Jed Forman

University of California, Santa Barbara

PhD

Religious Studies

2021

University of Barcelona

PhD

Philosophy

2030

In progress

California State University, Northridge

MS

Kinesiology

2014

Seeds of Enlightenment

American Council of Learned Societies $10000

2026-06-15

This project focuses on the Geluk Tradition’s unique theory of the Buddha Trait (sangs rgyas kyi rigs), also commonly known as Buddha Nature (de bzhin snying po), which is understudied. Our goals are (1) to provide a comprehensive introduction to Geluk views on this topic and (2) to promote recognition of Tibetan scholarship. To this end, our work focuses on the translation of two texts. The first is A General Introduction to The Buddha by Jetsün Chökyi Gyeltsen (1469–1544), the famed author of the Sera Jey Monastery textbooks. The second is A Festival for Scholars by Lharampa Geshe Lobsang Gyatso (b. 1979), a contemporary luminary. Our study demonstrates how Gelukpas have adapted their explanation within different zeitgeists and for different audiences.

Forgetting Oneself: Tsongkhapa and Severance

Jed Forman

2025-08-11

This paper explores philosophical issues of personal identity and its connection to forgetting through the famed Tibetan Buddhist thinker Tsongkhapa (1357–1419). Tsongkhapa, in turn, follows the Middle Way (madhyamaka) tradition of Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) and Candrakīrti (c. 600–650 CE). Specifically, Tsongkhapa demonstrates that we can make sense of a consistent personal continuity despite the disruptions of forgetting and remembering. In so doing, he nuances the notion of personhood, revealing that it does not exist in the way we think. I rely on a thought experiment derived from the hit TV show Severance to demonstrate the ramifications of his theory. By way of conclusion, I explore how Tsongkhapa’s analysis constitutes a notion of “positive forgetting”.

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An Article on Articles: Tibetan Debate and Translation

Jed Forman

2025-03-01

Collected Topics (Bsdus grwa) has been a foundational genre for Tibetan philosophy since the foundation of Sangpu Neutok (Gsang phu ne’u thog) in 1072 CE, where it was first conceived as a vehicle for the study of authentic cognition (tshad ma), up until the present day. This terse and formulaic genre is something like its own Tibetan dialect, replete with its own technical neologisms and idiosyncrasies. It eventually became the engine of both textual and verbal Tibetan philosophical debate, allowing for a targeted, efficient, and fast-paced dialectic. For anyone interested in Tibetan philosophy, a grasp of Collected Topics is indispensable. However, translation of this genre of texts presents special challenges. Some of these are specific to the genre and how to render its concise formulations into natural English prose. Other challenges arise from broader differences between Tibetan and English, both grammatical and cultural. The present study focuses on one specific part of a much wider set of complexities in translating Collected Topics. Specifically, we concentrate on the English demand for articles in contrast to the absence of articles in Tibetan. We analyze how this linguistic difference presents specific challenges to rendering this genre into an English prose intelligible to an educated readership.

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Subtle, hidden, and far-off: The intertextuality of the Yogasūtras

Jed Forman

2023-04-10

Modern scholarship discusses ‘Buddhist influences’ on the Patañjali’s Yogasūtras (YS). Indeed, Patañjali borrowed key Buddhist concepts, particularly from Yogācāra. But this borrowing does not evince that the YS is just ‘crypto-Buddhism’. In fact, during the first millennium CE, the YS was equally influential on Buddhist thinkers. I make this argument by focusing on YS 3.25, which discusses the yogic ability to see subtle (sūkṣma), hidden (vyavahita), and far-off (viprakṛṣṭa) objects. Tracing textual occurrences of these three words, I use this stable mimetic trope to demonstrate the influence of YS on Buddhist, Nyāya, and Vaiśeṣika writings. This influence is all the more interesting given that Buddhists explicitly disagree with many of the theoretical suppositions latent in YS 3.25. I demonstrate that despite this theoretical disagreement, Buddhists make ample use of YS 3.25. This paper thus complicates any clear direction of influence between Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and further questions the cogency of strict delineations between different philosophical schools. I also offer the method used in this paper as a novel approach to textual exegesis. By focusing on stable textual memes and tracing their occurrences across sources, we gain a powerful method to more deeply plumb India's rich intertextual intellectual history.

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