Description: "Reason's Traces" addresses some of the key questions in the study of Indian and Buddhist thought: the analysis of personal identity and of ultimate reality, the interpretation of Tantric texts and traditions, and Tibetan approaches to the interpretation of Indian sources. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, "Reason's Traces" reflects current work in philosophical analysis and hermeneutics, inviting readers to explore the relationship between philosophy and traditions of spiritual exercise in a Buddhist context. This volume is part of the Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism series.
Brief description: Matthew Kapstein is Numata Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Chicago. His previous publications include the Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory and, with the anthropologist Melvyn C. Goldstein, Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity. He is co-translator of the late H.H. Dujom Rinpoche's The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism. Since 2002 he has also served as director of Tibetan Studies at the ecole Pratique des Hautes etudes, Paris.
Review Quotes: Only Matthew Kapstein could present such a collection of essays. He brings to his exploration of Buddhist philosophy and hermeneutics an unmatched range of scholarly skills. He is an insightful and acutely analytic philosopher with a sure command of the Western philosophical canon and method; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Indian and Tibetan philosophical literature; his Sanskrit and Tibetan philology is superb; he is a lucid translator; he is completely at home in the living tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and has close working relationships with many eminent Tibetan scholars and access to a wealth of oral textual material and rarely-studied texts. He has also thought deeply about the enterprise of Buddhist Studies and cross-cultural scholarship. Kapstein brings his unique set of abilities to bear in this set of linked essays that together explore with great precision, insight and masterful scholarship a range of important issues in Indian and Tibetan philosophy, drawing on Western philosophical ideas, texts and techniques where appropriate, and shedding light not only on these philosophical traditions and the problems they address, but also on the study of Buddhist philosophy itself, and the place of this project philosophy as a whole.--Jay L Garfield, Professor of Philosophy, Smith College, Director, Five Colleges Tibetan Studies in India Program