A Buddhist meditation manual from Central Asia, the 'Qizil Yoga Manual', combines Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma with Mahāyāna Yogācāra strands and describes vivid visualization practices specific to the Kucha region. The paper examines how the manual's hyper-real visualizations relate mind to reality and whether Yogācāra meditation proposes idealism as a metaphysical theory. It also considers whether neurocognitive research can help understand the 'hallucination-like' quality of some visualizations that blur appearances and reality. Analyzing the material context of meditation, especially cave environments, aids in understanding the text's techniques. The manual facilitates soteriological idealism, and factoring in material contexts is useful for deciphering its methods and discussing idealism.
Madhyamaka philosophy is inseparable from meditative practice. While traditional Indian and Tibetan scholarship has always understood Madhyamaka as a meditative tradition, contemporary interpretations often treat it as a purely theoretical or metaphysical system. This paper argues that the Madhyamaka insight into emptiness (śūnyatā) is unique and therefore requires a distinct method of meditative cultivation (bhāvanā). To demonstrate this, it surveys the Tibetan genre of dbu ma'i lta khrid (Guides to the Madhyamaka View), examining works by Réndawa, Tsongkhapa, Baso Chökyi Gyeltsen, Shakya Chokden, Jamyang Zhépa, and Ju Mipham. These texts provide specific meditative instructions for embodying different interpretations of Madhyamaka, revealing a Madhyamaka phenomenology and extending the methodology for interpreting this tradition.
Candrakīrti's Madhyamakāvatāra (MA) chapter 6, published in 2015 from a rediscovered Sanskrit text, offers a critique of the Indian Abhidharmic 'chariot argument' for the merely conventional existence of the self. In verses 140–141, Candrakīrti alludes to the Milindapañha's use of the chariot argument as negating only a permanent self (compared to an elephant), not ego-identification (compared to a snake in its hole). In verses 150–165, he uses the chariot argument as an allegory for a sevenfold meditation that refutes the basis of ego-identification. This use does not establish a theory of self or not-self but guides meditation as part of philosophy as a spiritual practice aimed at liberation.