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The Adornment of the Middle Way: Translators' Introduction

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The Adornment of the Middle Way—Translators’ Introduction

The 30-page introduction to the Padmakara Translation Group’s translation of shantarakshita’s Madhyamakālaṅkāra with Mipham’s commentary (Shambhala, 2005). Page numbers below are the PDF’s.

Main argument

The introduction situates Śāntarakṣita’s synthesis in the history of Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka and argues that its eclipse in Tibet was a historical accident rather than a philosophical defeat. For this vault, its use is narrower: it is the only source held here that treats the relation between the pramāṇa tradition and Madhyamaka directly, and it states the case for reading Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s logic as having grown up with Svātantrika rather than alongside it.

Key themes

1. Śāntarakṣita’s synthesis (pp. 2–4)

  • The synthesis unites Madhyamaka for the ultimate truth, Cittamātra for the conventional, and the logico-epistemological tradition of dignaga and dharmakirti. The translators call it “the last great development of Buddhist philosophy in India” (p. 3)
  • Abbot of Nālandā, son of the king of Zahor, “a formidable expert in the art of philosophical disputation” (p. 2)
  • He began Samye, ordained the first monks, inaugurated the translation work, and advised the king to invite Padmasambhava (p. 2)
  • Mipham presents him as “the third charioteer”, the equal of Nāgārjuna and Asaṅga; Mipham’s commentary, composed in 1877, was the first on the Madhyamakālaṅkāra in four hundred years, its subject having been forgotten by the nineteenth century (p. 4)

2. Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika (pp. 5–16)

  • Yeshe De’s ལྟ་བའི་ཁྱད་པར་ divides the two Svātantrika subschools by the acceptance or rejection of extramental phenomena at the conventional level: Bhāviveka’s Sautrāntika-Madhyamaka, Śāntarakṣita’s and Kamalaśīla’s Yogācāra-Madhyamaka (p. 5)
  • The Yogācāra-Madhyamaka tradition was well established by the turn of the twelfth century, counting ngok-lotsawa (1059–1109) and cha-ba Chökyi Sengge (1109–1169); the change came when Patsap Nyima Drak (1055–1145) first translated Candrakīrti’s major works (p. 5)
  • Bhāviveka’s use of formal logic in commentary followed “in the wake of Dignaga’s important and still recent work” (p. 7)
  • The pramāṇa tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti “was primarily and intimately linked with the kind of Madhyamaka that was dominant in both India and Tibet until the twelfth century”—that is, with what would later be called Svātantrika (p. 9). This is the sentence the rest of the vault’s Svātantrika–pramāṇa claims rest on
  • Candrakīrti rejected that tradition as “a misguided attempt to find philosophical completeness” antithetical to Madhyamaka insight (p. 10)
  • The school of Sang-pu was founded by Ngok Loden Sherab and continued by Cha-ba, who composed the first Tibetan summary of Dharmakīrti’s thought and “played a crucial role in the founding of Tibetan scholasticism”; he defended Svātantrika against Prāsaṅgika and wrote refutations of Candrakīrti (p. 11)
  • Mipham’s resolution: Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika differ in method, not in ultimate view, the former emphasising the approximate ultimate (རྣམ་གྲངས་པའི་དོན་དམ་) and the latter the ultimate in itself (p. 14)
  • Tsongkhapa’s position is where the introduction sees a tension: he rejected Svātantrika for Prāsaṅgika while adopting the pramāṇa teachings of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti on Cha-ba’s interpretation, applying the logical method to a view that had traditionally rejected it (p. 16)

3. Why Mind Only, and not as ontology (p. 22)

In both Svātantrika subschools the ultimate is settled by Madhyamaka, so the ontology of whatever tenet system is adopted for the conventional is annulled: “The Sautrantika and Chittamatra tenets are refuted on the point of their ontology but retained for what is essentially their epistemological usefulness.” Bhāviveka uses Sautrāntika atomism as a stepping-stone; Śāntarakṣita, aware of the difficulties in claiming knowledge of an extramental world, presents the conventional on the Mind Only model. “A ‘relatively true ontology’ is a contradiction in terms.”

