The View of Bodhicitta in Tibetan Buddhism (Dargyay 1981)

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The View of Bodhicitta in Tibetan Buddhism

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:

One of the great French Buddhologists Louis de la Vallée Poussin, has said: "The entire career of a Bodhisattva is to think about bodhi."

The structure of this "thought of bodhi" is twofold: firstly the wish to attain bodhi (saṃbodhi-kāmanā-sahagatā), secondly there is the motivation to aspire bodhi for the benefit of all sentient beings (parārthālambanā) alone. However, I do not wish to discuss the altruistic motivation for aspiring bodhi but should rather confine the topic of my paper to bodhicitta in the sense of being the mind directed towards bodhi.

The phenomenology of bodhicitta has been the topic of discussion of many Indian Buddhist scholars. Within philosophical traditions such as the Mādhyamika, different theories are expounded. When the Tibetan scholars, from the seventh century onward, became acquainted with Buddhism, they confronted various diverse theories and had to come to a conclusion for themselves as to how they were to interpret bodhicitta and cittotpāda that were formulated by the Indian masters.

The approach of a Tibetan scholar differs widely from the approach of a Western scholar who wants to know exactly what a single Indian or Tibetan master has said and what induced him to utter his thoughts and ideas just in the way he did.

In this paper, I wish to demonstrate the Tibetan discussion of bodhicitta and how the Tibetans strived to harmonize the divergent views on bodhicitta.

Citation

Dargay, Lobsang. "The View of Bodhicitta in Tibetan Buddhism." In The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhism, edited by Leslie S. Kawamura, 95–109. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981.

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Kawamura, Leslie. ed. The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhism: papers presented at the Calgary Buddhism Conference, Sept. 18 - 21, 1978. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981.

Books1981About this item

In order to investigate what current research in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese materials could contribute to the study of the Bodhisattva doctrine, the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary planned a conference around the theme of the Bodhisattva. The papers presented in this volume were first read and discussed at the conference in 1978.