Tsongkhapa's Ganden and the Case for a Bare Negation

Tsongkhapa founded Ganden monastery in 1409, and the tradition that grew from it, later called Gelug, built its philosophical identity on a specific reading of Madhyamaka reasoning that treats emptiness as a pure negation and nothing more. On this reading, to say a person or a phenomenon is empty is only to say that no independent, self standing nature can be found in it when it is properly analyzed; the analysis finds an absence and stops there, without positing anything positive behind or beneath that absence to explain what is really going on. Tsongkhapa argued this bare negation is not a lesser or incomplete account of ultimate reality but the correct and complete one, because any attempt to describe what emptiness itself positively consists of reintroduces exactly the kind of independent existence the whole analysis was meant to dissolve. The position became known by the Tibetan term rangtong, self emptiness, marking what it denies, a thing's own inherent nature, rather than naming any further thing the analysis is thought to arrive at. It set the philosophical terms Gelug scholastics have defended in debate against rival Tibetan readings ever since, most persistently against the very different account the Jonang tradition built around the same word, emptiness, used to mean something structurally opposite.