Nāgārjuna [c. 150 – c. 250 CE (disputed)] was an Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher monk of the Madhyamaka school. He is widely considered one of the most important Buddhist philosophers. Jan Westerhoff considers him to be "one of the greatest thinkers in the history of Asian philosophy."
Saṃsāra is a Pali/Sanskrit word that means "wandering" as well as "world," wherein the term connotes "cyclic change" or, less formally, "running around in circles." The "cyclicity of all life, matter, and existence" is a fundamental belief of most Indian religions. When related to the theory of karma it is the cycle of death and rebirth, also referred to with terms or phrases such as transmigration/reincarnation, karmic cycle, or Punarjanman, and "cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence".
The Kadam school of Tibetan Buddhism was an 11th century Buddhist tradition founded by the great Bengali master Atiśa (982-1054) and his students like Dromtön (1005–1064), a Tibetan Buddhist lay master. The Kadampa stressed compassion, pure discipline and study.
Vedanta, also known as Uttara Mīmāṃsā, is one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy. The word "Vedanta" means "end of the Vedas", and encompasses the ideas that emerged from, or were aligned with, the speculations and enumerations contained in the Upanishads, with a focus on knowledge and liberation. Vedanta developed into many schools, all of which base their ideas on the authority of a common group of texts called the Prasthānatrayī, translated as "the three sources": the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita.
Indian philosophy consists of philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. A traditional Hindu classification divides āstika and nāstika schools of philosophy, depending on one of three alternate criteria: whether it believes the Vedas as a valid source of knowledge; whether the school believes in the premises of Brahman and Atman; and whether the school believes in afterlife and Devas.
East Asian Madhyamaka is the Buddhist tradition in East Asia which represents the Indian Madhyamaka (Chung-kuan) system of thought. In Chinese Buddhism, these are often referred to as the Sānlùn school, also known as the "emptiness school", although they may not have been an independent sect. The three principal texts of the school are the Middle Treatise, the Twelve Gate Treatise, and the Hundred Treatise. They were first transmitted to China during the early 5th century by the Buddhist monk Kumārajīva (344−413) in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. The school and its texts were later transmitted to Korea and Japan. The leading thinkers of this tradition are Kumārajīva's disciple Sēngzhào, and the later Jízàng. Their major doctrines include emptiness (k'ung), the middle way (chung-tao), the twofold truth (erh-t'i) and "the refutation of erroneous views as the illumination of right views" (p'o-hsieh-hsien-cheng).
The Buddhist doctrine of the two truths differentiates between two levels of satya in the teaching of the Śākyamuni Buddha: the "conventional" or "provisional" (saṁvṛti) truth, and the "ultimate" (paramārtha) truth.
The Nyāya Sūtras is an ancient Indian Sanskrit text composed by Akṣapāda Gautama, and the foundational text of the Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy. The date when the text was composed, and the biography of its author is unknown, but variously estimated between 6th-century BCE and 2nd-century CE. The text may have been composed by more than one author, over a period of time. The text consists of five books, with two chapters in each book, with a cumulative total of 528 aphoristic sutras, about rules of reason, logic, epistemology and metaphysics.
Dharmakīrti, was an influential Indian Buddhist philosopher who worked at Nālandā. He was one of the key scholars of epistemology (pramāṇa) in Buddhist philosophy, and is associated with the Yogācāra and Sautrāntika schools. He was also one of the primary theorists of Buddhist atomism. His works influenced the scholars of Mīmāṃsā, Nyaya and Shaivism schools of Hindu philosophy as well as scholars of Jainism.
The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad is the shortest of all the Upanishads, and is assigned to Atharvaveda. It is listed as number 6 in the Muktikā canon of 108 Upanishads.
Ajātivāda (अजातिवाद) is the fundamental philosophical doctrine of the Advaita Vedanta philosopher Gaudapada. According to Gaudapada, the Absolute is not subject to birth, change and death. The Absolute is aja, the unborn eternal. The empirical world of appearances is considered unreal, and not absolutely existent.
Bhartṛhari was a Hindu linguistic philosopher to whom are normally ascribed two influential Sanskrit texts:
Manjushrikirti or Manjughoshikirti in a name which refers to different figures in Indian Buddhism.
The Samādhirāja Sūtra or Candrapradīpa Sūtra is a Buddhist Mahayana sutra. Some scholars have dated its redaction from the 2nd or 3rd century CE to the 6th century, but others argue that its date just cannot be determined. The Samādhirāja is a very important source for the Madhyamaka school and it is cited by numerous Indian authors like Chandrakirti, Shantideva and later Buddhist authors. According to Alex Wayman, the Samādhirāja is "perhaps the most important scriptural source for the Madhyamika." The Samādhirāja is also widely cited in Tantric Buddhist sources, which promote its recitation for ritual purposes. A commentary to the sutra, the Kīrtimala, was composed by the Indian Manjushrikirti and this survives in Tibetan.
Padmanabh Shrivarma Jaini was an Indian born scholar of Jainism and Buddhism, living in Berkeley, California, United States. He was from a Digambar Jain family; however he was equally familiar with both the Digambara and Svetambara forms of Jainism. He has taught at the Banaras Hindu University, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he retired in 1994. Jaini was the author of several books and papers. His best known work is The Jaina Path of Purification (1979). Some of his major articles have been published under these titles: The Collected Papers on Jaina Studies (2000) and Collected Papers on Buddhist Studies (2001). He died on 25 May 2021 at Berkeley at age 97.
Kotha Satchidananda Murty (1924-2011) was an Indian philosopher and professor. Murty served as the Professor of Philosophy, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam and Vice-Chancellor of Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati in the state of Andhra Pradesh, South India. He specialized in Buddhist philosophy and contributed extensively to Mahayana Buddhism. His treatise on the teachings of Nagarjuna is well acclaimed.
Karl Harrington Potter was an American-born writer, academic, and Indologist, from the University of Washington. He studied at the University of California, as well as Harvard University and is known for his writings on Indian philosophy.
Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism share significant similarities. Those similarities have attracted Indian and Western scholars attention, and have also been criticised by concurring schools. The similarities have been interpreted as Buddhist influences on Advaita Vedanta, though some deny such influences, or see them as expressions of the same eternal truth.
Rajeshwar Shastri Dravid was an Indian writer, scholar, grammarian and translator of Sanskrit literature. Born in 1899 in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, he was the author several books in Sanskrit which included Sāṅkhyakārikā, Bhāratīya-rājanīti-prakaśah and R̥ṣikalpanyāsaḥ. His brother, Raja Ram Dravid, was the author of The Problem of Universals in Indian Philosophy, a critique of ancient Indian philosophy. The Government of India awarded him Padma Bhushan, the third highest Indian civilian award, in 1960.
Ashok Kumar Chatterjee was an Indian philosopher and Buddhist scholar who taught philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He is best known for his book The Yogãcāra Idealism, published in 1962, in which he interpreted Yogacara-Vijnanavada school of Buddhism.
