Mipham's Dialectics and the Debates on Emptiness: To Be, Not to Be or Neither

by Karma Phuntsho

This is an introduction to the Buddhist philosophy of Emptiness which explores a number of themes in connection with the concept of Emptiness, a highly technical but very central notion in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. It examines the critique by the leading Nyingma school philosopher Mipham (1846-1912) formulated in his diverse writings. The book focuses on related issues such as what is negated by the doctrine of emptiness, the nature of ultimate reality, and the difference between 'extrinsic' and 'intrinsic' emptiness. Karma Phuntsho's book aptly undertakes a thematic and selective discussion of these debates and Mipham's qualms about the Gelukpa understanding of Emptiness in a mixture of narrative and analytic style.

Genres: Buddhism

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 17, 2005

Reviews

[Yontan Gyatso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible book. At $175 or something I could never have gotten my hands on it, but thanks to inter-library loan got to sit with it for two weeks – not anywhere near long enough! That said, I did manage to gloss the whole book and dive into some of the more attention-grabbing parts. The author is incredibly adept at the English language (his second) forcing me to look up a few words, but that's a good thing! He's a Nyingma khenpo trained at Ngagyur Nyingma Institue who then went on to get his Dr Phil of Oriental Studies at Oxford: he knows his stuff. In this book he draws from the huge corpus of Mipham's writings (~24 volumes?) to show his stance on major points of Buddhist philosophy. I sent the book back about six weeks ago, so I can't give much of a meaningful review except to say if you are a fan of Mipham Rinpoche and can find a way to get your hands on this book, I don't think you'll be disappointed. He spends time on the basic reasons we need to understand the doctrine of emptiness as a religious issue, explains some of the fundamentals of Tibetan debate and reasoning for the uninitiated, explains emptiness as a path of meditation, and as the goal of the path. From there he gives some history about the "fuss" of it all, the controversies surrounding the subtle but all-important points dividing understanding and completely missing the boat. While showing Mipham's dedication to the view of Shantarakshita as fundamentally "Nyingma" and worthwhile he goes about confronting some of the polemics against Shantarakshita and his followers, as dealt with by Mipham himself, the fairly uncontested champion of modern Nyingma scholarship.

[Artur Matos · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a world dominated by Geluk Madhyamaka studies (as far as Western scholarship is concerned), it's rather refreshing to finally see a volume dedicated to Jamgon Mipham, a very important Nyingma scholar and a towering figure on Tibetan Madhyamika exegesis. Mipham was a highly innovative thinker who carved his own middle way between the austere rationality of the Geluks and the anti-intellectualism of the Ngarabpas. This comprehensive volume covers all the main differences between Tsongkhapa's and Mipham's thought, including the object of negation, the differences between the two truths, the role of logic, interpretations on the catuskoti and the epistemology of emptiness. Incidentally, by contrasting Mipham to Tsongkhapa this book also works fairly well as an introduction to Tsongkhapa himself, although readers not familiar with Tsongkhapa's thought might want to start with something lighter ("Introduction to Emptiness" by Guy Newland easily comes to mind). A challenging but deeply rewarding read.

[André Pais]

