Project Intent and Initial Research Programme
1. Purpose
This project will develop a manageable comparative corpus for exploring Buddhism from several historically developed and actively practised perspectives, particularly Theravāda and early Buddhist traditions, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna. The central interest is not simply in cataloguing doctrines or constructing a linear history of Buddhism, but in examining how different Buddhist traditions understand the same areas of experience, practice and liberation. Particular attention will be given to the ways later traditions reinterpret earlier Buddhist teachings, and to the possibility of reading those reinterpretations in both directions rather than treating Buddhist development as a simple hierarchy. The project therefore aims to create a structured conversation across Buddhist history rather than a single synthetic account of what Buddhism “really” teaches.
A recurring question will be how descriptions of mind and practice change when viewed from different perspectives. Early Buddhist and Abhidharma traditions provide detailed accounts of conditioned mental events and the processes through which suffering arises and ceases; Mahāyāna traditions reinterpret these structures through emptiness, bodhicitta and the bodhisattva ideal; Vajrayāna traditions further develop questions of transformation, symbolic practice, embodiment and direct recognition of the nature of mind. Rather than assuming that these perspectives are either identical or mutually contradictory, the corpus will allow us to investigate where they overlap, where they genuinely differ, and where they may be addressing different stages or dimensions of practice.
2. Starting point: the Sangharakshita Complete Works
The initial point of entry will be the concordance and reference structure of the Complete Works of Sangharakshita. Sangharakshita drew extensively on Pāli, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna literature, and the concordance provides an unusually broad map of canonical texts, commentaries, teachers, doctrines and practice traditions encountered within one modern Buddhist body of work. It will therefore be used as a practical sampling framework for identifying significant source texts and recurring areas of concern. This does not imply that Sangharakshita’s selection defines the Buddhist canon, nor that his interpretations will be treated as normative.
The concordance is valuable precisely because it provides a historically situated set of pathways into a much wider Buddhist literature. These pathways can be followed outward into primary sources, traditional commentaries, practice manuals, biographies, songs of realization and selected modern practitioner interpretations. Sangharakshita’s writings then become one perspective within the resulting corpus rather than the framework into which all other sources must fit. This approach also enables the existing SRWORKS infrastructure and derived data to provide a concrete and reproducible beginning for the project.
3. Research method
The project will proceed from source identification to comparative analysis in stages. References within the Sangharakshita corpus will first be mapped by text, tradition, historical period and thematic importance, distinguishing substantial engagements from passing references. A bounded initial corpus will then be assembled from legally obtainable editions, with preference given to stable EPUB, HTML or searchable PDF sources that can later be processed without altering the preserved originals. Each source will retain full provenance and bibliographical metadata, together with information about its historical and interpretative role.
The initial corpus will deliberately contain several kinds of Buddhist voice rather than simply an equal number of books from three traditions. Texts will be tagged with roles such as canonical, analytical, philosophical, commentarial, practice_manual, biography, realisation_song, later_rereading, and modern_practitioner. This will make it possible to ask not only what different traditions say about a subject, but how a canonical discourse, an analytical treatise, a meditation manual and a realization song describe the same territory differently. The aim is therefore to preserve differences in genre and function instead of flattening everything into doctrinal propositions.
4. A provisional comparative framework
A first set of common questions will be developed before large-scale analysis begins. These will include questions such as: What is mind? What constitutes ignorance? How do craving and affliction operate? What is meditation intended to change? What constitutes liberation? What is the status of conceptual thought? What are emptiness and dependent arising? What roles do ethics, bodhicitta, imagination, ritual, devotion and the teacher play? How does a tradition judge whether practice is working?
These questions will not be treated as a fixed taxonomy. Their first purpose is to make comparison possible across texts that otherwise use very different conceptual languages, and their second purpose is to reveal where our own questions prove inadequate. The analytical framework should therefore remain revisable throughout the project. New sources will be allowed to disturb the model rather than simply being classified within categories developed from the initial corpus.
5. Core corpus
The first corpus should remain deliberately limited, probably to approximately twenty-five to forty substantial works. Early Buddhist material will include texts such as the Dhammapada, Sutta Nipāta, selections from the four main Nikāyas, the Udāna and Itivuttaka, together with representative Abhidhamma material such as the Abhidhammattha Saṅgaha. A modern Theravādin practice voice, for example Ajahn Chah or another suitable forest or insight practitioner, will be included so that early Buddhism is not represented only through ancient texts and scholastic analysis. Different translations of selected texts may also be retained where comparison of interpretation is useful.
