Charles Goodman, "The Tattvasaṃgraha Of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters" (Oxford UP, 2022)
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What is the Tattvasaṃgraha and why translate it into English?
Welcome to the new books network.
Welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Malcolm Keating, and today we'll be talking to Charles Goodman, translator of the Tatvasangraha of Shantarakshita, Selected Metaphysical Chapters, published in 2022 by Oxford University Press. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy, Charles. Thanks for having me on, Malcolm. Well, glad to have you. Let's dive right in. So, your book is a translation of sections of a text written by a Buddhist philosopher. Um, two Buddhist philosophers will talk about the who who they are in a moment, and it's focusing on metaphysics. So, let's just start with the big picture for our listeners. What is the Tutvasangraha? And why did you think it was important to translate this book into English?
And maybe why now if there's a particular no particular reason for now.
So as we've already suggested This text has a little bit of a complex structure. The Tuttva Samgraha, strictly and narrowly speaking, is a philosophical poem. Uh by an eighth century author, Shantarukshita. And this is in many ways um one of the last major works of Buddhist philosophy in India. There is some material later than Tatvasamgraha, uh which is extremely complex and scholastic uh and somewhat more obscure. Tatva Samgraha is a text that received a lot of attention from scholars around the world, in in Europe and Japan as well as in the United States in recent years. Uh and it's a text that can draw on the entire history, more than a thousand years of history, of Buddhist philosophy in India up to that time.
It also engages very deeply um and І інві кес, бестон, акурат удерні. With a number of other Indian philosophies of the time. One way to try to think about what Tattva Sangraha is, is that it's like a Buddhist debater's manual. It tells you here are the philosophical positions that are out there on our intellectual scene, here are some of the arguments for them, here are responses you can use to try to critique those arguments, here are arguments you can use to defend our position and advance our intellectual agenda in the context of a conversation with an advocate of this other philosophy. And that conversation might be an informal conversation, but it seems that Chantaraksh envisages that this text will be.
used for public formal debates with a variety of strict rules that need to be followed. And he's often discussing how the ideas fit into those rules of formal debate. Now along with uh Tatvasamgraha, we have a canonical commentary. The Tvasamgraha Panjika. One reason why it's thought of as canonical is that it was written by uh Shantrakshina's student, Kamala Shila. Okay, so Shantarakshta's dates are usually given as around seven hundred twenty five to seven hundred eighty eight CE. Kamala Shila as seven hundred forty to seven ninety five CE. So these people knew each other, they worked together. And so we have some reason to assume that at least most of the time, Kamala Shila knows what Shantrakshana's view is and is probably trying to faithfully explicate it.
And without the commentary, the verses are so terse and cryptic as usual in Indian philosophy that they would be rather difficult to interpret. So One reason why people in general might be interested in this text. Is that both Shantarakshida and Kalmashila played a very important role in the formation of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition? So these are important figures in the history of religion. They're also remarkably philosophically sophisticated on a number of levels. Um and they uh are also giving us priceless information. about the intellectual history of the context in which they appear. One famous example of this is that this is the first Buddhist text we know of that explicitly mentions something called Advaita Darshana, the view of Advaita or non-duality, which eventually becomes the dominant form of Hindu philosophy.
So it's it's got a number of angles wh where it would be interesting to people philosophically, intellectual history, uh religion, history.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the Tattvasaṃgraha and why translate it into English?
0:01–7:33
2
Why does the translation use the term “soul” for the Sanskrit Ātman?
7:33–14:33
3
How does the Tattvasaṃgraha address the problem of causation and karma?
14:33–21:52
4
What challenges arise when translating Sanskrit philosophical texts for a modern audience?
21:52–29:10
5
Why engage with non‑Buddhist philosophies like Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, and Advaita?
29:10–36:15
6
What is the Buddhist critique of prime matter in the Samkhya tradition?
36:15–42:09
7
What is at stake in the Buddhist‑Jain debate over the soul and personal identity?
42:09–50:28
8
How can modern analytic philosophers apply insights from the Tattvasaṃgraha?
50:28–58:34
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