Part III, Chapter 5: External Criticism¶

This chapter collects the criticisms made of this tradition from outside it, in three groups: the criticisms of the "object of negation" by other Tibetan schools and by dissenters within the Geluk; the assessment of Chinese scholarship; and the treatment of the tradition by modern scholarship and experimental research. The three groups do not aim at the same target. The criticism of the other schools falls almost entirely on the first of the four essential points described in Chapter 2, the identification of the object of negation; the Chinese assessment falls on the tradition's choice of method for insight; the modern treatment falls on the category of "experience" itself and on the measurable effects of calm abiding. The chapter restates each party's arguments and grounds from the sources; judgment is reserved for Chapter 6.

1. Sakya: Gorampa's dispute over diagnosis

Gorampa's (1429–1489) Distinguishing the Views is the first systematic critique of Tsongkhapa's Madhyamaka; Taktsang Lotsāwa's Knowing All Tenets, five years earlier, had already opened the attack. Gorampa judges Tsongkhapa a nihilist, which is surprising on its face, since that is precisely the charge Tsongkhapa brought against the view of "neither existence nor non-existence" that Gorampa held. Cabezón points out that Gorampa's central thesis is that Tsongkhapa does not negate far enough: after negating true existence, the negation "emptiness" itself and the apprehension of it must also be negated, which Tsongkhapa does not allow; "Those who grasp at emptiness have not gone beyond falling into the extreme of nihilism."¹

The root of the disagreement is diagnosis. Cabezón sets the two diagnoses of ignorance side by side: "for Tsong kha pa the problem lies with the false quality that the mind attributes to objects, whereas for Go rams pa it lies with the very proliferative character of the conceptual mind itself, an aspect of mental functioning that cannot be entirely eliminated through the selective negation of a specific quality (true existence), requiring instead the use of a method (the complete negation of all extremes) that brings dualistic thinking to a halt."² In other words, Tsongkhapa holds that the disease is a quality the mind attributes to objects, so the cure is to find that quality and negate it by reasoning; Gorampa holds that the disease is the dichotomizing operation of conceptual mind itself, so the selective negation of one quality is useless. Gorampa accordingly also charges that Tsongkhapa "reifies the 'mere I,' making it into a real entity that is found when the self is rationally analyzed."³ To the charge that this amounts to the view of the Chinese Heshang, his answer is that the Heshang does not analyze but merely stops thought, whereas we first refute each of the extreme conceptions by Madhyamaka reasoning and only at the end call "not finding any extreme" the realization of the Madhyamaka view; analysis is a necessary preliminary, but one that must be transcended by the complete negation of the four extremes.⁴

2. Kagyü: the Karmapa's "hornlike object of negation"

The Eighth Karmapa Mikyö Dorje's (1507–1554) critique of Tsongkhapa in his commentary on Entering the Middle Way has been set out by Brunnhölzl. Tsongkhapa holds that a vase is not empty of the vase itself but of the vase's real existence, so that the object of negation and its basis are two different things. The Karmapa's rebuttal has two steps. First, following Candrakīrti's Clear Words and autocommentary on Entering the Middle Way, emptiness is the emptiness of the eye and the rest of the eye itself, not the emptiness of one thing in another; the Laṅkāvatāra calls the latter "very inferior." Second, if the object of negation is a "real existence" different from the vase and non-existent to begin with, negating it does nothing to the grasping at the vase: fix a horn on a rabbit's head and then remove it, and the rabbit is still a rabbit. The critics call this a "hornlike object of negation" and say that such an object is not suitable for relinquishing the reifying clinging to persons and phenomena and so does not lead to liberation.⁵ Brunnhölzl cites a dissenting voice inside the Geluk as witness: Janggya Rölpé Dorjé's (1717–1786) Song of the View, Called Recognizing the Mother says that nowadays "some of our great luminaries / Cling to terms such as solid, real existence… They are seen to search for something hornlike to be negated."⁶ The Karmapa concludes that in its soteriological efficacy Tsongkhapa's account of the object of negation and of emptiness is a realism outside Madhyamaka, to be placed doxographically between the Mind-Only school and the Svātantrika; and that any meditation that takes as its object a "nature of phenomena" unconnected with the phenomena themselves, whether it is called a non-implicative negation or a permanent ultimate entity, is of the same kind: "Both are equally soteriologically ineffective."⁷

