Many tantric Buddhists engage critically and constructively with Buddhist philosophy. In commentarial literature, practice texts, and independent treatises, these authors seek to show that certain practices are rational and others are not; that certain conceptions of knowledge, mind, and existence make sense and others do not; and that we can adjudicate all this with reason in addition to appeals to tantric scripture. Their philosophical interlocutors extend beyond just Madhyamaka to Yogācāra and the epistemological tradition of Dharmakīrti (ca. 550–650) as well, and their interest in philosophy goes beyond philosophical doxography (though there is certainly plenty of that, too). Perhaps most well-known in this regard from the Sanskrit world is Ratnākaraśānti, the remarkable early eleventh-century polymath whose systematic unification of exoteric and tantric Buddhism is grounded on a fierce defense of Yogācāra.^[1] But many others engaged philosophically with Buddhist Tantra, each in their own way—authors like Indrabhūti (ca. late eighth to early ninth century), Samantabhadra (ca. mid-ninth century), Maitrīpa (a.k.a. Advayavajra, a.k.a. Maitreyanātha) and his disciples (ca. eleventh century), Abhayākaragupta (ca. twelfth century), and more.^[2] In Tibet, where thinking philosophically about Buddhist Tantra was even more prevalent, luminaries from Rongzompa (eleventh through twelfth century) to Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) to Ngorchen (1382–1456) to Mipham (1846–1912) continued this trend.^[3] There are of course iconoclastic figures who eschew and critique all reasoned argument, and perhaps some “masqueraded” as philosophers, picking up the mantle of reason for the sake of the “derivative authority” it was thought to bring.^[4] But many others, like those we will consider here, engaged in philosophical inquiry out of a clear commitment to what reason can teach us about reality and the means to realize it.

Here, as further evidence of this, I will discuss a revealing thread of engagement with Dharmakīrti’s view of yogic perception (yogipratyakṣa) that runs through some tantric authors writing in Sanskrit from the late eighth to the early thirteenth centuries. In the context of debates about the tantric practice of deity yoga (devatāyoga), these authors appropriate Dharmakīrti’s view to ends that are at odds with Dharmakīrti’s own aims. However, we will see that in doing so tantric authors are picking up on important worries about mental cultivation (bhāvanā) and repeated practice (abhyāsa) that run through Dharmakīrti’s discussions of yogic perception and his efforts more generally to ground the Buddhist path on reason. Like Dharmakīrti, these tantric authors are concerned with how the repeated practice of cultivation can transform the practitioner’s mental stream in ways that cannot be undone. Most experiential habits, or habitual ways of experiencing oneself, others, and the world, can be changed; those habits that characterize a buddha’s experience, however, have reached a level of perfection at which they become unbreakable. The tantric authors we will consider here aim to understand how the repeated practice of cultivation results in such unbreakable habits and which practices will do so. And it is with this in view that they turn to Dharmakīrti.

In Buddhist tantric treatises and commentaries, ideas about yogic perception are often marshaled in the context of debates about deity yoga. This visualization exercise is taken by most to be constitutive of the generation stage (utpattikrama).^[5] This is the first stage of postinitiatory practice: that is, it comes after the practitioner has had a fleeting glimpse, in initiation (seka, abhiṣeka), of the experience of reality a buddha enjoys unendingly; and it comes before the second stage of postinitiatory practice, the completion stage (utpannakrama), which was variously understood by different authors to ingrain more deeply or to transcend the practices of the generation stage.^[6] In deity yoga, an imagined identification with a deity-image in a maṇḍalic palace via carefully visualized, variegated mental imagery gradually changes the practitioner’s physical, verbal, and cognitive dispositions. Through the repeated practice of this exercise, the practitioner proceeds to the completion stage, which promises to bring buddhahood in the course of a single lifetime.

