Tsongkhapa · Theology
Tsongkhapa’s thesis, poured into a hymn of devotion, that emptiness and cause-and-effect are perfectly compatible and even reinforce each other - so that dependent arising is itself the <em>reason</em> for emptiness - and his gratitude to the Buddha as the teacher who revealed it.
Among Tsongkhapa’s many works, one stands apart in tone: In Praise of Dependent Arising (in Tibetan, rten-brel bstod-pa), also called Dependent Arising: A Praise of the Buddha. It is not a treatise but a hymn - an outpouring of gratitude to Shakyamuni Buddha. Yet its subject is the most rigorous point in all of Tsongkhapa’s philosophy. He tells us he composed it after a long retreat at Wolkha, during which he dreamed of Nagarjuna and his great commentators and, consulting the commentary of Buddhapalita, finally broke through to a complete understanding of emptiness. The overwhelming emotion that followed did not make him praise the Buddha for miracles or majesty. It made him praise the Buddha for one specific teaching: dependent arising. That, Tsongkhapa says, is what a Buddha is supremely to be thanked for - the insight that everything arises in dependence, which is the master key to reality. The hymn is thus a rare thing: a work of technical philosophy written in the language of the heart.
Buddhist philosophers offered several arguments for emptiness. Tsongkhapa singled out one as supreme, calling it the ‘king of reasons’: the argument from dependent arising. It runs like this. Whatever arises in dependence on something else cannot have an independent, self-established nature, because to depend is precisely not to stand alone. Everything we encounter - every object, every self, every event - arises in dependence: on causes and conditions, on its own parts, and on the mind that conceives and names it. Therefore everything is empty of independent existence. What makes this reason ‘royal’ is that it establishes emptiness without throwing away the world. Other approaches to emptiness risk sounding like a demolition; this one derives emptiness from the most obvious and undeniable feature of things - that they arise from and depend on other things. Dependent arising is the one premise a nihilist cannot use, because it affirms that things really do arise and function. From that affirmation, emptiness follows - and follows in a form that can never collapse into nothingness.
It can seem strange that Tsongkhapa expresses his most rigorous philosophy as devotion. But for him the two are one. To understand dependent arising is to be released from the deepest ignorance - the grasping at independent existence that is the root of all suffering - and the being who made that release possible, by seeing it directly and then teaching it, is the Buddha. So gratitude is not a decoration on the philosophy; it is the appropriate response to what the philosophy reveals. Tsongkhapa praises the Buddha not as a distant deity but as the supreme teacher, the one who found the way things actually are and, out of compassion, spoke it into words that others could follow to freedom. The hymn even carries a note of longing: Tsongkhapa laments that he was not born in the Buddha’s presence, and vows to repay the teacher’s kindness by upholding this precise, easily-lost teaching. In this fusion of sharp analysis and warm devotion, we see the whole of Tsongkhapa: the scholar-practitioner for whom understanding reality and loving the one who revealed it are not two acts but one.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Tsongkhapa wrote a hymn praising the Buddha specifically as the teacher of dependent arising , and that its core claim is that dependent origination is the reason for emptiness: because things arise dependently, they must be empty of independent existence, so emptiness and cause-and-effect confirm rat…
Leads to Nagarjuna.
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