Buddhapālita
| Wylie | sangs rgyas bskyang |
|---|---|
| English Phonetics | Buddhapālita |
| Sort Name | Buddhapālita |
| Birth: | c. 470 |
|---|---|
| Death: | 540 |
Tibetan calendar dates
Biographical Information
Buddhapālita. (T. Sangs rgyas bskyang) (c. 470—540). An Indian Buddhist scholar of the Madhyamaka school, who is regarded in Tibet as a key figure of what was dubbed the Prāsaṅgika school of Madhyamaka. Little is known about the life of Buddhapālita. He is best known for his commentary on Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, a commentary that was thought to survive only in Tibetan translation, until the recent rediscovery of a Sanskrit manuscript. Buddhapālita's commentary bears a close relation in some chapters to the Akutobhayā, another commentary on Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of uncertain authorship, which is sometimes attributed to Nāgārjuna himself. In his commentary, Buddhapālita does not adopt some of the assumptions of the Buddhist logical tradition of the day, including the need to state one's position in the form of an autonomous inference (svatantrānumāna). Instead, Buddhapālita merely states an absurd consequence (prasaṅga) that follows from the opponent's position. In his own commentary on the first chapter of Nāgārjuna's text, Bhāvaviveka criticizes Buddhapālita's method, arguing for the need for the Madhyamaka adept to state his own position after refuting the position of the opponent. In his commentary on the same chapter, Candrakīrti in turn defended the approach of Buddhapālita and criticized Bhāvaviveka. It was on the basis of these three commentaries that later Tibetan exegetes identified two schools within Madhyamaka, the Svātantrika, in which they included Bhāvaviveka, and the Prāsaṅgika, in which they included Buddhapālita and Candrakīrti. (Source: "Buddhapālita." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 154–55. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)
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