Rationalism
Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia is now 14 years old
Our Encyclopedia recently received a wonderful opportunity for a major renewal on its 14th birthday . After many years of growing our Encyclopedia had become bit slow and sometimes even decided not to answer when people knocked on the door.
A very big thank you and blessings to Dmytro Rudiy (rudiy.nl) for his great work in upgrading the server, website and all of the infrastructure and helping make TBE fast and reliable again for everyone!
We kindly ask our readers to help us cover the cost of this important upgrade and also help with the ongoing costs of keeping the Encyclopedia alive and freely available.
or card
Every little donation helps and every one is deeply appreciated. 🙏🙏🙏
OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM 🙏🙏🙏
May blessings shower down on all of yous 🙏🙏🙏
Rationalism is the philosophical theory that knowledge can be obtained by human reason alone. Some enthusiastic but uninformed Buddhists have claimed that the Buddha was a rationalist and that Buddhism is ‘pure rationalism .’ While Buddhism does have strong rational elements, probably more than most religions , it is an exaggeration to say that it is completely rational . The Buddha was too aware of the subtle influence that desire and prejudice can have on the thought processes to rely entirely on reason . According to him, three things have a role to play in the attainment of knowledge or wisdom – data obtained through education (sutamayā paññā), data obtained through reasoning (cintāmayā paññā) and data obtained by meditation (bhāvanāmayā paññā).