The following is an excerpt from Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen’s Mountain Dharma: An Ocean of Definitive Meaning translated by Cyrus Stearns.
Translator’s Introduction
If buddhahood will be reached even by hearing just the term
“sugata essence,” what need to mention what will happen with
faith and devotion, and by actualizing it through meditation? So
compassionate experts should teach it even if they may lose their
lives, and so on, and those striving for liberation should seek it
out, listen, and so forth, even if they must cross a great pit of fire.
—Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, Mountain Dharma
Some people thought he was a demonic genius. Others believed he was the incarnation of the Shambhala king Kalkī Puṇḍarīka. Still, everyone recognized his realization and brilliance and called him The Omniscient One. No other thinker shook the Buddhist world of fourteenth-century Tibet as deeply as Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen (1292–1361), who taught that an eternal enlightened essence, or buddha nature, exists in all living beings, and that ultimate reality is empty only of relative phenomena other than itself, unlike relative phenomena that are empty of self-nature.
The most famous (or infamous) book Dölpopa wrote to present his unprecedented interpretations of Buddhist doctrine is called Mountain Dharma: An Ocean of Definitive Meaning (Ri chos nges don rgya mtsho). Few controversial books remain controversial a hundred years after they were written. This one has. After nearly seven hundred years, the ideas discussed in Mountain Dharma are still as provocative as when Dölpopa first openly taught them in 1330. Written for learned practitioners of Vajrayāna Buddhism who were meditating in mountain retreats, Dölpopa’s masterpiece is filled with an ocean of quotations selected from the Indian Buddhist scriptures and treatises translated into Tibetan and preserved in the canonical collections of the Kangyur and Tengyur. When deciphering the true intent of these passages of definitive meaning, he never mentions another Tibetan author or book. His only goal is to establish the validity of his theories based on Indian works of indisputable authority.
"Few controversial books remain controversial a hundred years after they were written. This one has."
Dölpopa’s ideas spread widely and have had an enduring impact on Tibetan Buddhism to the present day. He taught that the ultimate and the relative are both empty, but they must be empty in different ways. Phenomena at the relative level are empty of self-nature and no more real than the fictitious horn of a rabbit or the child of a barren woman. In contrast, the reality of ultimate truth is empty only of those other relative phenomena. Dölpopa was not simply setting up these viewpoints of emptiness of self-nature, or rangtong (rang stong), and emptiness of other, or shentong (gzhan stong), as opposed theories located on the same level. He saw them as complementary, making the distinction that the view of the emptiness of other applied only to the ultimate and the emptiness of self-nature only to the relative. Both approaches are essential for a correct understanding of the nature of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. He disagreed with those who said both the ultimate and the relative are empty of self-nature and did not accept that anything was not empty of self-nature. Many masters in India and Tibet had held opinions similar to Dölpopa’s in the past, but he was the first to write about such ideas in detail, using terminology that was new and shocking for many of his contemporaries.
Dölpopa, who was also known as The Buddha from Dölpo and The Omniscient Dölpopa Who Embodies the Buddhas of the Three Times, identified the ultimate with the buddha nature, or sugata essence, which he held to be eternal and not empty of self-nature, but only empty of other. The buddha nature is perfect, with all its characteristics inherently present in all living beings. It is only the impermanent and temporary afflictions veiling the buddha nature that are empty of self-nature and must be removed through the practice of the path to allow it to manifest. He often remarked that most buddhas and bodhisattvas agreed with him, but most scholars in Tibet opposed him. They viewed similar statements in the scriptures to be of provisional, not definitive, meaning and in need of interpretation for the true intent to be correctly understood. This was the opinion of the Sakya tradition to which Dölpopa belonged before he moved to Jonang. He thus kept his new viewpoint secret for some time, knowing it would be misunderstood by those who had closed minds and were accustomed to different interpretations.
Dölpopa also asked if a relative truth were possible without an ultimate truth, the incidental possible without the primordial, and phenomena possible without a true nature. If their existence were possible without an ultimate, primordial, true nature, would these relative, incidental phenomena then not constitute an omnipresent reality or true nature? But if it were impossible for there to be no ultimate, would that not contradict the notion of an ultimate that is totally unestablished? Everything cannot be just empty of self-nature, because there would be no fundamental difference between the ultimate and the relative. For Dölpopa, the ultimate is a true, eternal, and established reality, empty merely of other relative phenomena.
"The ultimate and the relative are both empty, but they must be empty in different ways."
Such descriptions of reality and the buddha nature are found in many Mahāyāna scriptures that the Tibetan tradition places in the third turning of the Dharma wheel, and in the Buddhist tantras. But no one in Tibet before Dölpopa had specifically emphasized that ultimate reality was not empty of self-nature. And he admitted that his teachings and the Dharma language he was using were new, but only in the sense that they were not well known in Tibet. They had come from the realm of Shambhala to the north, where they had been widespread from an early time. He explicitly linked his ideas to the Kālacakra Tantra and its great commentary, the Stainless Light, composed by the Shambhala king Kalkī Puṇḍarīka.
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A brilliant annotated translation of Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen’s Mountain Dharma that opens a masterpiece of the Jonang tradition to Western readers and presents Dölpopa’s provocative ideas about a true, eternal, and established reality that still impact Buddhism today.
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