An objection to deity yoga practice developed in tantric circles, however. Why should deity yoga help lead to a transformation that is real, lasting, and liberative? The imagined identification at deity yoga’s core, it might be said, is after all a deceptive fantasy. As Indrabhūti presents this argument in his eighth- through ninth-century The Accomplishment of Gnosis (Jñānasiddhi), it is clear enough that the practitioner is not a buddha when undertaking this exercise. If the practitioner were already awakened, the practice would have no purpose. So, just as a pauper imagining himself to be a king will not thereby become one, the unawakened practitioner will not become a buddha just by imagining that it is so.^[7] Later, around the turn of the thirteenth century, Ratnarakṣita puts the still-current objection like this:

Moreover, buddhahood is the effect of the accumulation of merit and insight. How could that arise just through mental cultivation? For a poor man does not become a Cakravartin king through the cultivation of the thought, “I am a Cakravartin king!” Nor does someone all of the sudden become a hungry ghost just by imagining a hungry ghost, for there would be the unwanted consequence that good and bad actions would be fruitless.^[8]

Perhaps the imagination can generate vivid imagery that appears as if it is real to a person lost in reverie. Still, like a lover pining for his beloved who might see her appearance as if before him, the meditator’s vision will last only a short time, “since its nature is false insofar as it is imagined” (kalpitatvena mṛṣātmakatvāt). It will be overturned. “Precisely insofar as they have their origin in attachment to the unreal, worldly phenomena are impermanent,” Ratnarakṣita’s opponent continues. So, being impermanent, all the imagery the practitioner identifies with is quite unlike the unending buddha-qualities it is supposed to represent.^[9] However vividly it is made to appear, the identification with the deity-image the practitioner accomplishes in deity yoga remains incongruous with the goal. It is fleeting, not everlasting. If the practitioner thinks the identification is true, they are just fooling themselves.

And the problems do not end there. Many proponents of deity yoga, in the course of their vision practice texts themselves, argue that the mental imagery these practices involve does not exist ultimately. These texts typically begin with a reflection on emptiness according to the author’s preferred set of arguments. So, an author might argue at this stage that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic nature because they are dependently arisen or because they have neither a unitary nor a manifold nature; another might argue that all phenomena are empty of duality because every awareness-event is devoid of object and subject, and so on. These arguments lead to insight born from rational reflection (cintāmayī prajñā), which in turn grounds the following practice.^[10] Only then, having understood that mental imagery is empty of ultimate existence, does the practitioner dissolve all phenomena into emptiness and generate the maṇḍala and deity-image out of illusion-like imagery. But if all this imagery does not ultimately exist, why should we think that the practitioner’s identification with it later in the practice will have any ultimate efficacy? If the imagery and identification are taken to be ultimately real and nondeceptive, then the practitioner is deluding themselves. If they are taken to be false and deceptive, what is the point?

There are different ways one might respond to these worries. One is to argue that deity yoga is indeed beside the point. It leads to worldly accomplishments (laukikasiddhi), but it will not result in the ultimate attainment of buddhahood, which is reached only through practices of the completion stage that do not involve such illusion-like, deceptive imagery. Some authors take this tack—most prominently, authors in the early Kālacakra tradition.^[11] Proponents of deity yoga, however, try to save its soteriological efficacy. The imagery is ultimately unreal, yet its cultivation is still essential to reaching buddhahood. It is typically these proponents of deity yoga who appeal to Dharmakīrti’s view of yogic perception. Dharmakīrti had claimed that the gradual, repeated contemplation of anything, whether it is real or unreal, results in a vivid, transformative experience. Faced with the above objections, some proponents of deity yoga cite Dharmakīrti to this effect: the cultivation of the identification with the deity, they claim, will result in a vivid, transformative experience; it does not matter that the imagery this identification involves is false. Yet in this respect, their use of Dharmakīrti runs counter to Dharmakīrti’s own immediate aims in his discussion of yogic perception. For, as we will see in a moment, Dharmakīrti had not meant to endorse imagining unreal mental imagery as an effective liberative practice. Far from it. And yet tantric authors seem to take him to be doing just this. Why? Are they appealing to Dharmakīrti just for the authority he brings? Or are they just being sloppy?

