The Dialectic Between Religious Belief and Contemplative Knowledge in Tibetan Buddhism

I would like to present this essay as an example of a Buddhist theoretical critique of the relation between religious belief and contemplative knowledge in Tibetan Buddhism, and I shall contrast this with Steven Katz's and Paul Griffith's academic analyses of mysticism and Buddhist insight practice. A tension has long existed in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition between religious belief based upon scriptural authority and contemplative knowledge drawn from first-hand, personal inquiry. While many of the great scholars and contemplatives of Tibet have emphasized the importance of a balance between these two themes, when a contemplative tradition degenerates, this tension is lost: scholars devote themselves exclusively to textual study, disclaiming the present possibility of experiential knowledge; while contemplatives disdain textual knowledge as dry intellectualism, thereby reducing their tradition to a system of theoretically barren techniques. The very possibility of genuine contemplative inquiry and insight has been called into question by modern scholars of mysticism and Buddhism. Steven Katz, for example, claims that religious images, beliefs, symbols, and rituals define, in advance, th