Jonang

Jonang is the fifth school of Tibetan Buddhism, and the one most often left out of the list. For a long stretch of Western scholarship it was described as extinct, suppressed out of existence by the politically dominant Gelug under the fifth Dalai Lama in the seventeenth century. That is half true. The school lost its central monasteries and its standing, and it did not lose its lineage: practice continued without interruption in Amdo, in the far northeast of the plateau, and from there re-established itself in Golok and Kham. Around five thousand monks and nuns hold it today.

What the suppression was about comes down to one word. Most Tibetan schools hold to rangtong, empty of self: whatever you examine, awareness included, turns out to have no existence of its own. Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, the fourteenth-century master who gave the school its voice, argued for shentong, empty of other: the ultimate is empty of everything that is not itself, and is therefore not empty of itself. To his opponents that sounded like letting a permanent self back in through a side door. To the Jonang it is the only honest way to say what a buddha actually is. The argument is seven hundred years old and still live, and a directory is not the place to settle it.

In practice the school is built around a single tantra. The Kalachakra, the Wheel of Time, is its central transmission, and Jonang holds the most complete surviving lineage of the completion stage, the six vajra yogas. The empowerment itself is given widely across Tibetan Buddhism, sometimes to crowds of thousands. The full path behind it is taught by very few.

The school stayed regional until the nineteenth century, when the Rimé movement encouraged study outside the Gelug and carried the shentong view back into wider circulation. The third Karmapa, Jamgön Kongtrül and Kalu Rinpoche all took it up. Its arrival in the West is far more recent than that, and far smaller.