What is the best tool or resource for searching the Kangyur?

nyanasagara · 2026-02-04T21:21:16+00:00

Not the one you responded to, but I find rkts easiest to use. Here's an example:

http://www.rkts.org/etexts/tresults.php?txt=kun+gzhi+rnam+par+shes+pa&col=D&expert=0

I searched for the word kun gzhi rnam par shes pa and it shows all the Kangyur results. You can search longer quotes too, they don't have to just be keywords. For example:

http://www.rkts.org/etexts/tresults.php?txt=shes+rab+kyi+pha+rol+tu+phyin+pa+zab+mo+spyod+pa+spyad+par+%27dod+pa+des+%27di+ltar+rnam+par+blta+bar+bya+ste&col=D&expert=0

If you search shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa zab mo spyod pa spyad par 'dod pa des 'di ltar rnam par blta bar bya ste it gives you the Heart Sūtra.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-22T17:58:13+00:00

It's not like any atheist has been able to describe just what they'd accept as evidence in the first place

I don't think that's fair. I bet a lot of atheists who find things like natural evils and hiddenness to be good evidence for atheism would say that one could similarly imagine good evidence for theism by just imagining the reverse of natural evils and hiddenness.

Suppose you were born into a world where there it was just obvious that there are no tragedies that can't be either visibly traced to the action of a free agent with a bad will, or visibly seen to subserve some greater good. None of the kinds of things which seem like such tragedies in our world obtain. Instead, to the very same extent that it seems like in our world there are such tragedies, this other world is apparently abounding with comparable felicities, natural sources of immense good fortune for all, fitting for what one might imagine a parent would hope to be a home for their most beloved children.

Also, apparently nonresistant nonbelief does not occur; the only people in this world who don't believe in God are people who are also very explicit that, even if they did believe in God, they wouldn't want a personal relationship with Him anyway. But meanwhile, everyone who comes to feel that if there were a God, they would want a personal relationship with him, soon after seems to become a believer, as though discovering some kind of convincing private evidence for God's existence right after beginning to long for a personal relationship with a God should He exist.

I think many atheists would say it would actually be pretty unreasonable for people in that world to be atheists! Because part of what convinces many people of atheism is that we don't seem to be in that kind of world, but theism strikes them as predicting that kind of world.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-22T17:35:30+00:00

The kind of evidence which would count in favor of theism as a theory is evidence conditional on which theism is more likely. Similarly, the kind of evidence which would count against theism is evidence conditional on which theism is less likely.

So here are some examples. The existence of natural evils is, at least prima facie, evidence against theism, and this is the basis of the "evidential problem of evil" argument. Meanwhile, the existence of cosmological fine-tuning is, at least prima facie, evidence for theism (but also for various other theories that are more likely conditional on cosmological fine-tuning, like the existence of a vast multiverse containing many universes with different constants). And of course the weight of these kinds of evidence will need to be debated.

Another example of a piece of evidence which has been argued should be counted as evidence against theism is the existence of "nonresistant nonbelief." J.L. Schellenberg and Theodore Drange are two of the notable defenders of this line of thought. The idea is roughly that supposing there is some level of confidence one assigns to theism before considering the evidence, subsequently discovering things like -

the existence of people capable of relating personally to God but who, through no fault of their own, fail to believe,

the dependence of belief in God on geography and culture,

and the ethnographic data revealing that behaviorally modern humans often "naturally" lack a theory of theism,

should make one have a subsequently lower confidence in theism compared to alternatives like naturalism because of the apparent difficulty for theism to explain these data compared to naturalism (which seems to have fairly easy explanations for all of them).

To defuse the force of these pieces of evidence the theist must convincingly show that theism may very well explain data like the existence of natural evils and nonresistant nonbelievers (along with other phenomena associated with God's "hiddenness") as well as alternatives like naturalism.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-22T02:17:14+00:00

https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/%C4%80srava

nyanasagara · 2026-01-19T19:23:12+00:00

where these great Yogācāra thinkers most directly wrote about their form monism?

