Comments on “Learning from other traditions”

The four major Tibetan schools are Nyingma, Kagyud, Sakya, and Geluk. The one that happens not to be included in the public reading list is Sakya (probably because the Sakya school has had the least presence in the English-speaking world). There is a book by a Sakya author on the Aro apprentice reading list.

Shin, and Pure Land Buddhism more generally, never seems to have had any significant presence in Tibet. It's a Chinese development, and the Tibetans generally regarded Chinese Buddhism as invalid. They viewed India as the sole source of authentic Buddhism.

I don't think Aro has anything to say about Pure Land one way or another. Aro is part of the Nyingma tradition, which is defined in part by its refusal to get involved with Buddhist politics. The general Nyingma attitude is "you've got your thing, we've got our thing, we're really happy for you to do your thing, and we'd like it if you left us alone to do our thing."

I sometimes think of the landscape of Buddhism as roughly triangular. The three corners are Nyingma, Pure Land, and Theravada. This is a gross oversimplification, but those are probably the most-dissimilar Buddhist traditions. They have almost nothing in common; I'd say they are as different as Wahhabi Islam, Jewish Reconstructionism, and Roman Catholicism.

Unfortunately, there is no really good "teach yourself Classical Tibetan" book (and there are quite a few direly bad ones). Stephen Hodge's book is good-ish but incomplete.

If you just want to learn the script and pronunciation, you can probably find something on-line. Actually, I will send you some things I wrote myself, by email.

The script is easy. You know Devanagari (the Hindi script), and Tibetan is derived from the same ancestor (Brahimi); you'll laugh when you learn the Tibetan letters, because they are almost identical, but distorted differently from Brahimi.

The pronunciation is not so easy; there are moderately complex rules that relate spellings to pronunciations. It is definitely worth learning those, however, because you suddenly realize that words you thought distinct are actually alternate spellings of the same things.

If you can deal with the jargon of professional linguists, Stephen Beyer's book is wonderful. It's not a language-learning primer, however.

Yes, John Powers' book is an excellent overview of Tibetan Buddhism. Maybe not the first thing to read, but once one is intrigued enough to read something chewy, it gives context for more popular books.