THE JO-NAN-PASSa bzan Ma ti ba came to mDog dpan po [spelling?] and attended on Dol bu
ba, Kun spans pa, dPan lo tsa ba, and others. He also was the first Upadhyaya
(mkhan po thog rna) of bZan !dan. His learning was great, and his action was
farreaching.^93 He also founded the hermitage (dgon gnas) in the secluded place
of dGa' !dan sa bzan.
Sa bzan 'Phags pa gzon no blo gros occupied his seat there.^94 And the Vajrad-
hara Kun dga' bzan po came together with the others and occupied this seat.^95
Notes
To begin with the writer wishes to express his deep gratitude and indebtedness to his
Tibetan teachers who have generously given him instruction; whatever value the
following contribution may possess is largely due to the guidance and instruction of
these kind kalya1.1amitras.
la Cf. Kathiivatthu, p. 56 ff.; etc.
lb Some resemblances are also perhaps to be found between Jo nan pa doctrines and
certain works attributed to Asvagho~a which are not available in either Sanskrit or
Tibetan. Points in common are also noticeable between them and certain schools of
Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, including Ch'an/Zen and T'ien-t'ai/Tendai. These
cannot be further gone into here.
Since the present paper is intended in the first place to make more accessible the
chapter of the Grubs mtha 'sel gyi me !on dealing with the Jo nan pa school, prefatory
matter and annotations have had to be reduced to a minimum. There is not enough
space to go into detail about their theory of siinyatii or the tathiigatagarbha and the
exegesis of the canonical texts treating it. (This topic forms the subject of a separate
study the present writer is preparing.) Nor has it been possible to furnish a full analy-
sis of all the doctrines of the Jo nan pa school according to their own texts, since it
has hitherto been necessary to rely almost exclusively on accounts of them contained
in works written by their critics; it has therefore been possible to give only an outline
of their best known doctrines.
The chapter of the Grub mtha' sel gyi me !on (ThG) translated below is one of the
most comprehensive discussions available despite its comparative brevity and should
thus serve as a reliable sketch of the history and doctrines of the Jo nan pas. The
writer hopes to publish accounts drawn from other sources in further articles.
The best known and the most recent of the original Jo nan pa sources is the gsun
'bum of Taranatha (sgrol mgon) Kun dga' sfiin po, who was born in 1575. (The
spelling Taranatha appears to be the invention of a few modern writers.) On
Taranatha, cf. G. Tucci, Tibetan Painted Scrolls, pp. 128-131, 163-164. The gsun
'bum was printed at Phun tshogs glin, the Jo nan pa centre mentioned below (cf. op.
cit., p. 163b ).-A collection of a Century (?) of Jo nan pa texts was apparently printed
at sDe dge in a single volume under the title Jo nan mdsad brgya; and more or less
fragmentary manuscripts of some of their works have also been preserved (v. R. 0.
Meisezahl, Die alttibetischen Handschriften im Reiss-Museum; L. Chandra, JA
(1961), p. 513, number 103).
In this article the following abbreviations will be used:
KD = gSun 'bum ofKlon rdol Rin po che (lHasa edition);
KhG = mKhas pa 'i dga' stan of gTsug lag phren ba (Delhi edition);
ThG =Grub mtha 'set gyi me ton ofThu'u bkvan Blo bzail chos kyi iii rna;
DN =Deb ther snon po of'Gos lo tsa ba gzon nu dpal;
PSJZ = dPag bsam /jon bzan of Sum pa mkhan po (Calcutta edition);