The Buddha From Dolpo: A study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen.

• Author: Tatz, Mark
• Position: Review

The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen. By CYRUS STEARNS. SUNY Series in Buddhist Studies. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1999. Pp. xi + 318. $20.95 (paper).

The mainstream of philosophy of monastic Buddhism in Tibet takes the Middle Stanzas (Madhyamaka-karika) of Nagarjuna as the ultimate statement of how things are: all phenomena (dharma) are empty of self-nature (rang-stong). However, one stream of heterodox thought, sometimes suppressed, has developed an ontology that places "emptiness of self-nature" on a non-ultimate plane (a "relative truth," samvrtisatya); the ultimate view is that the highest nature, or buddhahood, is only "empty of other" (gzhan-stong), i.e., empty of relative phenomena, but is itself full of positive qualities. Furthermore, "the Buddha nature is perfect and complete from the beginning, with all the characteristics of a Buddha eternally present in every living being" (p. 3). This view is traced back to Nagarjuna in others of his works, and is regarded as the philosophy of the highest tantras, especially the Kalacakra Tantra, and as the culmination of Buddhist thought.

This heterodox stream of thinking has itself a number of branches. It has attracted the attention of several modern scholars, and in their researches Dolpopa (A.D. 1292-1361) has come to light as an early, perhaps the earliest formulator and teacher of "other-emptiness."

In the book under review, based upon a 1996 doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Washington, Stearns provides a life of Dolpopa, a history of "other-emptiness" doctrine, and an exposition of Dolpopa's own doctrine. (Shouldn't the latter two sections be reversed?) Sources for the life are biographies by two of Dolpopa's disciples, and later histories. The history of the doctrine is a marvelous work of scholarship, relying almost entirely on diverse untranslated Tibetan sources. The exposition of Dolpopa's doctrine contextualizes and clarifies his doctrinal works impressively.

In the second half of the book, Stearns translates (but without the original text) two works by Dolpopa. The first is an early composition in eight sections of forty-one four-line verses (but the verses are not numbered) in the form of a prayer for recitation (gsol 'debs), but distinguished, in the tradition of Nagarjuna's stotras, by heavy ideological freight and intended, according to the author, to induce "the sublime...