Karma Phuntsho is a Bhutanese scholar who is already well known in the Tibetan
monastic colleges of India, Nepal and Bhutan as a teacher and also as the author of some
widely used and well respected text books. It was only after completing his training
and graduating with the highest degree of Khanpo (mKhan po) from Namdrol Ling, the
leading rNying ma pa monastic college in India, that Karma Phuntsho began his second
academic career as a graduate student at Oxford. This book is the outcome of his DPhil
thesis written there, under the supervision of Professor David Seyfort Ruegg, the leading
Western academic scholar of Madhyamaka. This book therefore combines the intellectual
infl uences of the very best of contemporary rNying ma pa monastic learning, from
Namdrol Ling, with the very best of Western academic scholarship on Madhyamaka,
from Professor Ruegg.
The outcome is a book of outstanding authority and clarity that seamlessly bridges
East and West while maintaining a consistently high level of intellectual sophistication
in both traditions. In particular, it shows a remarkable mastery of the technical terms of
both traditions. In fact, Karma Phuntsho’s grasp and skilful usage of Western philosophical technical language certainly exceeds that of most Western authors on Madhyamaka,
who too often seem to retain one foot in the culture of the Dharma Centre. Above all, as
his authorship of popular Tibetan-language scholastic textbooks would suggest, Karma
Phuntsho is a gifted communicator who can convey complex philosophical ideas, in both
Western and Tibetan idiom, with a deceptively easy clarity and simplicity. In fact, if one
looks at other volumes on the subject of Madhyamaka, one can see that such simplicity
and clarity is not at all easy to achieve, so we must count this volume as an unusually
valuable contribution to the understanding of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy in the West.
Its particular strong point, then, is its clarity and reliability of presentation: while Karma
Phuntsho makes no attempt to produce an entirely original or previously unheard of
contribution to philosophy on his own account, nor any radical new reinterpretation
of Mipham, he does achieve a remarkably mature, subtle, contextualised and wellbalanced synthesis of his diխ cult subject matter. This is not as simple as it might seem,
since Mipham’s Madhyamaka thought is scattered over several of his works, which Karma
Phuntsho has therefore had to draw together. In fact, it might even be that Mipham’s
various writings specifi cally on Madhyamaka have never before been brought together and presented as a single systematic whole in this way in any language, in which case, it
might be a good idea to translate the book into Tibetan.
The focus of the book is the Madhyamaka interpretation of Ju Mipham Namgyal
Gyatsho (1846-1912). Mipham was a towering intellect and polymath from East Tibet who
completely revolutionised rNying ma pa scholasticism in the late 19th century, raising its
status after many centuries as a comparative intellectual backwater, to arguably the most
dynamic and expansive of philosophical traditions in all of Tibetan Buddhism, with an
infl uence and impact far beyond the rNying ma pa themselves. Despite Mipham’s astonishingly broad range of interests, it is his writings on Madhyamaka, Karma Phuntsho
believes, that will make the deepest long-term impact on Buddhist thought. Since almost
all presentation of Madhyamaka in the west has until now been mainly dGe lugs pa in
orientation, and since only two previous full length works on Mipham have so far been
published in English, the publication of this book is a most welcome event.
The fi rst fi fty-four pages of the book contextualise Mipham’s Madhyamaka thought by
introducing the necessary philosophical and historical background in a very well-rounded
way. Hence we are fi rst introduced to a whirlwind tour of the many philosophical and
soteriological implications of emptiness within the entire sweep of Buddhist thought, before
narrowing the focus on to emptiness in specifi cally Mahāyāna Indian philosophy, with
special emphasis on Nāgārjuna. Next, emptiness in Tibetan philosophy is reviewed, including
a concise discussion of the entire panoply of Tibetan debates on the nature of emptiness,
through which Mipham’s immediate context and circumstances are introduced.
From page fi fty-fi ve onwards, the book begins to narrow the focus on to Mipham’s
specifi c contribution, presented in three long sections on delimitation of the Mādhyamika
negandum, on the theory of the ultimate reality, and on knowability and eff ability. With
these, the main body of the book, are introduced numerous highly complex and technical
analyses that can not be adequately dealt with in a short review such as this one, presented as
it is by a non-specialist in Buddhist philosophy and Madhyamaka. A longer and more philosophically detailed review by a specialist such as Matthew Kapstein would be welcome.
Mipham’s particular views are fi rst introduced through a lucid analysis of the
delimitation of the negandum of the ultimate analysis – what exactly is it that the famous
Madhyamaka analysis negates? – since here lay the core issue of debate in Tibetan
Madhyamaka. Mipham’s views diff er from those of the dGe lugs pa school, even if, like
the dGelugs pa but unlike the Jo nang pa and some of the bKa’ brgyud pa, he certainly does
not in any straightforward way espouse the absolutist gzhan stong view, and clearly retains
the mainstream Madhyamaka apophatic understanding of the ultimate as the absence of
a negandum achieved by negative logical analysis.
The dGe lugs pa had, according to their critics, diff ered even from their Indian hero
Candrakīrti in narrowing the negandum in Madhyamaka down to the mere absence of
hypostatic existence within objects, while leaving conventional phenomena intact. Mipham
feels this innovation entailed a form of conceptual clinging which should also be given
up, since such an absence of hypostatic existence is itself still logically dependent on the
