Hey /lit/ eastern fag here looking for recommended reading in a particular order for eastern philosophy, in particular Buddhist philosophy, any suggestions?
>>7595364
Yes. Skip Buddhism and go straight to Taoism.
>>7595364
>Buddhist philosophy
>Buddhist
>Philosophy
>>7595364
Buddhist philosophy is a massive corpus.
The earliest stuff is the abhidharma of the Pali canon, literally "phenomenology." Might check out Nyanaponika Thera's Abhidhamma Studies: Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and Time.
Mahayana philosophy is usually depicted as being comprised of two pillars - Madhyamaka and Yogacara. For Madhyamaka the principal work is Nagarjuna's Mulmadhyamakakarikas. Use the Nishijima translation. For Yogacara Vasubandhu is the main guy. I can't think of a good intro book on that.
The third phase of Buddhism, Vajrayana, things get much more complicated. For the Tibetan tradition, Tsongkhapa, founder of the Geluk sect (the Dalai Lama's sect) is very straightforward and systematic in his writings, and forged an extremely precise form of Buddhist dialectics. In Japan it was Kukai. Around this time Chan/Zen was born in China. Huineng's platform sutra is a good starting point. Then there's no shortage of English books on Japanese Zen, so I won't get into that here.
Buddhist philosophy, as you can see, is a very general umbrella term. Lots of stuff there.
