ENGLISH INTRODUCTION


"Jewel of the True Thought" is an important new treatise on the
concept of valid perception ("pramana" or "tsad-ma") in Buddhist
philosophy.  Its author is the venerable Geshe Yeshe Wangchuk,
an eminent scholar from the Sera Mey college of Sera Tibetan
Monastic University.  The work has already taken its place in
the commentarial tradition of Buddhist literature.


Subject of the Work

The study of valid perception is of vital importance in Buddhist
philosophy, for it is this perception which allows us to
determine the real nature of the world around us and thereby
escape pain, whether it be in the form of a mild headache, or
anxiety, or any undesirable object at all, on up to death
itself.
 
This real nature of the world must be perceived not only with
our direct physical and mental senses, but by indirect methods
such as reasoning, which allows our minds to see important
concepts such as the benefit of being moral.  Therefore the
study of perception is tied to the study of reasoning, or
logic--and these form the core of the subject matter of the
"Commentary on Valid Perception," the classical text which this
book explains.


The Commentarial Tradition

The "Commentary on Valid Perception" ("Pramanavarttika," or
"Tsad-ma rnam-'grel") is a work in four chapters by the Indian
Buddhist master, Dharmakirti.  As with many early Buddhist
sages, we know little of his life or even the dates that he
lived; Western scholars place him at around 630 AD, although
even this is uncertain.  The "valid perception" in the title of
his masterwork refers to another treatise, the Compendium on
Valid Perception (Pramanasamuccaya, or Tsad-ma kun-btus), and
Master Dharmakirti's text is actually a defense of this piece.

The Compendium was itself composed by Master Dignaga, who is
considered the father of the Buddhist logic traditions and is
dated by Western scholars at around 440 AD, although again there
is considerable uncertainty, and according to tradition he was a
direct teacher of Master Isvarasena, who is said to have been
the direct teacher of Master Dharmakirti.

The philosopher Dignaga was for his part commenting upon the
concepts of perception and logic presented in the teachings of
Shakyamuni Buddha, who lived 500 BC.  And so the lineage goes
from the Buddha, to Master Dignaga, to Master Dharmakirti, and
then on to the early Indian explanations of Master Dharmakirti,
including his own autocommentary.

Looking backwards from our present time, it is typical for a
modern Tibetan commentator of the Gelukpa tradition to base his
work on one of the monastic textbooks, typically written in the
17th or 18th centuries for the curriculum of a specific monastic
college.  These textbooks are themselves based on a preceding
generation of commentaries composed in the 15th century by
Tsongkapa the Great (1357-1419) or by one of the scholars of his
immediate school.

Here two important works are the Jewel of Reasoning (Tsad-ma
rigs-rgyan) of the First Dalai Lama, Gyalwa Gendun Drup
(1391-1474), and Light on the Path to Freedom (Thar-lam gsal-
byed) by Gyaltsab Je (1362-1432), who was the great first regent
of Je Tsongkapa's school.  These texts are based on the Indian
commentaries to Master Dharmakirti's work, and thus the entire
commentarial tradition stretches through 25 centuries, from
Shakyamuni Buddha up to the great Tibetan philosophical masters
of our own time.


About the Author

Very few people alive today are capable of even reading and
comprehending the Commentary on Valid Perception, so we are
fortunate to have in Geshe Yeshe Wangchuk a scholar who is
moreover qualified to write a commentary that gives us a door to
travel back into the increasingly more difficult earlier
explanations.

Gyaltsab Je's Light on the Path, for example, is so deep and
packed with analysis that only a handful of students in the
traditional monastic curriculum ever get further than the second
of its four chapters, despite the fact that a month of intense
debate is devoted to the book every year in the course of a
monk's philosophical studies, which take up to two decades.  And
without understanding this generation of commentaries, it is
difficult to grasp accurately the Indian commentaries, without
which the original sutras can hardly be appreciated in depth.

Geshe Yeshe Wangchuk was born in 1928 in the Tarlam region of
Kham, eastern Tibet, and entered the monastic life at the age of
eight.  When he was fifteen he travelled to Lhasa, the national
capital, and entered the Sera Mey college of Sera Monastic
University, considered one of the greatest educational
institutions of the country.  

For seventeen years he devoted himself to an intense study of
the classical texts of Buddhism, winning honors in every area of
the traditional curriculum.  He became an accomplished debater,
and gave successful defenses of his knowledge in public oral
examinations at every one of the great Gelukpa colleges.  At an
early point in his scholastic career he had already taken on
students of his own.  

