Mipham's Dialectics and Debates on Emptiness: To Be, Not to Be or Neither (RoutledgeCurzon Critical Studies in Buddhism Series) Book

Incredible book. At $175 or something I could never have gotten my hands on it, but thanks to inter-library loan got to sit with it for two weeks - not anywhere near long enough! That said, I did manage to gloss the whole book and dive into some of the more attention-grabbing parts. The author is incredibly adept at the English language (his second) forcing me to look up a few words, but that's a good thing! He's a Nyingma khenpo trained at Ngagyur Nyingma Institue who then went on to get his Dr Phil of Oriental Studies at Oxford: he knows his stuff. In this book he draws from the huge corpus of Mipham's writings (~24 volumes?) to show his stance on major points of Buddhist philosophy. I sent the book back about six weeks ago, so I can't give much of a meaningful review except to say if you are a fan of Mipham Rinpoche and can find a way to get your hands on this book, I don't think you'll be disappointed. He spends time on the basic reasons we need to understand the doctrine of emptiness as a religious issue, explains some of the fundamentals of Tibetan debate and reasoning for the uninitiated, explains emptiness as a path of meditation, and as the goal of the path. From there he gives some history about the "fuss" of it all, the controversies surrounding the subtle but all-important points dividing understanding and completely missing the boat. While showing Mipham's dedication to the view of Shantarakshita as fundamentally "Nyingma" and worthwhile he goes about confronting some of the polemics against Shantarakshita and his followers, as dealt with by Mipham himself, the fairly uncontested champion of modern Nyingma scholarship.