Texte remanié de: Diss.--Cambridge--University, 1998. Titre de soutenance : Self, persons and Madhyamaka dialectics : a study of Tsongkhapa's Middle Way philosophy. / Bibliogr. p. 227-239. Index.

Texte remanié de: Ph. D.--University of Hamburg, 1993. / Contient des textes en tibétain. Bibliogr. p. 175-187.

The dissertation delineates how the writings compiled in The Collected Works (Gsung ’bum) of Jey Tsongkhapa Lobzang Drakpa (1357–1419), the founder of the Geluk School of Tibetan Buddhism, constitute the centrality of the Geluk thought and philosophy and have contributed towards the school’s formation. It details how the texts have played a prominent role in establishing doctrinal authority, defining philosophical boundaries, postulating intellectual identity, and reorienting monastic education for the school. These texts have also considerably enhanced the intellectual, spiritual, and charismatic authority of Jey Tsongkhapa as a teacher and philosopher. This dissertation bases its approach on the premise that the life and writings of Tsongkhapa define the core identity of the Geluk School and that an explicit rejection of either tantamount to an outright abnegation of its membership. The dissertation begins with a critical retelling of Tibet’s religious history to contextualize the subject. The second chapter presents the culture and practice of life writing in Tibet to inform about the mechanism employed in traditional auto/biographies. Given the enormous attention drawn by the study of Jesus Christ (c. 4 BCE–c. 33 CE) in western academia, the chapter includes a literary review of contemporary studies and research for their emulation in the study of Tibetan hagiographies. The life story of Tsongkhapa is recounted in the third chapter. The fourth chapter details significant historical events that helped recenter Tsongkhapa in the Tibetan religio-cultural landscape. The fifth chapter presents his oeuvre—The Collected Works, the first extensive xylographic work printed in Tibet in the early fifteenth century. It also outlines the volume contents, presents sample texts, and chronicles the history of its publication and printing. The sixth chapter illustrates the centrality of Jey Tsongkhapa’s writings and its integration into the Geluk monastic educational system. The seventh chapter explicates on the topic of textual transmission and demonstrates how the texts were passed down through unbroken lineages to this day. The dissertation concludes with an epilogue and other back matters, including a list of transliteration of names, which are phoneticized in the main body for the ease of reading.

The dissertation examines the life narrative of Tsongkhapa Losang Dragpa (1357-1419), the influential founder of the Ganden school of Tibetan Buddhism, primarily through the lens of the bodhisattva path to enlightenment, a topic that animates much of Indian Buddhist literature and Tsongkhapa’s own writings. Over the course of five chapters, the dissertation (1) contextualizes Tsongkhapa’s social, political, and historical circumstances, the limiting factors for that narrative; (2) explores the social nature of life narratives themselves, particularly Tibetan Buddhist ones, and the many sources on which Tsongkhapa drew in creating a self in relation to the bodhisattva ideal; (3) analyses the topic of asceticism as a constellation of practices that embody traditional ideals, which the dissertation uniquely relates to both monastic and, perhaps surprisingly, tantric discipline in the construction of a bodhisattva/would-be buddha self; (4) synthesizes several themes within Tsongkhapa’s oeuvre in relation to the bodhisattva path to enlightenment, highlighting the irreducibly social nature of embodied enlightenment; and (5) proposes that Tsongkhapa’s social activities, specifically his so-called Four Great Deeds, instantiate the ideal of the enlightened self’s acting within society, specifically his context of fifteenth-century Central Tibet. The dissertation relies primarily on Tsongkhapa’s brief intellectual autobiography, Excellent Presence, his earliest biography, Haven of Faith, a number of Tsongkhapa’s systematic writings, and a variety of primary and secondary sources that contextualize elements of the historical, sociological, religious, and theoretical analyses presented throughout the five chapters. In biographies of Tibetan Buddhist figures, emphasis on the hagiographic tends to obscure the social, political, and historical contexts in which their subjects act, which in turn tends to reinforce the Weberian notion of Buddhism as an individualist path. Emphasis on individual achievement (simultaneously including yet excluding lineages, practices, philosophical positions, and so on) tends to reinforce the inverse, Foucauldian notion that this is a deliberate attempt to obscure various power struggles that actually define religious actors and institutions. In the case of Tsongkhapa, modern scholarship has tended to present the remarkable success of his Ganden school either to his individual genius in advancing (allegedly) unique philosophical positions or to social facts (e.g., his efforts at monastic reform), political facts (e.g., Phagdru dominance over rival Sakya), and historical facts (e.g., Mongol allegiance to his successors) largely unrelated to his personal charisma, erudite scholarship, or social impact. As a sort of middle way between these extremes, it is possible to locate within these contexts the specific achievements of the individual who is—according to both general Buddhist understanding and contemporary theorists in philosophy, psychology, literary studies, and sociology—deeply socialized. As social documents, life narratives, inclusive of biography and hagiography, function as indices of tradition, just as do practices of monastic and tantric asceticism, all with goals of embodying the principles articulated in the systematic literature within the social, political, and historical contexts to be transcended. This ideal, then, proves to be fully situated within social contexts, and Tsongkhapa’s Four Great Deeds instantiate it in relation to both individual achievements of asceticism and the institutionalization of communal and educational capacities to replicate the processes engendering this ideal, buddhahood. In sum, Tsongkhapa’s life narrative expresses the expectations and ideals of Tibetan Buddhist culture in a way that proves complementary to systematic presentations and to “lived” practices of monastic and tantric asceticism.