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. 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. Specifically, while Mikyö Dorje takes pains to profess a Madhyamaka philosophical view reflecting the apophatic bent 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.