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Introduction to the Middle Way (Dzongsar Khyentse)

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“Introduction to the Middle Way: Chandrakirti’s Madhyamakavatara, with Commentary by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche” — Khyentse, Dzongsar Jamyang, 2003.

Bibliographic note

Transcript of teachings given by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche (a contemporary Nyingma / Sakya-trained master of the Khyentse lineage) at Centre d’Études de Chanteloube (Dordogne, France) over four summers, 1996–2000. Edited by Alex Trisoglio; rough translation of the root verses by Jakob Leschly. Published 2003 by the Khyentse Foundation. The teachings are explicitly arranged according to Gorampa’s sa bcad, with secondary influence from Shenga Rinpoche (gzhan dga’). 483 pages. The text covers chapters 1–11 of the Madhyamakāvatāra, with the bulk of the philosophical material in the chapter 6 commentary.

Thesis / main argument

A practising Buddhist’s reading of the Madhyamakāvatāra organised around three insistences: (i) Madhyamaka is establishment of the view, not a method of practice — and without the view the whole Buddhist path collapses into “temporal relief”; (ii) the Two Truths must be drawn subjectively (from the side of the cognising subject’s defect) and never objectively (from the side of the object’s intrinsic existence) — this, Khyentse Rinpoche argues, is the single non-negotiable Madhyamaka commitment; (iii) the Prāsaṅgika method is the destruction of all views, in both ultimate and relative registers, and the Mādhyamika has no thesis even at the conventional level. The commentary self-consciously transmits Gorampa’s reading of Candrakīrti to a contemporary Western audience, with sustained critique of the “blind doubt and cynicism” Khyentse perceives in Western academic Buddhism.

Distinctive features of this commentary

  • Self-described as a Gorampa commentary in contemporary English. The structural outline followed is Gorampa’s sa bcad in full (28 levels deep at one point); the text reproduces the H1–H28 hierarchy in margin notation. This is significant because Khyentse is a Nyingma-affiliated master who could have chosen Mipham as structural authority — his selection of Gorampa is itself a doxographical datum.
  • Treats philosophical opponents as descriptions of the practitioner’s own emotional/cognitive habits. “Each of these schools represents your emotions, the way that you think.” Sāṃkhya self-arising ↔ ordinary self-identity; Cittamātra ↔ the seductiveness of subjective idealism for tantric practitioners. This is a contemplative-practical use of the doxographic apparatus, not a historical-comparative one.
  • Explicit address to Western academic Buddhology. Khyentse names “renowned and influential professors from prestigious universities in the West” and warns that translators and commentators who lack contemplative formation are “the future of Buddhism in the West” — a future he treats as in jeopardy. He distinguishes “secular” from “cynical” and identifies fashionable cynicism as a danger structurally parallel to blind devotion.
  • Lecture-transcript register. Long passages are dialogic; the text preserves question-and-answer with named students, examples drawn from the Dordogne setting (Gérard, Ani Jimpa, the tent), and Khyentse’s repeated disclaimers about his own English. This is not a polished treatise — it is a shedra-style oral teaching reproduced verbatim.

Key claims (with location)

Two Truths drawn subjectively, not objectively

The most distinctive claim of the entire commentary, developed at length around MA 6.23 (pp. 142–46 of the source).

  • “Whatever these people decide about the two truths, they always make the distinction between relative and ultimate truth based on the object and its intrinsic nature or existence. The Madhyamikas refute this totally, and say that the distinction between the two truths must be made subjectively.” (p. 143)
  • “There is no such thing as two truths existing somewhere outside there.” (p. 143)
  • All four non-Madhyamaka Buddhist schools are characterised as object-side: Vaibhāṣika (the indivisible particle), Sautrāntika (capacity for ultimate functioning), Cittamātra (paratantra — dependent reality — as substantially existent base for ultimate). All four place the ultimate “out there” and so all four “contradict the Madhyamaka totally” on the basic move. (pp. 143–46)
  • Provocative aside: Khyentse generalises this as the “perhaps the difference between eastern and western philosophy” — Western thought, he claims, takes objectivity as the index of truth, which on the Madhyamaka analysis already commits the foundational error. (p. 144)
  • Four admissible bases for drawing the distinction subjectively: mind, tendrel (interdependent origination, pratītyasamutpāda — རྟེན་འབྲེལ་), the contents of sūtra, knowledge. Any of the four works “since in reality, there are no ‘two truths’.” (p. 143)

This is structurally close to the Ninth Karmapa’s “the two truths are drawn from the perceiving subject’s side” position (in karmapa-feast-fortunate-1578) and to Gorampa’s two-level ultimate, but the framing is sharper than either: object-side two-truths is not Madhyamaka at all.

The Prāsaṅgika has no view, even conventionally

  • “[Prāsaṅgikas] do not have a view in the ultimate truth, and they do not even have a view in the relative truth. This is their beauty!” (p. 101, in dialogue)
  • Citation of the prostration verse used by HH the Dalai Lama: “To the lord Buddha, who taught us the view-less teaching, in order to destroy all views, I prostrate.” (p. 102)
  • The Mādhyamika accepts the Four Noble Truths “but only for the sake of others.” Compassion, devotion, and even path-talk are path language, not view language: “establishing the view, the Prasangikas are establishing the view that there is no view.” (p. 102)

This pushes the “no thesis of one’s own” position — see candrakirti-prasannapada-mmk1-excerpt §IV — into a stronger reading than Tsongkhapa would accept. Tsongkhapa’s reconstruction (in jinpa-tsongkhapa-qualms-1999) carefully preserves robust conventional positions; Khyentse’s reading does not.