The Mahāyāna corpus will include major Prajñāpāramitā texts, Nāgārjuna, Śāntideva, Yogācāra material, the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa, the Lotus Sūtra, and selected East Asian sources. Including Chan/Zen and Pure Land material is important because otherwise “Mahāyāna” could too easily become shorthand for the Indian and Indo-Tibetan developments most immediately connected with Vajrayāna. The corpus should therefore contain several significantly different Mahāyāna voices rather than presenting Mahāyāna as a single intermediate stage between early Buddhism and tantra.
The Vajrayāna and Mahāmudrā corpus will initially include Tilopa, Nāropa, Milarepa, Gampopa and selected later Kagyu expositions, together with some Nyingma and Dzogchen material where it illuminates the questions being pursued. Particular attention will be paid to those texts in which earlier Buddhist structures are explicitly retained, reinterpreted or transformed. Tibetan scholastic sources, especially those connected with Abhidharma, Madhyamaka and the major Indian śāstras, will provide an important historical bridge between early analytical traditions and later yogic literature. This should help avoid an artificial comparison between Theravāda Abhidhamma and Mahāmudrā with no account of the intervening intellectual and practice history.
6. Yogi Chen as a cross-tradition practitioner
A distinct Yogi Chen subcorpus will be developed because his role is especially relevant to the questions being asked. Chen worked across Chinese Mahāyāna, Chan, Tibetan Vajrayāna and systematic meditation practice, and he taught Sangharakshita directly in an extended series of meetings concerned with Buddhist meditation. His writings therefore offer an unusually explicit example of an engaged practitioner attempting to relate teachings from several Buddhist vehicles to concrete meditative practice. He may provide an important bridge between doctrinal classification and the practical transformation of mind.
Initial Chen material should include Buddhist Meditation: Systematic and Practical, How to Develop the Bodhi-Citta, The Lighthouse in the Ocean of Chan, and selected writings on emptiness, tantra, meditation and measures of realization. These texts can be examined both independently and in relation to Sangharakshita’s later teaching. The aim will not be to establish simple lines of influence, but to identify areas where Chen’s way of organising Buddhist practice may have contributed to Sangharakshita’s own cross-traditional approach. Chen will therefore be treated as one of several “integrative practitioners” whose work consciously crosses conventional school boundaries.
7. First detailed experiment: from mapping mind to looking at mind
The first substantial perspective study will provisionally be titled Milarepa Meets the Abhidharma: From Mapping Mind to Looking at Mind. It will follow descriptions of mental experience through early Buddhist discourse, Pāli Abhidhamma, Indian Abhidharma, Mahāyāna philosophical reinterpretation, Tibetan scholastic inheritance, Yogi Chen’s practice-oriented synthesis, and Mahāmudrā literature associated with Gampopa and Milarepa. The purpose will not be to decide which description is correct, but to investigate how the function of Buddhist analysis changes across these contexts. Particular attention will be given to what is classified, what is regarded as conditioned, what is regarded as empty, what is transformed, and what is directly recognised.
This first experiment will act as a methodological test for the entire project. If the corpus and analytical framework allow genuinely illuminating comparisons to emerge without collapsing the traditions into one another, the approach can then be repeated with other themes. If important historical or interpretative gaps become visible, those gaps will guide the next round of source acquisition. The first study therefore functions both as research in its own right and as a calibration exercise for the wider corpus.
8. Reciprocal perspective
A central methodological safeguard will be to avoid allowing Vajrayāna to become the unexamined final standpoint from which all earlier Buddhism is interpreted. The project will certainly examine Vajrayāna reinterpretations of earlier Buddhist material, because this is one of its main interests, but comparison will also be run in the opposite direction. Early Buddhist, Theravādin and Madhyamaka perspectives can be used to question later Vajrayāna claims, categories and practices, just as Mahāmudrā may expose limitations in overly static or purely classificatory accounts of mind. The resulting inquiry should therefore be dialogical rather than hierarchical.
This reciprocal approach may reveal that some apparent doctrinal conflicts concern different levels of practice or different uses of conceptual description, while other differences may remain genuinely substantive. It may also show that later traditions preserve structures inherited from earlier Buddhism even while radically changing their interpretation. Such findings should emerge from sustained comparison rather than from an assumption that the Buddhist traditions necessarily form a single progressive sequence. The project should remain open to discontinuities as well as continuities.
