Buddhist Minds and Bodies

Students and admirers of Jose Ignacio Cabezon pay tribute with this collection of thirty diverse essays on the study of religion. Centered on Buddhism and Tibet, contributors also uncover insights about missionaries, Muslims, and Mongolia.

As the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Chair of Buddhist Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, a past president of the American Academy of Religion, and a prolific author of watershed books, Jose Cabezon has left an indelible mark on the discipline of religious studies. A refugee from Cuba who was brought to the US as a child, he trained both as a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist system and as a scholar at the University of Wisconsin. From his earliest publications, he has demonstrated the breadth of his interests and expertise, from philosophy, exegesis, and translation, to history, sexuality, and comparative religion, spanning centuries and sects, and interrogating hidden assumptions within the field.

The present volume honors that broad legacy in similarly diverse fashion. Thirty fellow scholars, both peers and former students, explore a rich array of topics inspired by Cabezon’s seminal contributions and scholarly collegiality. Whether it is the intersection of queer theory with Madhyamaka philosophy, Jesuit engagement with Tibetan scholasticism, shifting mores around selling religious objects in Tibet, the religious identity of Tibetan women who travel beyond death, or the fate of Tibetan Muslims in exile, the articles collected here will intrigue even as they expand our knowledge of the diverse ways that Tibetan religion and Buddhist practice has manifested, both historically and in the present day.

Introduction: The Life and Career of Jose Ignacio Cabezon

Rory Lindsay and Vesna Wallace

PART 1. BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

Candrakirti on What Is Unreal Even for Conventional Truth: The Significance of a Prevalent Misreading of Madhyamakavatara 6.26
Dan Arnold

The Bodhisattva’s Aspiration and Vow

Douglas Duckworth

How the First Jebtsundampa Zanabazar’s Profound Sadhana “Became” a Geluk Text

Baatra Erdene-Ochir

Pus and Cinnabar Makes Ambrosia: Khedrup’s Epistemological Alchemy

Jed Forman

Sailing Neurath’s Ship Across the Ocean of Samsara: Why Geluk Epistemology Provides the Most Reliable Compass

Jay L. Garfield

Buddhadicy: Is There a Buddhist Version of the Problem of Evil?

John Powers

“God Existing in Himself”: Catholic Missionaries in Tibet and Their Revalorization of the Three Jewels

Michael J. Sweet

Is Prasangika a Global Eliminativist? Tsongkhapa and Taktsang Lotsawa on the Role of Madhyamaka Analysis and Its Implications

Sonam Thakchoe

Queering the Conventional

Sara McClintock

Ippolito Desideri on Tibetan Scholasticism

Trent Pomplun

Mahamudra, Extrinsic Emptiness, and the Otherness of Consciousness

Georges Dreyfus

Who/What Was Sherab Zangmo? Religious Identity in Contemporary Eastern Tibet

Alyson Prude

PART 2. BUDDHIST TANTRA

A Yab Without a Yum? Tsongkhapa’s Vajrabhairava Controversy
Bryan J. Cuevas

Great-Seal Text, or Not? Saraha’s Vajra-Secret Song

Roger R. Jackson

Everything Arises on Its Own: Inclusivism and the Spontaneous Union of Mahamudra in Kuddalapada’s Acintyadvayakramopadesa

Adam C. Krug

Buddhist Mind-Body Problems: Dolpopa and Rendawa on Tantric Polemics of Emptiness and Bodiless Transference in the Kalacakra Tantra

Michael R. Sheehy

Locating Sambhala in the Kalacakra Tantra

John Newman

Emptiness and the Epistemology of Perception in Kalacakra Literature

Vesna Wallace

PART 3. CRITICAL TEXTUAL STUDIES

“Intertextual Promiscuity” and Appropriation Writ Large: Authorship and Citational Practice in Tibetan Texts
Rae Erin Dachille

Sera Jetsun’s Text-Critical Note Anent a Passage in the 1449 Xylograph of Gyaltsab’s Pramanavarttika Commentary

Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp

Iterated Rebirth Lineages of Thuken Losang Chokyi Nyima

Nancy G. Lin

The Unjust King? The Great Fifth Dalai Lama’s Advice to Tusiyetu Qan Gombodorji

Matthew W. King

Orazio della Penna, the Lam rim chen mo, and the Serampore Dictionary

Leonard Zwilling

Practical Instructions on the Nine Vehicles

Nathaniel Rich

PART 4. TIBETAN BUDDHISM AND MATERIAL CULTURE

From Molten Lead to Momos: The Shifting Moral Dimensions of Selling Buddhist Objects in Tibet
Alex Catanese

Digital Projects in Tibetan Buddhist Studies

William Dewey

Reimagining the Mani Pill: Ritual Innovation and the Invention of Tradition in Tibetan Buddhist Material Religion

James Gentry

PART 5. TIBETAN ISLAM

Shifting Sacred Centers and the Reconstruction of Tibetan Muslim Religious Identity
Rohit Singh

The Tibetan Quran

Rory Lindsay

POSTLUDE
Our Histories, Our Selves: A Few Reflections on José Cabezón’s 2020 AAR Presidential Address
Francis Clooney, S.J

Rory Lindsay is an assistant professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Trained at Harvard University, he is also an editor at 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.

 

Vesna A. Wallace is a distinguished university professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches South Asian and Inner Asian religions and advanced Sanskrit.

Jose Ignacio Cabezon (author of Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism and co-author of Freedom from Extremes) was co-chair of the Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism series from 2005 to 2022. He is XIVth Dalai Lama Professor of Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Cabezón studied physics as an undergraduate at Caltech, trained as a monk at Sera Monastery in India, and translated for the Dalai Lama into Spanish on several occasions. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1987. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books on Indo-Tibetan scholasticism, Madhyamaka philosophy, Buddhism and sexuality, and Tibetan ritual. His co-authored Sera Monastery, also published by Wisdom, is a history of one of the great monastic universities of Tibet from its founding to the present. Cabezón served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2020.