Why the Jonang Suppression Matters
The significance of the suppression of the Jonang, the fifth Dalai Lama declared them heretics for what we today call the “Shentong” view of emptiness, is as relevant today as it was in the 17th century when the Government of Tibet attempted to eradicate the Jonang in the first place in Japhy’s opinion. According to Japhy, the Jonang Suppression of the 17th century continues to this day in the form of the efforts of the Karma Kagyu orthodoxy to suppress as heretics those that challenge its hegemony over the lives and practices of Karma Kagyu in America.
For the Jonang emptiness was threefold, that of the imagined, the dependent, and the pure. What jammed them up with the Government was that last part, the emptiness of the pure. To this day, if you even suggest the emptiness of the pure as a Tibetan Buddhist you are considered a heretic to be suppressed by those that deem themselves to be pure and thus superior to those whom they consider to be impure, the rest of us. For upholding the Jonang view of emptiness as I do here has alienated a number of my co-religionists that consider themselves as being orthodox. It is no coincidence that the the powers to be in the Karma Karma that control KTD consider myself and so many of my co-religionists to be heretics. All you need is to know Tibetan history for the precedent.
A co-religionist of Japhy’s suggested here that he was a heretic in need of suppression for stating that a monastic vocation was no more pure than that of any other vocation a Karma Kagyu might be called to, which in turn reminded him of why he upholds the Shentong view since he was introduced to by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso when he was a young man. The fate of the Jonang really spoke to his sense of justice. As someone committed to speak truth to power going back to his high school days in Quebec in the early 1970′s, Japhy is an Anglophone, something that remains a contentious issue to this day there, from the get go, he has been down with the Jonang cause in Tibetan Buddhism, as so many of his co-religionists in America today are.
