As you know, Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra are two of the many towering figures that somehow came to shape the identity of the rNying-ma school. Over the years, I have been increasingly getting an impression that the philosophy of what Rong-zom-pa calls “special Mahāyāna” (based on 5 criteria but I suspect there are more), which also turns out to be the doxography of Rong-zom-pa’s Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda, actually defines the special positions/presuppositions of the early and later rNying-ma philosophy.  I feel that later scholars such as Mi-pham and Klong-chen-pa have been essentially orienting themselves according to this special Mahāyāna. My interest is to see how far can we trace back such a philosophy underscored in the rNying-ma school.  In this paper, I shall attempt to show that also Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra (judging, for example, from the former’s lTa phreng and the latter’s Sher snying ’grel)  appear to propose/presuppose this “special Mahāyāna” or “Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda” (as defined by Rong-zom-pa). One will certainly find all sorts of accretions and innovations in the rNying-ma schoo, but its philosophical core, I will argue, has remained the philosophy of the special Mahāyāna or Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda. In short, the point that I wish to make is that the early and later rNying-ma philosophy may or may not be genetically linked with the philosophy of Padmasambhava, but at least generically, it seems to be linked with it.

Bio: 

After completing a nine-year course in the study of Tibetan Buddhism from a traditional Tibetan Buddhist monastic seminary in South India, Dorji Wangchuk studied Classical Indology and Tibetology  at the Universität Hamburg (MA 2002). He wrote his doctoral dissertation on The Resolve to Become a Buddha: A Study of the Bodhicitta Concept in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and received his PhD from the same University in 2005. Between 1992 and 1996, he taught Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in monastic seminaries in India. Since 1998, he has been teaching and researching at the Universität Hamburg in various capacities. He also taught a term each at the University of Copenhagen, McGill University, Renmin University of China, and University of Tsukuba. Currently he is a professor for Tibetology at the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Faculty of Humanities, Universität Hamburg. His main teaching and research interests lie in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist texts and ideas, Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history and history of ideas, and Tibetan Buddhist intellectual/literary/textual culture.

He is one of the initiators, together with Dr. Orna Almogi and Sebastian Nehrdich, of the BuddhaNexus project and is currently is one of the PIs of the ERC Synergy Project “Intellexus.”