Status Updates From The Golden Age of Indian Bu...

Peak

Absolute banger. This is such a good book. Westerhoff even has little marginalia that tell you the specific topics being introduced at different points. Not only is the content of this book fantastic, but the attention to detail in its composition is evident. Once again, thank you Jan Westerhoff.

I'm still in the Abhidharma chapter, almost through the section on the Sarvastivada school. Westerhoff writes in an extremely approachable way. I appreciate footnotes for citations, as I find flipping between what I'm reading and a citation index to be annoying. Thank you, Jan Westerhoff. This is fantastic.

Westerhoff’s examination of the Abhidharma traditions is very fascinating. His analysis certainly undermines the vocal minority who hold dogmatic views as to Theravada’s ‘purity’ over Mahayana.

Banger

am not entirely convinced by this supposed connection between Nāgārjuna and Dinnāga, primarily because I do not consider it to be very likely that in the Vigrahvyāvartani Nāgārjuna was in fact pursuing a skeptical agenda. "It is true that Nāgārjuna argues against a foundationalist conception of the epistemic instruments, a picture according to which these instruments . . . .

[see comment]

“While it is true that for the Mādhyamika there is no thesis, philosophical position, or other linguistic item that could express ultimate truth, his reason for this view is not that conceptualization necessarily distorts the reality it sets out to represent, as the Yogācārin would have it, but a global anti-realism about truth. . . .

continued at ‘comment’

“Throughout the history of Madhyamaka some of its opponents have considered this view as tantamount to nihilism. For if everything is only made up of something else, and therefore empty of intrinsic nature and 'not really there', there must be something not made up of anything else at the bottom of the chain, for otherwise nothing is 'really there'. . . .

“Having thought: 'Did these Tathāgatas come from somewhere? Did I go anywhere?' he understands that those Tathãgatas did not come from anywhere. Having comprehended that his own body did not go anywhere either, he thinks: These triple worlds are only mind. Why? Because however I mentally construct things, so they appear."