Only Matthew Kapstein could present such a collection of essays. he brings to his exploration of Buddhist philosophy and hermeneutics an unmatched range of scholarly skills. he is an insightful and acutely analytic philosopher with a sure command of the Western philosophical canon and method; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Indian and Tibetan philosophical literature; his Sanskrit and Tibetan philology is superb; he is a lucid translator; he is completely at home in the living tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and has close working relationships with many eminent Tibetan scholars and access to a wealth of oral textual material and rarely-studied texts.