Conversation — 5 August 2023
John Tan wrote to someone else:
John Tan: Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche is Nyingma and champions the Shentong view. I think Malcolm once confronted him and said that harboring that sort of view is no different from the Advaita view. Wei Yu may have the text since he compiles Malcolm's answers and comments.
John Tan: However, it is not exactly wrong to emphasize clarity/awareness when one has somehow missed the "clarity" aspect when negating the inherentness of reified mental constructs. In other words, negation involves two authentications of critical insights: one is in clearly seeing how reified constructs are mistaken as real, and two, the direct recognition that appearances are one's empty clarity.
John Tan: It is not that their experiential insights differ; it is how it unfolds.
John Tan: The two can be treated as separate, which results in the 外道 [externalist/non-Buddhist] view. This means a direct taste of clarity, yet without realizing its empty nature. This results in a self-view.
John Tan: For example, one can have very powerful experiences and authentication of clarity as "I-I" in phase one, as in my case or Sim's case, but still not have realized that sound, sensations, thoughts, etc. (appearances) are one's radiant clarity. Then, when we authenticate that later in anatta insight, it becomes very clear. For these practitioners, clarity/presence/awareness is nothing special at all and, more often than not, is misunderstood.
John Tan: Appearances are treated as external. Even in the case of non-duality where it is clearly experienced, it is still treated as if the Self is special and something beyond, which is a misconception due to our inherent pattern of analyzing things.
John Tan: These Shentong practitioners do not understand "self-aware" as "sounds hear themselves," as you wrote, or as how you understand the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. They see "self-aware" as a special Awareness apart from luminous appearances. Many can't get around that. Rangtong is pointing out what you are saying. Rangtong is not against appearances or the union of appearances and emptiness. Shentong can be skewed towards pointing to some super awareness, which is Advaita.
John Tan: However, there are some Rangtong practitioners that somehow do not get the clarity part, but that is not the teaching of Rangtong.
Soh Wei Yu: I skimmed through the Mountain Doctrine on Dolpopa's texts before. To me, it was no different from Advaita at all. But that is the founder of Shentong. The modern proponents of Shentong, however, are often clear about anatta and empty clarity. Even Thrangu Rinpoche taught the view of Shentong, but instead of the original "empty of everything else but not itself," he taught Shentong as the ultimate also being empty.
Soh Wei Yu: Which, in my opinion, seems to be different from the original Dolpopa teaching but more aligned with anatta.
John Tan: Yes. It is simply tradition and sectarian biasedness to present Rangtong as denying clarity. Mipham also rejected Shentong. Tibetan Buddhism has this problem of stereotyping and presenting a one-sided view.
Soh Wei Yu: Yes, I read that even Longchenpa anticipated and rejected Shentong, even though he lived before its time. He rejected the kind of view that Buddha nature is empty of everything else but its own existence.
John Tan: In the Buddha's time, there was no need to emphasize Presence and clarity. It was the orthodox view and taught in the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita throughout India. This did not require the birth of the Buddha to point out.
....
Soh Wei Yu: It depends on who the Shentong writer is. Some teachers like Thrangu Rinpoche and many others are very clear. Still, I find most Buddhist teachers today are also not clear—mostly awareness teachings.
John Tan: There may have been an overemphasis on emptiness without clarity that gave birth to Yogacara teaching to bring out this clarity aspect.
...
Soh Wei Yu: This part should be criticized, which is the general understanding of Shentong from the start. But people like Thrangu Rinpoche don't see it that way when explaining Shentong. Also, it will fall under the same criticism as this:
“Also, Mipham Rinpoche, one of the most influential masters of the Nyingma school wrote:
...Why, then, do the Mādhyamika masters refute the Cittamātra tenet system? Because self-styled proponents of the Cittamātra tenets, when speaking of mind-only, say that there are no external objects but that the mind exists substantially—like a rope that is devoid of snakeness, but not devoid of ropeness. Having failed to understand that such statements are asserted from the conventional point of view, they believe the nondual consciousness to be truly existent on the ultimate level. It is this tenet that the Mādhyamikas repudiate. But, they say, we do not refute the thinking of Ārya Asaṅga, who correctly realized the mind-only path taught by the Buddha...
...So, if this so-called “self-illuminating nondual consciousness” asserted by the Cittamātrins is understood to be a consciousness that is the ultimate of all dualistic consciousnesses, and it is merely that its subject and object are inexpressible, and if such a consciousness is understood to be truly existent and not intrinsically empty, then it is something that has to be refuted. If, on the other hand, that consciousness is understood to be unborn from the very beginning (i.e. empty), to be directly experienced by reflexive awareness, and to be self-illuminating gnosis without subject or object, it is something to be established. Both the Madhyamaka and Mantrayāna have to accept this…”
John Tan: It is not easy to sort out all of this, and it takes some time to get used to it.
Soh Wei Yu: Malcolm says Rangtong is totally a strawman set up by Shentongpas. It doesn't actually exist.
John Tan: This is good.
Soh Wei Yu: “Yes, realization of emptiness automatically entails having right view.
Your next statement presumes that those debating Gzhan stong and Rang stong have realized emptiness.
Since Rang stong is just a strawman set up by Gzhan stong pas, there is really no debate between Gzhan stong and Rang stong since there is no Rang stong Madhyamaka except in the imagination of those who call themselves "Gzhan stong" Madhyamakas.
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Pure because purity has always been a nonexistence.
Sound Tantra, 3:12.5”
“I mean that there is no Rang stong at all from a Madhyamaka perspective: Nāgārjuna states:
If there were something subtle not empty, there would be something subtle to be empty,
as there is nothing not empty, where is there something to be empty?
I mean that there is no Rang stong at all, apart from what the Gzhan stong pas have fabricated.
The Gzhan stong controversy arose out of a need by Tibetans to reconcile the five treatises of Maitreya with Nāgārjuna's Collection of Reasoning based upon the erroneous historical idea that the five treatises were authored by the bodhisattva Maitreya rather than a human being (who incidentally was probably Asanga's teacher).
In my opinion, the five treatises were a collection of texts meant to explicate the three main thrusts of Indian Mahāyāna sutras: Prajñāpāramita, Tathāgatagarbha, and Yogacāra. Four of the five are devoted to these three topics independently, with the Abhisamaya-alaṃkara devoted to Prajñāpāramita; Uttaratantra devoted to Tathāgatagarbha; and the two Vibhangas devoted to Yogacāra. The last, the Sutra-alaṃkara is an attempt to unify the thought of these three main trends in Mahāyāna into a single whole, from a Yogacara perspective.
When these treatises arrived in Tibetan, at the same time, a text attributed to the original Bhavaviveka, but probably by a later Bhavaviveka, translated under Atisha's encouragement, called Tarkajvala, presented the broad outline of what we call today "the four tenet systems".
In this text, the three own natures and so on were presented in a very specific way from a Madhyamaka perspective and labelled "Cittamatra".
So, the Gzhan stong controversy (with additional input from Vajrayāna exegesis based on a certain way of understanding the three bodhisattva commentaries) is about reconciling Madhyamaka with Yogacara.
Personally, I see no need to attempt to reconcile Madhyamaka and Yogacara. Madhyamaka is the pinnacle of sutra explication. But Tibetans did and still seem to need to do so, and they have passed on this need to their students.
But from my perspective, one cannot go beyond freedom from extremes.
N”
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