedagogical devices. For the Lotus, Corless suggests, the "true truth" is that all living beings are in fact possessors of Buddha Nature; it is this toward which the pedagogically useful though partial truths (upāya) found in other assertions point. This position is illustrated with extensive quotations from Kūkai, and is compared with positions taken by a series of Christian thinkers from Nicholas of Cusa to John Henry Newman. (Griffiths and Keenan, introduction to Buddha Nature, 3–4)
Corless, Roger Gregory-Tashi. "Lying to Tell the Truth—Upāya in Mahāyāna Buddhism and Oikonomia in Alexandrian Christianity." In Buddha Nature: A Festschrift in Honor of Minoru Kiyota, edited by Paul J. Griffiths and John P. Keenan, 27–40. Tokyo: Buddhist Books International, 1990.

Interviews

Interview
Buddha-Nature Is Who We Really Are by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo: Conversations on Buddha-Nature
In this video, part of Tsadra Foundation's ongoing video series called Conversations on Buddha-Nature, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo and Lopen Dr. Karma Phuntsho discuss various topics related to buddha-nature, including her early childhood belief in innate perfection, traditional versus alternative approaches to learning about Buddhism, guru devotion in Tibetan Buddhism, and her work as the founder and director of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India, among many other topics.
Palmo, Jetsunma Tenzin. "Buddha-Nature Is Who We Really Are." Conversations on Buddha-Nature with Lopen Dr. Karma Phuntsho. Produced by the Tsadra Foundation Research Department, September 25, 2021. Video, 1:11:58. https://youtu.be/V4Ajks-goDo.
Interview
Wulstan Fletcher Interview on Buddha-Nature
Wulstan Fletcher discusses buddha-nature and it's related concepts in an interview with Marcus Perman of Tsadra Foundation.

Multimedia

Video
Lama Palden Drolma: Is Buddha-Nature a Teaching That Is Universal?
Drolma, Lama Palden. "Is Buddha-Nature a Teaching That Is Universal?" Conversations on Buddha-Nature with Lopen Dr. Karma Phuntsho. Produced by the Tsadra Foundation Research Department, November 27, 2021. Video, 4:14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMxLlbsnyZQ.
Drolma, Lama Palden. "Is Buddha-Nature a Teaching That Is Universal?" Conversations on Buddha-Nature with Lopen Dr. Karma Phuntsho. Produced by the Tsadra Foundation Research Department, November 27, 2021. Video, 4:14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMxLlbsnyZQ.
Video
Lama Shenpen Hookham: On Buddha-Nature and the Divine
Hookham, Shenpen. "On Buddha-Nature and the Divine." Conversations on Buddha-Nature with Lopen Dr. Karma Phuntsho. Produced by the Tsadra Foundation Research Department, July 30, 2022. Video, 7:11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP_GgoGx93c.
Hookham, Shenpen. "On Buddha-Nature and the Divine." Conversations on Buddha-Nature with Lopen Dr. Karma Phuntsho. Produced by the Tsadra Foundation Research Department, July 30, 2022. Video, 7:11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP_GgoGx93c.
Video
On His Personal Encounter with Buddha-Nature Teachings by Wulstan Fletcher
Wulstan Fletcher describes his own experience with the teachings of buddha-nature. In particular he speaks about how his study of the emptiness teachings of Madhyamaka has been essential to his understanding of buddha-nature. He goes on to discuss how practice is a means of developing the recognition of the buddha-nature within.
Fletcher, Wulstan. “On His Personal Encounter with Buddha-Nature Teachings.” Interview by Marcus Perman. Tsadra Foundation Research Department, November 9, 2019. Video, 7:39. https://youtu.be/IqAWmB_nDRM.
Video
On Teaching Buddha-Nature to Beginners by Ringu Tulku
Ringu Tulku talks about how the most important thing that Western students should understand about buddha-nature teachings is that buddha-nature refers to one's basic goodness. One always retains this sense of basic goodness, an idea that he places in contrast to the notion of Original Sin. He points out that Gampopa's text Jewel Ornament of Liberation teaches buddha-nature right from the beginning, an approach which he suggests makes sense for Westerners.
Ringu Tulku. “On Teaching Buddha-Nature to Beginners.” Interview by Marcus Perman. Tsadra Foundation Research Department, October 10, 2019. Video, 3:18. https://youtu.be/RNFC4OdeRFw.
Video
Why Study Buddha-Nature? by Karl Brunnhölzl
Brunnhölzl, Karl. “Why Study Buddha-Nature?” Interview by Marcus Perman. Tsadra Foundation Research Department, December 3, 2018. Video, 2:07. https://youtu.be/ucYPoDioF_U.
Brunnhölzl, Karl. “Why Study Buddha-Nature?” Interview by Marcus Perman. Tsadra Foundation Research Department, December 3, 2018. Video, 2:07. https://youtu.be/ucYPoDioF_U.

prabhāsvaratā - In a general sense, that which clears away darkness, though it often appears in Buddhist literature in reference to the mind or its nature. It is a particularly salient feature of Tantric literature, especially in regard to the advanced meditation techniques of the completion-stage yogas. Skt. प्रभास्वर Tib. འོད་གསལ་ Ch. 光明

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