References
Citation: | Wangchuk, Dorji. "Rong-zom-pa’s Ontological Abyss: Where the Positivistic Ontology of the Tathāgatagarbha School and the Negativistic Ontology of the Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda School Meet." Critical Review for Buddhist Studies 21 (2017): 85–107. |
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called Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda. To be sure, the word ontology is used here in the sense of the philosophical theory about the true or ultimate reality of phenomena (according to any given Buddhist system).[2] In particular, the idea that the “root-less-ness” of the mind (or, the rootless mind) is the "root" of all phenomena, or ideas similar to it, is explicit in a number of textual sources that are de facto considered the literature of the Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda by Rong-zom-pa.[3]
With an intention to contribute a little to gaining a fuller and more accurate picture of the intellectual agenda and philosophical edifice of Rong-zom Chos-kyi-bzang-po (henceforth: Rong-zom-pa), an eleventh-century Tibetan scholar, I wish to address in this article merely one question, namely, how Rong-zom-pa interprets what we shall call the positivistic ontology of the Tathāgatagarbha school[1] while he himself undoubtedly proposes a radically negativistic ontology of a Madhyamaka sub-school called Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda. To be sure, the word ontology is used here in the sense of the philosophical theory about the true or ultimate reality of phenomena (according to any given Buddhist system).[2] In particular, the idea that the "root-less-ness" of the mind (or, the rootless mind) is the "root" of all phenomena, or ideas similar to it, is explicit in a number of textual sources that are de-facto considered the literature of the Sarvadharmāpratiṣṭhānavāda by Rong-zom-pa.[3] (Wangchuk, prologue, 87–89)
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