Other-emptiness (shentong): ultimate reality is empty of what is other than itself

Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, born in 1292 and trained first within the Sakya tradition before his own thinking diverged from it, built the doctrine that became shentong from a close reading of buddha nature literature and the Kalachakra tantra, texts he read as describing an ultimate reality that is positively present rather than a mere absence. On his account, the buddha nature spoken of in Mahayana sutras is not empty of its own qualities, only empty of the adventitious defilements that are other than it and obscure it from view, so that awakening is a matter of removing what covers an already complete nature rather than constructing something that was not there before. Dolpopa taught this at Jonang monastery, which gave the position its later name, and treated it as the teaching the tantras themselves point to when they describe an ultimate reality that practitioners realize directly rather than infer through negation alone. Cyrus Stearns's scholarly reconstruction of Dolpopa's own Tibetan writings, produced because so much of that record had been actively suppressed for centuries after his death, is largely why a reader outside the tradition can now access his argument in anything like its own terms rather than only through the later polemics of the schools that opposed it.

Shentong doctrine did not simply lose a philosophical argument and fade; it was administratively suppressed. In the mid seventeenth century, under the government the fifth Dalai Lama established, Jonang's central Tibetan monasteries, including Dolpopa's own seat, were closed to the tradition, their libraries partly sealed, and their monastic populations converted into Gelug institutions, a decisive political intervention rather than a gradual loss of adherents. The suppression was effective in central Tibet specifically, which is why later generations of Tibetan Buddhists there sometimes described shentong as an extinct or purely historical position. It was never extinct at the edge of the Tibetan cultural world. Jonang communities in the Amdo and Golok regions of eastern Tibet, geographically distant from the central government's reach, kept ordaining monks and teaching the doctrine without interruption across the same centuries, and Jonang institutions in that region remain active today. The tradition also found new attention within the nineteenth century Rime, or non sectarian, movement, whose leading scholars treated shentong as a serious philosophical option worth studying on its own terms rather than as a settled error, restoring it to wider Tibetan Buddhist conversation from outside the school that had tried to end it.