Tsong Khapa's Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet

by Robert A.F. Thurman

Overview

This is the first full study, translation, and critical annotation of the Essence of True Eloquence, by Tsong Khapa (1357-1419), universally acknowledged as the greatest Tibetan philosopher. The work is a study of the major schools of Mahayana Buddhism, known as Vijnanavada and Madhyamika, and an explanation of the Prasarigika (Dialecticist") interpretation of Madhyamika ("Centrism").

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691640273
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Library of Asian Translations , #627
Pages:	474
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

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Tsong Khapa's Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence

Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet

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By Robert A. F. Thurman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07285-2

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INTRODUCTION

I

Reverence to the Guru, Manjughosha!

So I begin, joining Tsong Khapa in paying homage to the "Eternal Youth of Dulcet Voice," Manjughosha Kumarabhuta, the great spiritual hero who raises up the shining golden sword of transcendent wisdom in all universes where living beings seek the real meaning of their existence and need the liberating path of philosophy.

According to the belief of Universal Vehicle Buddhists, Manjushri became a perfectly enlightened Buddha many aeons ago in another universe. However, one manifestation of his special skill in liberative technique is to emanate as a bodhisattva in all those universes where Supreme Buddhas dwell. He always asks them to teach living beings, divine as well as human, the wondrous message of the Profound, the Ultimate Reality, the Transcendent, often called "Selflessness," "Emptiness," "Signlessness," or "Wishlessness." In his most common icon, Manjushri appears as a princely youth of sixteen years, saffron-gold in hue, radiant, holding a text of the Transcendent Wisdom Scripture in his left hand, and a flame-tipped sword — the two-edged, razor-sharp sword of critical wisdom — upraised in his right hand. The light from the tip of the sword floods the intellects of all present in the assembly, clearing away the darkness of confusion that has enshrouded them since beginningless time. He is called "Lord of the Word" Vagisvara, and also "Sole Father of all Victors" (Sarvajinapita), the Prince Consort of the Supreme Queen, Transcendent Wisdom, Prajnaparamita, the Mother of All Buddhas.

As spiritual Father, it is fitting that he be the patron divinity of literature, the Word used consciously as tool of liberation, a sharp sword that cuts away the tangle of misknowledge that traps humans and gods in the automatic habit patterns of cyclic living. Thoreau echoed this symbolism when he called this transvalued word "our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak." It may surprise some, who have heard that words cause confusion and that the "mystic sages" seek to transcend words to commune with the "inexpressible beyond," to see how great is the veneration accorded the Word in the Buddhist tradition. Tsong Khapa himself wrote, the very morning of his highest enlightenment, that "Of all deeds, the deeds of speech are supreme; hence, it is for them that the wise commemorate a Buddha!" And Manjushri, as god of the Word, is the universal icon of the liberative power of the Word. Thus he is invoked at the beginning of all works of philosophy in the Buddhist tradition.

For what is of value in a work of philosophy? Is it the amount of information given in displays of erudition, the density of thought of the writer, the completeness of schematization of reality, or the acuity of critical penetration? It is all of these, of course, but what is that underlying criterion that itself makes them all worthwhile? Is it not the exact degree to which the work conveys "Truth"? And is not "Truth," after all, not merely "right" as opposed to "wrong," but rather "that which makes one free"? "Love of Wisdom" is fundamentally liberative. It is a love of that faculty of genius that comes to apprehend truth, in truth embraces freedom, and then flows out to liberate the genius of others. There are only two kinds of words, those that breed misknowledge and thereby increase bondage, and those that open to wisdom and thereby liberate. The engine of language never idles, as Wittgenstein observed, and so even this here now is leading either to bondage or liberation. It is to aspire, invoke, and ensure the latter that I, too, as a translator and elucidator of the central way philosophy in our times and culture, pay homage to my innermost guru. May the radiance of his intelligence and the music of his eloquence illuminate my mind and energize my speech.

