Part II, Chapter 6: Verification: The Drift in Certifying Realization¶

Part I, Chapter 3 noted that systematization made the threshold for certifying “direct realization of emptiness” higher and more specialized. The chapter on the truth of cessation (Part II, Chapter 3) further noted that “direct realization” itself had become an objectified goal. This chapter follows the actual course of that criterion of certification within the tradition.

Early Buddhism's criterion of liberation

Early Buddhism's criterion for the state of liberation has a structure that seems simple but is in fact precise: suffering ceases, craving is abandoned, and one is no longer driven into the cycle of rebirth. Epistemologically, this criterion is inward and gives priority to the person's own report; it is weak in external observability. No outward sign can establish with certainty that someone is liberated, because liberation is fundamentally a transformation of an experiential state, not the acquisition of a skill or accumulation of knowledge. Descriptions of the exhaustion of the influxes in the Saṃyutta-nikāya emphasize the quality of inner experience. A bhikkhu whose influxes are exhausted truly knows: “My birth is exhausted, the holy life is established, what had to be done has been done, and I know for myself that I will not undergo further existence.”¹ This is self-knowledge, not a performance.

Though difficult to manifest outwardly, this criterion has a clear referent. It describes a change in the stream of experience, specifically the actual severance of craving, rather than a philosophical understanding of craving's ineffectuality. The tradition does also have a structure of “direct realization” (abhisamaya), which provides a framework for attaining this inner state. But its core remains a direct experiential transformation of suffering, not a theoretical analysis of suffering.

The process of drift

As Madhyamaka and the traditions that followed it developed, a gradually discernible drift occurred in the criterion of liberation. This drift is a structural, gradual process, not anyone's deliberate choice. It progressively replaces the experiential criterion of “the cessation of suffering” with a set of epistemological standards: correctly using Madhyamaka methods to speak about emptiness; effectively demolishing an opponent's claims of intrinsic nature in debate; making incisive Chan-style replies; writing doctrinally precise commentaries; and composing verses on emptiness.

These activities share a structural feature: all are performances at the cognitive and linguistic levels. They can be publicly displayed and received, recorded, evaluated, and taught within a learned tradition. Compared with the privacy and incommunicability of “the cessation of suffering,” these epistemological performances have considerable social visibility. That visibility makes them exceptionally convenient for institutional operations, and this is no accident.

The rise of scholastic institutions as a structural cause

This drift is inseparable from the development of Buddhist institutions into scholastic establishments. When itinerant monastic communities—including the Indian itinerant tradition, which still retained considerable vitality in Nāgārjuna's time—become monastic colleges with fixed buildings, systematized scriptures, teacher-disciple lineages, and relationships of lay support, their normal functioning requires workable criteria for evaluation. The cessation of suffering is private and almost unusable for certifying qualifications or managing hierarchies within an institution. Victory or defeat in debate, the quality of commentaries, and mastery of doctrine, however, are public, comparable, and available as grounds for promotion.

The pressures of the institutional environment naturally tend toward replacing the former with the latter as outward signs of “realization.” This is a natural extension of institutional logic, not a product of corruption. When an institution needs to identify who can teach, who is qualified to receive offerings, and whose transmission of the Dharma is authoritative, it must have criteria of evaluation. Those criteria necessarily favor observable performance and bypass unobservable transformations of inner states.

The drift's internal logic

Besides external institutional pressures, this drift has an internal philosophical logic. Madhyamaka argument is a highly technical philosophical activity. Mastering the correct use of reductio requires prolonged training, a fine grasp of logic, and actual practice in debate. A monk's ability to use reductio fluently in debate is itself hard-won and displays a deep grasp of the structure of arguments for emptiness. Under these conditions, “using reductio correctly” can readily be internalized as a practice in its own right, rather than merely an instrument needed to understand practice.

This internalization is psychologically intelligible. If the view of emptiness is the epistemological foundation of liberation, and argument is the means of deepening that view, progress in argumentative skill seems to advance liberation. Yet a subtle and important shift occurs here: progress in argumentative skill and an actual deepening of the view of emptiness are not entirely equivalent in their manifestations. One can use reductio with impeccable logic while making no progress whatever in actually undoing self-grasping within the mental continuum, just as one can explain the mechanics of swimming with great skill yet be unable to keep oneself afloat.

