Meditation on Emptiness

Jeffrey Hopkins's Meditation on Emptiness is genuinely one of the great works of Buddhist scholarship in any language — 1,058 pages of rigorous Prasangika-Madhyamaka philosophy that launched modern academic Tibetan Buddhist studies in North America, now revised in a posthumous second edition. For advanced students of Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhist philosophy scholars, this is an indispensable resource. For everyone else, it's the wrong starting point — not because of quality but because it assumes substantial prior background and demands complete commitment.