Six-criterion Prāsaṅgika–Svātantrika distinction mapped to syllogism components

Set out at pp. 98–101 of the source, on MA 6.8 (“things are not born from self, other, both, or neither”). The six criteria correspond to the six elements of a Buddhist syllogism: (1) subject (chos can), (2) predicate (bsgrub bya’i chos), (3) thesis (bsgrub bya), (4) reasoning (rtags), (5) example (dpe), (6) syllogism (sbyor ba).

  • Svātantrika: each must be mutually accepted by proponent and opponent (jointly established).
  • Prāsaṅgika: it is enough for the opponent to accept it — “you, the proponent, do not need to accept it.”
  • Svātantrika add the qualifier “in the ultimate truth” to the predicate; Prāsaṅgika do not, because for them “even in the relative truth, things are not born from themselves, from other, from both or from neither.”
  • Svātantrika hold the distinction between bden grub (truly existent, བདེན་གྲུབ་) and tshad grub (existence logically established) — they accept tshad grub in conventional truth. Prāsaṅgika reject this distinction entirely.
  • Smoke-and-fire example: Svātantrika reasoning runs “there is fire because there is smoke” (forward inference accepted by both); Prāsaṅgika runs “there should not be smoke if there is no fire” (reductio against the opponent’s commitment). “The Prasangikas are more on the attack.”

This is a clean, contemporary articulation of the Prāsaṅgika-Svātantrika distinction that maps exactly onto Ruegg’s six interrelated criteria (ruegg-svat-pras-2006). The convergence is significant: Ruegg derives his criteria from textual-historical analysis; Khyentse arrives at the same six from Gorampa’s sa bcad. Different methodologies, same six.

Tathāgatagarbha must be beyond the four extremes

  • “Buddha nature has to be beyond the four extremes.” (p. 122) Repeated emphasis: if Tathāgatagarbha is presented in any way that admits bhāva-type characteristics (existence, beginning, middle, end, function), it collapses into the Hindu ātman / Sāṃkhya puruṣa / Christian creator-God family.
  • Explicit warning: “I have read so many new books that talk about buddha nature and it makes me feel like I am travelling along some kind of cliff that has no support at all.” (p. 122)
  • Method statement: “Absolutely, go beyond the four extremes, and do not analyse. Relatively, just do not analyse! That’s it.” (p. 122) — the entire Madhyamaka practical method compressed into one sentence.

This positions Khyentse with Gorampa and the Karmapa lineage and against any zhentong-leaning reading: a tathāgatagarbha that truly exists is, on this analysis, a non-Buddhist ātman in Buddhist clothing. Compatible with zhentong-is-refined-cittamatra-not-madhyamaka.

Cittamātra is the most dangerous opponent

  • The Madhyamaka refutation of paratantra (dependent reality, gzhan dbang, གཞན་དབང་) as substantially existent is the chapter 6 climax; Khyentse pre-announces it as “the main problem” (p. 177).
  • The candour is striking: “I do not understand much at all about Madhyamika, and I like the Cittamatra school so much. It is so much easier for me to accept the Cittamatra view that everything is just mind than the Madhyamika view that everything is just emptiness.” (p. 177)
  • The Madhyamaka position on the Cittamātra slogan “the three realms are mind only” (Daśabhūmika Sūtra): the Buddha taught this to dispel wrong views such as a truly existing creator, not as a teaching of definitive meaning. (Appendix on Chandrakirti’s Opponents, p. 466)
  • “Even the Madhyamikas accept that all is just alaya, ‘mere clarity, mere awareness’, but only in the conventional truth.” (Appendix, p. 466)

This is the standard Prāsaṅgika handling of the Cittamātra–Madhyamaka relation — but its function in Khyentse’s transmission is that the danger is internal: tantric practitioners and Yogācāra-Madhyamaka sympathisers naturally drift toward Cittamātra, and the discipline of Prāsaṅgika is precisely the discipline of resisting this drift.

”Path is the ultimate delusion”

  • Citation of Dharmakīrti: “Path is the ultimate delusion” (lam ni ‘khrul pa’i mthar thug). (p. 137)
  • Even devotion and compassion are “defects” in the technical sense: they are subjective contaminations producing a kun rdzob register (སྦྱོར་ — “obscuring”). The work of the practitioner is not to remove the defect (impossible mid-path) but to see relative truth as relative truth.
  • “If you see relative truth and think that it is relative truth, then that is good!” (p. 137) — Khyentse’s compressed practical instruction. The error is not perceiving the relative; it is taking the relative for ultimate.

This sub-theme matters because it preserves the path-validity of standard Mahāyāna methods (bhakti, bodhicitta) while denying any view-status to them. Compare Atiśa’s contemplative use of dependent origination at the conventional level (atisha-key-instructions) — Khyentse arrives at a similar two-level pragmatics from a different traditional vantage.

Methodology

A shedra-style oral commentary, structured by Gorampa’s sa bcad and following the bhūmi-by-bhūmi progression of the Madhyamakāvatāra. Khyentse explicitly distinguishes “view language” from “path language” and brackets the Vajrayāna context throughout: “this is a Mahayana teaching and not a Vajrayana teaching.” Heavy reliance on traditional Indo-Tibetan logic (Dharmakīrti’s three-fault definition of definition; the six-fold syllogism). Examples are drawn from contemporary Western life (sunglasses, Land Rovers, Shakespeare, aromatherapy) but the philosophical apparatus is unmodified shedra material. No engagement with Western philosophical sources, but extended polemical asides on Western academic Buddhology.

Notable quotes

  • “There is no such thing as two truths existing somewhere outside there.” (p. 143)
  • “Path is the ultimate delusion.” (Dharmakīrti, cited p. 137)
  • “Absolutely, go beyond the four extremes, and do not analyse. Relatively, just do not analyse.” (p. 122)

Connections

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