Part III, Chapter 6: This Book's Critique¶

The five preceding chapters set out, from the sources, this tradition's calm abiding, its insight, its founder's own account, the records of its practitioners, and the criticisms made from outside. This chapter gives the judgment of this volume. The judgment starts from a premise that the earlier chapters touched on repeatedly and that no critic has questioned head-on: this tradition fixes the root of suffering as a grasping that can be found in the mind, identified, and negated by reasoning. The chapter first states what that premise is, then why it cannot stand, then what follows from it for the whole path, and finally where the critique stops.

1. The step of "finding the grasping"

The first of the four essential points described in Chapter 2 is to ascertain the object of negation: let innate self-grasping become manifest, observe with a subtle part of the mind what it takes to be the self and how, and find that what is grasped is an "I" on the collection of body and mind "not imputed by thought and independent from the first." The manuals ask a great deal of this step: the Swift Path says there must be a vivid ascertainment in one's own mind; the Fourth Paṇchen Lama's guide says it must be realized nakedly in one's own continuum and must not be just an idea explained by others or a general image produced by words.¹ The remaining three steps of the path all take this step as their object: what pervasion, freedom from oneness, and freedom from difference analyze is the "I" identified in the first step; the ascertainment and the open vacuity after the analysis are its negation; the illusion-likeness of subsequent attainment is the same negation applied to all appearances; the measure of insight is the pliancy that this negation induces.

The step is called "identifying the object of negation." What it actually does is assign a cause: it attributes the afflictions and suffering to a particular object of grasping, and moreover to one conceived as something the practitioner can identify by introspection. Tsongkhapa built this attribution into the structure of the insight section of the Great Treatise; Chapter 2, section 7, counted that in the twenty-eight pages of "how to cultivate insight" more than twenty argue that this grasping must be negated by reasoning. His own account of his realization, read in Chapter 3, ties the ending of his doubts to the argument that "the self is neither the aggregates nor other than them."

2. Why this attribution cannot stand

This volume's judgment is that the attribution fails on three levels, and for each level the preceding chapters of this part supply the evidence.

On the first level, it is incompatible with the truth of suffering in the baseline. Part II, Chapter 1 showed that in the early baseline suffering is a predicate of formations, "all formations are suffering," and that the cessation of suffering is the cessation of conditioned continuity; Madhyamaka relocated suffering from formations into view, and this relocation is the hidden premise of its whole mechanism of liberation. The Geluk four essential points are the most complete operationalization of that relocation: the root of suffering is fixed as a "view," a mistaken mode of grasping the "I," so that the entire work of liberation becomes the correction of that view. This step was never argued; it was written into the manuals as a premise. The baseline's truth of suffering does not require anyone first to find a grasping in the mind; it requires the observation of formations.

On the second level, the thing one is required to find cannot be found, and both the tradition's own texts and its critics make this clear. On the side of the texts: the object of negation must be "realized nakedly," but the method the manuals give for provoking it is a supposition such as being falsely accused of theft, and what it yields is the look of an "I" that appears within a supposition; and Chapter 3 showed that Tsongkhapa himself verified whether he had gained the view by the deity's verdict and by comparison with the treatises, not by introspection. On the side of the critics: Gendün Chöpel cites Tsongkhapa's own words that before emptiness is understood it is impossible to distinguish existence from true existence, and concludes that "identifying the object of negation" before meditation is a "pretense"; the unenlightened cannot distinguish existence from true existence among the objects of ordinary experience, "A pot for us is indistinguishable from a 'truly established pot.'"² This criticism points to a structural difficulty: the first step requires the practitioner, before gaining the view, to pick out by introspection something that only one who has gained the view can pick out. The manuals' reply to this difficulty is "it must be realized nakedly in one's own continuum," which is not a reply but a restatement of the demand.

On the third level, even if it were found, what is found is what doctrine specified in advance. The definition of the object of negation comes from the Prāsaṅgika dispute with Bhāviveka, as noted in Chapter 2, section 1; change the school's definition and the thing sought in the session changes. The criticisms of Gorampa and the Karmapa fall exactly here: Gorampa says the disease lies in the dichotomizing of conceptual mind and not in a quality of objects; the Karmapa says an object of negation separated from its basis is a rabbit's horn, and negating it "affects neither the rabbit's existence nor your taking the rabbit for a rabbit."³ This volume does not adopt either school's alternative, but the fact they point to holds: the shape of the "I" identified in the first step is determined by doctrine, and the four essential points negate that shape, not grasping itself. Tsongkhapa supposed that negating "an I independent from the first" shakes innate self-grasping; this step needs an additional premise, namely that the content of innate self-grasping is exactly the object of negation as doctrine defines it. In the texts this premise is supplied by definition; it has no independent evidence.

