Ngok Lotsawa Loden Sherab (རྔོག་ལོ་ཚཱ་བ་བློ་ལྡན་ཤེས་རབ་)
By the end of the eleventh century all of Dharmakīrti’s major works had been translated into Tibetan by Tibetan scholars working with Indian counterparts. Ngok Lotsawa, one of the most renowned of those translators, is also held to be the first native Tibetan to compose original works on Indian logic (sonam-introduction-treasury).
What he changed
Berzin gives the sharpest statement of the shift. The first Tibetan students of the tradition, under Atiśa’s influence, studied dignaga alone; Ngok moved the emphasis onto dharmakirti, and it is this move that established the new epistemology (ཚད་མ་གསར་མ་, tshad-ma gsar-ma), which cha-ba then elaborated (berzin-science-of-mind, Basic Distinctions among Cognitive Objects).
This does not agree with the attribution on cha-ba, where the new epistemology is credited to Cha-ba’s own innovations. The sources divide: Berzin makes Ngok the founder and Cha-ba the elaborator; the Padmakara introduction has the Sang-pu school “founded by Ngok Loden Sherab and continued by Chapa Chökyi Senge”, with Cha-ba composing the first Tibetan summary of Dharmakīrti and playing “a crucial role in the founding of Tibetan scholasticism” (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 11). Sönam credits the seminaries, the texts and the debate methodology to Cha-ba without saying who began the tradition (sonam-introduction-treasury). [unverified]—no source held here settles which innovations are Ngok’s own and which are Cha-ba’s, and the reason is the one recorded below: none of Ngok’s writing is in front of us.
The Kashmiri teacher
Ngok studied under Kalden Gyalpo (བསྐལ་ལྡན་རྒྱལ་པོ་), a Kashmiri scholar said to have been trained in non-Buddhist schools before his conversion to Buddhism. Sönam reports that “many scholars believe” non-Buddhist tenets were on this account inadvertently upheld by Ngok (sonam-introduction-treasury). He names none of those scholars, and the claim is doing real work downstream, since it supplies the aetiology for sakya-pandita’s charge; it is repeated here as a report, not as an established finding.
Sapan’s critique
Before sakya-pandita, Dharmakīrti was read in Tibet principally through Ngok and Cha-ba. Sapan’s Sanskrit and his contact with Indian scholars, above all Śākyaśrībhadra (1127–1225), brought him to judge that Dharmakīrti’s works had been, in his own phrase, “polluted by the innovations of earlier Tibetans”. He took the interpretations descending from Ngok’s tradition to read into the master’s texts positions Dharmakīrti “either explicitly rejected or never propounded”, and held that the doctrinal purity of the Indian Buddhist pramāṇa system “had become littered with Hindu tenets and novel concepts developed by Tibetans”. He treated these as the norm rather than the exception (sonam-introduction-treasury).
Before Ngok
Go Lotsawa’s Blue Annals (དེབ་ཐེར་སྔོན་པོ་) records that before Ngok, rMa taught pramāṇa, and that this earlier tradition is known as ཚད་མ་རྙིང་མ་, the Old Pramāṇa. It appears to have died out long ago (sonam-introduction-treasury, n. 7).
The gap
Nothing Ngok wrote is held in raw/, and no source here names a single title of his. Every claim on this page therefore reports what later writers say about him rather than anything read in him: the charge of Hindu contamination, the credit for the new epistemology, and the founding of the Sang-pu tradition all come from parties with a stake in the outcome. Sönam’s own pointer for the material is the collected works of sakya-chok-den (1428–1507), volumes 16 and 19 (sonam-introduction-treasury, n. 5), which is not among our sources. Until something of Ngok’s own is read, this page cannot be more than a record of his reputation.
Sources
- sonam-introduction-treasury—first native Tibetan logician, the Kashmiri teacher, Sapan’s critique, the Old Pramāṇa, and the pointer to Sakya Chokden
- berzin-science-of-mind—Basic Distinctions among Cognitive Objects: the shift from Dignāga to Dharmakīrti and the founding of the new epistemology
- shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro—p. 11, the Sang-pu school and its continuation by Cha-ba