Essay name: Hevajra Tantra (analytical study)
Author:
Seung Ho Nam
Affiliation: University of Kerala / Faculty of Oriental Studies
This is an English study of the Hevajra Tantra: an ancient Sanskrit text that teaches the process of attaining Buddha-hood for removing the sufferings of all sentient beings. The Hevajratantra amplifies the views and methods found in the Guhyasamaja Tantra (one of the earliest extant Buddhist Tantras) dealing with Yoga and Mandalas.
Chapter 1 - Tantric Buddhism
33 (of 63)
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stopped, and so forth.
The twenty-fifth chapter mainly refutes inherent establishment with
respect to those dependent- arisings.
�,
(4) The suitability of everything, the four truths, and so forth.
The twenty-fourth chapter of Nāgārjuna's "Treatise on the Middle Way
that analyzing the noble truths, extensively settles how all
presentations of cyclic existence and nirvāṇa such as arising,
disintegration, and so forth, are not positable within the system of those
who assert a non-emptiness of inherent existence and how all those
activities are positable within the system of those who assert things that
· are empty of inherent existence.
(5) In the superior Nāgārjuna's system everything is suitable within
dependent arising.
(6) The superior master Nāgārjuna spoke again and again about such
suitability.
(7) The suitability of all the activities of cyclic existence and nirvāṇa
within a system of no inherent existence.
Finally they conclude that emptiness and dependent-arising are of one
meaning.
In Nāgārjuna's writing we come across the term śünyavāda, but never
to śūnyadarśana. Originally Śūnyatā was never a darśana. The words vāda
and darśana seem to have been used interchangeably by Bhāvaviveka. In
the excerpts from Nāgārjuna's writing cited above, the wise man,
convinced that things are impermanent and so neither true nor false, "is
not carried away by a drṣti." Even more than the other two terms with
which it is aligned, drsti functions throughout the corpus of Nāgārjuna's
work as the paradigmatic emblem of what is to be avoided. Moreover, all
of his Indian commentators down through the centuries were careful to
follow the Master's lead in this respect. Candrakīrti himself was against
the holding of any drsti, but this did not stop him from using the word
madhyamaka as the formal name of a darśana. In his time it had become
commonplace to speak in terms of philosophical schools or systems
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