Adorning Maitreya's Intent

Adorning Maitreya's Intent (T mi pham dgongs rgyan). A commentary on the Madhyāntavibhāga written by Rongtön Sheja Kunrig.

Full title

• Tibetan: dbus dang mtha’ rnam par ’byed pa’i rnam bshad mi pham dgongs rgyan
• English: Adorning Maitreya's Intent: A Commentary on the Madhyāntavibhāga

English translation

• Adorning Maitreya's Intent: Arriving at the View of Nonduality, translated by Christian Bernert (Snow Lion, 2017).

Overview

Christian Bernert states:

According to our sources, there are only four Tibetan commentaries on the Madhyāntavibhāga. Of those four, only the one by the early Sakya master Pang Lotsāwa Lodrö Tenpa (1276–1342) predates Rongtön’s. Rongtön’s has the advantage of being more concise and clearer than Pang Lotsāwa’s, avoiding long and difficult points of debate. The two later commentaries on the Madhyāntavibhāga are fairly recent. One is by Ju Mipham (1846–1912), one of the most prolific authors of the Nyingma school, who revived the approach uniting the views of Yogācāra and Madhyamaka. He often follows Rongtön in his exposition of this text. The other is a brief “annotation commentary” by Khenpo Shenga (1871–1927), a widely respected master from the Nyingma tradition, famous for having penned commentaries for “the thirteen great Indian treatises” (gzhung chen bcu gsum).49 The scarcity of commentaries is attributed to the fact that of the two main Mahayana schools, Yogācāra received less attention than the Madhyamaka school, for historical reasons.

Rongtön is famous for commenting on the treatises of the various schools from their own perspective, not in order to establish a hierarchical system. While teaching this text, he assumes the role of a Yogācāra teacher, commenting on it according to its own tradition. His commentary is therefore of great interest to those eager to understand this tradition in a more unbiased manner.