Congkhapa

Dzieła

• 1402Wielki traktat o stopniach drogi (Lamrim Chenmo)

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Stanowisko

Tsongkhapa sought to unite rigorous reasoning with meditative practice. Following Candrakirti’s Prasangika Madhyamaka, he insisted on identifying the object of negation exactly: emptiness denies that things exist by their own nature, not that they exist at all. Precisely because they lack intrinsic nature, things can arise dependently, so cause and effect, ethics and valid conventional knowledge remain intact. He therefore opposed both a nihilistic reading of emptiness and a meditation that merely halts thought, and he integrated Dharmakirti’s epistemology. His Great Treatise expands Atisha’s Lamp. Sakya critics such as Gorampa attacked his interpretation, but his Gelug school, that of the Dalai Lamas, became Tibet’s dominant tradition.

Życie i kontekst

Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa was born in 1357 in the Tsongkha region of Amdo in north-eastern Tibet. He became a novice as a child and at sixteen went to central Tibet, where he studied with masters of several schools, notably the Sakya scholar Rendawa. In 1409 he founded the Great Prayer Festival in Lhasa and the monastery of Ganden, where he died in 1419. His disciples built up the Gelug school.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path (Lamrim Chenmo, 1402)
• Essence of Eloquence (Legshe Nyingpo, c. 1407–08)
• Ocean of Reasoning (commentary on Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika, c. 1407–08)
• Illumination of the Thought (Gongpa Rabsel, 1418)