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A Buddhist Reading, Doug Vincent

Digitized Theses

How do you study texts as a Buddhist? How do you reconcile Buddhist notions of a text’s impermanence (anitya), insubstantiality (nihsvabhava, sunyata), and dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) - notions that destabilize any conviction that a text is an entity capable of supporting predication - with literary study, which operates under the assumption that not only are texts entities (objects of study) but also that discovering new predicates about them is one of the most valuable and significant things you can do with them? Moreover, how do you reconcile the goal of Buddhist practice - the cessation of suffering (duhkha) - with …