Overview
Lta ba’i shan ‘byed theg mchog gnad kyi zla zer (Distinguishing the Views: Moonlight to Illuminate the Main Points of the Supreme Path) is the principal Madhyamaka polemical treatise of Gorampa Sönam Senge (1429–1489) and one of the most influential Sakya Madhyamaka works of the fifteenth century. The text articulates Gorampa’s threefold taxonomy of Tibetan Madhyamaka — eternalism (Dolpopa), nihilism (Tsongkhapa), freedom-from-extremes (the Sakya position) — and defends the third against the first two via primary-text-grounded refutation.
The treatise is the locus classicus for the Sakya critique of Tsongkhapa, on a par in influence and rigour with Mkhas grub rje’s Stong thun chen mo on the Geluk side and the Eighth Karmapa’s MA commentary on the Kagyü side.
Structure (per Gorampa’s own sa bcad)
The text divides into four chapters (skor ‘go bzhi):
- Chapter 1 (–1.3) — The Three Systems of Those Who Claim to Be Mādhyamikas. Programmatic chapter introducing the threefold taxonomy and laying out, in succession, what Tsongkhapa and Dolpopa each maintain.
- Chapter 2 () — Refutation of the System that Advocates that the Extreme of Eternalism Is the Madhyamaka (= Refutation of Dolpopa).
- Chapter 3 (–3.3.5) — Refutation of the System that Advocates that the Extreme of Nihilism Is the Madhyamaka (= Refutation of Tsongkhapa). Five sub-divisions: the ultimate; the conventional (with .1 karma, .2 the bowl-of-water example); ancillary points (.1 two obscurations, .2 two selflessnesses, .3 Mahāyāna/Hīnayāna abandon-and-realise distinction, .4 external objects without ālaya/svasaṃvedana, .5 no autonomous reasons or theses, with .5.1–3 on theses, adequate argumentation, and the basis on which the two-truths division is drawn).
- Chapter 4 (–4.3) — Establishing the System that Advocates that the Freedom from Extremes Is the Madhyamaka (Gorampa’s own system). Three subdivisions: identifying the vessel; the basis-path-result triple (with .1 the basis = union of the two truths, .2 the path = union of method and wisdom, .3 the result = union of the two bodies); trustworthy scriptural sources (with .1 the two ultimates by name and .2 the four-extremes scriptures).
The internal .1.2 is the locus classicus of Gorampa’s two-level ultimate (rnam grangs pa / mtshan nyid pa); of his anti-med dgag / “you have not negated enough” critique; .5 of his Prāsaṅgika-Svātantrika position; of his transmission of Red mda’ ba’s structural reduction of zhentong to refined Cittamātra.
Tibetan editions
Per the Distinguishing the Views editor’s preface (Cabezón & Dargyay 2007 ), three editions of the Tibetan text are collated:
- K = the Sde dge xylograph carved in the first decade of the twentieth century, found in The Complete Works of Gorampa Sönam Senge, vol. 3, in Sa skya pa’i bka’ ‘bum: The Complete Works of the Great Masters of the Sa skya Sect of Tibetan Buddhism, vol. 13, ed. Bsod nams rgya mtsho (Tokyo: Tōyō Bunko, 1968), 47 folios.
- S = Lta ba’i shan ‘byed theg mchog gnad kyi zla zer, published with Khenchen Sönam Lhundrup’s Rtags kyi rnam bzhag (Sarnath: Sakya Students’ Union, 1988), pp. 1–154.
- B = an unidentified mechanical reproduction of a handwritten text in the library of the Institut für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets, Hamburg (access no. MIV 345/6, catalogued 1968?), most likely printed in Buxa Duar, India, in the early 1960s, 42 folios.
Transmission and reception
The text was, per Cabezón’s preface, banned by the Ganden Potrang (the Geluk-backed Tibetan government) before 1959 — the principal example in this period of the Geluk political establishment suppressing a major Sakya philosophical text. The ban was lifted with the dispersal of the Tibetan diaspora, and the text is now widely read across all four Tibetan schools, including the Geluk.
The principal Geluk-side reply is Sera Jetsun Chökyi Gyaltsen’s (1469–1546) Lta ngan mun sel, frequently cited in the endnotes of the Cabezón & Dargyay translation. Mkhas grub rje’s earlier Stong thun chen mo (which inspired Cabezón’s interest in identifying its unnamed opponents and led to this translation project) is the Geluk-side polemical analogue, written before Gorampa but addressing many of the same issues from the opposite direction.
Modern reception
- Translated in full as Freedom from Extremes: Gorampa’s “Distinguishing the Views” and the Polemics of Emptiness by José Ignacio Cabezón and Geshe Lobsang Dargyay (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2007). added into the wiki as gorampa-distinguishing-views-1469.
- Cabezón also translated Mkhas grub rje’s Stong thun chen mo as A Dose of Emptiness (SUNY 1992); the two translations together provide the symmetric Sakya-and-Geluk picture of fifteenth-century Tibetan Madhyamaka polemic.