3. The consequences of the mistaken attribution

The attribution is in the first step; the consequences are everywhere.

First, the content of meditation can only be the redoing of reasoning. Chapter 2, section 7, counted that this tradition's entire instruction on "how to analyze" is the one sentence "recall the view, analyze by reasoning, rest on the meaning analyzed" plus one rule of alternation, and that the rest argues that analysis is necessary. This is not an oversight of the literature but a necessity of the attribution: since the object of negation is defined by doctrine, all that can be done in the session is to run the doctrine's argument again. Rabten's autocommentary in Chapter 4 shows this plainly: what he did for years in the hills was to apply the sevenfold and one-and-many analysis to "the old monk" and the whole-and-parts analysis to the pillar, on the basis of Tsongkhapa's treatises and the Kadam oral records.

Second, the criterion can only be the practitioner's reaction to the result of the reasoning. Chapter 2, section 6, and Part II, Chapter 6, have already pointed out that the signs of success this tradition gives, the sense of recognition when the object of negation is manifest, the ascertainment and the fear that follows it, the pliancy induced by analysis, the turning of analytical meditation into stabilizing meditation, are all reactions provoked in the mind by reasoning and reported by the one who reasons; and the texts themselves admit that appearances of brightness and clarity after meditation cannot decide whether insight has been accomplished, that only "whether the correct view was first obtained" can decide it. Tsongkhapa's own criterion, the two certainties of appearance and emptiness arising together without alternation, is equally a description of a state of one's own mind. Attribute suffering to a view, and verification can only be verification of the view, and verification of the view returns in the end to the source of the view, which is hearing from others. Chapter 3 showed that his own attainment of the view was decided by the deity and the treatises, and that his teacher judged the view still capable of being dismantled.

Third, the difficulty of the path stands in inverse proportion to its attribution. A path whose first step is "find the grasping" cannot begin until the grasping is found, and there is no independent criterion for whether it has been found; so what actually happens is the situation recorded in Chapter 4: the geshe examination selects a few, these few leave the monastery for the mountains after their studies, those who claim attainment are very few, and those who state that they did not attain do so without embarrassment. The institution arranges this situation reasonably: study comes first, because the view is heard from others; meditation comes after, because meditation is the redoing of the view; attainment is not proclaimed, because the criterion lies in the practitioner's mind. What Dreyfus records as "debate itself counted as practice" is, under this attribution, not a drift but a direct consequence.

4. The place of this tradition within this volume's framework

Parts I and II judged the attachment of Madhyamaka soteriology to be an attachment of the intellect: dismantling every view of intrinsic nature by the most precise reductio and finally developing that argument into a scholastic system that requires intensive intellectual training to enter. Geluk meditation is the operationalized form of that attachment: it writes liberation as a course of study, whose content is a set of arguments, whose examination is ascertainment of the arguments, and whose instructor is the school that defines the object of negation. Tsongkhapa's own account writes the founding of this course as the result of a lifetime of extensive learning, which is consistent with the form of the course.

This volume does not on that account deny the tradition's two achievements. First, it wrote the path of Indian Madhyamaka as a manual that can be carried out step by step, which no other tradition in history did; the precision of the manual has been recorded in Chapters 1 and 2. Second, its criticism of the claim that "non-conceptual resting is meditation on emptiness" holds: the cessation of attention does not cut the grasping at reality, which agrees with the baseline, and Tsongkhapa's argument on this point is correct. This volume's criticism is directed at the manual's first step: it requires the practitioner first to find a grasping defined by doctrine, and this requirement is both incompatible with the baseline's truth of suffering and impossible for the practitioner to carry out independently, so that the whole path can only be a redoing of doctrine and its verification can only return to the source of the doctrine.

5. Boundaries

Three boundaries must be stated. First, this chapter does not deny that the training of calm abiding has measurable effects: the study by MacLean and colleagues shows that three months of training in calm abiding improves perceptual sensitivity and sustained attention;⁴ this agrees with the place of calm abiding in the tradition, as a practice shared with others and unrelated to the view. Second, this chapter does not treat tantra; the Geluk highest yoga tantra has a separate method whose objects are the subtle structures of body and mind, and Part V of this volume deals with it. Third, this chapter's criticism is a criticism of an attribution, not a doubt about anyone's honesty: most of the writers in Chapter 4 state that they did not attain, and that candour is itself a side of the tradition worth recording. The attribution is mistaken at the start and the path follows from it; those who wrote the records walked that path, and not reaching its end is no fault of theirs.