His knowledge was not gained without great effort.  He would
devote long and tireless hours to the college debate ground,
where student monks meet to review their daily lessons in heated
philosophical debates.  His free time was given almost entirely
to memorization of the great philosophical texts, a traditional
requirement of a monk's training.  He would recite his texts
from memory late into the night, and to keep himself from
falling asleep would perch high in a tree, or on a large
boulder, where the self-imposed punishment for dozing off would
be a nasty fall.  In this manner Geshe Wangchuk was able to
commit to memory literally thousands of pages of the original
works, and became something of a walking encyclopedia.

As a result of his philosophical acumen and vast store of
knowledge, he received highest honors in the final examinations
that mark the end of the long course to become a Geshe, or
master of Buddhist philosophy.

In the difficult period following the loss of Tibet, Geshe
Wangchuk suffered greatly.  He was imprisoned for some time and
then, during the "Cultural" Revolution, assigned to hard labor.
In 1977 he was appointed to the Bureau of Cultural Preservation,
where he devoted himself to a research of written and physical
antiquities.  He has travelled to China on various occasions
and, with the relaxation of some of the previous restrictions,
has visited Japan and India.

In recent years Geshe Wangchuk has made exceptional efforts to
help preserve the Buddhist religion in Tibet.  He has played a
leading role in the restoration of the literary classics of the
country, and has served in Beijing as a university professor of
Buddhist philosophy, as well as performing the duties of a
traditional lama by teaching many students in Lhasa and other
parts of Tibet.  He also assisted the late Panchen Lama in his
efforts to gain the release of the many monks imprisoned during
demonstrations for a free Tibet.

Among the notable events of his life, Geshe Wangchuk includes
the traditional acts of generosity he has performed for monks
and monasteries during his trips to India.  Despite his limited
means, he has made donations to help build new temples and
support needy refugee monks.  The most important part of any
Buddhist's life is the success of his relationship with his
spiritual instructors, and in his autobiography Geshe Wangchuk
describes his studies under some thirty great religious
teachers.  In his usual modest way he concludes that "On the
good side, I have never once in my life deprecated one of my
lamas; and yet, on the bad side, I don't feel that I was able to
pay proper service to any one of them either."

Geshe Wangchuk has composed a great many original works.  In his
student days he wrote a eulogy of Je Tsongkapa and essays on
difficult points of the Madhyamika and Vaibhasika schools of
Buddhist thought; all these papers were destroyed in the
upheaval during the loss of Tibet.

Throughout the 1960s he continued writing on various subjects,
but again these manuscripts were all burned during the chaotic
"Cultural" Revolution.  Since this time he has been a prolific
writer, publishing works on the comparative study of the
classical philosophical schools of Buddhism; an historical essay
of 21 great Tibetan monasteries; numerous articles in Buddhist
journals; versed petitions and prayers to eminent lamas; and a
summary of the 500-year history of Sera Mey College.

In the past few years, Geshe Wangchuk has been allowed to travel
outside of Tibet for extended teaching tours, and has greatly
benefitted the students and teachers of the Tibetan refugee
community in India.  Within the last year he has given an
extensive public discourse on the entire text of Liberation in
Our Hands, an immense description of the lam-rim or steps on the
path to enlightenment, composed by the illustrious Pabongka
Rinpoche, Dechen Nyingpo.  He has also found time to give public
teachings on the subjects of logic and valid perception set
forth in the present book.  It is greatly hoped that he will
enjoy the freedom and health to continue this great work.

The details of Geshe Wangchuk's life mentioned here have been
summarized from a brief autobiographical work currently under
publication by the press of Sera Mey College.  The final pages
of this text contain exquisite verses that describe his own life
and practice, and it would not be inappropriate to include a few
of these lines here, to show the value of modesty in the
thinking of a great man:

It is an excellent thing
That I have imparted to others 
The power to learn and become 
The mystical worlds and beings;

It's though a thing that makes me sad 
That I myself have never
Seen the slightest vision 
Of an angel's face.

It is a thing of goodness 
That I have paid my visits
To very holy places 
And spared no effort there;

It's though a thing that makes me sad 
That they could not affect me 
And here I am exactly 
As I was before.

