Publications - 2019

Atiśa Dīpaṃkara: Illuminator of the Awakened Mind (Lives of the Masters)

The first-ever biography with selected writings of one of the greatest Indian Buddhist masters in history. Few figures in the history of Buddhism in Tibet have had as far-reaching and profound an influence as the Indian scholar and adept Atiśa Dīpaṃkara (982–1054). Originally from Bengal, Atiśa was a tantric Buddhist master during Vajrayana Buddhism’s flowering in India and traveled extensively, eventually spending the remaining twelve years of his life revitalizing Buddhism in Tibet. Revered by all the schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Atiśa and his students founded what came to be known as the Kadam school, whose teachings have influenced countless Buddhist masters. These teachings, cherished by all major traditions, are preserved by the Geluk in particular, the school of the Dalai Lamas. Although Atiśa was an influential practitioner and scholar of Tantra, he is best known for introducing many of the core Mahayana teachings that are widely practiced throughout the Tibetan Buddhist world, including the Stages of the Path to Awakening and Mind Training (lojong), as well as having contributed to highly influential commentaries on Madhyamaka that synthesize various schools of thought. This succinct biography of Atiśa’s life, together with a collection of translations, represents for the first time the full range of Atiśa’s contribution to Buddhism. As the most comprehensive work available on this essential Buddhist figure, this book is an indispensable resource for scholars and Buddhist practitioners alike.

Christianity in India: The Anti-Colonial Turn

Christianity in India: the Anti-Colonial Turn presents research on seminal sources to show how and why European travelers, traders, soldiers, and clergy sought out the so-called “Thomas Christians” of South India in medieval and early modern periods and how and why these Indians of pre-colonial Christian heritage did business and prayed with the early Europeans and at times fought against them and their colonial oppression. The story of their fight in the early period of colonialism has mostly gone untold. To tell that story is to alert academics and the broader public to the historical fact of an Eastern Christianity, the colonial dynamics of Western (Latin) and Eastern (Syriac) rites, and the significant impact of both colonial and anti-colonial movements on ancient churches and their associated communities. The book productively complements missionary conversion narratives by highlighting movements and events that were distinctly native and Eastern Christian. Whereas scholarship on the history of the freedom struggle of India has followed James Mill's The History of British India (1817) in acknowledging only a Hindu-Muslim presence as “Indian,” my book inserts the study of the struggle of Indian Christians against Portuguese colonization as the anti-colonial “turn.” Furthermore, it points to the colonial – political, economic, and cultural – bases of what later, in the mid-seventeenth century, became the first major schism in the Thomas Christian church. The book, thus, reviews the colonial beginnings and its impact on matters of consequence in the twentieth and twenty-first century and prompts a re-assessment of the contours of world Christianity. Why was India imagined as Christian in medieval times? Did Vasco da Gama meet vegetarian Christians? What was “nationalist” about an early sixteenth-century Indian Christian leader? Were Indian Christians heretics or simply anti-colonial? Was a “slap in the face” [the sacrament of] Confirmation or colonization? Were the Thomas Christians the first “to run amok”? What was happening: Christianizing or colonizing? Christianity in India: The Anti-colonial Turn invites the reader to consider these and other questions in the face of the other Christian.

Framing and Threading Non-Literary Discourse into the Structure of Cervantes’s Don Quixote II

Jewels of the Middle Way: The Madhyamaka Legacy of Atiśa and His Early Tibetan Followers

This book presents a detailed contextualization of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school in India and Tibet, along with translations of several texts in the Bka’ gdams gsung ’bum (Collected Works of the Kadampas), recently recovered Tibetan manuscripts that are attributed to Atiśa and Kadampa commentators. These translations cohere around Atiśa’s Madhyamaka view of the two realities and his understanding of the practice and the nature of the awakening mind. The book is organized in three parts based on the chronology of Atiśa’s teaching of Madhyamaka in India and Tibet: (1) Lineage Masters, the Mind of Awakening, and the Middle Way; (2) Articulating the Two Realities; and (3) How Mādhyamikas Meditate. Each part focuses on a specific text, or set of texts, specifically related to Atiśa’s Middle Way. The authorship and date of composition for each work is discussed along with an outline of the work’s textual sources followed by an analysis of the content.

Money and Calgary

Sigismunda como peregrina en Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda de Miguel de Cervantes

The Filiation of Phylogenetic Analysis in the Study of Tibetan Buddhist Canonical Texts.

In this chapter I briefly explain the critical editing and restitution of Tibetan Buddhist canonical texts through the text critical analysis of manuscripts supported with computer technology. The chapter succinctly outlines the principles and methodology involved in applying phylogenetics to investigating the genealogy of texts found in Tibetan Kanjurs. In the following sections I discuss the current known history of Tibetan Kanjurs to account for the textual witnesses under philological consideration, outline the principles of text criticism for editing Tibetan versions of Buddhist canonical texts, and explain the method of applying phylogenetic analysis to critical editions of Tibetan texts. The chapter concludes with a brief example that illustrates the techniques involved in utilizing phylogenetic analysis in text criticism.