The Extent of All Knowledge: Jamgön Kongtrul and the Epistemic Future of Religious

In this paper, I will take up the 19th century Tibetan polymath Jamgön Kongtrul as a theorist of religion. Kongtrul's encyclopedic Treasury of Knowledge places the "inner science" of Buddhism alongside medicine, astrology, logic, and other Tibetan disciplines as intellectual and somatic crafts, locating all knowledge, religious and otherwise, in the relational transformation of persons rather than the correspondence of facts to an objective reality. Pursuing impartiality (rimé), Kongtrul presents a fractally multiplying series of accounts of everything from architecture to Buddhist soteriology, treating each contradictory possibility as an integral whole. Like his European parallels - whose desire for objective and universal knowledge still runs through Religious Studies – Kongtrul’s own hierarchical preferences shape his project. But in his insistence that relational particularity is what makes each way of knowing effective, Kongtrul offers us a different epistemic path.