Śāntarakṣita
'''''' (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
Article
12 sectionsContents
- 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).