Without an independent standard to distinguish the two, argumentative skill quietly rises into an outward sign of realization. In a Madhyamaka college, how do teachers and peers judge whether an accomplished debater is actually practicing, rather than simply training an epistemological skill? If this question has no clear answer, skill in debate becomes, in effect, realization as recognized by the community.

The Gelug practice manuals left their own answer to this question, and it is worth recording because it shows exactly where the criterion lands. Explaining how to identify the object of negation, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand says that knowing the words may win a debate, but without experience one still does not know what is to be refuted: "you will not identify a thief if you just go by descriptions such as 'the thief is a man' or 'he was wearing white.'" The sign of first finding the view is likewise an experience: those of sharp faculties feel they have found a treasure, those of dull faculties are frightened "as if they had suddenly lost something precious"; the book records that when Tsongkhapa gave the instruction on the view at Sera Chöding, his disciple Sherab Sengé was so frightened on understanding it that he clutched his own collar, and Tsongkhapa was delighted. Mañjuśrī's Oral Instruction gives as its sign a feeling like bone striking stone when certainty arises, and the sense of having found or lost a treasure held in the hand; the sign of attaining insight is that the pliancy induced by analysis surpasses the pliancy attained with serenity.² What these signs have in common is that they are all reactions stirred up in the mind by an inference, reported by the person who performs the inference, while the tradition states outright that winning in the debating courtyard does not count. The criterion thus retreats from debate to the practitioner's own experience, in the same direction as the Kadam maxim, discussed below, of relying on the principal of the two witnesses. But what is experienced is still the conclusion of an argument; the difference between conceptual simulation and direct realization receives no independent test here, only a different reporter.

Analysis of the Gelug debate system

This drift reached a highly institutionalized form in Tibetan Buddhism's Gelug debate system (rtsod pa). The geshe (dge bshes) degree is the highest degree in the Gelug monastic system. Obtaining it requires ten to twenty years of systematic study and a demonstration of mastery of the five major treatises—logic, prajñā, Madhyamaka, the Abhidharmakośa, and Vinaya—in large debate assemblies. Debate examinations are essentially displays of epistemological performance: can one accurately cite treatises under the pressure of argument, discriminate valid from invalid arguments, and maintain the consistency of the Madhyamaka position in debate?³

The Gelug have a complete internal rationale for the debate system. Correct understanding of doctrine is a necessary condition of practice, and debate is an effective mechanism for testing whether understanding is genuine, deep, and free of confusion. A geshe established through debate is qualified to serve as an authority in transmitting the Dharma, which ensures the quality of doctrinal transmission. This defense holds within its own logical framework.

This book's criticism concerns the connection between the debate system and “certification of realization,” not that defense itself. When the community regards a geshe as an “accomplished practitioner,” rather than merely a “doctrinal authority,” and mastery of debate is conflated with direct realization of the view of emptiness, the drift is complete. A diagnosis further upstream than this drift is available in Volume 1, Part II, Essay 18. There, the meaning of emptiness is a rule, not information about the world. The rule says everything that needs saying within every framework and hands in a blank paper at the level of states of affairs. Treating “realizing emptiness” as an event at the level of states of affairs that can be marked out and certified is itself a misplacement of meaning, because something at the level of rules has no “occurrence” to certify. This and the reobjectification of direct realization discussed in Chapter 3 of this essay are two halves of the same matter. The distinction between the two accomplishments does exist in the Gelug tradition's normative formulations: the Gelug fully acknowledge that success in debate is not realization through direct perception. Yet in actual institutional arrangements, the distinction suffers continual wear. Dreyfus's fieldwork provides an institutional footnote. Debate training overwhelmingly dominates the traditional curriculum; systematic meditation is usually deferred until geshe studies have been completed. A test pushed indefinitely back in the timetable effectively yields to the one taking place every day (see Dreyfus, cited above).

