Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism

by Jeffrey Hopkins

Dzong-ka-ba's (1357-1419) The Essence of Eloquence is the one book on wisdom that the Dalai Lama carries with him wherever he goes. Composed by Tibet's great yogi-scholar and founder of the Ge-luk-ba school, it stands as a landmark in Buddhist philosophy. In this first of a three-volume series, Jeffrey Hopkins focuses on how the conflict between appearance and reality is presented in the Mind-Only, or Yogic Practice, School.

The Essence of Eloquence is so rich that for the last six centuries numerous Tibetan and Mongolian scholars have been drawn into a dynamic process of both finding and creating consistency in Dzong-ka-ba's often terse and cryptic tract. Hopkins makes extensive use of these commentaries to annotate the translation. Included are historical and doctrinal introductions and a critical edition of the text, as well as a lengthy synopsis to aid the general reader. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will find this important book indispensable.

This book is the first of a three-volume series of related but stand-alone works on the first two sections of Dzong-ka-ba's The Essence of Eloquence. The focus of all three volumes is the exposition of emptiness in the Mind-Only School according to numerous Tibetan and Mongolian scholars over the last six centuries who have tried both to find and to create consistency in his often terse and cryptic tract.

This first volume is in four

--A historical and doctrinal introduction

--A translation of the General Explanation and the Section on the Mind-Only School in The Essence of Eloquence with frequent annotations in brackets, footnotes, and backnotes

--A detailed synopsis of the translation

--A critical edition in Tibetan script of these sections in The Essence of Eloquence

Genres: Buddhism

542 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Paul Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1973; B.A. English Literature, Harvard University, 1963), served for a decade as the chief English-language interpreter for the Dalai Lama. A Buddhist scholar and the author of more than thirty-five books, he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, where he founded the largest academic program in Tibetan Buddhist studies in the West.

Reviews

[meena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes it’s so exhausting when the thing you apprehend not for the sake of its image or referents to words as beautiful can’t be apprehended in the same way to those around you. People depend so much on their own words about things, identities of things, and their emotions towards it that referentiality, how one refers to those things, feels integral for the possibility of relation. Music is quite loose with this; since it isn't comprised of the discursive thought of language nor does music have a syntax that we can say function as terms for us to read (more so 'patterns' of chords and progressions that can function as 'meanings' that 'resonate' with listeners). The particular school that asserts the naturelessness of character nature could ultimately point to something pre-symbolic of forms of sentience, in their absentia of their conventional appearances, bound in cyclicity through the particular of an artist's conception. I have a special love for PJ Harvey because through her lyrics, which are metaphysical propositions, I am connected to a fantasy sculpted from unborn concepts and memories, something collected from within my sense-organs and utilised in wordless cognition. It was in an Uh-Huh-Her interview where the cessation of each album's reproduction was tied to the orientation of her inexhaustible, mercurial power. Where the mind wanders to and how it chooses to apprehend. She informs us in terms such as, “When I finish an album, the next one has to be something entirely different. That is me”. If there has to be any kind of intimate relation with what of a particular world is quiescently existent and beyond cessation, to apprehend objects 'in absentia', then what lies behind signific value and conventions of discourse has to be meditatively sought and engaged with.

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

This critical analysis and translation of the Cittamatra portion of Dzong-ka-ba's Essence of Elloquence is an astonishing work both for its depth and the skill with which Professor Hopkins negotiates this extremely difficult material. The material, while difficult, repays the effort of engagement richly. The root text is reknown in the Ge-lug school of Tibetan Buddhism as the most important text for understanding the key doctrine of emptiness as well as being crucial to understanding the interpretation of sutra and Ge-lug presentations of tenets. Yet few can master it for its cryptic brevity and the multitude of interpretive dilemas it poses. This work includes a translation of the Cittamatra section of the Essence of Eloquence along with a commentary by Professor Hopkins, reflecting the opinions of western scholars and nearly two dozen Tibetan commentaries. Also included is an emmended edition of the translated portion of the text. The portion translated presents Dzong-ka-ba's view of the Mind-Only school, based on a careful reading of the seventh chapter of the Samdhinirmocana Sutra. Dzong-ka-ba also considers other interpretations of the same sutra, especially those of the Indian proponent of Cittamatra, Asanga, and the Tibetan founder of the Jo-nang sect, Shey-rap-gyel-tsen. Dzong-ka-ba's text thus becomes the doorway to a lively, complex, and compelling debate with voices speaking from Sutra, the Indian and Tibetan commentarial traditions, the current Tibetan scholarship, and western scholarship. Professor Hopkins begins to make sense of the complex material, which will be examined in further detail in the forthcoming two volumes of this series. For those who wish to find a technical discussion of the philosophical issues raised by this text, this translation will be of greater service than that published already by Robert Thurman in The Central Philosophy of Tibet. Due to the difficulty involved in reading this material, this is something that I certainly welcome.