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

“I...