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that after his death his notes could not be found. It is to be hoped that someone will undertake the critical edition of these fragments which Siegling and Bernhard have not been able to bring to completion.
NOTES
Untersuchung über die textgeschichtliche Entwicklung des tibetischen Buddhacarita. Berlin,
1980.
2 Op. cit., p. 27.
3 Op. cit., p. 30.
4 This correction had already been proposed by Böhtlingk in 1894.
5 Cf. R. O. Schrader, Kleine Schriften (Wiesbaden, 1983), p. 332.
Australian National University
J. W. DE JONG
Paul J. Griffiths, On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and The MindBody Problem. LaSalle, Illinois, Open Court Publishing Company, 1986. xxii, 220 pp. $24.95.
Indo-Iranian Journal 31 (1988).
Paul Griffiths' book deals with the Attainment of Cessation (nirodhasamāpatti) in Indian Buddhism. The first chapter examines the Theravada tradition according to the Nikayas and to Buddhaghosa. The second chapter, The Attainment of Cessation in the Vaibhāṣika Tradition, is based mainly on Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosabhāṣya and the commentaries by Sthiramati and Yasomitra. The third chapter deals with the Yogacara tradition according to Asanga and Vasubandhu. The fourth chapter, The Attainment of Cessation and the Mind-Body Problem, summarizes the results of his study with regard to the relationship between the mental and the physical.
In the introduction, Griffiths remarks that he originally conceived his work as an historical and exegetical study of a set of Indian Buddhist controversies about certain kinds of meditational practice. However, in the process of research and writing his work received another dimension as an exercise in cross-cultural philosophizing. Griffiths writes that 'where it seems appropriate I shall not hesitate to offer critical assessments of both the arguments presented in those [i.e. Indian Buddhist] traditions and of the truth of the premisses involved therein'.
Griffiths' work is intended to be of use not only to Buddhist scholars but also to philosophers interested in the mind-body issue and to historians of religion concerned with the study of soteriological practices and of altered
