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Śāntarakṣita
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Śāntarakṣita

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'''''' (Sanskrit: शान्तरक्षित; , 725–788), whose name translates into English as "protected by the One who is at peace" was an important and influential Indian Buddhist philosopher, particularly for the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Śāntarakṣita was a philosopher of the Madhyamaka school who studied at Nalanda monastery under Jñānagarbha, and became the founder of Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet.

Person · Open Library

Born
705
Died
762
Works
12

Top works

  • The Tattvasangraha
  • Dbu ma rgyan daṅ deʼi zin bris brjed byaṅ bcas
  • Dbu ma rgyan gyi tshig leʼur byas pa bźugs so
  • Tattvasaṅgraha-Śabdārthaparīkṣā
  • The adornment of the middle way

via Open Library + Wikidata

Key facts

Religious biography.image
Shanta Rakshita Khenchen Bodhisattva at Guru Lhakhang Monastery at Bouddhanath.jpg
Religious biography.image_size
275px
Religious biography.caption
Statue of Śāntarakṣita at Guru Lhakhang Monastery, Bouddhanath
Religious biography.birth_date
725 CE
Religious biography.death_date
788 CE
Religious biography.religion
Mahayana Buddhism
Religious biography.occupation
Translator, Philosopher, Abbot
Religious biography.education
Nalanda

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Instance of
human
Gender
male
Citizenship
India
Place of birth
Rewalsar
Occupation
writer
Languages spoken
Sanskrit
Image
Shantarakshita.JPG
Show 3 more facts
date of birth
0725-01-01
date of death
0788-01-01
Commons category
Śāntarakṣita
Sources (1)

via Wikidata · CC0

~20 min read

Encyclopedic overview

12 sections
Contents
  • Biography
  • Philosophy and teachings
  • Ultimate Truth and neither-one-nor-many
  • The Conventional
  • Works
  • ''Tattvasaṅgraha''
  • ''Madhyamakālaṅkāra''
  • Influence
  • References
  • Sources
  • Further reading
  • External links

'''' (Sanskrit: शान्तरक्षित; , 725–788), whose name translates into English as "protected by the One who is at peace" was an important and influential Indian Buddhist philosopher, particularly for the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Śāntarakṣita was a philosopher of the Madhyamaka school who studied at Nalanda monastery under Jñānagarbha, and became the founder of Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet.

Śāntarakṣita defended a synthetic philosophy which combined Madhyamaka, Yogācāra and the logico-epistemology of Dharmakirti into a novel Madhyamaka philosophical system. This philosophical approach is known as Yogācāra-Mādhyamika or Yogācāra-Svatantrika-Mādhyamika in Tibetan Buddhism. Unlike other Madhyamaka philosophers, Śāntarakṣita accepted Yogācāra doctrines like mind-only (cittamatra) and self-reflective awareness (svasamvedana), but only on the level of conventional truth. According to James Blumenthal, this synthesis is the final major development in Indian Buddhist philosophy before the disappearance of Buddhism from India (c. 12-13th centuries).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Śāntarakṣita” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.