It is a thing of goodness
That I have had the chance 
To meet and seek the blessings 
Of many thousand lamas;

It's though a thing that makes me sad 
That I remain no more 
Than a hollow log of wood
That never could be blessed.

It is a thing of goodness 
That in society 
I've dressed up in the handsome 
Robes of a Buddhist monk;

It's though a thing that makes me sad
That on my inside rains 
A steady shower of sins, 
Of evil thoughts, of wrong.

It is a thing of goodness 
That I've donned the ritual robes 
And taken in my hands 
The holy bell and scepter;

It's though a thing that makes me sad 
That still I'm stuck in seeing 
The world as ordinary, 
And as no paradise.

It is a nice thing people speak 
Of me in flattering terms 
And give me all those titles 
I really don't deserve;

It's though a thing that makes me sad
That actually I've not
The moral strength to watch
What I do and say.

It is a true thing, that if you 
Don't look very closely
I seem to you a monk 
With the cleanest vows.

It's though a thing that makes me sad 
That if you really check
You'll find I've not the slightest
Thing to show you now.

But of course he does, and in the present work Geshe Wangchuk
shows himself as one of the greatest living scholars of the
Buddhist logic tradition.


About the Text

Geshe Wangchuk has completed a commentary to all four chapters
of the Commentary on Valid Perception, a formidable
accomplishment since each chapter is practically a separate
philosophical classic in its own right; this is borne out by the
fact that numerous commentators on the work over the centuries
have, for various reasons, written explanations of only one or a
few of its chapters--Master Dharmakirti himself was unable to
complete the entire autocommentary during his lifetime.

The first two chapters of the present commentary have been
published in Tibet and also at the new Sera Mey College in south
India.  These books contain some printing errors that are
serious enough to justify a new edition, and the galleys to a
companion first volume of the present book are currently under
correction by the author himself, after which they will be
published.

This is the first printing of the commentary to the third and
fourth chapters, and due to the difficulty of the text a
considerable amount of editing work was required.  The editing
was performed by a team under the direction of the venerable
Geshe Thupten Rinchen, a student of Geshe Wangchuk's from the
Tsangpa House of Sera Mey College, and himself one of the most
capable scholars of Buddhist philosophy alive.

Fortunately, Geshe Wangchuk himself received permission to visit
India just before the publication deadline, and was able to
review the work in its entirety and make his own final
corrections.

The book was typeset at the Sera Mey Computer Center, under the
auspices of the Asian Classics Input Project.  ACIP is a
non-profit effort to preserve the important literature of Asia
in digital format and distribute it throughout the world on
computer diskettes.  The editor-in-chief and founder of ACIP is
the venerable Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin, a former
abbot of Sera Mey.

ACIP was begun through a grant from the Packard Humanities
Institute, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.  It
currently receives funding from various institutions, including
the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Buddhist
Cultural Exchange Research of Yuisho Ji, Japan.  Please refer to
the statement of details of NEH support for ACIP on the
copyright page of this publication.

The actual printing of the book has been completed under the
able direction of Mr. Praveen Sareen of Classics of India
Publications, Delhi, India.


Dedication

The majority of the cost of this publication (for 500 copies)
has been borne by the venerable Lhatsun Rinpoche, a young monk
scholar and reincarnated lama from the Shungpa House of Sera Mey
College, on the occasion of his standing for his Rikchung degree
examination in June of 1992 (Tibetan Royal year 2119).  He
dedicates the virtuous power of this good deed first to his
ability to preserve and uphold the great works of his previous
incarnations.

He secondly prays that this goodness will help his father, Jampa
Sopa, and his mother, Tsewang Drolma, and all the members of his
family of disciples and dependents to achieve success in any
virtuous task they may undertake.  Finally he would like to
acknowledge and express his appreciation for the efforts of
Michael Roach in preparing this work for publication, and prays
for the ultimate accomplishment of his wishes.

An additional 200 copies of this work have been sponsored by the
venerable Lhundrup Lekden, upon the occasion of his standing for
his Lharampa Geshe examinations.  He dedicates the virtuous
power of this good deed to the long and fruitful life of his
spiritual teachers.  He prays that it may help clear away any
and all of the past bad deeds and spiritual obstacles of those
dear to him who have passed away, beginning with his own mother,
Sonam Kyipa; and he prays it may bring them to final
enlightenment.  He prays lastly that this good work may keep his
father, Tenzin, and all others of their friends and family who
are still in this world from any harm, and bring them each a
long and deeply religious life.