Dolpopa's Doctrine, Recovered From Its Own Suppression

Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, born in 1292 and trained first within the Sakya tradition before his own thinking diverged from it, built the doctrine that became shentong from a close reading of buddha nature literature and the Kalachakra tantra, texts he read as describing an ultimate reality that is positively present rather than a mere absence. On his account, the buddha nature spoken of in Mahayana sutras is not empty of its own qualities, only empty of the adventitious defilements that are other than it and obscure it from view, so that awakening is a matter of removing what covers an already complete nature rather than constructing something that was not there before. Dolpopa taught this at Jonang monastery, which gave the position its later name, and treated it as the teaching the tantras themselves point to when they describe an ultimate reality that practitioners realize directly rather than infer through negation alone. Cyrus Stearns's scholarly reconstruction of Dolpopa's own Tibetan writings, produced because so much of that record had been actively suppressed for centuries after his death, is largely why a reader outside the tradition can now access his argument in anything like its own terms rather than only through the later polemics of the schools that opposed it.