Cyrus Stearns - A Historical Survey of the Shentong Tradition in Tibet

Описание: Chapter Two reframes shentong (gzhan stong) as a historically transmitted hermeneutic rather than a doctrinal anomaly introduced by Dölpopa. Stearns begins by challenging the claim that other-emptiness lacks Indian or early Tibetan precedent. Drawing on Tibetan historiography, especially Tāranātha and Kunga Drölchok, he traces proto-shentong orientations to early receptions of Maitreyan texts such as the Uttaratantra, where the Buddha’s final turning of the wheel is treated as definitive because it makes careful discriminations between phenomena and their true nature. Figures like Tsen Khawoché are remembered as early Tibetan carriers of this approach. From the outset, shentong appears not as a sectarian doctrine but as a way of preserving the asymmetry between what is adventitious and what is definitive, ensuring that emptiness does not collapse into nihilistic negation.

Against this background, Stearns presents Dölpopa as the figure who rendered shentong systematic, explicit, and controversial, but not isolated. Dölpopa’s articulation of other-emptiness emerges through sustained debate and correspondence, and Stearns devotes careful attention to dismantling later polemical legends—especially claims that Dölpopa renounced shentong late in life—by citing eyewitness accounts of him teaching Mountain Dharma in his final days. Episodes such as Barawa Gyeltsen Palsang’s doubts over the distinction between universal-ground consciousness and universal-ground primordial awareness illustrate how Dölpopa’s formulations were refined through challenge rather than imposed dogmatically. Shentong thus takes shape as a position stabilized through intellectual contestation within a vibrant Jonang milieu.

Stearns then traces how shentong was taken up beyond Jonang through processes of reinterpretation, harmonization, and selective critique in Kagyu and Nyingma contexts. Rather than portraying these traditions as simply accepting or rejecting Dölpopa, the chapter shows how later masters often affirmed the insight driving shentong—namely, that the ultimate is free from adventitious stains and inseparable from wisdom qualities—while resisting Dölpopa’s rhetoric or scriptural absolutism. In Kagyu circles, this took the form of attempts to reconcile emptiness of self-nature and emptiness of other at the level of tantric definitive meaning; in Nyingma contexts, it dovetailed naturally with accounts of luminosity and primordial awareness already present in Dzogchen idioms. Stearns’s emphasis is not on doctrinal verdicts but on adaptive transmission: shentong becomes a resource that different lineages re-express in their own conceptual languages.

Finally, the chapter situates shentong within the politics of suppression and the realities of revival, culminating in both rimé syntheses and Jonang continuity. Stearns details how seventeenth-century political realignments led to the administrative conversion of Jonang institutions and the banning of shentong in central Tibet, while noting that this did not entail extinction. In the eighteenth century, the Nyingma polymath Katok Tsewang Norbu plays a crucial role: deeply devoted to Dölpopa and the Jonang masters, he receives Jonang transmissions, is identified with earlier Jonang incarnations, and even teaches from the Jonang seat itself, demonstrating that shentong survived on the ground despite official prohibitions. In the nineteenth century, rimé figures such as Jamgön Kongtrul and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo further disseminate shentong-inflected views through nonsectarian syntheses, while twentieth-century Jonang masters in Amdo preserve Dölpopa’s textual and practice lineages intact. The chapter thus concludes by presenting shentong as a historically layered tradition: suppressed yet transmitted, reinterpreted yet continuous, and integral to the plural history of Tibetan Buddhist thought.