The Complete Nyingma Tradition from Sutra to Tantra, Book 13: Philosophical Systems and Lines of Transmission

Choying Tobden Dorje’s magnum opus presented in English for the first time, in an authoritative translation prepared under the auspices of well-known and highly respected Tibetan teachers and translators.

The Complete Nyingma Tradition from Sutra to Tantra, a multivolume masterwork by the eighteenth-century tantric master Choying Tobden Dorje, traces the path of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism from beginning to end. Book 13 concerns the philosophical systems of India and Tibet and their historical lines of transmission. It describes the views held by (1) the established non-Buddhist Indian schools, (2) the Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Cittamatra, and Madhyamaka systems, which exemplify the causal approach of the sutras, and (3) the inner and outer classes of the fruitional approach of the tantras, with the greatest attention paid to the three classes of Atiyoga, the Great Perfection. It concludes with a description of the lines of transmission of the philosophical systems within Tibet, and with an example of the rich Tibetan commentarial tradition, showing how the techniques of consequential reasoning are applied to the first chapter of Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Phenomenology.