The heart of this work is the gift of the great Tsong Khapa (1357-1419), and is not originally mine, although any work of genuine translation places the responsibility for understanding on the translator, or "public eye" (lokacaksu), as he is called in Indo-Tibetan traditions. And even Tsong Khapa, as great a genius as he was, owes this Essence of True Eloquence to Manjushri's supernal activities.

The story goes, as we shall see in greater detail, that Tsong Khapa was greatly discouraged at the prospect of writing his most advanced philosophical works, the first being the transcendent insight (vipasyana) section of his Stages of the Path of Enlightenment. The reason for his discouragement was not the difficulty of the work, for he could cope very well with even these extreme subtleties and profundities, but rather his sense that few if any of his contemporaries and successors would be able to benefit by his efforts. He felt that his genius was almost extraterrestrial, and that it would be fruitless to impose his teachings on mere mortals (a feeling Shakyamuni Buddha is said also to have experienced after his enlightenment). But Manjushri appeared to Tsong Khapa and demanded to know what the procrastination was all about. When Tsong Khapa complained about his sense of being a misunderstood genius, the bodhisattva scathingly challenged his ability to count the geniuses in the world, in those times or in the future, and then gave his assurance that many would indeed benefit, beyond Tsong Khapa's fondest imaginings. This verbal assurance was reinforced by a continuous vision Tsong Khapa had from that moment, while working on the book, of the formulae of the twenty emptinesses from the Transcendent Wisdom Scriptures written in three-dimensional translucent silver letters in the sky all around him. A few years later, when he wrote the second book, the Essence now before us, in conjunction with his master commentary on Nagarjuna's Wisdom, the vision returned for several months, but that time in letters of pure gold. I will return to this story in the biography below.

I make no claim to such a vision. And if the original author felt diffident about the work's usefulness in his times, how much more should I be discouraged by the enormity of the task of making these insights available to a modern audience! Indeed, the question must be faced, just what is the audience of this book?

First, the Essence of True Eloquence is a work of "philosophy," and hence a communication to "philosophers" in the true sense of the title, as "lovers of wisdom, whose wisdom is their love." But where are today's philosophers to be found? Too many have almost forgotten that Science and Technology are mere children, that ageless Father Philo and Mother Sophia still must worry about their notions and their adventures. Thus neglecting the parents, these philosophers become enthralled by the willful children. Their "philosophy" becomes a mere "handmaiden" of "Science," and is hard-pressed even to cope with rambunctious Technology. They take comfort in assuming the role of technicians of language and other conceptual systems, servicing the theoretical software of the empirical experimenters, whose work they assume to be really important as directly affecting "physical reality." They constantly proclaim the "end of philosophy," or the "end of metaphysics," and devote much care to the history of this now obsolete pursuit. In fact, metaphysical thought is still very much in charge of the prevalent world view. It seems at an end only because it has become stuck on materialism, it has conceded final, "objective" reality to the "given data" of the senses. In short, it has become dogmatic and, like other dogmatisms before it, it has little patience with heresies. In particular, it has eviscerated itself by completely devaluing the power and importance of the mind, losing sight of the role the understanding plays in the actual construction of "reality." It has therefore ruled out in principle its own power, the power of philosophy, to transform life, either individual or social.

On the other side are the existentialist, humanistic philosophers, who decry the sterility of the technicians' approach, and position themselves somewhere among the poets and theologians. Still, all too often they also take the "massive facticity" of the "given" for granted, and do not fully take responsibility for their imaginative construction of reality. They tend to defend metaphysics as an art form, avoiding the critical insights of the materialists, whom they rightly consider as having gone too far, as having lost sight of the whole enterprise. In response, these "essentialist" philosophers tend to lose their moorings in metaphysical flights of imagination, unleashing torrents of terminology.

