Reason and Experience in Tibetan Buddhism _ Mabja Jangchub Tsöndrü and the Traditions of the Middle Way

Abstract

Madhyamaka teachers of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, such as Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (Tib. Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa, 1357–1419), stand at the heart of the Tibetan traditions that reach us today. Yet, without access to the works of their predecessors, it has, for us, seemed as if their interpretations appeared out of nowhere. These later, now classical, authors do refer to teachers before them, yet typically very briefly and often in ways that are mutually conflicting. With the recent discoveries of previously unavailable text material, we are now in a position to understand the central issues that these later thinkers responded to and developed. Specifically, we now can examine the works of key Tibetan authors from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and so witness the emergence of the themes that have continued to inform, provoke, and inspire Tibetan Madhyamaka discussions up until today. Scholars such as Georges Dreyfus,1 Pascale Hugon,2 Helmuth Tauscher,3 Kevin Vose,4 and Chizuko Yoshimizu5 have begun such research that is of fundamental importance to understanding the intellectual history of Tibet. This book explores the philosophical and exegetical project of Mabja Jangchub Tsöndrü (Tib. rMa bya byang chub brtson ’grus, d. 1185),6 who appeared at a central crossroads in the cultural and intellectual evolution of Madhyamaka Buddhism: the period when the works of the seventh-century Indian teacher, Candrakīrti, were being translated and transmitted into Tibet. According to several sources,7 Mabja was among the foremost students in the circle surrounding the renowned Tibetan logician and epistemologist, Chapa Chökyi Seng-ge (Tib. Phya pa chos kyi senge, 1109–69).8 Yet, contrary to Chapa, who is known for his thoroughgoing criticism of Candrakīrti’s Madhyamaka interpretation, Mabja embraced the teaching of Candrakīrti’s newly translated texts. Having studied with the translator Patsab Nyima Drakpa (Tib. Pa tshab nyi ma grags pa, b. 1055)9 and, according to some, the Kashmiri pan. d. ita Jayānanda (fl. twelfth century),10 Mabja taught extensively and produced several Madhyamaka treatises and commentaries. With his stern revision and transformative re-employment of the epistemological framework that Candrakīrti otherwise scorns, Mabja developed, as we shall see, an original and highly influential Madhyamaka interpretation. Closely associated with both the primary exponents and adversaries of Candrakīrti’s Madhyamaka, his discussions throw a rich light on this crucial and yet little known period of Tibetan intellectual history. In the academy, the first treatments of Mabja’s Madhyamaka take place in two articles by PaulWilliams that were carried in the Journal of Indian Philosophy in the mid-‘80s.11 Ruegg 2000,12 Vose 2009,13 and Doctor 2009 have continued the explorations, and in 2011 appeared the Ornament of Reason,14 an English translation of Mabja’s extensive commentary (Tib. dBu ma rtsa ba shes rab kyi ’grel pa ’thad pa’i rgyan) to Nāgārjuna’s (fl. 150–250) Root of the Middle Way (Skt. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā). Beyond this translation and the aforementioned pioneering works, Mabja’s Madhyamaka has, however, hardly been visited by modern scholarship. Moreover, as for the later Tibetan Madhyamaka literature, although Mabja’s interpretations reappear in a number of important works, they are rarely explicitly acknowledged. As we shall see, Mabja provides a conceptual framework that is crucial to the thought of Tsongkhapa, and yet this deep link with later Gelug (Tib. dGe lugs) philosophy not withstanding, he is also the source of central Madhyamaka exegesis in the works of Tsongkhapa’s formidable adversaries, such as Gorampa Sönam Seng-ge (Tib. Go ram pa bSod nam seng ge, 1429–89). Mabja’s Madhyamaka, which itself can be seen as a creative synthesis of opposing eleventh–twelfth-century schools of thought, has been relied on extensively but rarely explicitly. His views and interpretations turn out to have exercised a deep and lasting influence within all of the traditions that are now referred to as the “four schools” (Tib. chos lugs bzhi) of Buddhism in Tibet.