Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

336 Timeless Rapture
In Tibet’s new political world, this was insufficient grounds for action:
a “spiritual” justification had to be given for the extinguishing of Jonang
institutions. Our spiritual ancestor, the recently deceased Taranata, provided
a suitable target. Two charges were leveled against him. First, he was
deemed a corrupt monk. As evidence, his own very explicit account of his
sexual encounters was read in public. 51 Had he been alive, he might have
retorted, the tantras’ chapters and verses in hand, that his chosen spiritual
path was that of the highest level of Buddhism. He preferred to view the
lower paths of Buddhism from the perspective of the higher, rather than
the other way around. His reading of the three vows corresponded to that
of many accomplished tantric masters of India and Tibet. The Tibetan
debate concerning the proper integration of Buddhism’s three levels of
vows began many centuries before him and continues to the present day,
but this marked a low point in the conversation. Taranata’s views were
branded unreasonable and dangerous; the system of monasteries he had led
was deemed contaminated.
The new central government did not stop there. A second charge was
leveled against Taranata and the Jonang system, that of heresy. What was
the view so wicked and inimical to warrant the closure of a monastic system?
Precisely the one mentioned earlier in relation to Kunga Drolchok—
extraneous emptiness. To repeat Gyurmé Dorjé’s words, it is “the view that
all the attributes of Buddhahood are extraneously empty of mundane
impurities and defilements, but not intrinsically empty in a nihilistic sense,
their experience thereby transcending all notions of existence and nonexistence.”
To put it in slightly easier language, proponents of extraneous
emptiness contend that our innate enlightenment, buddha nature, is not
merely empty but constitutes an infinite mine of enlightenment’s inconceivable
and indescribable qualities, which cannot be identified as existent
or nonexistent. What is truly empty is that which veils our enlightened
nature—the “mundane impurities and defilements,” such as karma, negative
states of mind, and habitual patterns.
Kalu Rinpoché used to characterize this debate, which has kept lamps
burning during long Tibetan nights for many centuries before and after the
Jonang, as an argument over whether a glass is half empty or half full.
However, the early seventeenth century was no place for such an openminded
attitude. The new government declared Taranata and the Jonang
system guilty of heresy. As punishment, they impounded the wood blocks
used to print the heretical works. Thus, Taranata’s Collected Works remained