A Doctrine the Fifth Dalai Lama's Government Tried to Close Down

Dolpopa's fourteenth century systematization of other-emptiness did not simply lose an academic argument, it was suppressed by force. The Jonang school he had built the doctrine within flourished for roughly three centuries after him, with its own monasteries and its own textual tradition, until the Fifth Dalai Lama's Gelug government, consolidating political and religious authority across central Tibet in the seventeenth century, closed Jonang monasteries, converted most of them to Gelug institutions, and restricted the printing and circulation of Dolpopa's own works. Jonang teaching survived afterward mainly at the margins, in monasteries in Amdo far from central Tibetan Gelug authority, where the tradition continued with reduced institutional standing rather than disappearing outright.

The doctrinal dispute and the political suppression are not simply parallel events, because the Gelug objection that shentong smuggles a self back in under the name of ultimate reality was also an argument about which school's account of emptiness the newly centralized Tibetan state would treat as orthodox. Modern scholarship on Dolpopa, working from manuscripts that survived the suppression and were not widely available outside specialist circles until relatively recently, has recovered a more systematic and more carefully argued shentong position than the Gelug polemical summary of it generally conveyed, part of why the rangtong and shentong dispute continues to be actively reargued in contemporary Tibetan Buddhist scholarship rather than treated as settled by the outcome of the seventeenth century.