In an intensive series of lectures sponsored by the Institute for Śaiva and Tantric Studies, Professor Dr. Harunaga Isaacson will translate and explain the whole of the Bhramahara, a profound and comprehensive Sādhana of Hevajra that has reached us in its original Sanskrit.
Its eleventh-century author Ratnākaraśānti [Rinchen 'byung gnas zhiba] is arguably the most brilliant and insightful of all the Indian masters of Tantric Buddhism of whom we have surviving works; and he is all the more remarkable since his contributions were not limited to the Tantric domain. He also produced major works in the general Mahāyānist domains of Yogācāra and Prajñāpāramitā; and he has much to say on the crucial issue of how the relationship between the Tantric and non-Tantric, between the Way of Mantras and the Way of the Sūtras, should be understood.
BECAUSE OF THIS PROGRAM, THERE WILL BE NO 7 PM MEDITATION PROGRAM ON:
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22
THURSDAY, AUGUST 23
MONDAY, AUGUST 27
TUESDAY, AUGUST 28
The schedule of talks follows:
Wednesday, August 22 &
Thursday, August 23
6:00 to 8:00 pm
Saturday, August 25 &
Sunday, August 26
10:00 am to 12:00 pm
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Monday, August 27 &
Tuesday, August 28
6:00 to 8:00 pm
On Friday, August 24, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, there will be a lecture by Professor Alexis Sanderson, Academic Director of ISTS, on The Goddess Kālasaṃkarṣaṇī.
About Professor Dr. Harunaga Isaacson
Professor Dr. Harunaga Isaacson is a world-renowned Sanskritist with exceptional expertise in the fields of Vajrayāna Buddhism, classical Sanskrit poetry, classical Indian philosophy, Purāṇic literature, and manuscript studies.
Professor Isaacson was awarded the doctorate by Leiden University for his work on materials of the Vaiśeṣika system of philosophy. For the next five years, he worked with Professor Alexis Sanderson as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the University of Oxford. From 2002 to 2006 he was Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies in the University of Pennsylvania; and from 2006 until the present he has been Professor of Classical Indology in the University of Hamburg. In the field of Indian Vajrayāna Buddhism, he is undoubtedly the world’s leading authority, exploring its vast unpublished literature in Sanskrit and Tibetan and bringing to bear on it a degree of rigorous scholarship that has rarely been seen in classical Indology and never before in this branch of it.