Interpreting Mahayana syncretism: A comparative study of Santarakista's 'The Ornament for the Middle Way' in Indian and Tibetan contexts

Santaraks&dotbelow;ita's text, The Ornament For The Middle Way (Skt. Madhyamakalam&dotbelow;kara , Tib. dbU ma'i rgyan) is commonly considered as the foundational or root text of the final major development in Indian Buddhist thought, a philosophical system known in Tibet as Yogacara-Svatantrika-Madhyamika. This system of thought offered a unique synthesis of major trends in Mahayana discourse by presenting the Yogacara framework as a viable presentation of conventional truth while maintaining a Madhyamika perspective for ultimate analysis, and all the while stressing the necessity of incorporating recently formalized systems of Buddhist logic. This dissertation conducts a comparative analysis of the ideas presented in The Ornament For The Middle Way in the context in which they arose in eighth century India with the way in which they have been understood, interpreted and represented within the dGe-lugs school of Tibetan Buddhism. As such this study offers a historical and contextual framework for understanding this text in both its Indian and Tibetan settings. In particular a new three-fold model is presented for contextualizing dGe-lugs commentarial literature on the subject which is cognizant of these contexts in which the texts operate and the pedagogical and hermeneutical objectives of the dGe-lugs school. Included in this study are translations of Santaraks&dotbelow;ita's text The Ornament For The Middle Way, and one of the primary dGe-lugs commentaries on that text, rGyal-tshab's Remembering ' The Ornament For The Middle Way' (Tib. dbU mai rgyan gyi brjed byang).