Vol. XIV, Issue 2 — Autumn 2025

A fresh translation of Chekawa Yeshe Dorje’s foundational lojong text, incorporating newly discovered manuscript variants from the Bhutanese National Library. The author argues that several key phrases in the standard version reflect a later editorial hand, and that the original text presented a more provisional view of self-cherishing as the root of suffering.

The tension between Madhyamaka’s rejection of inherent existence and the demands of a substantive Buddhist ethics has occupied philosophers for decades. This essay argues for a middle path that preserves conventional moral claims without reifying them, drawing on Tsongkhapa’s distinction between ultimate and conventional analysis and recent work in metaethics.

Sarah Harding has spent four decades translating Tibetan Buddhist texts, including the landmark Machik’s Complete Explanation. In this conversation, she speaks candidly about the ethics of translation, the impossible choices every translator faces, and why she believes the field is at an inflection point as the last holders of living oral lineages age.

A young monk in a remote Ladakhi gompa receives an unexpected letter that will unravel his understanding of his own origins. A quietly devastating story about belonging, impermanence, and the strange mercy of loss told across a single rainy afternoon and the memories it floods back. Winner of the 2024 Inkwell Fiction Prize.

A sequence of five poems written in the aftermath of her mother’s death, drawing on the Tibetan Book of the Dead as both structure and solace. MacCulloch braids medical fact — the clinical language of hospital records — with luminous images from the bardos of dying and becoming, producing something that is neither eulogy nor liturgy but partakes of both.

Three important texts on Tibetan Buddhist theories of mind have appeared in English translation within the past eighteen months: Mipham Rinpoche’s Gateway to Knowledge, Düdjom Lingpa’s Buddhahood Without Meditation, and Longchenpa’s The Natural Freedom of Mind. This review essay considers each on its own terms and asks what, taken together, they reveal about the state of the field.

Selected chapters from Gölo Zhönnu Pel’s fifteenth-century history of Tibetan Buddhism, here translated into English for the first time. The passages focus on the cult of Avalokiteshvara in Central Tibet from the seventh through the fourteenth century, including previously unexamined accounts of the great image at Potala before the construction of the present palace.

This essay examines the distinctive Nyingma presentation of buddha-nature doctrine through close reading of three texts from the Longchen Nyingtik cycle, arguing that the tradition’s equation of buddha-nature with rigpa represents a coherent philosophical position rather than the category mistake often attributed to it by critics within the Gelug tradition.