Can Madhyamaka Philosophy Ground a Political Theory?: Tsongkhapa, Mikyö Dorje, and the Political Stakes of Buddhist Omniscience

In this paper, I consider the opposing Madhyamaka ('Middle Way') Buddhist philosophical positions of Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (1357-1419) and Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje (1507-1554) as contrasting visions for theoretically grounding political authority. While scholars acknowledge that Tibetan philosophical debate carries important political stakes, little attention has been paid to the presence of political theory within the actual philosophical positions. In Tibet, demonstrations of philosophical prowess carried politically valuable prizes such as prestige for oneself and one's school, aristocratic or imperial financing, and protection by the ruling party's armies. These prizes were never more valuable than during Tibet's period of high scholasticism between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which all the major Tibetan Buddhist orders developed centralized monastic curricula shaped around distinct institutional doctrines. But the question remains: Did the prospect of political rewards exert an influence upon the philosophy itself? 

I explore this question by looking at the contrasting philosophical views of Tsongkhapa, the progenitor of the ascendant Gelukpa order, and his critic Mikyö Dorje, who headed the Karma Kagyü order at the height of its power before being politically eclipsed by the Gelukpa. Specifically, I look at the two thinkers' respective approaches to the crucial questions of what we can know and what it means for a buddha to be omniscient as elaborated in their Madhyamaka philosophy, which was renowned as the highest form of Buddhist thought. By comparing Tsongkhapa's and Mikyö Dorje's divergent attitudes toward epistemology and gnoseology, I argue that we see differences emerge that helped or hindered their orders in consolidating extensive political control by a central authority. The upshot is that while Mikyö Dorje takes pains to profess a Madhyamaka philosophical view emphasizing the apophatic attitude of the Madhyamaka progenitor, Nāgārjuna (2nd c. CE), as well as his preeminent commentator, Candrakīrti (7th c.), the interpretive liberties that Tsongkhapa takes with those Indian thinkers' texts help establish justification for the kind of intensified bureaucratic control over the Buddhist monastic clergy that marked the Gelukpa order and aid its rise to power.

While Nāgārjuna's philosophy has a strong anti-realist bent, Tsongkhapa elaborates a Madhyamaka position that Georges Dreyfus (1997) refers to as a "moderate realism." According to Dreyfus, Tsongkhapa's view is a form of realism because he considers conventional truths (Skt. saṃvṛtisatya) about apparent phenomena to be epistemologically verifiable, but his realism is moderate because he maintains that the ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) is those conventionally real phenomena are devoid of any intrinsic nature. As Garfield (2011) succinctly puts it, "The ultimate truth is...for Tsongkhapa, that the conventional truth is all that there is." Tsongkhapa accordingly grounds his epistemology in the assertion that Candrakīrti accepts our conventional cognitive objects and instruments to be mutually verifying, though scholars like Arnold (2005) note that this in fact inverts Candrakīrti's Madhyamaka view of epistemology which ultimately rejects that cognitive apparatus. For Tsongkhapa, our conventional knowledge of the world is grounded by the fact that the Buddha's omniscience sees all things as they truly are and can therefore verify or confute the perceptions and beliefs of all other beings. Thus, he writes that for buddhas, "since the predisposition toward errant dualistic appearance is destroyed from the root, the appearing objects are inerrant dualistic appearances, not errant dualistic appearances." (Tsongkhapa [N.d.]) On Tsongkhapa's view, an enlightened buddha--the ideal knower--perceives all the dualistic conventional appearances that ordinary beings do, but with an unimpeachable epistemic authority.

Mikyö Dorje takes a radically different approach to both epistemology and gnoseology in his Madhyamaka philosophy. Rather than accept Tsongkhapa's coherentist epistemological reading of Candrakīrti, he takes a more conservative reading of the latter, maintaining that Madhyamaka analysis neither affirms nor denies the veracity of our conventional ways of perceiving and knowing the world. Thus, Mikyö Dorje (2004) notes that it would be absurd if "what the Perfect Buddha's knowledge realized were just [the same as] the conventional truth which ordinary beings pretend is established by epistemic warrants." Rather than validating the experience of ordinary beings, Mikyö Dorje considers buddhas to have overcome the very mental structures that project inherently mistaken conventional experience. He thus interprets Candrakīrti's (1913) statement in that for buddhas "mind and mental factors have ceased" to mean that, paradoxically, for buddhas--again, the ideal knowers--nothing can be said to appear at all. 

In Tsongkhapa's Madhyamaka philosophy, the view that conventional truths may be established (and so, in an important sense, controlled) epistemologically combined with the notion of a buddha as a perfect knower of all conventional things renders omniscience a kind of panopticism (cf. Foucault 1975). Tsongkhapa's philosophical view, I argue, grounds the sort of top-down control--exemplified by politico-religious disciplinary technologies like monastic codes of conduct (bca' yig)--that enabled the Geluk order to centralize control over a broad network of monasteries through the efforts of what Sullivan (2020) calls monastic 'organization men' who closely monitored monastic life. 

By contrast, Mikyö Dorje's denial of both epistemic verifiability and a buddha's direct engagement in worldly affairs meant that the monastic codes he and his successors authored were fewer and less effective in centralizing bureaucratic control, a major factor in their loss of political power to the Gelukpas. In essence, while Mikyö Dorje's hermeneutically conservative Madhyamaka philosophy motivated a more localized, less structured form of governance associated with earlier Kagyüpa figures like Lama Zhang Yudrakpa (1122-1193)--who, Rheingans (2017) notes, was a major influence on Mikyö Dorje's philosophical view--Tsongkhapa's moderate realist reading of Madhyamaka precedents allowed the Gelukpas to establish new forms of centralized governmental control, leading to their eventual multi-century hegemony over their peer Buddhist orders.

Key Sources:

Tsongkhapa Lobzang Drakpa. N.d. Dgongs pa rab gsal (Illumination of the Intent). Rje Tsong kha pa’i gsum ’bum, Vol. ma. Sku ’bum edition.

Mikyö Dorje, Karmapa VIII. 2004. Grub mtha’ smra ba bzhi’i rtse mor byon pa (The Great Chariot that Has Arrived at the Pinnacle of the Four Philosophical Schools). In gsung ’bum/_Mi bskyod rdo rje. 2004b.