Maps of the Profound: Jam-Yang-Shay-Ba's Great Exposition of Buddhist and Non-Buddhist Views on the Nature of Reality

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Summary: Masterful Translation of a Ge-luk-ba Cornerstone
Review: Maps of the Profound is a career-capping work for Professor Jeffrey Hopkins, who has worked with this text for decades. This book contains a short translation of the terse root verses of the late Ge-luk-ba doxographical work Great Exposition of Tenets by the quintessential Tibetan Buddhist scholastic author Jam-yang-shay-ba, followed by an enormous commentary unpacking the significance of each word.

The root text is one of the best known and most highly regarded specimens of the Tibetan genre of writing concerning the tenets of philosophical schools belonging to India. The endeavor of the work is to identify and refute both philosophical and innate misconceptions that cloud our perception of the true nature of all phenomena. This is done against a semi-historical background of analyzing the tenets propounded by various Buddhist and Non-Buddhist philosophical schools.

Jam-yang-shay-ba spends precious little time summarizing and discarding the tenets of non-Buddhist schools such as Samkhya and Vedanta before moving on to the so-called four schools of Indian Buddhism. Jam-yang-shay-ba presents these schools as presenting fundamental Buddhist truths on an ascending scale of precision, starting with the imprecise and misleading presentations of the "lower" Vaibashika school and winding up through the most subtle and refined understanding, found in the Prasangika-Madhyamaka school.

As I mentioned previously this work is only partially historical at best, because it does not endeavor to accurately state the positions of the schools of Indian thought (indeed, some tenet systems, such as the Svatantrika-Madhyamaka school, are wholely of Tibetan invention). The idea is instead to reconstruct different possible positions and use logical analysis with history as a sort of touchstone to identify and refute one's own misconceptions.

For this reason, this book says much more about Ge-luk-ba than the schools under analysis. We learn how the Ge-luk-bas interpret and utilize Dharmakirti, for example, in the chapter on the Sautantikas Following Reason, but many of the Ge-luk-ba interpretive positions regarding Dharmakirti are highly contraversial, such as their assertion that Dharmakirti accepted conventionally existent spatially extended objects.

This is not to say that we learn nothing about Indian Buddhism however, for the Ge-luk-ba scholarship is wide ranging, and this work in particular is encyclopedic to a degree rarely rivaled in the Buddhist canon.

The root text itself is relatively short - about thirty pages. Most of the book is a lengthy commentary pieced together by Professor Hopkins from a variety of sources, including Jam-yang-shay-ba's autocommentary, Nga-wang-bel-den's Annotations, and Dzong-ka-ba's Essence of Eloquence. Interestingly, Professor Hopkins also makes extensive use of the Sakya scholar Dak-tsang's Freedom from Extremes through Knowing All Tenets, which is highly critical of Dzong-ka-ba and frequently comes under attack in Jam-yang-shay-ba's work.

Anyone already familiar with the work of Professor Hopkins and his students will find a lot of familiar material in this translation. Nevertheless, this may be because this is the work Professor Hopkins has been working towards for many years. It is extremely valuable resource. Few will be the brave souls who read this work cover to cover, but it will serve the student of Ge-luk-ba as an vast and learned treasure-trove of interpretation and insight. It is a testimony to the astonishing breadth of persistence of Professor Hopkins' study, and his many decades of careful and meticulous study, that he was able to marshal the necessary resources to compile, edit, and ably translate this monumental work, and students of Buddhist philosophy are in his debt.