Self-emptiness (rangtong): things are empty of their own inherent existence

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.

Gelug philosophers do not treat the Jonang school's other emptiness teaching as a minor variation on their own position; they read it as a return to exactly the error Madhyamaka reasoning was built to rule out. Their argument runs like this: if ultimate reality is described as empty only of what is other than itself while remaining full of its own luminous, unchanging nature, that description has smuggled a permanent, independently existing essence back into the picture under the cover of the word emptiness, the same kind of self the teaching of no self was meant to dismantle wherever it appears, whether in a person or in the fabric of reality itself. Gelug scholars press this as a philosophical criticism developed in formal debate, not as a claim that Jonang teachers are being dishonest about the experience they say their view accounts for; the disagreement is over whether that experience is best described in positive, self affirming language or in the bare negations rangtong insists on. Jonang defenders have their own long standing answer to the charge, that a purely negative account cannot make sense of what the texts describe as directly realized, and neither side has historically treated the other's position as simply a misunderstanding correctable by better explanation.