Extract :
Introduction
Dependent-arising and emptiness are two crucial concepts within Buddhism. Difficult to understand and subject to a variety of interpretations, an understanding of them and of their compatibility can serve as a key revealing the essence of the Buddha’s teachings.
In very brief form, dependent-arising, labelled by the present Dalai Lama “Buddha’s slogan”, indicates the inter-relatedness of all things in the universe. Things arise dependent on causes and conditions, they gain their identities in relation to other things. Nothing stands alone, autonomous and isolated, but instead exists only in a web of interconnectedness. Like near and far, all things are relative, dependent on their causes, on their parts, or on their relationship to something else. Things are always in flux, always changing; there are no independent autonomous entities. Emptiness expresses this same idea from another viewpoint.
All things are empty. Empty of what? Of being independent autonomous entities, of having some “own thing”, some intrinsic nature that comes from their own side without depending on external causes and conditions or on a subjective factor of those who observe them. As solid, substantial, and graspable as things — persons, tables, chairs, or anything may seem, when sought among the parts that make them up, there is nothing that can be pointed to as that thing itself. The non-finding of something when it is sought analytically is its emptiness. If things existed in the palpable, independent way we imagine them to, they would have to be such that they could be found when sought but they cannot. In fact, when sought analytically in this way in meditation, they disappear altogether. When searching among the parts or collection of the parts of a table for the table or among the mind and body for the person and not coming up with the object sought, at some point the conventional phenomenon drops away and one is left with only the absence of what was sought, with a mere vacuity that is emptiness.
This fact of meditative experience might lead to the conclusion that emptiness and the conventional world are incompatible, that emptiness cancels ordinary phenomena, which would exist only so long as one has not realized emptiness and would cease to do so once emptiness is realized. Perhaps all that we see around us is only an illusion, a fabrication of our lack of understanding of the true nature of reality, which is only emptiness. But what is one to do then with dependent-arising? How does such a nihilistic emptiness fit with the Buddha’s carefully formulated teachings such as the doctrine of karma — responsibility for the effects of all one’s actions -and with the instructions on proper ethics and the precise delineations of the many varieties of phenomena? Why bother if all this is false, only illusion?
These are questions with which Buddhists have struggled over the more than two thousand years since the time of the Buddha, and numerous different schools and sects have arisen based on different ways of resolving these and other questions, The dilemnia concerning the relationship of dependent-arising and emptiness is a particular issue for the Middle Way, or Madhyamika (dbu ma pa), school. Founded by the great Indian scholar and yogi Năgarjuna in the early centuries of our era, Madhyamika has consistently been a focus of doctrinal controversy. Other philosophical schools do not take as uncompromising a stance regarding emptiness and the utter unfandability of objects, and, as a result, Madhyamika has been accused by other schools, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, of having gone too far and fallen into nihilism. Even within Madhyamika, varying strands of interpretation have arisen as later commentators worked out their own solutions to the accusations of conflict between emptiness and conventional phenomena.
The Mădhyamika tradition developed in India over several centuries and was transmitted to Tibet along with the rest of the Buddhist teachings by the 9th century C.E. Buddhism underwent a period of repression in Tibet during the late ninth century and was essentially reintroduced to Tibet during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The early centuries of Buddhism’s flourishing in Tibet were intellectually lively as Tibetans newly studied and absorbed the Buddhist teachings, and during this period a number of different sects developed based on different traditions of textual study and interpreta~ tion, including varying assessments of the Madhya.mika teachings.
A number of individuals stand out during this period of development, brilliant thinkers whose interpretations gained them large followings and whose influence has continued up to the present as their followers have sustained and refined their views. One such figure is the great scholar and yogi Dzong-ka-ba (tsong kha pa) who lived from 1357 to 1419.1 Widely acclaimed for his scholarly and meditative achievements during his lifetime, his followers evolved into the Geluk-ba order of Tibetan Buddhism, an order that has dominated Tibetan religious and political life from the mid-seventeenth century to the present.
The tradition of study during Dzong-ka-ba’s lifetime was, for many, peripatetic, as students travelled from monastery to monastery taking instruction in various topics from many different teachers, seeking out those renowned as having special expertise in a particular text or lineage of teaching. Dzong-ka-ba participated in this tradition and received teachings from numerous teachers, including members of all the main orders that flourished at the time. Madhyamika was widely accepted in Tibet as the highest of all the Buddha’s philosophical sütra teachings, and the focus of Dzong-ka-ba’s study, as described in his writings, was his effort to gain a correct insight into Madhyamika. Years of intense study culminated In 1398 in a vision during which he experienced a transformative realization of the meaning of the Madhyaniika teachings.2 This experience radically changed his perception of the world as well as his understanding of the import of Buddha’s teachings, causing him to disagree with many of the MAdhyamika interpretations prevalent at his time, which he felt had moved too far in the direction of nihilism, delineating an emptiness that was antithetical to valid maintenance of the conventional world.
Dzong-ka-ba undertook to formulate his own Mădhyamika interpretation which focused, in contrast, on the importance of valuing conventionalities within a sweeping negation of any inherent existence, setting forth a presentation that emphasized the compatibility of emptiness and dependent-arising. He wrote five major works on Madhyamika philosophy, of which the first, and the focus of this work, was his Great Exposition of the Stages of the Path (lam rim chen mo), written in 1402 when he was 45 years old. It includes, as its final section, a presentation of special insight (ihag mthong, zvipassyana) that is his earliest detailed exposition of Mădhyamika philosophy. |