I will show in what follows that the appropriation of Dharmakīrti’s discussion of yogic perception in tantric texts is rather on to something of philosophical importance. These tantric authors are not interested in the same epistemological problems that are of principal concern to Dharmakīrti when they cite him on yogic perception. Still, they rightly see in his work a clear expression of a fundamental Buddhist commitment to the power of mental cultivation—its power not just to change the practitioner’s mind temporarily but to transform it fundamentally in a manner that cannot be undone. And some are committed, too, to the idea that knowledge of this fact should be motivating for a rational, judicious person (prekṣāvat). Just as Dharmakīrti had argued that the cultivation of compassion, insight into selflessness, and so on, is rational activity, so too some of the authors we will consider here argue that we can know that tantric practice will result in the goal of buddhahood and that this fact should motivate us to undertake it. Tantric appeals to Dharmakīrti on yogic perception and cultivation’s power, then, are best understood in this light: as constructive and not unreasonable extensions of Dharmakīrtian ideas about the power of cultivation into the realm of tantric practice.

With this context in view, we will turn now to the adaptive reuse in tantric texts of two of Dharmakīrti’s verses on yogic perception, namely, Detailed Commentary on the Sources of Knowledge (Pramāṇavārttika) 3.282 and 3.285 (= The Ascertainment of the Sources of Knowledge [Pramāṇaviniścaya] 1.29 and 1.31).^[12] Then, we will turn to the power of cultivation to fundamentally transform a sentient being’s mental stream in a way that is stable and irreversible. This, I will show, is what is most important about Dharmakīrti’s view for these tantric authors. We will see that this is an important theme in the sections of the second chapter of Dharmakīrti’s Detailed Commentary that deal with a practitioner’s repeated practice of compassion (karuṇābhyāsa) and realization of the truth of cessation (nirodhasatya). Finally, we will turn to The Accomplishment of Reality (Tattvasiddhi), a tantric treatise attributed to a Śāntarakṣita (ca. ninth century), which contains a sustained discussion of the problem of irreversibility that is quite clearly indebted to Dharmakīrti’s ideas.^[13]

Dharmakīrti’s view of yogic perception has received a good deal of attention.^[14] A brief discussion will suffice for our purposes. Yogic perception is a direct source of knowledge that results from the repeated practice of cultivation. As an instance of perception, it is nonconceptual (akalpa, nirvikalpa, etc.). Famously, Dharmakīrti says at Detailed Commentary on the Sources of Knowledge 3.285 that repeatedly imagining anything, whether real or unreal (bhūtam abhūtaṃ vā), will result in an awareness-event that is both nonconceptual and vivid (sphuṭa, spaṣṭa, etc.). He writes:

Therefore, whether it is real or unreal,

whatever is intensely meditated upon

results in a vivid and non-conceptual awareness-event

when the cultivation is perfected (bhāvanāpariniṣpattau).^[15]

This counts for erroneous awareness-events as much as it does for yogic perception—that is, it counts for awareness-events that are not sources of knowledge as well as for those that are. As Dharmakīrti writes at Detailed Commentary 3.282:

Those who are deranged due to lust, grief, fear, or madness,

or are confused by dreams of thieves and the like,

perceive even false objects as if

they were present before them.^[16]

Even something false might be experienced as not conceptually constructed and as having a vivid appearance through the power of the imagination, whether this is cultivated intentionally (as in certain meditation practices) or unintentionally (as in cases of lust, grief, and so on).

Dharmakīrti’s primary interest in his definitions of yogic perception is to distinguish between cases of genuine yogic perception and mere episodes of yogic awareness (yogijñāna).^[17] To do so, Dharmakīrti stipulates that repeatedly turning attention only to those things that were previously known by some other source of knowledge can result in a vivid awareness-event that counts as perception. As he writes at Detailed Commentary 3.286, regarding the different kinds of vivid and nonconceptual awareness-events that arise from repeated cultivation:

Among those, that which is confirmed by a source of knowledge

and is related to a real object that has been ascertained earlier

is accepted as perception that arises from mental cultivation;

the rest are distortions.^[18]

For Dharmakīrti and his followers, inference (anumāna)—and finally the perfection of this in rational insight (cintāmayī prajñā)—is this other source of knowledge.^[19] The practitioner who has ascertained the truth of impermanence, selflessness, and so on based on rational inquiry (yukticintā) might then begin to meditate on these truths. So, it is reason that grounds yogic perception as a source of knowledge and directs the cultivations that aim toward it. In the context of Dharmakīrtian epistemology, then, Detailed Commentary 3.285 almost serves as a warning, a caveat to the meditator: since even false things might be made real through mental cultivation, one has to do some rational, inferential work first to settle what should and should not be cultivated.^[20]