The case of contemporary academic Buddhist studies

This drift has an unusual contemporary continuation in academic Buddhist studies; for its history, see Volume 1, 12.3, “Academic Buddhist Studies.” In some Buddhist studies communities, precise academic publications on emptiness, degrees, and correct interpretations of Nāgārjuna's texts at conferences function as circulating credentials for having “understood emptiness.” The limits set by this volume require an explanation: this describes a mechanism of recognition, not anyone's psychology. This volume diagnoses structures, not motives; see Introduction, Chapter 1. As a mechanism of recognition, this has already entered the domain of certifying realization.

This case reveals the drift's general mechanism, which is not confined to medieval colleges. Whenever a tradition makes highly technical epistemological activity—whether debate or academic research—its central intellectual practice, “performing this activity correctly” will, under communal pressure, become the outward form of realization, however explicitly the tradition's normative texts assert that the two differ.

Resistance within the tradition

The source lists recognition of qualifications, hierarchical administration, and authority to transmit the teaching as institutional pressures. Its endpoint includes victory and defeat in debate, commentaries, degrees, and public comparability. The third resistance example specifies that Dahui Zonggao burns the printing blocks of the Blue Cliff Record. The source's final statement about resistance arising mainly at the margins applies to the resistance cases generally, rather than only to the Kadam outcome. In the chapter's argument, that marginal position is indirect evidence of the strength of institutional drift; “negative evidence” should not be read as evidence that the drift did not occur.

The drift met resistance within the tradition, and the traces of resistance are themselves testimony. The Kadam mind-training tradition laid down two instructions in the Seven Points of Mind Training directly relevant here. First, “All teachings come down to one point”: all teachings converge on one test, whether self-grasping has diminished. The commentator explicitly calls this a scale for weighing practitioners. Second, “Of the two witnesses, take the foremost”: between others' approval and scrutiny by one's own mind, give primacy to one's own mind.⁴ Together, these almost reestablish in Tibet the early criteria verifiable in this life—fewer afflictions, loosened grasping, and reliance on changes observable to the person concerned. Their target is precisely the drift toward reliance on scholarly performance and others' recognition. The same resistance appears in the long tension between lineages of practice and lineages of exposition. Several confrontations with geshes in Milarepa's biography set victory in debate against assurance at death as two criteria of accomplishment. China supplies a more forceful example. Seeing students memorize the incisive exchanges of the Blue Cliff Record to pass off as realization, Dahui Zonggao burned its printing blocks outright. This was a master's institutional surgery on “realization reduced to model answers.” These acts of resistance show that the tradition saw the drift. Their tendency to arise at the margins, or to require extreme gestures, also shows the scale of the institutional forces behind it.

The fate of the Kadam school itself should also be recorded. For the most part, it did not survive as an independently organized school. After the fifteenth century, its teachings dispersed among other schools, while its monasteries successively passed to Sakya and Gelug or became nunneries; Tsongkhapa's line also called itself “New Kadam.” Only Radreng and Narthang retained the Kadam name as late as the eighteenth century.⁵ The criteria represented by the two instructions spread among the schools as mind-training literature and survive today. But the school that established them saw its teachings pass to other schools, its monasteries into others' hands, and its name adopted by the line with the most complete institutions of debate. A tradition that weighed practitioners by the increase or decrease of afflictions is now remembered chiefly as the “old name” of a tradition that weighs them by degrees and the debating ground. The power of the drift is displayed most fully in this outcome.

The limits of the criticism

This chapter's criticism has clear limits. There is nothing problematic in understanding doctrine as a necessary condition of practice; the question concerns equating “understanding doctrine correctly” with “already practicing.” Incisive exchanges and verses can transmit the Dharma and need not be self-advertisement. The concern is that when they become realization as recognized by the community, a means of transmission becomes a mechanism of certification. For those actually meditating, training in debate may indeed consolidate correct doctrinal understanding and thereby support meditation. The concern lies elsewhere: in how the community identifies this auxiliary means as realization.

The drift is structural and gradual, not a single decision by any one person or period. It can recur in any tradition of practice that gives highly technical epistemological practice a central place. Recognizing this mechanism is necessary to remain clear-eyed about one's own tradition.

References¶