Gorampa
Encyclopedia
Gorampa Sonam Senge was an important philosopher in the Sakya
Sakya
The Sakya school is one of four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the others being the Nyingma, Kagyu, and Gelug...

 school of Tibetan Buddhism
Tibetan Buddhism
Tibetan Buddhism is the body of Buddhist religious doctrine and institutions characteristic of Tibet and certain regions of the Himalayas, including northern Nepal, Bhutan, and India . It is the state religion of Bhutan...

. He was the author of a vast collection of commentaries on sutra and tantra whose work was influential throughout Tibetan Buddhism. He instituted the formal study of logic in the Sakya tradition and established one of the definitive Tibetan understandings of Prasangika Madhyamika. He was the student of Rongtön. He founded the Thupten Namgyal Ling monastery in Tanag.

Philosophic views

One of his most important and popular works is 'Distinguishing the Views' in which he argues for his view of Madhyamaka
Madhyamaka
Madhyamaka refers primarily to a Mahāyāna Buddhist school of Buddhist philosophy systematized by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna may have arrived at his positions from a desire to achieve a consistent exegesis of the Buddha's doctrine as recorded in the āgamas...

. He and other Sakya teachers classify themselves as presenting the "Freedom from Proliferation" (Wylie: spros bral, Tibetan: སྤྲོས་བྲལ་) Madhyamaka.

A critic of both Dolpopa and Je Tsongkhapa
Je Tsongkhapa
Tsongkhapa , whose name means “The Man from Onion Valley”, was a famous teacher of Tibetan Buddhism whose activities led to the formation of the Geluk school...

, he joined into the polarized Prasangika and Svatantrika
Svatantrika
In the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism, specifically in the Madhyamaka view, Svātantrika is a category of Madhyamaka viewpoints attributed primarily to the 6th century Indian scholar Bhavaviveka...

 debate at that time, but he attempted an allegedly 'moderate' position between the 'extremes' he saw in their opposing views. Dolpopa disregarded the distinction between Prasangika and Svatantrika and considered them a later elaboration that damages the non-conceptual view of the ultimate. Gorampa sides more closely with Tsongkhapa that a distinction is reasonable to make and he also critiques the traditional Svatantrika approach. However, he disagreed with Tsongkhapa's "Eight Difficult Points" and instead posited his own sixteen points of distinction between the two views.

Of particular note in his characterization, he does not agree with Tsonghkapa that the Prasangika and Svatantrika methods produce different results nor that the Prasangika is a "higher" view. He does also critique the Svatantrika approach as having too much reliance on logic, because in his view the component parts of syllogistic logic are not applicable in the realm of the ultimate. But this critique is constrained to the methodology, and he believed both approaches reach the same ultimate realization.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK