r0b’s Reviews > The Central Philosophy of Tibet: A Study and Translation of Jey Tsong Khapa's Essence of True Eloquence > Status Update

...the profound, terrifying practice of enlightenment, whose essence is emptiness and compassion.

Finally, the Jewel Garland declares:

Just as the grammarians make one read the grammar, the Buddha teaches the Dharma according to the tolerance of the disciple. To some he teaches the Dharma to refrain from sins, to some to accomplish virtue, to some as dependence on dualism, and to some as freedom from dualism; (finally) to some he teaches...

...the “real” relative, the inexpressible processes that we are.

[I have the impression that Thurman unfortunately makes this text, through his translation and his presentation, more difficult than is necessary. It is a bit of a slog at times and I don't think it should be.]

...“The form-aggregate is produced,” “it is ceased,” “it is abandoned,” “it is fully understood,” and so on. Thus, as long as our perceptions are habitually entangled in our conventional, verbalized descriptions of the world, that is, as long as we have not seen the unreality of the “structured, verbally, conceptually, and imaginatively constructed world,” we do not perceive...

“The imagined reality” designates the world of conditional processes, which are its ground as object of conceptual constructions, when this world is verbally and conventionally structured into a world of natural entities, as [evinced in perceptions accompanying such] expressions as “This is the form-aggregate,” and of natural qualities, as [evinced in perceptions accompanying such] expressions as...

...Tsong Khapa has the audacity to argue that the Absolute, the Ultimate Truth, Reality, can be proven, expressed, and experienced, and that human reason can thus serve as the solid ground for ethical, creative, and liberative action in the world.

P. 230
(re-reading some as I had put it down for awhile)

...Nirvana cannot be distinguished from samsara. It is just here now, and the full experiential acceptance of that is liberation, which is not a going elsewhere.

There is a Nirvana, a supreme bliss. But salvation is not “mystic,” a “leap into the void” having discarded reason, and Nirvana is not a place outside the world; it is a situation that includes the world within its bliss.Samsara cannot be distinguished from it. It is in Nirvana that samsara is embraced completely.In the ultimate reality, there is no duality of any sort, and samsara and Nirvana are the same actuality.

Tsong Khapa urges us to “listen with reverence” to the philosophy of enlightenment and yet we have discovered that the hermeneutical act of listening can only be performed by means of pure reason. The definitive teaching turns out ultimately to be sheer silence, an absolute negation of the ultimate expressibility of reality.

Most commentaries on the Essence place it in the context of the four traditional hermeneutical strategies called the “Four Reliances,” which are as follows:

a. rely on the teaching, not the teacher(’s authority);
b. rely on the meaning, not the letter;
c. rely on the definitive meaning, not the interpretable one;
d. rely on (non-conceptual) wisdom, not on (dualistic) cognition.