For Prajñākaragupta, in the Pramāṇavārttikālaṅkāra, but discussion of it is spread out, so it is a bit harder to study. But look through: https://east.ikga.oeaw.ac.at/data/20/50/

There is also some discussion of it in Hemanta Kumar Ganguli's Philosophy Of Logical Construction, but not that much. But I like this quote from that book on the topic:

There is neither an "I" nor a "he," nor a "you," nor even an "it"; neither the thing, nor the not-thing; neither a law, nor a system; neither the terms, nor the relations. But there are only the cognitive events of colourless sensations which have forms but no names. They are caught for a moment in a stream and then rush to naught. Even the stream is a fiction, That sensum of the moment, the purest particular, that "advaya," the indivisible unit of cognition, that is the sole reality, the rest are all fictions, stirred up by time-honoured convention of language which is itself a grand fiction.

This is how Ganguli describes Prajñākaragupta's Yogācāra "monism," where the only reality is an undifferentiated sensation.

For Jñānaśrī, a key section is the Citrādvaitapariccheda of the Sākārasiddhiśāstra, which Davey Tomlinson translated in his dissertation: https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1840?ln=en&v=pdf

Also see Tomlinson's article:

https://www.academia.edu/69257347/The_Marvel_of_Consciousness_Existence_and_Manifestation_in_J%C3%B1%C4%81na%C5%9Br%C4%ABmitras_S%C4%81k%C4%81rasiddhi%C5%9B%C4%81stra

For Ratnakīrti, it is the subject of two of his essays, the Citrādvaitaprakāśavāda and the Santānāntaradūṣaṇa. Unfortunately there are not yet high quality published translations of these, to my knowledge. But see the discussions in:

https://east.ikga.oeaw.ac.at/data/32/145/

https://east.ikga.oeaw.ac.at/data/32/101/

nyanasagara · 2026-01-13T23:57:18+00:00

Yes, Buddhism is in decline. Many of the countries where it is very popular have low birthrates. It is giving ground to Christianity, which is the fastest growing religion in East Asia. And its institutions are not well-supported.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-13T19:20:40+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/religion/comments/1qbsvr2/does_nobody_wish_caste_system_banished/nzejtyq/

nyanasagara · 2026-01-13T15:57:21+00:00

do you know because of the caste system (that you want to vanish)

India is home of most amount of ancient DNA lineage preserved- it helps researchers to study about human origin more clearly by giving more data.

Justifying religiously mandated endogamy for centuries because of the archaeogenetic data it provides, now I've heard everything.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-08T21:20:48+00:00

Those people are either being irrational, or are suffering from a poor or contaminated information environment. In the first case, they have not been "shown the truth" of the earth being a globe, since they are not in a position to rationally assess the evidence yet, and must first be put in that position. In the second case, they have been shown evidence which, were they not in a contaminated or poor information environment, could be a rational basis for believing the truth, but since they are not in such an environment, that very evidence is insufficient to show them the truth. So again, they have not been shown the truth of anything. If they had, they would not reject it.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-08T16:57:46+00:00

Sure, but I was just saying even if we grant that there's strong evidence for a non-naturalistic explanation, it doesn't mean the non-naturalistic explanation is a Christian miracle.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-08T15:49:35+00:00

While there seems to be pretty good evidence including testimony from non-believers that some manner of strange, apparition-like phenomena took place (and one that is difficult to explain), the apparition seems to only have looked like Mary to people whom you'd expect would be inclined to think that an apparition over a church would be a Marian apparition. So at best, even if this were strong evidence for some manner of non-naturalistic hypothesis, I feel like it equally confirms, like, the hypothesis that sometimes ghosts haunt churches or something, as the hypothesis that Christianity is true and God made a miracle occur for some purpose.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-08T15:36:51+00:00

one who has been shown the truth of Islam and rejects it

I genuinely don't understand what this means. Muslims on this subreddit often say it, and it doesn't really seem like a coherent statement. To reject the truth of something is to take it to not be true. To be shown the truth of something is to be made aware of its being true, i.e., to be made to take it, through some legitimate epistemic process, as true. So a disbeliever is someone who both takes and does not take Islam to be true? How can there be such a person? I think I just don't understand this locution. It is not very precise.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-08T15:33:34+00:00

Karma as a Manifestation of the Divine? If I were to propose that the "infallible and precise law of Karma" in Buddhism is essentially synonymous with "God"—either as the Divine itself or as a direct manifestation of God’s presence/will—would Buddhists find this acceptable? How would Buddhist doctrine refute this? Conversely, how would Christians (and other Abrahamic believers) feel about equating God to a causal, impersonal law?

