David Reigle
| David Reigle | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 22, 1952 Danville, Pennsylvania, United States. |
| Occupation | Scholar, writer |
David Reigle (August 22, 1952 in Danville, Pennsylvania, US) is an American author and an independent scholar of the Sanskrit scriptures of India and their Tibetan translations. He has written on the Buddhist Kālacakra teachings, and has published research on the sourcebooks accepted in Theosophy. These are the Books of Kiu-te, i.e., rgyud-sde, the Tibetan Buddhist tantras, and the so-called Book of Dzyan, which still remains unidentified.
David Reigle became interested in Theosophy in 1973. Although he began his Sanskrit studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1978, he did not pursue a PhD, but rather continued his Sanskrit studies independently. He began his Tibetan studies with a private tutor in Dharamsala, India, in 1979. While working on Sanskrit texts, he identified two very rare Sanskrit verb-forms and wrote an article about them that was published in the Indo-Iranian Journal.
The Books of Kiu-te are said by Theosophical founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to be a series of texts, some of which are secret, and others public. The secret ones are said to include the Book of Dzyan, from which stanzas were allegedly translated by Blavatsky to form the basis of her major book, The Secret Doctrine (2 vols., 1888). The public ones, said to be in the possession of Tibetan monasteries, long remained unidentified. In 1981, Reigle identified them as rgyud-sde, the Tibetan Buddhist tantras, by tracing out the reference Blavatsky gave when referring to these books. Then unknown to Reigle, Henk J. Spierenburg had made this identification six years earlier in a note to an article he wrote in Dutch. Reigle followed up this identification with a small book, The Books of Kiu-te, or the Tibetan Buddhist Tantras: A Preliminary Analysis, published in 1983. This book surveys the Buddhist tantras as found in Tibetan translation in the Tibetan Kangyur and their commentaries as found in the Tibetan Tengyur, and includes a bibliography of the then available printed editions of their Sanskrit originals. It was reviewed in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies.
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