The reuse of Dharmakīrti’s verses by proponents of deity yoga has a different purpose in view. When they cite Detailed Commentary 3.285, their aim is not to differentiate between those cultivations that lead to genuine instances of yogic perception and those that do not. (This is supported in part by the fact that, as far as I know, tantric authors never cite Detailed Commentary 3.286 along with their citation of 3.285.^[21]) Rather, their aim in citing 3.285 is to show that, even if the identification and imagery involved in deity yoga is all deceptive and false, per the kinds of objections we saw above, it will still have its desired transformative effect: it will result in an experience of buddhahood that is vivid, nonconceptual—and unending.

Consider Ratnarakṣita’s citation of Detailed Commentary 3.285. He introduces the verse by saying, “It is proven by experience that, with regard to a thing made into the mind’s object, there is the acquisition of stability (sthairyalābha) through repeated practice (abhyāsa) distinguished by careful attention and so on.”^[22] That is, the careful, attentive practice of mental cultivation results in a transformative experience that will motivate judgment, speech, and behavior in ways that become “stable,” “fixed,” or “everlasting” (sthira) once that cultivation reaches its culmination. Then, Detailed Commentary 3.285 is cited to show that this is so regardless of whether awareness’ object is unreal. As Ratnarakṣita cites the verse, with a not insignificant difference:

So, whether it is real or unreal,

whatever is intensively meditated upon

results in a vivid and non-conceptual awareness-event

when the cultivation’s power is perfected.^[23]

Underlining that the power (bala) of cultivation is such that it results in a vivid awareness-event whether or not its object is real, Ratnarakṣita refers back to the opponent’s example of the pauper imagining himself to be a king. “Insofar as all phenomena have a form that is merely mind-made,” he writes: “what’s the problem if, through even the cultivation of [oneself as] a Cakravartin king and so on, there is the vivid appearance of that?”^[24] The opponent had taken the example of the pauper imagining himself to be a king to be clear evidence that a deceptive cultivation will not lead to the ultimate attainment of buddhahood. Ratnarakṣita here asserts the contrary on the basis of Dharmakīrti’s authority: even in the case of the pauper imagining himself to be a king, the power of cultivation is such that, over a long period of time, kingship might be achieved.^[25] Detailed Commentary 3.285 is no longer a caveat to the meditator. It is rather an exhortation to cultivate the image of the deity, however deceptive it might at first appear.

In the early eleventh century, Vāgīśvarakīrti cites Dharmakīrti to similar effect. At one point in his Explanation (Vivaraṇa) to his own Beholding the Jewel of Reality (Tattvaratnāvaloka), his opponent appeals to a distinction between practices with proliferations (prapañca) and those without proliferations (niṣprapañca), arguing that deity yoga might be useful provisionally, but its proliferation of mental imagery has to be abandoned at a higher stage of practice wherein only the real—sheer bliss alone (sātamātra)—is cultivated.^[26] In response, Vāgīśvarakīrti argues that this distinction is unwarranted. “Surely,” he responds, “the mind becomes stable regarding precisely that object to which it is directed again and again, without interruption and for a long time.”^[27] As proof of this point, he cites Detailed Commentary 3.285, with the same difference we find in Ratnarakṣita’s citation.^[28] The power of cultivation is able to stably transform the mind regardless of whether its object is real or unreal. If this were not so, Vāgīśvarakīrti points out, even the advanced cultivations that his opponent claims are without mental imagery would not be able to transform the practitioner’s mind in a way that is everlasting. So, rather than concluding that stability can never be achieved, the opponent should concede that, whether or not it involves proliferation (prapañcam aprapañcaṃ vā)—indeed, whether or not it agrees with a source of knowledge (pramāṇasaṃgatam itarad vā)—the diligent practitioner ought to cultivate the illusion-like form of the deity.^[29]