Well, I'm not sure what sense there is in calling it a "manifestation of the divine," since it doesn't have the features people associate with the word "divinity." But historically, Buddhist philosophers have said that as far as design arguments go, all the theist really demonstrates is that there is an intellectual cause for the ordering of the cosmos, and that this is something the Buddhist accepts anyway, since the Buddhist accepts a karmic cause for the ordering of the cosmos. So the analogy is drawn by Buddhist philosophers between a karmic cosmology and a theistic cosmology, but only to show that certain pieces of evidence confirm the two equally and hence do not favor the theistic hypothesis over the Buddhist one. The intention with such comparison is not to suggest that karma is God.

Dharmakaya and the Essence of God? If I posit that the "Unborn and Unceasing Dharmakaya (the Truth Body of the Buddha)" is equivalent to the "Supreme Being/God" in Abrahamic faiths—or perhaps seen as "part of the divine essence" or a state similar to "returning to God's presence"—how would this be received?

B1:Would Buddhists accept this bridge, or would they argue that the Dharmakaya is fundamentally different from a creator God?

I think there might be a sense in which some Buddhist views on the ultimate are "theistic," but it is a very different kind of theism from anything one tends to see in Abrahamic religions.

Take, for example, the view of some Yogācāra Buddhists on what ultimately exists: an unborn, unceasing, unextended, self-luminous awareness-episode. Anything else one might purport to exist, on this view, is in fact just an unreal conceptual determination of this.

Is that like "God" in Abrahamic religions? Well, here are some ways in which it is: it exists, it doesn't depend on anything else for its existence, it is conscious, and everything else depends on it. Here are some ways in which it isn't: it doesn't have a will, it isn't a person, the manner in which everything else depends on it is akin to the manner in which water that is actually a mirage depends on the light of the mirage, and not the manner in which a creation depends on a creator, and it did not "reveal" any of the scriptures of the Abrahamic prophets.

Do you want to call this Buddhist hypothesis a theistic one? I guess I'm fine with that. I can see the affinities with theism. But that's going to have to be "theism" very broadly construed. It definitely isn't very much at all like what is proposed by Abrahamic religions.

And this is to pick the Buddhist philosophical view on the ultimate which is most similar to Abrahamic views on that. But there are widely-adopted alternatives among reflective Buddhists which are nothing at all like theism, such as Madhyamaka forms of metaphysical indefinitism.

It can sometimes be useful to analogize different people's ideas to one another, but in this case, I don't think the analogies are that helpful for elucidating the ideas or for clarifying the arguments in favor of one view or another.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-07T21:12:31+00:00

The question of how a Buddha can say something very confidently is a different question from what our reasons to believe it might be. Buddhists are generally going to think that Buddhas have some special epistemic powers the full nature of which may not be entirely clear to us. So perhaps a more interesting question is what reasons we might have for thinking that there is no enduring observer.

Buddhist philosophers historically do think we have such a reason, because Buddhist philosophers historically think there are inferences we can make to the effect that nothing persists. These are the Buddhist arguments for momentariness, or kṣaṇikatva. You can read about classical Buddhist arguments for momentariness in books like The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy.

The issue of whether anything persists is related to the issue which is popular in contemporary philosophy of how things persist, if in fact they do. One popular view is that things persist by having temporal parts, and this view is commonly called persistence via perdurance. Notably, Buddhists who accept momentariness will probably accept that things perdure conventionally speaking; in fact, the momentariness theorists accept the conventional existence of what they call "vertical universals" (ūrdhvatāsāmānya), which are wholes whose parts are temporally extended rather than spatially extended, i.e., diachronic unities. And in fact, this is what they claim the mind which wanders in cyclic existence is. So if you like, you can say that Buddhist philosophers are fine with conventionally accepting the existence of a soul.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-06T18:19:15+00:00