9. Archive and provenance
All acquired source files will be preserved unchanged in an ordered archive, with derived material maintained separately. The archive will contain bibliographical metadata, source and download information, rights or licence information where available, translator and edition details, historical and traditional classifications, and the source’s role within the comparative corpus. Machine-readable derived versions may later include structural segmentation, reference resolution, thematic tagging and embeddings, but these will never replace the preserved source editions. This follows the methodological lessons already learned during the construction of SRDERIVED.
A catalogue will provide the primary index into the collection. Each item should eventually record not only where it came from, but why it is present in the corpus and which research questions it is expected to illuminate. This should allow later expansion to remain deliberate rather than becoming accumulation for its own sake. The archive should therefore remain understandable even when viewed independently of the particular analysis that originally prompted a source to be acquired.
10. Expansion strategy
The initial corpus is intended to develop an informed perspective from which later additions can be encountered. Once the first comparative analyses have been completed, the archive can expand into areas that the initial work reveals to be important: additional Abhidharma traditions, Yogācāra, different Theravādin meditation lineages, Pure Land, wider Chan literature, additional Tibetan schools, historical tantric material, or alternative translations of already included texts. Expansion should be question-driven rather than driven by an attempt at encyclopaedic completeness. A few hundred carefully chosen sources may eventually be useful, but there is little value in reaching that scale before the comparative method has been tested.
The relationship between the initial and expanded corpora should remain dynamic. The first corpus provides a provisional framework; subsequent sources test and perturb that framework; and the resulting revised perspective then guides further acquisition. In this sense the archive itself becomes part of the research process rather than merely a store of material. The methodological cycle can be expressed simply as core corpus → provisional perspective → new source → perturbation → revised perspective → further expansion.
11. Initial programme
The first research cycle is expected to occupy approximately ten working weeks, although the stages will overlap and should not be treated as rigid deadlines.
| Workstream | W1 | W2 | W3 | W4 | W5 | W6 | W7 | W8 | W9 | W10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Define questions and methodology | ■ | |||||||||
| Mine SR concordance and references | ■ | ■ | ||||||||
| Build source map and catalogue | ■ | ■ | ||||||||
| Acquire core corpus v0.1 | ■ | ■ | ■ | |||||||
| Yogi Chen subcorpus and review | ■ | ■ | ■ | |||||||
| Abhidharma–Mahāmudrā source tracing | ■ | ■ | ■ | |||||||
| First comparative analysis | ■ | ■ | ■ | |||||||
| Reciprocal perspective test | ■ | ■ | ||||||||
| Review methodology | ■ | ■ | ||||||||
| Plan corpus expansion v0.2 | ■ | ■ |
The principal review point should come after the first comparative study rather than after the acquisition phase. At that stage we should be able to judge whether the source selection is sufficiently diverse, whether the metadata supports useful querying, and whether the analytical questions reveal genuine differences of perspective. Only after that review should the project move into systematic expansion of the corpus.
12. Expected outputs from the first cycle
The initial cycle should produce an organised Buddhist source archive with preserved provenance, a catalogue of the core corpus, and a map linking significant Sangharakshita concordance references to wider Buddhist source traditions. It should also produce a small Yogi Chen corpus with an initial assessment of his importance as a cross-tradition interpreter of Buddhist meditation and practice. Most importantly, the cycle should result in one substantial worked comparative study centred on Abhidharma and Mahāmudrā, together with a written account of the methodology that produced it.
These outputs should provide material suitable for later talks, essays and more substantial writing. The project may eventually contribute to the broader work on intelligence, awareness and changing mental states, but its immediate purpose should remain clearly Buddhist and textual: to examine how historically different Buddhist practice traditions organise, describe and transform experience. The wider theoretical connections should be allowed to emerge from the comparative work rather than determining its conclusions in advance.
13. Project intent
The project begins from the proposition that Buddhism is not best understood as a single fixed set of doctrines, nor simply as a sequence of competing schools. It can also be approached as a long historical conversation in which practitioners repeatedly inherit, reinterpret and transform earlier descriptions of human experience and liberation. By assembling a bounded but varied corpus and allowing these traditions to read one another, the project seeks to make some of that conversation visible.
The intention is therefore not to arrive quickly at a unified account of Buddhism. It is to develop a sufficiently informed and flexible perspective that similarities, differences and transformations can be recognised without prematurely resolving them. As the corpus expands, new sources should be capable of altering the perspective developed from earlier ones. The archive, the comparative method and the resulting interpretation will consequently develop together.