In the spirit of Manjushri, I would urge that philosophers hampered by either tendency, materialistic or romantic, no matter how diffident they may have become about the critical central role and liberative power of philosophy, might find a new encouragement and inspiration from the "light of the East," if only they could break free of certain tacit presuppositions imposed on them by the conventional wisdom of our culture. In my concern to open the door for them to appreciate central way thought (which I will call "Centrism"), I see the main obstructive presuppositions shared by most modern philosophers to be: a sense of the superiority, rational and cultural, of the "West"; a sense of the intrinsic progressivity of history; a sense of the intrinsic value of originality; and a sense of the fundamental non-perfectability of human understanding. These four presuppositions prevent them even from seeking in this book that which they would find interesting and helpful in their current philosophical malaises, for which the theories of emptiness and relativity are more than ever the needed medicines.

In another cultural universe, this Essence of Eloquence is a major document in the great river of teachings known as the Buddha Dharma. It is thus of great importance to all practitioners of Buddhism, especially those concerned with transcendent wisdom. The type of inquiry and intensity cultivated by this book is appropriate to the practice of transcendent insight, the advanced meditation of selflessness. But where are today's real practitioners of Buddhism to be found? Most of today's practitioners of Buddhism suffer from a variety of entrenched notions against the intellect and its role and power as a vehicle of liberation. They consider their duty to be the cultivation of a supposed "pure experience" free of concepts, unwitting of the fact that the conceptual aggregate ((samjnaskandha) is always operative to determine any state of consciousness. This is particularly tragic for many "meditators," since by conceptually choosing to eschew concepts, they lose the flexibility of conceptual adaptation, and become stuck with whatever range of concepts their habit of mind deems comfortable. This dooms them as modern persons to the grievous error of taking the nihilistic reification of the metaphysical nothingness underlying materialist culture to be the emptiness or selflessness that is ultimate reality. And this tends to make them morally defenseless against the dictates of various secular agencies. Practitioners from the remaining Asian traditionalistic Buddhist societies, on the other hand, most often fasten on some simple faith, stuck in an image of themselves as incapable of taking the responsibility of understanding the nature of reality on their own.

Thus blocked in their access to the royal road of central way philosophy, the main obstructive presuppositions Buddhist practitioners hold are: 1) a sense of the religious and cultural superiority of the "East"; 2) a sense of the inexorable degeneracy of the process of history; 3) a sense of the intrinsic value of traditionality, especially as supporting the cultivation of quietistic states of withdrawal; and 4) a sense of the vast difference between their own state of "ignorance" and the "enlightenment" of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. As a result, these practitioners consider the expression "Buddhist philosophy" a contradiction in terms, which view prevents them from engaging with this Essence as a vital path of practice, the critical contemplation of the analytic insights of intuitive wisdom.

I have had some experience in argument against these presuppositions of both modern philosophers and Buddhist practitioners, but I have no space here to engage in this at length. So I will assume that those who open this book and reach this page already have transcended these forms of conventional wisdom. I shall trust that they intend to explore the most useful philosophical and scientific teachings from "West" or East"; that they face the fact that history is not predetermined as inevitably progress or degeneration, and so take responsibility for creating progress, whether it seems feasible or not; that they realize that there is an age-old "tradition of originality," the enlightenment traditions that have flourished in all cultures. And most importantly, I shall trust that they suspend dogmatic prejudgment of the issue of the perfectability of human understanding, having realized the arbitrariness of either theistic or materialistic insistence on a fundamental imperfection in human genius, either dogma or "fact" arising as a philosophical or "scientific" buttress of authoritarian social structure, in ancient and modern cases, respectively.

I close this elucidation of the import of saluting Manjushri at the outset of the work by welcoming these readers to the Essence. May that incisive, irrepressible Youth that is the genius of each of them help them on their way, and remove all obstacles from their journeys to its profoundness and its beauty!

II

    Shambhu, Meghavahana, Hiranyagarbha,
    Anangapati, Damodara, and the other (gods),
    All puffed up with self-infatuation
    They roar their lordship o'er the worlds;
    And yet before the vision of His body,
    They dim like fireflies in the sun!
    Then down they bow their sparkling diadems
    In reverence to the lotuses of His feet!
    I pay homage to that Lord of Sages,
    The God of all the gods!

