Study and Retreats for Gaining Nonconceptual Cognition of Voidness

Then he went to study with a great Karma Kagyu master called Lama Umapa. Umapa means Madhyamika; someone who follows Madhyamaka. He went to study Madhyamaka with him, and also one special form of Manjushri. This lama had daily visions of Manjushri; Manjushri taught him one verse every day. And so Tsongkhapa and Lama Umapa became mutual teacher and disciple. They studied with each other and taught each other, which is a nice type of relationship. Sometimes you find that, certainly with the teachers of His Holiness. They have that type of relationship with each other; they share teachings with each other.

What’s very interesting is Lama Umapa started to check with Tsongkhapa to get confirmation that the teachings he received in his visions of Manjushri were correct or not. And this also is pointed out as an important point: even if you get visions from Manjushri, how do you know that it is not some ghost that’s pretending to be Manjushri and teaching you things? And so he checked with Tsongkhapa to get confirmation—Is it really correct? Does it make sense or not?

So, together with Lama Umapa, Tsongkhapa did a very extensive retreat on Manjushri. And from this time onwards, Tsongkhapa himself received direct instruction from Manjushri in pure visions and he was able to receive directly from Manjushri the answers to his various questions. Before that, he had to ask his questions to Manjushri through Lama Umapa. Now he could communicate directly with Manjushri.

So, of course, we could ask the question—these skeptical Westerners—What in the world does this mean, to be able to have visions and communicate and get teachings from Manjushri? I never asked the old Serkong Rinpoche, but I asked the young Serkong Rinpoche. He’s now 19. I have certainly as close a relation with him as I had with the old one. So I asked him about this. Because the old Serkong Rinpoche’s father, Serkong Dorjechang, had a vision of Tsongkhapa; and in this vision of Tsongkhapa—Tsongkhapa’s most difficult text is called The Good Explanation of Interpretable and Definitive Meanings (Drang-nges legs-bshad snying-po). It’s the most difficult text on the Chittamatra and Madhyamaka schools. The old Serkong Rinpoche recited it every day from memory. It’s 250 pages long. Every day he recited it from memory.

There’s a lineage that goes back to Tsongkhapa—it went down through all the generations—but there’s this special lineage that the old Serkong Rinpoche’s father, Serkong Dorjechang, received from a vision of Tsongkhapa, who gave him the oral transmission of the text and explained it to him. So I asked, “What’s this? What’s the story?” And so he told the story that Dorjechang was doing a retreat on this text in some cave up in the mountains to try to understand it more deeply. And one day a monk walked into his cave and sat down and explained to him the whole text; gave him the transmission. And it was quite an extraordinary explanation, and so on. And at the conclusion of it the monk said, “Oh, excuse me, I have to go out to the toilet.” And so the monk went outside and then didn’t come back, and so Dorjechang was wondering why. What happened? Maybe something happened. There was all snow and stuff, high up in the mountains outside of the cave. And he walked outside the cave—and there were no footprints; there was no nothing. And so he concluded that this had to have been a vision of Tsongkhapa. But when it actually was happening, it seemed as though it was an actual real person. This I found very interesting. I never had heard an explanation of what happens during a pure vision—what is it like. And of course he explained it as though it’s the most common, ordinary thing in the world. Tibetans are like that.

So Tsongkhapa’s doing this intensive retreat with his teacher and getting these visions of Manjushri. During the retreat, Tsongkhapa felt that he still didn’t have a proper understanding of Madhyamaka and Guhyasamaja. And he was no dummy. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t studied. He really worked hard. He probably had a better understanding of anybody in his day, but he still felt it was not good enough. And so Manjushri advised him to do a very long retreat and then he would understand the notes from the instructions that Manjushri had given him—because Manjushri had explained what Tsongkhapa just couldn’t get. So Manjushri was saying, “Do a very, very long retreat. Build up more positive force.” (Guhyasamaja, by the way, is called “King of the Tantras.” It’s in the explanations to this by Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti, both great Madhyamika masters, that you find the mechanism, the key for understanding all of tantra theory. So that’s the main thing when you study tantra.) “You need to build up positive force. Merit.”