This point about the power of cultivation is, I think, what is most crucial in these tantric reuses of Dharmakīrti’s verses on yogic perception.^[30] Regardless of its object, the power of cultivation is such that it can transform the mental stream of the practitioner, fundamentally and irreversibly. In many ways, this is a basic Buddhist point. In The Discourse Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dharma (Dhammacakkappavattanasutta), the Buddha makes clear that there was no turning back after his own direct realization of awakening. The Buddha says to the first five disciples: “Indeed, knowledge and seeing arose in me: ‘Unshakeable (akuppā) is the liberation of my mind; this is my last birth: now there is no more renewed existence.’”^[31] Irreversibility is of great concern in the basic literature of the Mahāyāna, too, as Peter Gilks has shown in his very fine study of the topic.^[32] The seventeenth chapter of The Perfection of Insight in Eight Thousand Lines (Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā), for instance, is devoted to the marks that distinguish the bodhisattva who cannot be turned back (i.e., the avinivartanīya bodhisattva), and the avinivartanīyabhūmi, “the stage of one who cannot be turned back,” would later become systematized as the eighth of the ten bodhisattva stages.^[33]

Still, it is with this point about irreversibility in view that tantric authors choose to appeal to Dharmakīrti in particular. In his ninth- through tenth-century, An Ascertainment and Proof of Insight and Means Explaining Their Nonduality (Advayavivaraṇaprajñopāyaviniścayasiddhi), Padmavajra cites both Detailed Commentary 3.282 and 3.285 in support of a proof that he appears to borrow from Śāntarakṣita’s The Accomplishment of Reality, one we will return to in more detail below:

With whatever thing [the mind is joined], through the power of repeated practice regarding it, a nature that is thoroughly distinguished manifests, which is characterized by the property that it does not turn back.^[34]

The mind’s nature is clear like a crystal; it might take on many different forms. Padmavajra cites a verse from scripture to this effect: “A person’s mind comes to consist of whatever it is joined with, like a crystal that takes on a variegated form.”^[35] However, repeated practice is able to transform the mind’s very nature in such a way that the form it takes on is, so to speak, forever lodged there, never to fade. It is to establish this point that Padmavajra refers us to Detailed Commentary 3.282 and 3.285.

With another pointed reference to Dharmakīrti’s Detailed Commentary, Vāgīśvarakīrti also tells us that there is no turning back when the imagination transforms the mental stream’s nature in a way that is free of misfortune and suffering.^[36] So, his opponent, who supposes that the mental imagery cultivated in deity yoga might be abandoned, is wrong in the first place because the right kind of habit that is deeply ingrained simply cannot be undone.^[37] As we saw above, it was cultivation’s attainment of stability, its coming to a point where it is everlasting, that framed Ratnarakṣita’s citation of Detailed Commentary 3.285. The mental stream is malleable. Our habits, to use William James’s felicitous phrase, have a certain “plasticity”: they are endowed with “a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.”^[38] Yet, these authors claim, in some instances the power of cultivation generates habits so strong they will never yield.

To understand why cultivation is capable of transforming the mental stream irreversibly, we can turn to Detailed Commentary on the Sources of Knowledge, chapter 2.^[39] Here, Dharmakīrti argues that, in certain cases, cultivation is capable of transforming the natural, spontaneous flow of the mental stream, its svarasa or “natural inclination.” This comes up most explicitly in Dharmakīrti’s discussion of the bodhisattva’s repeated practice of compassion (karuṇābhyāsa). An opponent argues that repeated practice cannot lead to the kind of limitless perfection Buddhists attribute to a buddha’s compassion. Train as much as you like—you will never be able to jump 100 feet in the air; however much you might heat it, water cannot be heated beyond a boil. Compassion, the opponent claims, is like that too: there is a limit to what repeated practice brings.^[40] In response, Dharmakīrti specifies that it is only certain properties that cannot be increased to a limitless state of perfection: those properties that are sustained through repeated effort (punaryatna) and those that have an unstable basis (asthirāśraya).^[41] As Eli Franco summarizes the point:

If these two conditions do not obtain, then cultivated properties become the own nature of the person, which means that they “proceed by their own essence” (svarasena pravartante), that is, they reproduce themselves (or more precisely: moments of their own kind) automatically, without any further effort, in the next moments of the succession of constituents that form the person.^[42]

Each jump depends on repeated efforts, and water cools down when it is removed from the flame, so these examples do not fit the case at hand. Instead, Dharmakīrti suggests, the cultivation of compassion is more like burning firewood: when the wood becomes charred, the black color it takes on does not require repeated efforts to be sustained, and the wood is such that it stably supports this new property.^[43] Each moment in the causal stream reinforces the next, and so there is no uncharring the firewood once it is burned. In a similar way, as each repeated act of imagination gives rise to greater intensity, a mental property like compassion becomes the very nature (svabhāva) of the mental stream.^[44]

