PhD Student, Divinity School, UChicago

In this paper, I trace Tsongkhapa’s integration of the pramāṇas into Madhyamaka philosophy. I examine how he justifies this project despite purported evidence in Candrakīrti’s writings (among certain Tibetan thinkers) that deny the validity of the pramāṇas in cognizing conventional phenomena. I show that Tsongkhapa recuperates pramāṇavādin epistemology by qualifying Candrakīrti’s statements to pertain only to the ultimate and not to phenomena in general, in this way accounting not only for a way to realize emptiness as an ordinary being, but also for a means to know the conventional. I further examine in brief a text that takes this union of Madhyamaka and epistemology to an extreme, framing itself explicitly as a Madhyamaka blo rigs—that is, a study of Madhyamaka using an overtly pramāṇavādin epistemelogical framework. My aim is to explore the intellectual antecedents in Tsongkhapa’s philosophy that legitimate projects such as these in modern Gelug philosophy.