It is remarkable how the first words of this great work reveal its quintessence. Tsong Khapa opens this, his magnum opus in philosophy, with a brilliant flash of poetic imagery, flooding the mind of the sensitive reader with the scintillating glare of the naked sun. Since the context is philosophical, and the reader ventures into this work out of interest in the nature and structure of knowledge and ultimate reality, this sun symbolizes the sun of transcendent wisdom. Tsong Khapa is signaling forcefully that this is a work written not out of perplexity, but out of a vivid and precise vision of the ultimate condition and specific constitution of reality, and out of a joyous generosity to share his vision, energizing our intellects to transcend our self-imposed limitations.

But this is traditional in Buddhist philosophy — indeed, is that which distinguishes it from other philosophical traditions throughout the world. For Buddhist philosophy is founded on a sense of the unlimited potential of the intelligence, that is, on the insight that we can successfully attain knowledge of everything we need to know, becoming "perfectly enlightened" (sambuddha), "omniscient" (sarvajna), and "transcendently realized" (tathagata); and on its corollary that many human beings have already done so and have subsequently given guidance. Thus Buddhist thought differs from most theological systems, which presuppose that the human capacity for knowledge is limited, that only gods can be perfectly enlightened or omniscient, and that therefore certainty can only arise from dogmatic authority, from the recordings of the utterances of these gods in sacred texts. It also distinguishes it from the philosophies of skeptics, nihilists, atheists, and materialists, who, although they are eager to be critical and eschew theological dogmatism, unwittingly presuppose dogmatically the impossibility of perfect enlightenment, certain only that they must always remain uncertain about ultimate questions, that all humans have always been so uncertain, and that any who claimed otherwise were deluded or pretending. Recent western philosophy is particularly characterized by this tendency, manifested most clearly by its ceding to "science" the quest of reality, to psychology the examination of knowing, and to theology or sociology the determination of values. Its a priori exclusion of even the possibility of solutions has led to the disastrous fragmentation of knowledge we now experience.

Against the theological dogmatists, Buddhist philosophy is critical of their restriction of omniscience to superhuman beings and affirms the transcendent potential of humans. Against the philosophical sophists, Buddhist philosophy is critical of their dogmatic insistence that all certainty is merely dogmatic and that omniscience is utterly impossible, and affirms that a rigorously honest confrontation with actual experience does afford an ultimately certain insight into its reality and function.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Tsong Khapa's Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence by Robert A. F. Thurman. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• List of Illustrations, pg. ix
• Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, pg. xi
• Preface, pg. xiii
• Note, pg. xviii
• I. Reverence to the Guru, Manjughosha!, pg. 3
• II. Shambhu, Meghavahana, Hiranyagarbha, pg. 8
• III. I bow devoted to Maitreya and Manjughosha, pg. 18
• IV. I bow my head to the feet of Nagarjuna and Asanga, pg. 21
• V. Respectfully I bow to those Master Scholars, pg. 33
• VI. Many who did not realize That, pg. 49
• VII. But I have seen It quite precisely, pg. 63
• VIII. You who aspire to Peerless Philosophy, pg. 89
• The Short Essence of True Eloquence, pg. 175
• Prologue, pg. 187
• I. Statements from the Elucidation of Intention, pg. 191
• II. Explanations of the Scripture's Statements, pg. 209
• III. The Essential Centrist Message, pg. 253
• IV. Explanations of the Followers of the Savior Nagarjuna, pg. 265
• V. The Dialecticist Elucidation of the Holy Intention, pg. 288
• VI. Avoidance of Contradiction between the (Dialecticist) System and the Scriptures, pg. 345
• VII. The Chief Reason for Negation of Ultimate Status, pg. 364
• Glossary of Technical Terms, pg. 387
• List of Abbreviations, pg. 401
• Bibliography of Principal Sources, pg. 407
• Index, pg. 421