The example of firewood is helpful, but we still might doubt that it fits the case of mental properties like compassion. Why should we think that the mental stream’s flow cannot be rerouted again, however long it has been directed toward compassion? All kinds of deeply ingrained habits—desire, aversion, greed, delusion, selfishness, and so on—reinforce themselves and ramify seemingly without end, and yet it is axiomatic in the Buddhist tradition that these habits can be undone. Why should we think that habits like compassion and selflessness cannot be broken but habits like desire and aversion can be?

This is something Dharmakīrti addresses at a number of places. He claims in the famous conclusion to The Ascertainment of the Sources of Knowledge, chapter 1, for instance, that “those who diligently practice precisely the insight that consists in reflection will directly experience the ultimate source of knowledge, which is without error, stainless, and unperishing (anapāyi).”^[45] He considers the point in most detail, however, in his account of the Truth of Cessation (nirodhasatya) at Detailed Commentary 2.190–216, which has recently been edited, translated, and studied, together with Manorathanandin’s commentary, by Cristina Pecchia’s Dharmakīrti on the Cessation of Suffering. Here, Dharmakīrti argues for irreversibility from the absence of causes for backsliding. As he puts it in Detailed Commentary 2.205, once the practice of the path has transformed “the fundamental basis” (āśraya) of the mental stream, the arising of faults will not occur again “due to the absence of the power [to do so].”^[46] Again, it is like firewood turned to ash and unlike water heated over a flame: the mind’s nature, once transformed, is stable and unerring.^[47] On Dharmakīrti’s understanding of our existential condition, suffering is at root caused by the innate sense of self (sahajā satkāyadṛṣṭiḥ), his understanding of our fundamental delusion (moha) or ignorance (avidyā). When that innate sense of self is replaced by the direct experience of selflessness (nairātmyadṛṣṭi), the causes for the arising of suffering are brought to an end. These do not recur, he claims at Detailed Commentary 2.208, because the mind’s “natural disposition” (prakṛti) is “luminosity” (prabhāsvara); occlusions like desire, aversion, and delusion are so many wisps of cloud in the sky.

Errors like our innate sense of self, in other words, are “unstable” (adṛḍha). Once truly corrected, these errors forever cease. Dharmakīrti avails himself of the stock example of the mistaken apprehension of a snake where there is really a coiled rope: once the rope is directly apprehended as such, the mistaken perception as of a snake coiled beside the path at dusk will not recur. In the same way, once the innate sense of self is replaced by the direct experience of selflessness, the sense of self and the suffering it causes are forever eliminated.^[48] What is left in that transformed mental stream is previously practiced compassion, now devoid of any conditions that might counteract its endless proliferation—all of which, again, would be grounded on the innate sense of self.^[49] Once it is made the mental stream’s natural inclination through repeated practice, compassion is an irreversible disposition, unlike desire and aversion. “Upon their realization of the truth of suffering,” Dharmakīrti writes, “for one who is without obstruction, the arising of compassion is a real property, borne by the current of previous inclinations; it does not conform to the sense of self.”^[50] Desire and aversion, on the other hand, are grounded on the innate sense of self, and so when that goes, desire and aversion cease, too. But compassion is not grounded on the innate sense of self. Instead, it is only intensified by the sense of self’s cessation and the uprooting of all desire and aversion. So, unlike desire and aversion, compassion can be made an unbreakable habit.^[51]

