HOW TO READ CLASSICAL TIBETAN Volume 2: Buddhist Tenets
Jay-dzun-ba's Presentation of Tenets
Translated and Annotated for language Students
By Craig Preston
320 pages, with first occurrence glossary of new particles, words, and phrases complete glossary, index of sentence diagrams.

I have written this book for intermediate Classical Tibetan language students who are interested in Buddhist philosophy and who want to improve their reading of Classical Tibetan through self-study. My goal is to teach students to recognize and decode the recurrent patterns of Classical Tibetan syntax. I also want to introduce students to the vocabulary of the tenets genre. Focusing on the task of teaching students to read Tibetan leaves open the question of how to address the philosophical content of the text. Does exposition of the underlying philosophical issues support the primary focus of helping language students, or does it detract from teaching students to read Tibetan, perhaps merely by providing too much information? On the one hand, my own experience has shown that merely learning to read Tibetan is a substantial task. I picked Jay-dzün Chö-gyi-gyel-tsen’s Presentation of Tenets to annotate for language students because this book will make the task of learning to read Tibetan easier. It is a standard work, using the core vocabulary of the topic of tenets. It is written in a simple, straightforward style. It is also a short book. The entire text is included in an appendix at the end of this book in a little over fifteen pages. It is written in a repetitive style. Each chapter is organized around the same seven-point outline. The amount of vocabulary to learn is manageable. The glossary of words, particles, and numerous compounds and phrases for the entire book has about 1,150 entries. The factors of simplicity, brevity, and repetition make this text ideally suited for Tibetan language students, who will find that it is easier to learn vocabulary and recognize recurring patterns of syntax when a limited number of terms and patterns recur frequently.

On the other hand, the qualities of simplicity, brevity, and repetition which make the book appealing to language students seem less well suited to the task of learning the underlying philosophy. There is almost no contextualizing of issues at all. The sections are quite sparse, like a series of telegrams. In fairness, we need to remember that a work of this sort is never intended to stand alone, without commentary, and independent of any context. Jay-dzün Chö-gyi-gyel-tsen was writing for a specific audience—young monks at Ge-luk debating institutions. These monasteries were not colleges as we use the term, but ritual communities of monks. Tenets manuals were studied during the preliminary phase of scholastic education. Jay-dzün-ba intentionally summarized only the major points, much like an outline, to be memorized by monks. The book served as a basis for a teacher’s oral elaborations to his students, who would then probe issues during debate sessions with one another for hours every day. Tenets manuals were not studied in isolation, but rather in conjunction with the other manuals studied during the preliminary phase of a monk’s education. Some understanding of this rich social and pedagogical context is necessary to appreciate the text. The ability to make the underlying philosophical issues come aliveis enhanced through placing tenets within this larger context of Tibetan religious culture. It seems reasonable for me to assume that you would not be bothering to learn to read a book about philosophy written in Tibetan if you weren’t interested in the underlying philosophical issues to some extent. Thus, some discussion of the intellectual context is warranted even in a book primarily designed for language students.

My compromise between saying too little about the philosophical issues (which bears the risk that even the central issues will not become accessible) and saying too much (which bears the risk of overwhelming language students with philosophy) is to address philosophical issues in three ways. I have included some admittedly superficial exposition of key philosophical issues as they come up to provide a context for approaching them. To augment this, I will direct the reader to the many excellent translations available on tenets by annotating the text with references where you can read more about individual topics. Finally, for the remainder of this chapter and the next, I will provide background material on the author, the genre of tenets, and the Tibetan monastic education system that used them. In the next chapter I will discuss how the wealth of detail found within grounds and paths manuals should be integrated with tenets manuals.

Indian Buddhist Tenets through Tibetan Eyes

You might wonder, why read a summary of Indian Buddhist tenets written by a Tibetan who lived hundreds of years after these tenets were formulated? Why not just read the Indian texts themselves? Approaching Indian Buddhist philosophy through the interpretive window of Tibetan systematizations as tenets has weaknesses as well as strengths. Some people think Indian Buddhist philosophy is best presented within a historical approach reflecting the order of events in India, rather than through Tibetan treatises on tenets. The reconstructive approach of Tibetan scholars is artificial and ahistorical, they say. The tenet systems themselves were set out in a Tibetan reconstruction, self-consciously in contradistinction to each other, long after the source texts were written in India. The way Tibetans ordered the tenet systems (from the Great Exposition School to the Middle Way School) did not follow the order of their historical development in India. In some cases, the subdivisions presented as separate schools with distinguishing names were entirely a Tibetan innovation. For instance, all Tibetans speak of the Autonomy School and Consequence School, while acknowledging this distinction was not used in India. Other divisions are controversial even within Tibet. The division of the Sátra School into Sátra School Following Scripture and Sátra School Following Reasoning is favored by Ge-luks, while rejected by Sa-gyas. Finally, some people think the minutiae of Tibetan commentaries detract from what should be the proper focus, the root texts of the Indian writers themselves.

Whatever merits these arguments might have, they mask what are for me many interesting questions. From whose point of view do you tell the story of Buddhist philosophy? Is Buddhist philosophy best approached from the point of view of the original sources, or from the point of view of those who investigate and adopt Buddhism from some foreign culture? Must Buddha be the focal point of discussions of Buddhist philosophy? Should the focus be on the chief Indian commentators on his thought, Nagarjuna and Asanga? Are there advantages to placing Tibetans—who lived over a thousand years after Buddhist philosophy’s formative period in India—at center stage when investigating Buddhist tenets?

I think the advantages to making Tibetans of the classic period the central figures in the examination of Indian Buddhist tenets outweigh the limitations of this approach. Jay-dzün Chö-gyi-gyel-tsen wrote his short Presentation of Tenets at a time when Tibet had already been assimilating Indian Buddhism for over five hundred years. Tibetan Buddhism evolved in phases, beginning with the translation of a large body of sátras, tantras, and commentaries from India. Following the period of translation was the classic period from about 1200 to 1500. In this period Tibetans standardized the canon and created competing systematizations of Indian Buddhism. With competing systematizations came partisan writing, supporting each tradition’s systematizations and finding fault with alternate systematizations. The tenets genre evolved within this rich intellectual climate of sectarian differences aired in print.

In philosophically significant respects, our situation shares similarities with Tibetans of the classical period. Just as Tibetans wrestled with the Buddhist philosophy they imported from the foreign culture of India and made it their own, we Westerners are trying to understand the philosophical outlook of people such as Döl-bo-ba Shay-rap-gyel-tsen and Tsong-kha-pa from a foreign culture who lived long before us. I find it significant that Tibetans, when faced with the task of assimilating Indian Buddhist philosophy and making it their own, adopted an ahistorical approach to Indian Buddhism. They made the ideas the center of their inquiry, not the actual history. These discrete “tenet systems” may exist primarily in the reconstructions born from the Tibetans’ creative imagination. That is precisely their relevance and strength for us. In the Buddhist view we are examining, it is within our own imagination that bondage and liberation are possible (more on this in the next chapter). Thus for someone who wants to make the study of Buddhist philosophy personal through investigating how phenomena exist, the imagination is an excellent realm in which to locate the study of tenets.