The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen

Cyrus Stearns is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, and this State University of New York Press book is his scholarly study of the life and thought of Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, the founder of the Jonang school's distinctive shentong, other-emptiness, teaching. Its strength is close engagement with Dolpopa's own Tibetan writings to reconstruct a controversial doctrinal position that was suppressed for centuries within Tibet, giving readers access to a genuinely marginalized strand of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy in its own terms. Its limit is that it is a focused study of Dolpopa and the Jonang tradition specifically, so a claim about the rival Gelug school's philosophical position, or about Tibetan Buddhism more broadly, needs a source addressing those separate traditions.