Aryadeva

Āryadeva (3rd century CE), was a disciple of Nagarjuna and author of several important Mahayana Madhyamaka Buddhist texts. He is also known as Kanadeva, the 15th patriarch in Chan Buddhism, and as "Bodhisattva Deva" in Sri Lanka.

Biography

Aryadeva was born as the son of a Sinhalese king and is considered the cofounder of Mahayana philosophy. According to Geshe Ngawang Dakpa of Sera Je Monastery,

Aryadeva was a student of Nagarjuna and contributed significantly to the Madhyamaka school. According to the Drikung Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, Garchen Rinpoche is the current incarnation of Aryadeva.

Works

Most of Aryadeva's works were not preserved in the original Sanskrit, but they mainly survived in Tibetan and Chinese translations.

His best-known text is probably the Catusataka (400 verses), in sixteen chapters of twenty-five stanzas each.

Several important works of esoteric Buddhism (most notably the Caryamelapakapradipa or "Lamp that Integrates the Practices") are attributed to Aryadeva. Contemporary research suggests that these works are datable to a significantly later period in Buddhist history (late ninth or early tenth century), but the tradition of which they are a part maintains that they are (at least in some measure) the work of the Madhyamaka Aryadeva. Traditional historians (for example, the 17th century Tibetan Tāranātha), aware of the chronological difficulties involved, account for the anachronism via a variety of theories, such as the propagation of later writings via mystical revelation. A useful summary of this tradition, its literature, and historiography may be found in Wedemeyer 2007.

Middle Way

The Central Path, Middle Way or Middle Path (Pali: Majjhimāpaṭipadā; Sanskrit: Madhyamāpratipad; Tibetan: དབུ་མའི་ལམ། Umélam; Vietnamese: Trung đạo; Thai: มัชฌิมาปฏิปทา) is the term that Gautama Buddha used to describe the character of the Noble Eightfold Path he discovered that leads to liberation.

Theravada

In the Pāli Canon of Theravada Buddhism, the expression Middle Way is used by the Buddha in his first discourse, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, to describe the Noble Eightfold Path as the way to achieve nibbana instead of employing extremes of austerities and sensual indulgence. Later Pali literature has also used the phrase Middle Way to refer to the Buddha's teaching of dependent origination as a view between the extremes of eternalism [ ?] and annihilationism.[ ? ]

Mahayana Buddhism

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Middle Way refers to the insight into śūnyatā "emptiness" that transcends the extremes of existence and non-existence, the two truths doctrine.

Noble Eightfold Path

Thubten Chodron

Thubten Chodron (born Cheryl Greene) is an American Tibetan Buddhist nun and a central figure in reinstating the Bhikshuni (tib. Gelongma) ordination of women. She is a student of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche, Lama Thubten Yeshe, Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, and other Tibetan masters.

Biography

Born in 1950, Venerable Chodron grew up in a "non-religious" Jewish family near Los Angeles, California and earned her B.A. in history from University of California at Los Angeles in 1971. After traveling through Europe, North Africa and Asia for one and a half years, she received a teaching credential and went to the University of Southern California to do post-graduate work in education while working as a teacher in the Los Angeles City School System. In 1975, she attended a meditation course given by Lama Thubten Yeshe and Kyabje Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, and subsequently went to Kopan Monastery in Nepal to continue studying Buddhism. In 1977 she was ordained as a Buddhist nun by Kyabje Ling Rinpoche in Dharamsala, and in 1986 she received bhikshuni (full) ordination in Taiwan.