Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.10, 2018

A Historical Interpretation of the Localization of the Mādhyamaka in Tibetan Buddhism

(Abstract)

Palpar Dodorgee

To examine the historical process of the sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism from a hermeneutical perspective, we need to gain an accurate understanding of the generality of Indian Buddhist texts and principles themselves while affirming the individualized and creative approach applied to Indian Buddhist texts and principles by their Chinese interpreterson the basis of their own experience. In the early period (qianhongqi), Tibetan thinkers developed an intellectual framework for the Mādhyamaka or Middle Way that inherited and integrated the relevant elements in Indo-Sinitic Buddhism and constructed a preliminary Tibetan Buddhist theoretical system for the Middle Way. Faced with “divide and rule” separatism and the burgeoning of different views, At the middle period, they grounded their exegesis in Tibet, establishing a new system of exoteric and esoteric Buddhism, new relations between state and religion, and a system of temples and developing a variety of theses on Buddhism’s Middle Way and transmitting a number of schools of thought. In the later period of development (houhongqi), interpreters reduced the multifarious and refined the canon, establishing the basic concepts and theoretical and textual systems of Tibetan Buddhism. After more than a thousand years of transformation and sublation in the Tibetan context, the Middle Way of Tibetan Buddhism finally developed a conceptual and theoretical system and transmission of literary forms with Tibetan and Chinese characteristics, which was integrated as a whole into the intellectual stream of Chinese Buddhism.