HTIB00016U Bodhisattva literature in Tibet + Easy Reading in Classical Tibetan

From the time of the earliest codifications of what is traditionally believed to be the direct words of the Buddha, its followers had to deal with very big corpora of text.
The breadth and profundity called for comprehensive summaries of the Buddhist doctrine.In how far already in India certain treatises were composed by the Buddha's followers with this outlook is still subject to research, but in Tibet a wealth of texts was produced with exactly that purpose of comprehensively summarising and gradually engaging into the vast and profound Buddhist doctrine.

In the course we will initially discuss the basic divisions of Buddhist literature into what is held to be the direct teachings the Buddha and the commentaries thereon and how on the basis of that, concepts of a graded path of Buddhist practice were developed. We will then read excerpts from The Essence of the Mahāyāna-doctrine (theg chen bstan pa'i snying po) as a specimen of that Tibetan literary genre.