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Record W4321506121 · doi:10.1086/722753

Visual Transmission in Tibetan Ritual Polemics

2023· article· en· W4321506121 on OpenAlex
Rory Lindsay

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Religion · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAnthropological Studies and Insights
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBuddhismPure landPhilosophyTantraRulerOrder (exchange)HumanitiesLiteratureArtTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Tibetan Buddhist debates about funerary practices feature no shortage of hairsplitting. In their writings on funerary rituals in the tradition of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra, the prolific Bo dong Paṇ chen Phyogs las rnam rgyal (1375/76–1451) and the Sa skya pa savant Go rams pa Bsod nams seng ge (1429–89) quarrel over what might appear to be very minor issues. This article looks at one such exchange, specifically, how these exegetes understand the details of “visual transmission” and how successive iterations of observation and imitation between master and disciple constitute an authoritative lineage. The article reveals that the specifics of each author’s position on visual transmission was the product of polemical pressures for each one to articulate the specifics of their viewpoint. Understanding a disagreement like this requires contextualization. When Go rams pa was writing his response to Bo dong Paṇ chen, he was receiving support from a local ruler who had been a disciple of the late Bo dong Paṇ chen. Looking to secure further patronage for himself and the Sa skya tradition more broadly, Go rams pa certainly had reason to defend the Sa skya patriarch Rje btsun Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1147–1216) against Bo dong Paṇ chen’s critiques. However, limiting this debate to issues of patronage would be reductive at best. Although this point of disagreement may seem minor, it reveals a sophisticated analysis on how textual and empirical evidence cohere in order to determine correct tantric practice. In this sense, elements of tantric Buddhist traditions are deeply indebted to empirical knowledge.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.547
Threshold uncertainty score0.258

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.027
GPT teacher head0.356
Teacher spread0.329 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it