Luminous Bliss: A Religious History of Pure Land Literature in Tibet

Preface

Preface Religious texts are as much about the circumstances of their production as they are about their interpretation and contemplative application. In this study, I tried to anticipate some historical aspects in the constitution of Tibetan Pure Land literature and signal, when possible, the dynamic relation between soteriology and contemplation and their impending synthesis in Buddhist orthopraxy. In Buddhist traditions a detached reading of religious texts and sober analysis of doctrines are not valued as an end in themselves. This approach ultimately tallies with Buddhist practice as a cognitive process with psychological reverberations and physiological repercussions that supersede the literary and theological redaction of religion to a disembodied collection of texts and tenets. Buddhist texts are not simply testimonies of doctrine but serve as diagrams of soteriology reflecting a constant struggle between silence, the highest embodiment of the Buddha’s teachings, and the limitations of the written word. As manuals for unlocking and shaping our inner worlds of intentionality, they trigger occasions for liberation that cannot be conveyed by language registers; they resort to reason, analogy, and illustration to transcend the very act of reading as a vindication of perfunctory understanding. Internalizing the contemplation of the Buddha is said to induce subtle insights into the acategorical configurations of reality, and to challenge false identifications with the self taken as a substantive, self-referential center of consciousness. The cultivation of the realization of “no-self” (a doctrinal pillar of Buddhism) precipitates a process of de-individualization and a progressive manner of loss that culminates in a new situationality whose very irreversibility offers a view into the timeless expanse of the present moment. Awakening with one’s senses to the insubstantiality of phenomena is a systemic process, a body-mind and time-space adaptation that does not reside in the statements that express it, nor in the visibilities that fill it. Nevertheless, it may be indexed along “four reliances” or hermeneutic guidelines that articulate a new species of awareness: rely on the teaching, not the teacher; on the meaning, not the letter; on the definitive meaning, not the interpretive meaning; and on wisdom, not consciousness. xxiii grub-pa rab-gnas lcags-stag Completed in the Year of the Iron Tiger (2137) xxiv ...