Cha-ba Chökyi Sengge (ཕྱ་པ་ཆོས་ཀྱི་སེང་གེ་)
Cha-ba is the figure the whole Sakya polemic is aimed at, and none of his works survive. Everything below is reconstructed from his critics, and that shapes what can be said: the positions are well attested because sakya-pandita and sakya-chok-den quote them in order to refute them, while the arguments Cha-ba gave for them mostly are not.
Contributions
- Wrote the first Summary (བསྡུས་པ་) of Dharmakīrti’s thought in Tibet, which “played a crucial role in the founding of Tibetan scholasticism” (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 11)
- Initiated the Collected Topics (བསྡུས་གྲྭ་) genre, later central to the Gelug curriculum
- Credited with settling the debate format Tibetans use: debate by consequences (ཐལ་འགྱུར་, prasaṅga) rather than by the formal argument forms of Indian logic (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 22)
- Read Dharmakīrti as a realist: epistemology is to be established on Vaibhāṣika lines and settled by “what is renowned to the world”
- Founded seminaries and developed the methods of monastic debate still practised (sonam-introduction-treasury, Transmission to Tibet)
- Dreyfus notes that neither Ngok’s nor Cha-ba’s works are available, which makes the early history of Tibetan epistemology difficult to reconstruct at all (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 22)
Specific Positions Critiqued by Sapan
- Five types of non-valid cognition: investigative thought (Sönam: “correctly assuming consciousness”, ཡིད་དཔྱོད་), appearance-without-ascertainment (Sönam: “inattentive cognition”, སྣང་ལ་མ་ངེས་པ་), subsequent cognition (བཅད་ཤེས་), doubt (Sönam: “uncertain consciousness”, ཐེ་ཚོམ་), wrong cognition (Sönam: “distorted cognition”, ལོག་ཤེས་). Sapan rejects the first three (sonam-introduction-treasury, Chapter Two: Consciousness). See non-valid-cognition
- All valid cognitions eliminate superimpositions (ཚད་མ་ཡིན་ན་སྒྲོ་འདོགས་གཅོད་པས་ཁྱབ་): valid cognition determines its object. This is the position Sapan’s passive perception is built to deny, and the disagreement is not local—a perception with cognitive content commits one to real universals, which is why the epistemological dispute and the ontological one are the same dispute (sonam-introduction-treasury, Chapter Nine: Valid Perception)
- The held object (གཟུང་ཡུལ་) applies to three types of mental episode, not to non-mistaken sense perception alone; Sapan treats this as a misreading of the Indian sources (sonam-introduction-treasury, Chapter One: Objects of Comprehension)
- Object and subject coexist. Dharmakīrti has them sequential, the object being the cause of the cognition and so ceased when it arises. Cha-ba’s version is friendlier to common sense and is what makes the equation of held and appearing objects available to him (sonam-introduction-treasury, Chapter One: Objects of Comprehension)
- On definition—that the name of a definition should itself have a definition while its meaning-distinguisher need not—Sapan agrees with him (sonam-introduction-treasury, Chapter Eight)
Svātantrika Allegiance
Cha-ba was reputedly formidable in debate and is said to have “brilliantly defended the Svatantrika view against Prasangika innovation and to have composed several refutations of Chandrakirti”; the Padmakara translators note his defeat of the Indian master Jayānanda as the expected outcome when a Svātantrika master of logic meets a Prāsaṅgika (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 11). The pairing is not accidental: on their account the logico-epistemological tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti was “primarily and intimately linked” with the Madhyamaka that dominated India and Tibet until the twelfth century, the view later called Svātantrika (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 9).
Their explanation of Cha-ba’s realism is worth marking as the kind of claim it is. A minority Indian interpretation had already softened Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s antirealism towards moderate realism, and it was this interpretation, by “what may have been no more than a historical accident”, that Cha-ba encountered and adopted, whence Tsongkhapa and the general Gelug outlook (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 29). That is an aetiology, not a refutation: it says how the reading arrived without saying that it misreads. dreyfus-recognizing-reality treats the same divide as a live philosophical disagreement, and the two accounts are not reconciled here. [unverified]
Sources behind Cha-ba’s innovations
Dreyfus’s case is that Cha-ba radicalises moves already made by dharmottara (c. 750–810), and possibly by Śaṃkarānanda. Dharmottara had begun to give perception an active, ascertaining role, and had introduced the held/conceived distinction that lets perception and conception coordinate (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, pp. 360–364). For the second name the evidence is Sapan’s own: his Auto-Commentary mentions “followers of Śaṃkarānanda” holding that valid cognition “merely eliminates an opposed superimposition with respect to a characteristic of the entity”. Dreyfus suspects Sapan is pointing at an Indian source, possibly Śaṃkarānanda himself, and that the work is not extant in Tibetan (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 368).
If that holds, the Sakya charge loses its historical premise. The new epistemology is then not a Tibetan deformation of an Indian original but the Tibetan continuation of an Indian revisionist current, and the argument against it has to be made on the merits rather than by appeal to provenance.
Cha-ba’s typology of objects
On sakya-chok-den’s reading, Cha-ba’s four-object typology (held, appearing, object of application, conceived) was never meant as an account of Sautrāntika perception. It was a refutation of it, clearing the way for a more direct-realist Vaibhāṣika theory. The equation of held and appearing objects is what does the refuting: if the held object is the cause of the perception, it has ceased when the perception arises and cannot appear to it, so anyone who wants it to appear must give up the causal theory. Cha-ba gave up the causal theory. His Gelug successors kept the equation and the causal theory both, which is “piling one mistake on top of the other” (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, pp. 385–386).
Dreyfus credits the historical reconstruction as a definite contribution and then declines to follow Sakya Chok-den’s conclusion. Concepts absent from Dharmakīrti are not thereby Tibetan inventions; dharmottara plainly asserts a conceived object, so on that point Sakya Chok-den is simply wrong, and his claim that the held/appearing equivalence has no Indian support goes too far as well. What drives the overreach, in Dreyfus’s diagnosis, is a polemical need to treat the Indian tradition as unified (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 386).
Legacy
sakya-pandita’s Treasure is aimed principally at Cha-ba’s realist innovations, and by the fifteenth century sakya-chok-den was complaining that the terminology of epistemological studies had become “hopelessly contaminated by the bizarre inventions of Cha-ba and his followers” (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 26). The complaint is evidence of how thoroughly Cha-ba had won: the vocabulary an opponent has to write in is his.
Sources
- dreyfus-recognizing-reality—Introduction II on the historical placement, ch. 21 on Dharmottara as the precedent, ch. 22 on Cha-ba’s own epistemology of perception, ch. 23 on the typology of objects
- shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro—Svātantrika allegiance, the encounter with the moderate realist interpretation, the founding of Tibetan scholasticism
- sonam-introduction-treasury—the positions Sapan attacks. No pagination in the source, so cited by section heading