4. Dharmakīrti’s ascending scales (pp. 26–27)

  • Dharmakīrti began from Sautrāntika realism because his opponents were realists and an idealist opening would have been rejected out of hand; the move was provisional and does not state his own view. Mipham: “It is well known that Dharmakirti said, ‘When I investigate outer phenomena, I take the Sautrantika as my starting point’” (p. 27)
  • The aspect theory (sākāravāda) is where the introduction locates the pressure. The aspect was posited to bridge mind and matter, but being itself mental it cannot: “the problem is not removed but only displaced” (p. 26). Confronted with this, Dharmakīrti moved to a Yogācāra frame—the same movement, at the level of one author’s work, as the historical passage from Bhāviveka’s Sautrāntika-Madhyamaka to Śāntarakṣita’s Yogācāra-Madhyamaka
  • Śāntarakṣita’s acceptance of Mind Only at the conventional level is, Mipham remarks, “in agreement with the view of the glorious Dharmakirti” (p. 27)

5. Universals and apoha (pp. 27–29)

  • An elementary exposition of Dharmakīrti’s rejection of universals and of the apoha theory
  • Two Tibetan traditions of Dharmakīrti interpretation: Cha-ba’s earlier tradition, moderate realist, inherited by Gelug; and sakya-pandita’s later tradition, antirealist, upheld by Sakya and the other non-Gelug schools (p. 29)
  • A “minority Buddhist interpretation” in India had already softened Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s antirealism towards moderate realism, and Cha-ba encountered and adopted it by “what may have been no more than a historical accident” (p. 29). The introduction is explicit that the dominant Tibetan realist reading rests on a contingency, not an argument
  • Sapan, in his “celebrated masterpiece the Tshad ma rigs gter” (ཚད་མ་རིགས་གཏེར་, the pramanayuktanidhi), “strongly reaffirmed Dharmakirti’s antirealism”; the reading was sustained by gorampa and sakya-chok-den and accepted as normative outside Gelug (p. 29). Mipham prefers it (p. 29)

6. Neither one nor many (p. 30)

The Madhyamakālaṅkāra invokes the argument through sixty-two of its ninety-seven stanzas, more intensively, the introduction says, than any other text in Buddhist literature. Khenpo Yönten Gyamtso’s enumeration of the standard arguments for the emptiness of phenomena follows.

7. Atiśa on pramāṇa (pp. 29–30)

Atiśa (982–1054) refused to teach logic and epistemology, holding that the doctrines of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti were elaborated to defend Buddhism against its Hindu opponents and had “little purpose” in Tibet. The introduction calls him “a Prāsaṅgika avant la lettre”, since he held the view more than a century before Patsap translated Candrakīrti. It sets this beside Candrakīrti’s own distrust and then notes that Tibetans in general have not shared it.

Relevance to the three primary texts

  • pramanasamuccaya: cited as the foundation of the tradition the introduction ties to Svātantrika (p. 9)
  • pramanavartika: the ascending-scales reading, and the aspect theory as the pressure behind Dharmakīrti’s move to Yogācāra (pp. 26–27)
  • pramanayuktanidhi: named as Sapan’s masterpiece reaffirming Dharmakīrti’s antirealism against Cha-ba’s realist reading (p. 29)

Critical assessment

This is a translators’ introduction with a case to make: Mipham’s, and behind it the Nyingma reading of Madhyamaka against Gelug scholasticism. It says so, in the section on the Rimé movement (pp. 3–4). Two places where that shows. The verdict on Tsongkhapa (p. 16) is framed as a paradox rather than argued as a position Tsongkhapa held for reasons. And the “historical accident” explanation of Cha-ba’s realism (p. 29) is an explanation of how an opponent came by a view, which is not the same as a refutation of it—dreyfus-recognizing-reality treats the same divide as a live philosophical dispute with arguments on both sides.

Translation material

No verse translations from the three primary texts.

Note on this page

The page does not follow the source-page template of docs//templates.md: the frontmatter lacks source_type, location, concepts and texts, and the body headings are its own. A conformance job, not a humanise pass—the same decision still pending for katsura-dignaga-lectures and berzin-science-of-mind.

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