The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners: The Buddhist Yogācārabhūmi Treatise and Its Adaptation in India, East Asia, and Tibet, edited by Ulrich Timme Kragh
Year: 2017
Type: book-review
Abstract: In 1971, when the noted Swiss Buddhologist Jacques May published "La philosophie bouddhique idéaliste" (Asiatische Studien/Études asiatiques 25 [1971]: , he was able to attempt a thorough survey of the state of the field in fewer than sixty pages.In that broad overview, the Yogācārabhūmi (YBh), considered the source of the Vijñānavāda doctrine that was May's major concern, was referred to but briefly.By contrast, the volume under review here-a volume that, in the editor's extensive introduction (pp.22-287) and the thirty-four essays that follow, both surveys the field and adds substantially to it-offers through its sheer girth a tangible demonstration of the remarkable expansion of research in this area during the four decades that followed May's benchmark article.The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners may now be taken as the "go-to" source through which to explore the YBh and its legacy, particularly for those depending primarily on research in European languages (though East Asian scholarship is also very well represented in these pages).The work was first conceived as the proceedings of a 2008 conference on the YBh held at Geumgang University (South Korea) honoring Lambert Schmithausen, whose contributions, together with those of his many students and others he has influenced, have been rightly thought to have revolutionized the study of the YBh in both its philological-historical and philosophical-hermeneutical dimensions.1Besides the fifteen scholars who participated on that occasion, an additional nineteen have contributed articles here.The editor, Ulrich Timme Kragh, has endeavored to present the resulting collection as a work of far greater coherence than one expects to find in a volume of proceedings.To achieve this, he has adopted an ambitious, overall plan suggested by the architecture of the YBh and its complex Rezeptionsgeschichte, elucidating the former in considerable detail in the course of his introduction
Source: Indo-Iranian Journal
Author: Matthew T. Kapstein
Institutions: École Pratique des Hautes Études, University of Chicago
Language: English
Topic: Indian and Buddhist Studies
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2744519913