The irreversibility of transformations effected by cultivation is defended in great detail—and in clearly Dharmakīrtian terms—by Śāntarakṣita in his tantric treatise, The Accomplishment of Reality.^[52] Ernst Steinkellner in particular has drawn attention to this fascinating work in a series of articles.^[53] The Accomplishment of Reality seeks to prove, through appeals to both reason and scripture, that the cultivation of great bliss (mahāsukha) in tantric practice is rational, an activity that should be undertaken by any judicious person (prekṣāvat) who seeks liberation from suffering. The work’s aim is normative and not only apologetic.^[54] As Steinkellner has shown, its first two parts utilize Dharmakīrti’s method of inferring the arising of an effect from the presence of its complete set of causal conditions (the so-called kāryotpādānumāna) in order to prove that the tantric practitioner who engages in sexual yogic practice will attain great bliss and the elimination of suffering.^[55] The “complete set of causal conditions” in the case of this practice involves not just the ordinary physical bodies of the practitioner and consort (though Śāntarakṣita is clear that it does involve these); involved too are additional properties that distinguish the causal complex and lead necessarily to a distinguished, distinctive, or special (viśiṣṭa) result.^[56] This is what it means to say that, for the practitioner, the forms and so on experienced are “embraced by insight and means” (prajñopāyaparigraha): the forms, bodies, and so on involved are all empowered by mantras and mudrās, and the practitioner is enjoined to experience himself or herself as the deity.^[57] Śāntarakṣita cites The Union of All Buddhas (Sarvabuddhasamāyoga) to this effect: “I myself am indeed the nature of all buddhas and of all the heroic [bodhisattvas]. Through union with one’s own deity (svādhidaivatāyogena), therefore, precisely I myself should reach accomplishment (ātmāiva sādhayet).”^[58] Not just any pleasure results in the attainment of great bliss, then. Great bliss is attained only through the cultivation of those pleasures distinguished by deity yoga and the empowerments, mantras, and mudrās this involves.

The portion of the text that interests us here is the lengthy discussion of the structure and force of cultivation and irreversibility.^[59] Śāntarakṣita states the proof that cultivation leads to permanent, irreversible change with the following:

Thus, given that the mind is like a crystal-stone, naturally luminous, one who is characterized by pleasure and delight attained through a distinctive conditioning by means of forms and so on should experience there, by force of that distinctive practice, the highest perfection of [that practice] that is embraced by insight and means. That is, an awareness-event—like in the case of discernment, crafts, and the practical arts—that partakes of a distinctive conditioning that is produced from the experience of objects like form and so on comes to have an accomplished nature that is supreme and permanent due to the power of the gradual repeated practice of mental cultivation, in virtue of reaching the highest perfection of cultivation; like the Sugatas and so on in our system and, in the common world [as Dharmakīrti says], like lust, grief, fear, madness, and so on. And [pakṣadharmatā:] the pleasure and delight and so on that are arisen from contact with sense objects] are cultivated. Therefore, they too are endowed with a distinction [whose nature is supreme and permanent when the practice is cultivated to its highest perfection].^[60]

The argument has a common form. First, Śāntarakṣita states the pervasion (vyāpti) between the reason (hetu) and the property to be proven (sādhyadharma). In this case, the reason is cultivation that has reached its highest perfection (prakarṣaparyanta) through repeated practice, and what is to be proven is the property of having an accomplished nature that is supreme (parama) and permanent (śāśvata). Śāntarakṣita then appears to give two sets of examples (dṛṣṭānta). First, there are cases like discernment, crafts, and the practical arts, wherein we also find a distinctive sort of conditioning. This example gives a sense of the sort of practice that is at stake. But the relevant similar cases where the pervasion is observed (i.e., examples where cultivation that has reached its highest perfection is seen to be permanent, etc.) are cases like the Buddha’s awakening—and, Śāntarakṣita says, other cases that are familiar from Dharmakīrti: cases like lust, grief, fear, madness, and so on. (The reference to Detailed Commentary 3.282 [= Ascertainment 1.29a] is unmistakable.) Finally, Śāntarakṣita establishes the so-called pakṣadharmatā, or the fact that the relevant case is in fact characterized by the presence of the reason. That is, the pleasure and delight that have arisen from sexual practice (the specific “contact” at issue here in Śāntarakṣita’s discussion) are also cultivated to their highest perfection. So, he concludes, pleasure and delight so arisen also come to have a nature that is supreme and permanent.

