Tsongkhapa's Praise for Dependent Relativity by Je Tsongkhapa
Author:Je Tsongkhapa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Perspectives on the Lower Schools’ Views
Though the thinkers of the lower schools contemplate various levels of dependent relativity to reach their insights, this does not prompt in them the suspicion that the self altogether lacks inherent existence. When they refute the permanent, unitary, independent self, they refute any self having a separate nature from the aggregates. When they refute the self-sufficient, substantially existent self, they refute a self from within the aggregates that has independent control over them. But when the Consequentialists penetrate to the third, subtlest, level of selflessness, they understand that not just persons but all phenomena, including the aggregates, have no “own-nature” whatsoever.
In complete contrast, the other schools say that form, feeling, discrimination, mind, and many of the items collected in the compositional factors aggregate are all substantially existent. In this way, they claim, a substantial foundation remains even if a person is only imputed. They can show how someone who is only an imputed existent can still be reliably identified, since he or she is supported by the sound bedrock of substantial aggregates. So for them the basis for the imputation of the person cannot itself be imputed.
Some noted scholars from these non-Consequentialist schools make another interesting move. They accept some form of subtle mental consciousness—different schools have different descriptions of it—as a substantially existing self. The subtle mental consciousness is the substratum of mind that persists from life to life even when coarser levels of consciousness shut down and the body is discarded at death. Bhavaviveka, one of the renowned commentators of the Middle Way Autonomy school, says in his Blaze of Reasoning (chapter 18):
. . .we also actually impute the term self to the [mental] consciousness conventionally. Because the [mental] consciousness takes rebirth, it is said that it is the self.
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