entity that was negated; Mipham believed Candrakīrti, for example, had himself negated
much more. In contrast with Tsongkhapa, Mipham favours a more complete letting go of
all concepts and elaboration (Skt. prapañca) whatsoever, which he terms the true Great
Madhyamaka – a view the dGe lugs pa found nihilistic and subversive of philosophical reasoning. Nevertheless, Mipham retains a very strong emphasis on rationality, which he sees
as supported by the two truths doctrine and by his aխ rmation of the classic Madhyamaka
belief that emptiness is entailed by dependent origination: thus even if all concepts are abandoned ultimately, cause and eff ect and hence rationality still prevail at the transactional
level, permitting and empowering philosophical analysis and much else.
Mipham’s Madhyamaka appears to constitute a return towards the more classic
Madhyamaka doctrines (snga rabs pa) that remain closer to the Prajñāpāramitā and which
had prevailed in Tibet prior to Tsongkhapa’s radical transformation of Madhyamaka after
the 15th century. Seen in historical perspective, this book tentatively seems to imply that
by inserting a qualifi er to the Madhyamaka negandum and thus limiting its reach to hypostatic existence only, Tsongkhapa had transformed Madhyamaka to make it suitable for
his very particular soteriological revolution, which had envisaged logical debate between
monks in the monastery courtyard as the primary soteriological exercise (no other
Buddhist order, not even the scholarship-oriented Sa skya pa, had given intellectual debate
such a high soteriological value, to the extent that it largely displaced meditation). Thus
Tsongkhapa needed to reinforce the status of conceptuality within Madhyamaka, in order
to validate ordinary conceptual processes to an extent that would philosophically justify
a lifetime spent in debate, rather than one that culminated in meditation.
By contrast, Mipham’s Madhyamaka view of abandoning all conceptual elaboration
(prapañca) whatsoever powerfully reaխ rms the classic Prajñāpāramitā congruent preTsongkhapa view of Madhyamaka shared by most Sa skya pa, rNying ma pa, and many bKa’
brgyud pa orders, and returns Madhyamaka to a system that harmonises better with those
schools’ fi nal soteriology of contemplation. For those orders, debate is a branch of study,
important to stabilise understanding and develop doctrinal certainty, but as such, still a
prolegomenon to meditation, which is where direct experience of reality fi nally arises.
Historically speaking then, one gets the impression from this book that Mipham represents
a returning of some strands within Tibetan Madhyamaka towards its more classic form,
after approximately two hundred years in which infatuation with and domination by
debate had prevailed, extending roughly from the beginning of the 18th century dGe lugs
pa political hegemony, until Mipham’s time.
Next, the theory of ultimate reality is examined; although some of this has already been
presented by John Pettit,1
Karma Phuntsho also employs many additional sources that
Pettit did not use. In brief, since Mipham diff ered from the dGe lugs pa in establishing
the negandum, his view of the ultimate is also necessarily diff erent. Mipham’s view of the
ultimate is coalescence, or, quite simply, that emptiness is form, and form is emptiness
(snang stong zung ‘jug), inseparably and not merely as the juxtaposition of two separate
things. This harmonises perfectly not only with Prajñāpāramitā, but also with the rNying
ma pa’s Mahāyoga and rDzogs chen meditation (it probably also suits the equivalent bKa’
brgyud pa and Sa skya pa systems pretty well). Thus Mipham’s ultimate is not merely
an absence of hypostatic existence, but also an ultimate reality that transcends all
conceptual extremes, in its completeness perceivable only through the non-dual gnosis
of the Buddhas; in this way, he retains a powerful mystical dimension as a correlate to his
emphatic rationality. Notable aspects of Mipham’s ultimate is a binary theory of the two
truths, and his important schema of four stages of approach to realising the ultimate,
which he describes as a ‘very important and sacred quintessence of instruction’. As in
previous chapters, Karma Phuntsho at all points throughout makes clear and very detailed
comparisons between Mipham’s views and those of other philosophers. The third and fi nal section is on whether ultimate emptiness is knowable and eff able.
Since the dGe lugs pa and Mipham are discussing a diff erent ultimate emptiness, they
unavoidably end up with diff erent conclusions. The dGe lugs pa delineate an ultimate
emptiness that is a mere absence of hypostatic existence, and hence an existent
phenomenon that is epistemologically knowable and expressible in language. Mipham’s
ultimate is far more radical, a complete freedom from all conceptual constructs; from the
point of view of ultimate truth it is beyond the reach of ordinary language, even if within
the reach of the enlightened being’s intuitive gnosis; nevertheless, from the perspective
of relative truth, it can still be approached through language and logical analysis. Hence
while the dGe lugs pa tend towards eliminating the mystical and paradoxical statements of
the Mahāyāna sŊtras and ĺāstras altogether, by interpreting them as merely fi gurative and
then strictly subordinating them to logical propositions, Mipham happily acommodates
them as expressive of higher modes of perception and discourse, that exist alongside
the conventional language analytic philosophical approaches of the relative truth. Thus
Mipham seeks to strike an even balance between his twin loves of scholastic rationality
and rDzogs chen mysticism.
The book ends with some concluding remarks that draw together the various themes,
and which reiterate Mipham’s Ris med background, and his irenic attempts to harmonise
dissenting views as partially expressed truths rather than falsehoods.

Review by:
Robert Mayer
Oriental Institute, University of Oxford

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read to avoid common misconceptions about emptiness.