Part One: Abhidharma, Madhyamaka and Yogachara
A Three-Part Course on the Buddhist View of Reality From the Buddha to Mipham the Great, and Everything In Between
Led by Derek Kolleeny and Chris Willcox
Tuesdays from September 16 thru December 16, 2025, 7-9 pm ET
Hosted by Rime Shedra NYC via Zoom
All scriptures should be realized free of contradiction,
And their teachings emerge as transformative precepts.
Then, the Buddha’s intention is easily understood,
And the pitfall of abandoning the Dharma is avoided.
- Atisha Dipamkara
One of the Buddha’s earliest and most essential teachings is that the suffering, anxiety, and malaise that characterize so much of life result from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of ourselves and apparent reality. Accurate or not, the way we see the world, known in the Buddhist tradition as the view, influences how we navigate and interpret our lives, our behavior and interactions with others, and the fundamental relationship we have with our own mind. The Buddha’s enlightenment demonstrates that a correct understanding of oneself and the world is possible, and is essential for anyone seeking relief from that suffering.
Naturally, the understanding of the view and its relationship to practice developed significantly over the past 2500 years. Different interpretations evolved that gradually coalesced into three major traditions, broadly known as the Abhidharma, Madhyamaka and Yogachara. These can be characterized by how they describe the two aspects of experience - the confused and the enlightened, samsara and nirvana, or as they are more commonly known, the two levels of reality or truth, relative and absolute.
Once these three traditions were established, there arose numerous efforts to either demonstrate the superiority of one against the others or to reconcile them. Especially difficult but fascinating are the ways subsequent practitioners attempted to reconcile the apparent contradiction between emptiness and buddha nature.
In his Lion’s Roar of Other Emptiness, Jamgön Mipham Namgyal skillfully exposes the limitations of understanding these two seemingly contradictory aspects of reality as separate, and masterfully demonstrates how they can be understood as a unity. This challenging philosophical text was cited by the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche as central to the development of his own view and because of that he encouraged his Nalanda Translation Committee to translate it in the early 1980s. This is the only text on the view that he had translated and its publication served as the initial inspiration for this course; it will be a focal point of our exploration throughout.
These three courses will be an extended exploration of the evolution of the view. Throughout, our emphasis is not on history or philosophy as theoretical pursuits, but on direct experience, understanding the view as it relates to meditation practice and daily life.
Please join us!
The Three Parts
Part I, Autumn 2025: Abhidharma, Madyamaka and Yogacara
The first part of this course will explore what is called “the golden age of Indian Buddhism”–the first 1000 years after the Buddha lived. This begins with the Abhidharmikas, who used the method of radical reductionism to break the perceptual experience of the self into smaller and smaller components in order to realize its nonexistence. If the self cannot be found in any of the isolated components of our interior lives, can it be said to exist at all? We will then turn to the Madhyamikas, who argued that the further consequences of this reductionist approach imply that even those small components also fall apart under close scrutiny, demonstrating, quite counterintuitively, that it is not just the self but the whole world that is fundamentally without foundation. Finally, we will turn to the Yogacharans, who focus on the nature of the perceiver of this emptiness, introduce their understanding of the all-basis consciousness (alayavijnana), and portray the reality of emptiness in a positive manner–as the experience of enlightened mind.
Part II, Winter 2026: From Synthesis to the Birth of Rangtong and Shentong
In the second course, we will explore the later development of the view in India, which included a synthesis of the earlier divergent views and addressed the teachings on tathagatagarbha or Buddha Nature. We will trace the transmission of these teachings into Tibet, where this synthesis was initially preserved in the so-called first transmission of the dharma and then further diversified in the second transmission. The subsequent flourishing of scholastic creativity that occurred in the 14th century resulted in the initial crystallization of these teachings into the five separate traditions that we know today. In particular, we see the formalization of the two extremely divergent ways of understanding the nature of the ultimate as either an emptiness which is understood as a mere non-implicative negation, known as the Rangtong, or Emptiness of Self tradition, to the ultimate understood as emptiness endowed with the supreme or all aspects, known as Shentong, or Emptiness of Other tradition.
Part III, Spring 2026: Rangtong, Shentong, Great Madhyamaka and Other Options
In this final course, we will examine further developments of these two main traditions and how various proponents reacted to each other, and how some others presented alternatives which attempted to reconcile them. Our investigation then concludes with the 19th century non-sectarian movement, called Rimé, or without boundary. Proponents of this tradition sought to collect all of the major teachings from all of the schools and preserve them in their own integrity, without trying to merge or blend them into one. Finally, we focus on Mipham Jamyang Namgyal Gyatso’s pivotal text on the Shentong tradition of Madhyamaka, The Lion’s Roar of Other Emptiness.
How to Join Us
Please register by an email to dkolleeny@gmail.com. You will need to obtain a copy of the main text, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy by Jan Westerhoff, published by Oxford University Press (additional readings will be circulated by pdf). If you are new to the Rime Shedra, please include a short description of your background in Buddhist practice and study, and please attend a couple of classes to make sure you would like to continue with the course before you purchase the text and make any offering. It is traditional to make some offering for any dharma teachings one receives. The suggested offering is the mystical number $108, but you may offer whatever you want to offer.