3. Nyingma: Mipham on the non-implicative negation

The first topic of Mipham's (1846–1912) Beacon of Certainty asks "which of the two negations is explained as the view?" Pettit explains: the Geluk takes emptiness to be a non-implicative negation (prasajyapratiṣedha), whose advantage in debate is that the Prāsaṅgika need not supply a counter-thesis; the hallmark of Geluk Prāsaṅgika is its insistence on correctly identifying the object of negation, over-defined it leads to nihilism, under-defined to eternalism.⁸ Mipham's criticism is aimed at taking a non-implicative negation as the object of meditation: "An absolute negation is a conceptual image exclusive of appearance and is not free of the elaboration of nonexistence." For the Nyingma, emptiness within luminosity is the coalescence of appearance and emptiness, not a bare negation, and to make the emptiness of absolute negation the object of fundamental luminosity "is contradictory at worst, and redundant at best."⁹ Pettit also reports the judgment of Mipham and Do Ngak Tenpé Nyima that Geluk Prāsaṅgika understands the two truths and emptiness in a way similar to the "proponents of true existence," the Sautrāntikas and Cittamātrins.¹⁰

The contemporary Nyingma teacher Anyen Rinpoche, lecturing on the Beacon, connects this criticism to the stages of practice. He grants that the Geluk non-implicative negation gives beginners something to work with: "the Gelug philosophy… is very supportive of beginning practitioners." Its weakness is that the non-implicative negation "is not a correct assertion of the uncontrived view," and that in refuting only the object's true establishment "there is something left over after you refute it." He does not believe that Tsongkhapa himself took the non-implicative negation as the ultimate view, citing the verse of the Three Principal Aspects on the two understandings appearing together without alternation, and attributes that position to Tsongkhapa's followers.¹¹

4. A dissenter from within the Geluk: Gendün Chöpel

Gendün Chöpel (1903–1951) was a Geluk monk trained at Labrang and Drepung, and his Adornment for Nāgārjuna's Thought was attacked by Geluk monks as soon as it appeared. Lopez's translation and commentary lay out his argument. He cites Tsongkhapa's own words: "Until one has understood emptiness, it is impossible to ever distinguish mere existence from true existence and, similarly, one cannot distinguish non-true existence from mere nonexistence," and then asks: if so, "how is it possible to identify true establishment separately before understanding the view? … Thus, how can one rely on that pretense of the identification of the object of negation?"¹² He mocks the practice of adding qualifier upon qualifier to the object of negation: if what is negated must be changed from "existence" to "truly established existence," then one had better add "intrinsically existent truly established existence"; the qualifications do not sharpen the focus on the target of wisdom, they change the target, and "A pot for us is indistinguishable from a 'truly established pot.'"¹³ Lopez summarizes the position: the unenlightened "are utterly incapable of distinguishing between existence and true existence among the objects of their ordinary experience," so that to require them to separate the object of negation from conventional existence before meditating on emptiness is impossible.¹⁴

Gendün Chöpel's criticism falls on the same point as the Karmapa's and Gorampa's, but from a different angle: the other schools say that the object of negation has been wrongly identified; he says that it cannot be identified at all.

5. Chinese scholarship: Lü Cheng

Lü Cheng's Outline of Tibetan Buddhism of 1933 was the first general account of Tsongkhapa's doctrine in Chinese scholarship, and its assessment cuts both ways. The positive judgment: "Tsongkhapa's teaching is so complete in its organization as to surpass ancient and modern alike, and the orthodox line of inference rests on it alone"; compared with Chinese Buddhism, "Tsongkhapa's teaching has at least two features never seen in the Chinese schools: first, it fully possesses the manner of late Indian Mahāyāna and lays extreme weight on practice; second, it takes practice as its ground and on that basis selects and organizes the various schools."¹⁵ The criticism falls on the choice of method for insight. Lü Cheng notes that Atiśa's commentary on the Lamp for the Path "still took something" from the Yogācāra on the method of insight, "but once Tsongkhapa followed Candrakīrti's position, he excluded it entirely from the method of insight, and this is truly the extreme point in Tsongkhapa's doctrine"; and that because Tibetan Buddhism rests on late doctrine, "it came to honour Madhyamaka alone in the Mahāyāna method of insight, and the Yogācāra teaching was wholly discarded, which must be called regrettable."¹⁶ His criticism is one of doctrinal history: it concerns the single source of the method of insight, not its workability.

