Toh 3247Untitled

Exposition of Toh 3247 — Tengyur Treatise Canon

Context

Toh 3247 belongs to the Treatise Canon (Sastrapitaka) in the Tengyur, the treatise collection of the Northern Tibetan Mahayana tradition. The Tengyur is a collection of explanations, opinions, and annotations on the scriptures taught by the Buddha, compiled and translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan under the Tibetan kings during the period of the Developing Dynasty of Religious Formation, in the eighth to ninth centuries. The works in the Tengyur come from great masters such as Dharmakirti, Vasubandhu, Nagarjuna, Candrakirti, and many famous Indian teachers.

Although the specific title of Toh 3247 has not been fully translated into Vietnamese, according to its classification in the Tengyur this is a commentarial work in the field of Buddhist philosophy or the doctrine of mind (Cittamatra), one of the main philosophical foundations of the Northern Tibetan Mahayana. Works in this numerical section often focus on analyzing the nature of mind, reality (dharmata), and the path of practice leading to awakening.

Main Content

Commentaries in this section of the Tengyur often deeply examine the nature of consciousness (vijnapti), the distinction between mind and mental factors (cittacaitta), as well as the relation between subjective cognition and the objective world. In the Northern Tibetan Mahayana tradition, especially the Cittamatra school of Vasubandhu, mind is not a fixed entity but a stream of continuously changing states of consciousness.

The content of this type of commentary often includes analysis of the Four Noble Truths: suffering, origin, cessation, and path, through the lens of mind and knowledge. It may also go deeply into the teachings on emptiness (sunyata) and the twofold emptiness (dvayasunyata), the emptiness of subject and the emptiness of object, thereby leading to the unity between the whole of phenomena and mind.