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Śāntarakṣita

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Śāntarakṣita (ཞི་བ་འཚོ་)

Śāntarakṣita joined three streams that had run separately: Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and the logico-epistemological tradition of dignaga and dharmakirti. The Padmakara translators call the result “the last great development of Buddhist philosophy in India” (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 3). He is also the figure through whom Buddhism was institutionally established in Tibet, and the two facts are connected: the synthesis reached Tibet not as a translated text propagated by scholars but through the direct intervention of its author.

Life

Mipham’s biographical notes, drawn from Butön, Tāranātha and the Blue Annals, are hagiographical and thin (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 2). From them:

  • Son of the king of Zahor; abbot of Nālandā; “a formidable expert in the art of philosophical disputation” (p. 2)
  • At Trisongdetsen’s request he began the construction of Samye, ordained the first monks, had texts brought from India, and inaugurated the translation work (p. 2)
  • He advised the king to invite Padmasambhava to quell the occult forces hindering the work (p. 2)
  • Foreseeing the difficulties to come, he provided for the visit of his disciple Kamalaśīla, who by tradition defeated the representative of a Chinese “sudden enlightenment” and established the gradual methods of Indian Buddhism as normative (p. 2)
  • Tāranātha places his life in the reigns of the first two Pāla kings, a period of confident expansion for Buddhist institutions (p. 2)

The threefold synthesis

Ultimate truth is presented in terms of Madhyamaka, the conventional in terms of Cittamātra, and to this pair is added the pramāṇa tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 3).

The label matters less than the reason for it. Yeshe De’s ལྟ་བའི་ཁྱད་པར་ describes Bhāviveka’s view as Sautrāntika-Madhyamaka (མདོ་སྡེ་སྤྱོད་པའི་དབུ་མ་པ་) and Śāntarakṣita’s and Kamalaśīla’s as Yogācāra-Madhyamaka (རྣལ་འབྱོར་སྤྱོད་པའི་དབུ་མ་པ་); what separates them is the acceptance or rejection of extramental phenomena at the conventional level (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 5). The fuller “Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Madhyamaka” is a later doxographic form of the same distinction.

The load-bearing point is that the non-Madhyamaka tenets are taken up for their epistemological use and not their ontology, which is annulled. Bhāviveka does not believe in the ultimate existence of the partless particle but finds Sautrāntika atomism a serviceable way to undermine belief in gross extended phenomena. Śāntarakṣita does not believe in the ultimate existence of the mind, but, “being well aware of the philosophical difficulties involved in claiming that we can have knowledge of an objective and extramental world”, he presents the conventional on the Mind Only model instead (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 22). A relatively true ontology, as the introduction puts it, is a contradiction in terms.

The Madhyamakālaṅkāra

The Adornment of the Middle Way (དབུ་མ་རྒྱན་) is the principal statement of the view. It runs the neither-one-nor-many argument through sixty-two of its ninety-seven stanzas, more intensively than any other text in Buddhist literature (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 30).

Contributions to Pramāṇa

Dreyfus adds Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla as a fourth group to Stcherbatsky’s three-way division of Dharmakīrti’s Indian commentators (Devendrabuddhi’s literal exegesis, Prajñākaragupta’s religious school, Dharmottara’s philosophical tradition). Two things are credited to them: a transformation of the apoha theory, and a strong influence on the later Indian commentators who read Dharmakīrti as a Mādhyamika—a reading early Tibetan commentators then adopted (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 21). The fourth group is not itself the Mādhyamika interpretation; it is what produced it.

The transformation of apoha turns on reflections (གཟུགས་བརྙན་, pratibimba), the term Dreyfus also renders “representations”. Dharmakīrti introduces the concept without making it central; for Śāntarakṣita it becomes the main element, so that “elimination” (སེལ་བ་, apoha) denotes primarily the representation arising in the mind and not merely the exclusion of the contradictory. Śāntarakṣita gives two reasons for calling such a representation an elimination, the first being that it is psychologically distinct from other conceptual appearances and so excludes them from the field of attention (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 239). Dreyfus’s own argument is that this is a development of elements already in Dharmakīrti rather than a departure from him, against scholarship that presents Śāntarakṣita as standing far apart (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 226).

Tibetan reception

For roughly the first four centuries of Buddhism in Tibet, Śāntarakṣita’s synthesis dominated the religious and intellectual scene at the sūtra level, and the Madhyamaka teachings were upheld principally in his tradition (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, pp. 3–4). By the turn of the twelfth century it counted ngok-lotsawa (1059–1109) and cha-ba Chökyi Sengge (1109–1169) among its adherents, along with Śāntarakṣita’s direct disciple Yeshe De earlier.

That changed when Patsap Nyima Drak (1055–1145) translated Candrakīrti’s major works for the first time, and again with Tsongkhapa’s promotion of Prāsaṅgika (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, pp. 5, 16). By the nineteenth century Śāntarakṣita’s writings had been forgotten and were practically unknown, despite his almost mythical standing in Tibetan religious history: Mipham’s commentary of 1877 was the first on the Madhyamakālaṅkāra in four hundred years, and its introductory verses say the tradition had “dwindled now to embers” (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 4).

Mipham’s revival within the Rimé movement presents Śāntarakṣita as “the third charioteer”, the equal of Nāgārjuna and Asaṅga, whose Madhyamakālaṅkāra united the two great streams of Mahāyāna (shantarakshita-madhyamakalankara-intro, p. 4).

What this page does not cover

The Tattvasaṃgraha is listed above as a key work and is used nowhere on this page, because no source held here treats it. That is the gap to close: on Dreyfus’s own account the apoha transformation is Śāntarakṣita’s principal contribution to pramāṇa, and it is being reported at second hand from a chapter about somebody else.

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