The Conventional Status of Reflexive Awareness: What’s at Stake in a Tibetan Debate?

‘Ju Mipham Rinpoche (1846–1912), an important figure in the Ris med, or nonsectarian, movement influential in Tibet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an unusual scholar in that he was a prominent Nyingma scholar and rDzog chen practitioner with a solid dGe lugs education. He took dGe lugs scholars like Tsong khapa and his followers seriously and appreciated their arguments and positions, but he also sometimes took issue with them directly. In his commentary on Candrakı̄rti’s Madhyamakāvatāra, Mipham argues that Tsong khapa is wrong to take Candrakı̄rti’s rejection of the reflexive character of consciousness to be a rejection of the conventional existence of reflexive awareness. Instead, he argues, Candrakı̄rti only intends to reject the reflexivity of awareness ultimately, and, indeed, Mipham argues, it is simply obvious that, conventionally, consciousness is reflexive. The debate is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it focuses attention on the hermeneutical strategies of Tsong khapa and his student rGyal tshab, as the case that they build against the conventional existence of reflexive awareness is philosophically complex, but grounded in a reading of a very few verses from the Madhyamakāvatāra and Śāntideva’s Bodhicāryāvatāra. Second, it forces us to confront a delicate question that Mipham poses: what is so important about the conventional existence of reflexive awareness that it makes a philosophical difference whether or not consciousness is reflexive? Third, it opens a window onto dGe lugs pa doxography, and in particular their account of the relationship between the accounts of the states of mind of Cittamātra, Svātantrika-Madhyamaka and Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka. Fourth, and perhaps most interestingly, it raises deep questions about the differences in epistemological perspective between Mipham and Tsong khapa and shows just how revolutionary Tsong khapa’s thought was. Attention was drawn to this debate by Paul Williams in an article (1983) and more recently in his much more extensive book (1998), and it is indeed Williams’ careful treatment of this question, its textual basis in the Indian loci classici, namely Madhyamakāvatāra VI : 72–78 and Bodhicāryāvatāra IX : 17–25, that sparked my interest in this debate. Williams points out that it is not at all obvious why Tsong khapa and rGyal tshab are so insistent on the conventional nonexistence of reflexive awareness, beyond its obvious ultimate nonexistence, and ends up defending Mipham’s plausible argument for the claims that Candrakı̄rti and Śāntideva countenance the conventional reality of reflexive awareness and that they are correct to do so.