Tags: rangtong

Dolpopa on Emptiness

The following post is titled, Emptiness of Self-nature and Emptiness of Other by Cyrus Stearns, a contributing author to the Jonangpa blog. It is an excerpt from the reprint of…

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The Quintessence of Rangtong

A long time coming, actually a year to the day since my last January 13th posting, The Quintessence of Zhentong from the collection of 108 Quintessential Instructions, I thought to…

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Reflecting ‘The Crystal Mirror’

Maybe its the dark magnetism of impending all hallows’ eve, but I’m feeling a mischievous urge to rile up all the ghouls and goblins of unapologetic dogmatism and have them…

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Tsoknyi Gyatso on Zhentong

Without jumping the gun (as we continue to set the text), I thought to write a post with the hope to help contextualize a forthcoming publication in the Tibetan language…

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Are there Geluk Zhentongpas?

Are there Geluk zhentongpas? This is a question that I’ve been asking for some time. Fortunately, a set of rare texts that were recently recovered from Tibet may shed some…

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Tibetan Zhentong Discourse II

Kongtrul also lists Rangjung Dorje’s and Dolpopa’s contemporary, the celebrated Nyingma master Kunkhyen Drimé Odzer or Longchen Rabjam (1308-1363). Longchenpa does use similar terminology but in a context and with…

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Zhentong isn’t Cittamātra

For some reason, those unfamiliar with the zhentong presentation tend to associate it with the Cittamāra (“Mind Only” or “Mentalist”) system, as if Madhyamaka was only divided into Svātantrika and…

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What Is / Isn’t Rangtong?

Dolpopa, like many great Tibetan scholars, was interested in making distinctions. Within his writings, we find several terse compositions that employ rich Buddhist lingo in order to succinctly and deliberately…

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Expressions of the Essence

Buddhist phenomenology tells us that one of the five fundamental constituents of the egoic complex is “form” (rūpa, gzugs), the configuration of tangible materiality that is so integral to ordinary…

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“Wheel of Time” III

Now that we have a rough sketch of Dolpopa’s concept of time according to Kālachakra cosmology, we can begin to think about what Dolpopa and later Jonangpas refer to as…

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