LAUSR

Mahāyāna sutras. After a lengthy discussion of early Dzogchen, Tiso concludes his volume with a discussion of “unanswerable questions.” Is there a connection between the Great Perfection and the teaching of the Church of the East? Are there connections between the peak mystical experiences described in this book? And actually, do these experiences actually happen? Tiso offers some suggestions about future possible directions for research, but all of these questions remain open. Where does this leave the reader? This reviewer has a few reservations about the structure of the monograph and its division into chapters. Tiso chooses to start his discussion of the Buddhist material with an exploration of the later developments of Dzogchen and returns to the origins of the Great Perfection after a long detour into Syriac Christianity. Perhaps his argument would have been helped by a more linear arrangement of the material, allowing the mystical speculation of Evagrios and the Syro-Oriental authors to pave the way to the elaborate philosophical constructions of Longchenpa and later Dzogchen. In a similar way, readers might have gained more from the report of Tiso’s travel in the Kham region if the latter had been placed after his overview of Dzogchen—in this way, his audience would have been more familiar with the beliefs of the individual practitioners that Tiso encounters on his travels. These considerations, however, are merely tangential to the main question, namely whether what Khenpo A Chö and “the man of the shroud” actually experienced was the same peak experience and whether Dzogchen was truly influenced by Syriac Christianity. Tiso is skeptical of all reference to Jungian archetypes (247), but this reviewer wonders whether it might not be possible to just argue that different religious traditions reach analogous conclusions about peak mystical experiences without direct historical contact, merely because they all spring from our common human condition. Perhaps, despite Tiso’s impressive attempt to prove otherwise, the question of the origin of different religious practices will always remain an “unanswerable question.”