Emptiness-Of-Other, Suppressed and Surviving

The Jonang school is defined by a distinctive and controversial philosophical position, zhentong ("emptiness of other"). Where the mainstream Tibetan reading of Madhyamaka holds that all phenomena are empty of any intrinsic nature (rangtong, "empty of self"), the Jonang masters, pre-eminently Dolpopa (1292-1361) and later the great scholar-historian Taranatha (1575-1634), taught that ultimate reality, the buddha-nature, is empty only of what is other than itself, of adventitious defilements, while being itself replete and truly existent. This was condemned by many, especially in the ascendant Gelug order, as verging on eternalism.

In the seventeenth century the Fifth Dalai Lama's government forcibly converted the main Jonang monasteries to Gelug and the school was widely believed extinct in central Tibet. In fact it survived in the remote region of Amdo, where its monasteries and its zhentong teaching continued unbroken; in recent decades the Jonang has been more openly recognised again as a distinct living tradition.