This would work as an advanced undergraduate textbook. It doesn't assume much of the reader, but it does require some ability to think through details. It's a bit of a slog - it probably took me two months to crawl through. There is a lot of information here. This is all material that I have studied repeatedly over the decades, Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, Yogacara - it's pretty much a view that parallels the Tibetan perspective. It seems like East Asian Buddhism assigns different works to e.g. Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu. I don't recall Westerhoff reviewing that difference, between Tibetan and Chinese views of Indian Buddhism.

Even though the basic trajectory of ideas here is quite familiar to me, I got a lot out of reading this book. Westerhoff does a great job of inviting the reader, coaxing the reader, to thing through these ideas, to bring them to life. ( )

Jan Westerhoff unfolds the story of one of the richest episodes in the history of Indian thought, the development of Buddhist philosophy in the first millennium CE. He starts from the composition of the Abhidharma works before the beginning of the common era and continues up to the time of Dharmakirti in the sixth century. This period was characterized by the development of a variety of philosophical schools and approaches that have shaped Buddhist thought up to the present day: the scholasticism of the Abhidharma, the Madhyamaka's theory of emptiness, Yogacara idealism, and the logical and epistemological works of Dinnaga and Dharmakirti. The book attempts to describe the historical development of these schools in their intellectual and cultural context, with particular emphasis on three factors that shaped the development of Buddhist philosophical thought: the need to spell out the contents of canonical texts, the discourses of the historical Buddha and the Mahayana sutras; the desire to defend their positions by sophisticated arguments against criticisms from fellow Buddhists and from non-Buddhist thinkers of classical Indian philosophy; and the need to account for insights gained through the application of specific meditative techniques. While the main focus is the period up to the sixth century CE, Westerhoff also discusses some important thinkers who influenced Buddhist thought between this time and the decline of Buddhist scholastic philosophy in India at the beginning of the thirteenth century. His aim is that the historical presentation will also allow the reader to get a better systematic grasp of key Buddhist concepts such as non-self, suffering, reincarnation, karma, and nirvana.