How a Suppressed School Survived at the Edge of Tibet

Shentong doctrine did not simply lose a philosophical argument and fade; it was administratively suppressed. In the mid seventeenth century, under the government the fifth Dalai Lama established, Jonang's central Tibetan monasteries, including Dolpopa's own seat, were closed to the tradition, their libraries partly sealed, and their monastic populations converted into Gelug institutions, a decisive political intervention rather than a gradual loss of adherents. The suppression was effective in central Tibet specifically, which is why later generations of Tibetan Buddhists there sometimes described shentong as an extinct or purely historical position. It was never extinct at the edge of the Tibetan cultural world. Jonang communities in the Amdo and Golok regions of eastern Tibet, geographically distant from the central government's reach, kept ordaining monks and teaching the doctrine without interruption across the same centuries, and Jonang institutions in that region remain active today. The tradition also found new attention within the nineteenth century Rime, or non sectarian, movement, whose leading scholars treated shentong as a serious philosophical option worth studying on its own terms rather than as a settled error, restoring it to wider Tibetan Buddhist conversation from outside the school that had tried to end it.