Rangtong, self-emptiness, holds that everything without exception is empty of inherent existence, including the ultimate itself; there is no residue. Shentong, other-emptiness, holds that ultimate reality, identified with buddha-nature or with the nature of mind, is empty of everything extraneous to it but not of itself. Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen of the Jonang school set the second out systematically in the fourteenth century. The Gelug school rejects it as a self under another name, and the objection is that an ultimate that is not itself empty is precisely what emptiness was formulated to deny. The Kagyu and Nyingma traditions are not uniform: the Karma Kagyu after the Third Karmapa reads buddha-nature in shentong terms, and Mipham's Nyingma reading treats the two as descriptions at different levels rather than as rivals. Sakya scholarship rejects shentong and, in Gorampa's hands, argued against the Gelug reading as well, holding a position the tradition calls freedom from extremes.
Facts
Position Profile
Principal ProponentDolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen of the Jonang, who set out the other-emptiness position systematically in the fourteenth century. 1 Principal CriticThe Gelug school, which rejects other-emptiness as a self under another name; Sakya scholarship rejects it as well, and in Gorampa's hands argued against the Gelug reading at the same time. 1 Opposing PositionRangtong, on which everything without exception is empty of inherent existence, the ultimate included, leaving no residue. 1 Origins
Held ByJonang above all. The Karma Kagyu after the Third Karmapa reads buddha-nature in other-emptiness terms, and Mipham's Nyingma reading treats the two as descriptions at different levels rather than as rivals. 1 Origin of the NameTibetan rang stong, empty of itself, and gzhan stong, empty of what is other than itself. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionGenuinely disputed within this tradition 1Tradition: Tibetan Buddhism Doctrinal CategoryMind, Self and Emptiness 1 Disputed
Point in DisputeWhether an ultimate that is not itself empty is precisely what emptiness was formulated to deny, which is the Gelug objection, or whether denying it leaves nothing for buddha-nature to name, which is the Jonang reply. 1 Learn More
A Doctrine the Fifth Dalai Lama's Government Tried to Close Down
Dolpopa's fourteenth century systematization of other-emptiness did not simply lose an academic argument, it was suppressed by force. The Jonang school he had built the doctrine within flourished for roughly three centuries after him, with its own monasteries and its own textual tradition, until the Fifth Dalai Lama's Gelug government, consolidating political and religious authority across central Tibet in the seventeenth century, closed Jonang monasteries, converted most of them to Gelug institutions, and restricted the printing and circulation of Dolpopa's own works. Jonang teaching survived afterward mainly at the margins, in monasteries in Amdo far from central Tibetan Gelug authority, where the tradition continued with reduced institutional standing rather than disappearing outright.
The doctrinal dispute and the political suppression are not simply parallel events, because the Gelug objection that shentong smuggles a self back in under the name of ultimate reality was also an argument about which school's account of emptiness the newly centralized Tibetan state would treat as orthodox. Modern scholarship on Dolpopa, working from manuscripts that survived the suppression and were not widely available outside specialist circles until relatively recently, has recovered a more systematic and more carefully argued shentong position than the Gelug polemical summary of it generally conveyed, part of why the rangtong and shentong dispute continues to be actively reargued in contemporary Tibetan Buddhist scholarship rather than treated as settled by the outcome of the seventeenth century.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The Gelug position is rangtong: emptiness is the absence of inherent existence in a thing itself, and any account making buddha-nature empty only of what is extraneous to it is rejected as a self under another name.
Shentong is the Jonang position and the school is identified with it: Dolpopa taught that ultimate reality is empty of everything extraneous to it but not of its own nature, against the reading that it is empty of any nature at all.
Why this is disputed. The Kagyu tradition is not uniform on this axis and both readings are argued from inside the lineage. The Karma Kagyu has produced teachers on both sides of the divide across its history, and no single settled Kagyu position on self-emptiness against other-emptiness has ever been agreed across its various sub-lineages.
The Tibetan dispute over self-emptiness and other-emptiness is a dispute about how Madhyamaka is to be read, and both sides claim Nagarjuna for their own position.
Why this is disputed. Nyingma writers differ over which side of this division the school stands on, and some reject the division itself. Some Nyingma scholars align the tradition's dzogchen teaching with a rangtong reading, others with shentong, and a third group holds that dzogchen's own view was never meant to be sorted into either category in the first place.
Sakya scholarship rejects shentong, and Gorampa argued against the Gelug rangtong reading as well, holding a third position the tradition calls freedom from extremes.
Held Differently
Karma Kagyu, Denominations The Karma Kagyu is the Kagyu branch most consistently associated with shentong, following the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje's reading of buddha-nature.
Positions on This Question
This is the question the Tibetan schools sort themselves by, and Tibetan Buddhism as a whole holds no answer to it: the Gelug position is rangtong, the Jonang position shentong, and currents within Kagyu and Nyingma stand on the shentong side. It is recorded here as the tradition's own dividing question rather than as a doctrine the tradition holds.
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