84
THE JO-NAN-PAS, A SCHOOL OF
BUDDHIST ONTOLOGISTS
ACCORDING TO THE GRUB MTHA'
SEL GYI ME LON^1
D.S. Ruegg
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society 83 (1963): 73-91.
In the history of Buddhist philosophy in India and Tibet an extreme and some-
what isolated position was occupied by the Jo nail pa school which flourished in
Tibet from about the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Amongst the earlier
Indian Buddhist schools a perhaps comparable tendency towards ontological and
metaphysical development is probably to be found in the pudgalavada of the
Vatslputrlyas; but the exact significance of this pudgala or personal element
which is indeterminable (avacya) in relation to the Aggregates (skandha)
remains somewhat uncertain owing to the lack of original texts belonging to this
school which might be expected to explain its meaning clearly and fully.^1 •
Somewhat later, on the other hand, one at least of Dignaga's writings, the
Traikalyaparl/cya, exhibits a rather remarkable ontological tendency which was
however repudiated in his Pramii1Jasamuccaya.^1 b
To judge by the accounts of their doctrines given by their critics, the Jo nail
pa masters took up a specifically ontological and hence apparently un-Buddhist
position by accepting in quite literal terms what appears as an eternal (nitya,
sasvata) and stable (dhruva) element. They taught also a theory of the absolute
Gnosis (yeses, jiiana), undifferentiated between apprehender and apprehended
(grahya-grahaka: gzwi 'dsin giiis med kyi yeses mthar thug pa), which is con-
stant or permanent (nitya) and 'substantially' real (rtag dnos; no bo rtag pa; ran
byun du grub pa; etc.) and which is the parini~panna or Absolute. Their funda-
mental doctrine was the Void-of-the-other (gian stan), that is, an absolute which
is established in reality and is Void of all heterogeneous relative and phenome-
nal factors, as against the Void-of-Own-being (ran stan; svabhavasiinya) of the
Madhyamika which the Jo nail pas considered to be a merely preliminary or
lower doctrine bearing on the relative (sa'!lvrti) and not on the absolute Meaning
(paramartha). Although the Jo nail pas none the less considered themselves to