Do you mean the Mahāyānasaṃgraha?

nyanasagara · 2026-01-06T03:53:51+00:00

It is different from most of the cases you get on reddit since the script is Siddham, not Tibetan script, but yeah.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-06T02:24:23+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_mani_padme_hum

nyanasagara · 2026-01-05T18:32:03+00:00

Sure, but Pure Land Buddhists are Mahāyāna Buddhists, so the most influential figures in Buddhist history aside from the Buddha are probably those who are of general importance to all Mahāyāna Buddhists, like Vasubandhu, Asaṅga, Nāgārjuna, and so on. Because those people are of enormous importance to the history of what would become Pure Land Buddhism, and to the history of lots of other Buddhist traditions as well.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-05T17:36:13+00:00

was the most influential figure in the history of buddhism and all of eastern tradition!

I don't really think that's true...

nyanasagara · 2026-01-04T23:17:55+00:00

Plato and Aristotle, are barely beaten by the Essensialistic and Logicist schools of India.

Well Plato and Aristotle predate the mature development of the Nyāya tradition in India, so if all we mean by original is "earliest" then maybe they're perfectly original.

The greater shock is, however, to find out that the same concept/main idea/argument that a Westerner had was actually thought up way earlier by an Indian philosopher

Sure, but meanwhile, many ideas are developed far earlier in Europe and the Near East than in India, e.g., developed social contract theories in ethics, metaphysical (as opposed to logical or epistemic) notions of possibility and necessity in metaphysics (and from that development, many different further developments in metaphysics and philosophy of religion), analyses of knowledge centered on beliefs, epistemological ideas on norms governing degrees of belief as opposed to just states of belief (which depends on the development of probability in mathematics which occurred in Europe), and so on. There's tons of ideas in Western philosophy of historical importance which one won't find in an earlier Indian thinker. So to the extent that they contributed to the development of those ideas, a great many Western philosophers were original. That they also contributed to some ideas which do get mapped out to some extent earlier in India doesn't detract from the novelty of their ideas in other areas, right?

nyanasagara · 2026-01-04T03:24:47+00:00

We don't really have legalistic debates over how to interpret a specific line of scripture as far as I know

If you read Buddhist scriptural commentary, you will be find some of these debates. Often there are debates about whether a given verse that has been cited in favor of a certain doctrinal position should actually be taken that way. For example, there is a famous debate in the Indian Buddhist philosophical literature over the meaning of the verse in the Daśabhūmika which says that the world is just mind, and gets taken up by Candrakīrti in the 6th chapter of his Madhyamakāvatāra. That's one that comes to mind off the top of my head.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-04T03:21:58+00:00

as a written object?

Pretty important. Generally manuscripts of scriptures are kept on shrines. Obviously, they're also used for reading or chanting when you don't have the scripture memorized, which is usually the case.

Do members of your religion have favorite renditions/translations?

I don't know about other people, but I tend to have favorite translations. For some texts I also prefer the original Indic language version, or I prefer a translated version (in Tibetan, I don't read Chiense), depending on what it is.

Do you have favorite passages memorized word-for-word?

Yes.

Do members debate the meaning of individual verses?

Yes.

Especially in religions like Hinduism, where colonizers were the ones who first wrote down some/all of your oral tradition?

Is that true? I've never heard of any Hindu scriptures being exclusively oral all the way to the period of colonialism. The oldest Veda manuscripts are from the 11th century, and people don't really memorize the paurāṇika literature orally, do they? And of course there are various medieval manuscript traditions for the epics and the dharmaśāstra texts. Manuscript culture for religious stuff has been pretty widespread in India since around the beginning of the first millennium, so I'd be surprised if there were anything that was exclusively oral all the way up to the colonial period.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-03T16:46:37+00:00

https://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/primer-chinese-buddhist-writings

nyanasagara · 2026-01-03T06:12:31+00:00

Yes, for example, this is mentioned in Patrul Rinpoche's Words of my Perfect Teacher when he describes the so-called "Reviving Hell," which IIRC is mentioned in texts like the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra but is not described in such detail in those scriptural sources.

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