The Gelug Argument Against a Hidden Something

Gelug philosophers do not treat the Jonang school's other emptiness teaching as a minor variation on their own position; they read it as a return to exactly the error Madhyamaka reasoning was built to rule out. Their argument runs like this: if ultimate reality is described as empty only of what is other than itself while remaining full of its own luminous, unchanging nature, that description has smuggled a permanent, independently existing essence back into the picture under the cover of the word emptiness, the same kind of self the teaching of no self was meant to dismantle wherever it appears, whether in a person or in the fabric of reality itself. Gelug scholars press this as a philosophical criticism developed in formal debate, not as a claim that Jonang teachers are being dishonest about the experience they say their view accounts for; the disagreement is over whether that experience is best described in positive, self affirming language or in the bare negations rangtong insists on. Jonang defenders have their own long standing answer to the charge, that a purely negative account cannot make sense of what the texts describe as directly realized, and neither side has historically treated the other's position as simply a misunderstanding correctable by better explanation.