conebeckham wrote:Here's the thing, and apologies to Astus, again.......it strikes me that those who assert Tsong Khapa's view, here on Dharma Wheel, as the final position are not familiar with the positions of Gorampa, Pawo Rinpoche, Karmapa Mikyo Dorje, etc.
However, those of us who question various points of Tsong Khapa's view ARE familiar with his positions--it's fairly hard not to be, if one has been studying the Dharma for more than a decade or so, as Tsong Khapa's position was the ONLY Indo-Tibetan interpretation you could find until fairly recently--or nearly so.
I'm familiar with Gorampa's position, and frankly, it's not very sophisticated compared with Tsongkhapa's view. 'All conventional truths are objects of deluded minds' is a pretty crude and wrong statement as it conflates conventional existence with inherent existence, but the point is that conventional truths are not established by the mind of self-grasping ignorance, they are established by valid cognizers such as valid eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mental consciousnesses as explained by Dharmakirti. They are established by valid minds, and then subsequently incorrectly conceived to exist inherently by the mind of self-grasping. It's only the perception and conception of phenomena being inherently existent that's deluded, not the perception of phenomena per se, unless they are non-existents such as seeing a face in a mirror as a real face, seeing a mirage as water, and so forth.
Gorampa is unable to distinguish between phenomena that exist as valid karmic appearances to mind and the appearance and conception of those phenomena as inherently existent as incorrectly projected by the mind of self-grasping, and thus he falls into the extreme of non-existence by denying the validity of conventional truths, which is a wrong view.