And so, after teaching a little bit after that, Tsongkhapa went into a four-year retreat with eight of his close disciples. During this retreat—he was already in his mid-30s when he was doing this—and during this retreat, they did thirty-five sets of 100,000 prostrations, one to each of the thirty-five confession Buddhas, and eighteen sets of 100,000 mandala offerings. No small thing. And consider how learned and how advanced he was before he did this. And, of course, at the same time they did Yamantaka self-initiation all the time and studied the Avatamsaka Sutra; that’s a huge sutra, and Tsongkhapa always said that this was the main source for learning about bodhisattva deeds.

After this retreat, Tsongkhapa had a vision of Maitreya Buddha. After the retreat, Tsongkhapa and his disciples restored this huge Maitreya statue in Dzingji Ling to build up even more positive force. It’s interesting that this is considered Tsongkhapa’s first great deed—restoring that statue. Not his teaching, not his retreats, not his books, or anything like that. Restoring a statue. Because it’s not only positive for him, but it gives other people great opportunity. As Lama Zopa says about the Maitreya statue he wants to build in India, it gives people the great opportunity to build up a lot of positive force. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lama Zopa thinks of this example of Tsongkhapa.

And then, after that, Tsongkhapa went back into retreat for another five months to try to put it all together. So it really shows the importance that if we have an impasse in our understanding, no matter how far we are on the path, the only way past that impasse is to really build up a tremendous amount of positive force—through purification and these sort of things, and actually doing something for the service of others. And rely on Manjushri; on the Manjushri mantra. After doing these incredible preliminary practices for four years and restoring the Maitreya statue, then Tsongkhapa went into another retreat for another five months.

There was a very famous Nyingma lama at the time called Lhodrag Namka Gyaltsen, and this Nyingma lama had, continually, visions of Vajrapani. And he invited Tsongkhapa, and they became mutual teacher and disciple. It’s from this Nyingma lama that Tsongkhapa got his main lam-rim transmissions from the Kadam tradition—two of the main Kadam lineages. There are three Kadampa lineages that had split. He got two of them from this Nyingma lama and one from a Kagyu lama. The Kadampa was divided into three: One was the lam-rim teachings, one was the textual teachings, and one was the oral guideline teachings. So he got the lam-rim and the oral guideline lineages from this Nyingma lama, and the textual tradition from a Kagyu lama. This I find very interesting. One always thinks that he got them from Kadampa lamas; he didn’t. And that Gelugpa was so separate from all these other traditions; it wasn’t. Look at this Kagyu lama, Lama Umapa, that Tsongkhapa studied Madhyamaka with; he had studied Madhyamaka with Sakya. The Sakyas were the main Madhyamaka people of those days.

Anyway, Tsongkhapa at this point wanted to go to India to study more. This also is very interesting. This is at the end of the 1300s. There’s this common part of the anti-Muslim prejudice which is that, well, Buddhism was all destroyed in India in the early 1200s and then it was finished. That wasn’t the case. This is the end of the 1300s, and Tsongkhapa wanted to go to India to study Buddhism. Obviously there were some teachers there. But Vajrapani advised Tsongkhapa to stay in Tibet since he would be of more benefit there. So Tsongkhapa didn’t go to India. But in staying, he resolved that in the future he would write the Lam-rim chen-mo (The Grand Stages of the Lam-rim Path) and the sNgags-rim chen-mo (The Grand Presentation of the Stages of Tantra) on all four classes of tantra. This is how he would most benefit.

He didn’t write them immediately, because he went into retreat again. And this time he did a retreat on the Kalachakra complete stage. And he got out of this retreat and he was still not satisfied. After all this time, he had done all these preliminaries and all this meditation, yet still hadn’t really gotten the full essence of the Madhyamaka teachings on voidness. He was still not satisfied. And it’s part of the tantric vows to never to be satisfied with your level of understanding until you reach enlightenment.

