Mesoscope > Recent Status Updates

I liked the translations and the preamble, but I'm finding the long discussion kind of tedious. It's not my style, very wordy.

On receiving a sadhana for Mahakarunika: 'The complete words and their meanings manifested all together at once on the surface of my mind, like a reflection shining in a mirror, such that it was as if I did not know how to read it in sequential order; it is difficult to explain.'

This book is incredibly interesting.

If I'm not mistaken, Bötrül states that the final view is deeply hidden, meaning that it is inaccessible to valid perception and indemonstrable through reason, and we must take the Buddha's word for it. That seems intensely problematic to me.

This isn't the best book I've read on Nyingma Madhyamaka, but it's the most indispensable. Bötrül really ties the whole thing together in a way I haven't seen in any other English-language source.

Bötrül's account of Geluk Madhyamaka is a bit of a caricature, as is Mipham's. They both frequently summarize the Geluk position as "A pot is not empty of pot, it is empty of inherent existence," Bütröl here, and Mipham in his commentary on the Madhyamakavatara. I don't believe this is an assertion that any Gelukpa would defend.

Many times in the Nyingma account of Madhyamaka, they take what is simple in the Gelukpa account and turn it into something extremely complicated.

Delightful book. I'm reading it slowly, I don't think it would do to drink it down, as it consists of lots of little stories and recollections, and a few short teachings.

I'm finding Bötrul's discussion of the two truths is much clearer if I look at the passages in Mipham's commentary to the Ornament of the Middle Way that they reference. It may function better as an amplification of that discussion than as a free-standing argument.

Fascinating to read this book after Rongzompa's Entering the Way of the Mahayana - you can clearly see the strong contribution Rongzompa made to Mipham's view, but here, it is reformulated in much more modern and familiar terms.

In the base, there is not Buddha;
do not hope for attainment.
In the ultimate, there are no sentient beings;
do not fear suffering.

"Nevertheless, since the nature of phenomena is inconceivable,
it is not the case that there is no way to realize it by means of discriminating knowledge."

Because phenomena are inconceivable, they may be known by discriminating knowledge?? Is that not what this clearly says?

This is the kind of statement that makes it excruciatingly difficult to read Rongzompa.

The long introduction of this work is incredibly good. It zeroes in on all of the important interpretive questions I have about Rongzompa after studying "Black Snake Discourse" and "Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle," and thinks though the core puzzles with admirable clarity.

Having studied Mipham Rinpoche's "Movement, Stillness, Awareness," I'm quite interested to learn that this framework for practice has foundations that stretch back at least to Manjushrimitra, and receive an important commentary in Rongzompa's work.

It seems that the long section on deviations from the view is basically a commentary on key sections of the All-Creating Sovereign Semde tantra.

Turns out that the author is publishing a separate commentary to this book, which in some places is clearly badly needed. It's due to come out in a couple of weeks, so I may put it on hold, even though I'm 3/4 done.

I love this book, but ... I think translating sangs rgyas pa as "perfecting" is flat-out wrong. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and translate this as "buddhafied" or similar. Otherwise, you have to say Rongzompa wrote that all things are already "perfect" (sangs rgyas) when he wrote that all things are already Buddha. That is not fair to the reader.

'Wenn die Luna im völligsten Schein uns erstrahlt, ist ihre andere Seite am völligsten verdunkelt.' There's so much sheer poetic power in this volume, it has to be read with great care. Very powerful stuff, and an excellent companion piece to the Dzogchen material I'm reading.

The difficult fourth chapter is uncanny in its similarity to Hegel's Science of Logic - more similar than any Buddhist treatise I've seen, by far.

"It is by realizing that the two truths are indistinguishable that one becomes capable of entering into the nonduality of phenomena. Thereby, one may be described as “abiding in the view of the Great Perfection," which is the act of simply being divorced from all clinging to views."

Note to the author: you are using the term "burden of proof" incorrectly. It refers to which party in a debate bears responsibility for establishing their position, and it makes no sense to talk about something being able to "withstand the burden of proof".

I have to say I think it's a very serious omission that this book doesn't include a glossary.

Point three of Mipham's eight points is much more helpful and interesting - he clarifies the difference between the correct view and, for example, conceiving of an inexpressible ultimate that exists but is indescribable, or imagining nothingness. Those may sound like simple errors, but they can be very subtle - this is an exceedingly important clarification.

Reading Mipham's critique of Tsongkhapa carefully, it does not obviously hold. In "Beacon," as in his commentary to the Madhyamakavatara, his critique depends on a formulation that Tsongkhapa made only once, to my knowledge, in "Illumination": that "a pot is not empty of pot, it is empty of inherent existence." If you substitute Tsongkhapa's usual language, Mipham's argument doesn't obviously make contact.

Now this is interesting: "Moreover, if negation applies only to true existence, and the appearance of the basis of negation is not eliminated, then emptiness of true existence would require the existence of something else—the basis of negation. Thus, emptiness would not be an absolute negation, as Gelugpas hold it to be, but an implicative negation (ma yin dgag)."

Hey folks, just an FYI that I haven't received any notifications from Goodreads on site activity for many months. If I haven't responded to a comment you made, that's why.

It's pretty frustrating - I contacted support and I got a boilerplate reply that they're "aware of the issue," but it's probably been about a year since this core piece of functionality hasn't worked.

Sebald, in a nutshell:

"I spent six weeks living
in the wreck of a marooned barge,
staring at the walls as they gathered rust,
and I thought about the bombing
of Hamburg and Dresden during
World War II. Then I moved
into an abandoned zoo and spent
each day staring into empty cages,
imagining how it must have felt
to be a tiger in that time and
place, and I thought about
Poland during World War II...."

Still rather unclear what she's even talking about when she refers to the "disintegration of nation-states" that putatively occurred in the early 20th century.

The Eurocentrism of this book defies belief. She talks about the French Revolution as if the American Revolution never happened, and all of its ideas were new. Focusing heavily on autocratic states in WW II, I don't think the word "Japan" has appeared once so far. And, like a great many Germans, when she says "European" she means "French, German, and English," and when she says "global" she adds Russia and the US.