6. The treatment by modern scholarship

Modern treatment of this tradition's meditation can be sorted into three lines.

The first is description of the Geluk institution and self-understanding. Jackson's study of Geluk mahāmudrā closes with a set of questions, two of which bear directly on this part. To "what is serenity and what is insight," his answer is that the First Paṇchen Lama places "pure vacuity" in both the section on serenity and the section on insight, while the Geluk in general judge experiences of vacuity, bliss, clarity, and nonduality to be serenity and not insight. To "is there a place for reason in mahāmudrā," his answer is that Gelukpas are more likely than Kagyüpas to treat reasoning as a necessary condition of realization, but that all Tibetan traditions accept that direct realization of the truth transcends rationality.¹⁷ Dreyfus's account was cited in Part II, Chapter 6, and in the previous chapter and is not repeated. Thakchoe's monograph on the debate between Tsongkhapa and Gorampa over the two truths summarizes it in the introduction: Tsongkhapa argues for the ontological identity of the two truths despite their conceptual distinctness, Gorampa for their ontological difference, one real and the other unreal; Tsongkhapa argues for the possibility of valid conceptual cognition, Gorampa against it; Tsongkhapa takes enlightenment to be the perfection of knowledge of empirically given phenomena from both standpoints, Gorampa takes it to be a breach with conceptuality.¹⁸

The second line questions the category of "meditative experience." Sharf's article of 1995 points out that modern interpretation of Buddhism commonly assumes that Buddhist philosophical literature is "a detailed map of inner space," and that terms such as śamatha, vipaśyanā, samādhi, prajñā, smṛti, and stream-entry are read as discrete states of consciousness experienced by practitioners in meditation; the question he raises against this assumption is whether the meaning of these terms really lies in the experiences they allegedly refer to, and whether meditative experience was in fact central to the Buddhist tradition throughout its history.¹⁹ Dunne's article of 2011 classifies Dreyfus's account of mindfulness as the "classical" Abhidharma approach, in which mindfulness must be cognitive and evaluative, retaining what has been learned and looking forward to spiritual goals; he contrasts it with the mindfulness of non-dual traditions such as mahāmudrā, which "remain highly skeptical about the utility of evaluative thought in practice."²⁰ Geluk calm abiding and insight belong to the former.

The third line is experimental research, which so far reaches calm abiding and debate but not insight. The study by MacLean and colleagues in 2010 used the method of calm abiding taught by Wallace as the training: thirty participants spent three months in retreat, practising about five hours a day, with thirty wait-list controls; the result was improved perceptual sensitivity in visual discrimination and an improved vigilance decrement in sustained attention. The study reports changes in attentional capacity and says nothing about the nine mental states or pliancy.²¹ The study of debate at Sera by van Vugt and colleagues in 2019 opens by saying that analytical meditation and monastic debate "have up to now been largely unexplored in Western contemplative science"; on the basis of interviews and preliminary experiments it proposes an initial theory of the psychological mechanisms of debate, lists the skills it requires, reasoning, attention, working memory, emotion regulation, and makes predictions.²² The classification by Dahl, Lutz, and Davidson in 2015 sorts meditation into attentional, constructive, and deconstructive families and lists Tibetan "analytical meditation" in the deconstructive family under object-oriented insight, with "self-inquiry" as its primary mechanism; this is a classification, not a test.²³

7. The distribution of the criticism

Taken together, the three groups of criticism show one clear pattern. The criticism of the other Tibetan schools and of the Geluk dissenters concentrates on a single point, the identification of the object of negation. Gorampa says the disease is the dichotomizing of the conceptual mind and not a quality of objects; the Karmapa says an object of negation separated from its basis is a rabbit's horn; Mipham says the non-implicative negation is a conceptual image that excludes appearance; Gendün Chöpel says the unenlightened cannot distinguish existence from true existence at all. The four differ in their alternatives, not in this point. The Chinese criticism falls on the single source of the method of insight. Modern scholarship questions the category of "experience" on one side and has measured only calm abiding and debate on the other. No external study has tested whether the insight described in Chapter 2, the rehearsal of the four essential points in concentration, produces the result it claims; and no critic has questioned the premise of the tradition, that the root of suffering is a grasping that can be found in the mind and negated by reasoning. Chapter 6 begins from that point.