This book aims to expound, for both scholars and practitioners of Buddhism, the doctrine of the "emptiness-of-the-other" (shentong, to adopt the author's more-or-less phonetic method of rendering terms in Tibetan; a more formally accurate transcription would be gzhan-stong), a Buddhist tradition of metaphysical reasoning that has its roots in Indian tathāgatagarbha thought and is associated especially with the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages in Tibet. This tradition of reasoning, as the author claims, has been given little attention by Western scholars working on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism; they have focused on the Madhyamaka schools in India and on their Gelug and Sakya inheritors in Tibet, and to a somewhat lesser extent upon Indian Yogācāra. In so far as they have said anything about the Shentong tradition or its Indian precursors, they have tended to dismiss it as heretical or not really Buddhist-often following in this the rhetoric of Gelug polemics. Dr. Hookham's book is therefore a welcome corrective, being, as she claims, "the first book in a Western language to discuss at length the views of Tibetan Shentong writers on the basis of their own works" (p. 5).
Tibetan scholastics divide over whether ultimate reality is best characterized as "self-empty" (rangtong)-i.e., empty simpliciter; or whether it should be described as empty of everything other than itself (shentong), but not simply empty. If the second alternative is taken then the deconstructive analytical procedures of Buddhist reasoning and meditational practice leave behind, when they have run their course, the purity, bliss, and radiance of the Buddha-mind, the body of dharma, which is empty not of itself but only of what is other than it. If the first alternative is followed then nothing is left behind; there is no possibility of nondual experience, the spontaneous shining forth of the Buddha-mind–or so at least a follower of the Shentong tradition would say. These are little more than caricatures of subtle and complex positions (Hookham's analysis is much more nuanced); but they do capture something of what the disagreement is about.
The first position is identified (in its extreme form) with the Gelug exponents of Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka, and the second, expounded and defended in this book, is identified with the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, and is presented largely through the nineteenth-century Kagyu Lama Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye's summary and exposition of a ca. third-century C.E. Indian text called Ratnagotravibhāga (RGV). While Hookham disavows sectarian animus, it is clear that her sympathies lie with the Kagyu position on shentong, and (markedly) against the Gelug. So we have here not just an exposition and study of an important Indo-Tibetan scholastic controversy, but also a contribution to it.
Hookham also emphasizes, rightly, that the shentong/rangtong controversy is only partly metaphysical; its resolution is also of central importance to the practice of meditation, since what one thinks about the nature of ultimate reality will directly influence how one engages in the kinds of virtuoso practice that are recommended and undertaken at the higher stages of the path to salvation.
In the six chapters of the first section of this book (pp. 11-131), Hookham sets forth the issues that divide adherents of shentong from those of rangtong. These issues are in part metaphysical and soteriological, as already indicated; but they are also deeply doxographic and hermeneutical, since metaphysical and soteriological disagreements among Indo-Tibetan scholastics are almost always pursued in terms of doxographic disagreements about which texts and lineages belong to which schools, and hermeneutical disagreements about what pivotal textual evidence means. The material analyzed here is unremittingly technical, but reading it with care provides a splendid illustration of how scholastic debate in these traditions proceeds.
But there are occasional oddities. Hookham, in expounding, for instance, the debates between the two sides about the status of a particular Indic text (the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra), betrays the fact that she thinks there is a right answer to the question of whether this work should be taken to mean what it says (e.g., at p. 118). This shows once again that she is a participant in, as well as a reporter on, these debates; but it also shows that she is sometimes false to the thrust of her own work on these doxographic/hermeneutical debates, for this work suggests strongly that disagreements about the status or meaning of some text are secondary to and parasitic upon straightforwardly metaphysical disagreements. It therefore makes very little sense to discuss hermeneutical disagree ments of this kind as though they could be resolved by appeal to the evidence of disputed texts without reference to the more basic metaphysical differences.
The two chapters that comprise the second section (pp. 135-78) give a historical introduction to the Shentong tradition, as well as to the interpreters of the RGV and its vyākhyā, texts of key importance for that tradition. The historical survey traces the development of thought about shentong from the Jonangpas of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries (especially Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, 1292-1361), who coined the term and developed systematic thought around it, to the contemporary Kagyu Lamas. (I note parenthetically that there appears to be some confusion about dates: Mikyo Dorje is dated 1507-55 on p. 140, and 1507-54 on p. 152; Kongtrul is dated 1813-1901 on p. 152 and 1813-99 on p. 161.) Throughout, Hookham emphasizes the connection between the affirmation of shentong and the tantric practices of the siddhas or 'accomplished ones', and suggests (again, making it obvious where her sympathies lie) that at least some of the scholastic animus against the followers of the Shentong tradition was fueled by the dislike of professional intellectuals for "mystics" (pp. 143-46). She also makes the more useful and pertinent point that the development of thought about shentong at the hands of Dolpopa met (or attempted to meet) an important conceptual need: that of linking the sūtras and the tantras. It was principally for this that the Tibetan expositors of shentong made such extensive use of the RGV.
The three chapters that comprise the third section (pp. 181-294) give an extended analysis of the RGV and its vyākhyā from a Shentong viewpoint; a translation of the introductory section of Kongtrul's commentary on these texts; and some concluding remarks. There is extraordinarily valuable material here, both for the understanding of the RGV corpus and for the understanding of the Tibetan tradition of commentary and analysis upon it. In her conclusions (pp. 289-94) Hookham once again plays the scholastic in good Indo-Tibetan style by providing a hierarchical arrangement of the interpretations of Tathāgatagarbha doctrine according to which the Shentong reading is placed at the top. Five appendices conclude the book (pp. 295-326); they provide brief discussions of technical matters and of resources for further study.
I have pointed to the strengths of this book in the course of this review; chief among them are its presentation of and contribution to an important scholastic debate which has until now been relatively little known in the West. But it also has some important weaknesses, among which I note three: first, Hookham writes a lumpish and clumsy prose, and is apparently quite without sensitivity to the possibility of presenting and contributing, in lucid and precise English, to the scholastic debates that move her; second, she appears not to have made a serious study of Sanskrit, which calls into question her occasional attempts (e.g., pp. 99-100) to enter into analysis of the Sanskrit text of the RGV; and third, she appears entirely innocent of the large body of work written by Japanese scholars in Japanese on the materials that concern her. These weaknesses are not disabling, but they are significant.
PAUL J. GRIFFITHS UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
