A Study of Dharmadharmatavibhanga (Volume Two)

The four-volume work presents texts representing over fifteen-hundred years of Buddhist thought bearing on the teaching of the Dharmadharmatavibhanga and the tradition of Maitreyan Yogacara to which it belongs. This second volume of the series presents the Dharmadharmatavibhanga and the Indian tradition to which it belongs by way of the translations and critical editions of the three root-texts comprising the Dharmadharmatavibhanga corpus.

The book begins with an historical overview of the Maitreyan tradition, and a study of the key doctrines presented in the Dharmadharmatavibhanga, including the transformation of basis (asrayaparivrtti), the teaching of the primordial loss of intrinsic awareness and the appearance of adventitious defilement, the hermeneutical tradition of Great Madhyamaka in Tibet, and a discussion of the Tibetan commentaries by Rong ston, Mi pham, and Blo bzang rta dbyangs.

The study also examines why the text does not mention the three constitutive principles (trisvabhava), and how Tsong kha pa and Bimal Krishna Matilal consider Yogacara to be a form of idealism or mentalism. It is then followed by an annotated English translation of Vasubandhu s commentary on the Dharmadharmatavibhanga, along with a modern commentary by Tam Shek-wing from the perspective of the rNying ma tradition (translated and annotated from Chinese by Henry C.H. Shiu). The book then ends with a comparative study of the three critical editions of the root text.