So Manjushri advised him to rely on the commentaries of Buddhapalita, a great Indian master. It’s interesting that Manjushri didn’t just give him all the answers; he directed him to the Indian texts to study. And so Tsongkhapa entered another one-year retreat at this stage, on Madhyamaka. And it was during this retreat—the end of the retreat—he got the full non-conceptual cognition of voidness. It was only at this point that he became an arya. The path of seeing.

Based on his realizations, Tsongkhapa revised completely the understanding of Prasangika-Madhyamaka of his day—the teachings on voidness and the related topics. He was a radical, radical revolutionary. It took unbelievable courage. He revised almost everything—the understanding of all the great masters of his day. And, after him, not many people agreed. His disciples agreed, but everybody else tried to refute him. And none of the other Tibetan traditions accepts what he says; his revisions. The only ones who accept some of what he said about Prasangika is Karma Kagyu, from the time of the Eighth Karmapa. They accept a little bit of his presentation of Prasangika, but the rest of the Kagyus and the Sakyas and the Nyingmas don’t accept it at all.

Tsongkhapa, however, based all his reforms strictly on logic and scriptural references. He didn’t base it on: “Well, Manjushri told me in a vision.” Based strictly on scripture and logic. He wasn’t satisfied with what his teachers had said as the deepest meaning of the great Indian texts. Now in doing this—in contradicting all his teachers, everything that they said, when he was refuting them—he wasn’t committing a breach of his close bonding relationship with his teachers. That’s very interesting.

I asked the young Serkong Rinpoche: “Seeing our teachers as Buddhas, doesn’t that mean that you can’t really go beyond them in terms of their realizations or refute them? You’re a Buddha, but your realization is wrong. Isn’t there something strange and contradictory about that?” So I asked the young Serkong Rinpoche the question, and the young Serkong Rinpoche explained. He said, “No no. It’s not any problem.” He said that to make a cake, for example, you need to put together many ingredients; you have to put together flour, butter, milk, and eggs. So our teachers show us how to make a cake and they bake a few for us. And they are very, very delicious, and we can enjoy them very much. And due to our teachers’ kindness, we now know how to make cake, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make some changes to the recipe and add a few more ingredients—some chocolate or something like that—and bake cakes that are even more delicious than the ones our teachers made. And, in doing so, we’re not being disrespectful toward our teachers. And if the teachers are really qualified, they’ll rejoice at our new recipe and enjoy the new cakes with us, and they might even decide that it’s more delicious than the ones they made.

The example of the cake is quite nice, but we’re talking here about something a little bit more serious, which is that Tsongkhapa is questioning the understanding of voidness that these arya people have, which actually is bringing into question whether or not they’ve ever achieved the path of seeing, let alone liberation or enlightenment. The path of seeing; have they actually achieved that? And of course you could look at it in that way. Shantideva argues in the Bodhicharyavatara, in the ninth chapter about the Prasangika understanding of voidness: If you had a low understanding of voidness, although you might think that you’ve achieved liberation, you haven’t. And so a rude awakening—as a so-called arhat—when you’re about to die and you find that you’re going to activate the twelve links again. So you could say, “Well, wasn’t Tsongkhapa saying that?” And I think that’s one way of interpreting it, but it’s not the only way of interpreting it.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains sometimes, when he talks about various views, that you have to distinguish—actually Shantideva did say this as well—you have to distinguish between what these great authors write and what they actually experience and achieve in meditation. And he says a great many highly-realized masters are not very skilled in explaining themselves clearly—what they actually realize. And because of their lack of skill in writing clearly, if you just look at what they wrote, then you’ll find quite a lot of contradictions in it and inaccuracies. But you can’t say on the basis of that that nobody ever achieved the path of seeing—or liberation, or enlightenment—without having the Gelugpa view. So that’s how His Holiness explains, and I think that’s very reasonable. Because you certainly can meet a lot of different masters who don’t have this skill of being able to explain themselves clearly. To teach clearly is really very, very rare. It’s interesting. Tsongkhapa emphasized, from very young, Sarasvati. That’s the special figure to be able to get clear explanations and to write so that other people really can understand clearly. And how important that is.

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