Much of the following discussion is in defense of the pervasion asserted here. For, it might be objected, some property that has been cultivated can be turned back, and so the mere presence of cultivation does not prove the permanence of the cultivated quality. Habits might be plastic, as James put it. They might be relatively stable and hard to change, but this is not to say that they will in principle never change. They might be lost and forgotten over a long period of time or counteracted by some opposed repeated practice. The cases Śāntarakṣita himself refers to—namely, discernment (prajñā), crafts (śilpa), and the practical arts (kalā)—are good examples of this. I grew up playing piano, but it has been years since I have practiced, and so much of whatever skill I had is lost. Even the cases Śāntarakṣita cites from Dharmakīrti as similar cases wherein the pervasion is observed seem not to be quite right. His Buddhist interlocutor will grant that the Buddha does not backslide from liberation from suffering, but surely habits of lust, grief, fear, and madness can be changed, however deeply ingrained they might seem. The Buddhist path is predicated on this fact.

In response to this worry, Śāntarakṣita argues that it is only if a cultivation is brought to its highest perfection that it is irreversible. This kind of perfection is not always obtained. Perhaps it rarely is. We can imagine many instances (like my piano playing) where practice falls far short of perfection. As Dharmakīrti himself emphasized, it is not embodied practices like jumping and so on that can be cultivated “to the highest degree of perfection,” but rather mental dispositions. Still, Śāntarakṣita writes,

Whatever has reached its highest perfection does not turn back, just like liberation and so on. Pleasure, delight, and so on have the nature of the reason [insofar as they are brought to their] highest perfection. [So, they do not turn back]. This is a svabhāvahetu, a reason based on the nature [of the concepts involved].^[61]

That is, it is simply in the nature of the reason in this case, namely, something in fact reaching its highest perfection, for it to be irreversible. When this perfection is reached, it is brought about by the sort of repeated practice that is observed to a limited degree in cases of discernment, crafts, and the practical arts. And, when it is reached, we speak of something’s being “fully integrated” (sātmīkaraṇa): “[a property’s] being fully integrated follows only from [cultivation] reaching its highest perfection [and not from a less fully developed cultivation].” So, Śāntarakṣita continues: “because of the power of a distinctive practice, this [property] reaches a state that cannot be turned back again. It does not turn back into something else again; it becomes the very nature of that [causal stream].”^[62] Skills might be lost as we fall out of practice. Habits are broken. Still, Śāntarakṣita claims, when cultivation reaches a certain level, it leads to an irreversible transformation, just as firewood turned to ash does not turn back into wood.^[63]

At this point, we might wonder why some cultivations reach this level of perfection and others do not. Why do we sometimes fall out of practice? And is there any reason to think that tantric practice is the sort of thing that will inevitably lead to the highest degree of perfection and thus become irreversible? Here again, Śāntarakṣita follows Dharmakīrti’s lead—though to rather surprising ends. As we saw above, Dharmakīrti argues that mental properties are the sorts of things that can be cultivated to a limitless degree. This goes for compassion (kṛpā) and desirelessness (vairāgya), as well as for states he views negatively as causes of continued existence in saṃsāra, like desire (rāga).^[64] Compassion, however, is not grounded on the false sense of self in the way desire is, and so it might be cultivated and sustained even after the false sense of self is overcome. That false sense of self, meanwhile, is overcome once and for all by the direct experience of selflessness, the vivid result of sustained cultivation brought to its highest perfection: “That which is free of misfortune, true, and the nature of things,” Dharmakīrti writes at Detailed Commentary 2.210: “cannot be obstructed by opposing factors even with effort, for awareness sides with that (buddhes tatpakṣapātataḥ).”^[65] When selflessness is directly experienced, there is no reason to unsee it. The mental stream flows forever in that direction. Śāntarakṣita refers to this idea in his discussion of irreversibility, too. In a clear reference to Detailed Commentary 2.210, he argues that, for a mental stream that has reached the state of perfection, there is no turning back “because awareness sides with that” (buddhes tatpakṣapātāt).^[66] The “that” here, though, is not simply the direct experience of selflessness. It is the experience of bliss.

Early in his discussion of irreversibility, Śāntarakṣita had sought to establish a basic point about the nature of bliss. Using one of Dharmakīrti’s models of our knowledge of absence via nonapprehension (anupalabdhi), he argues that, because the nature of bliss is opposed to the nature of suffering, the apprehension of bliss lets us infer the absence of suffering.^[67] He writes:

For instance, the present apprehension of heat, etc., which is opposed to cold, etc., proves the absence of cold, etc., since there is no apprehension in a single place of things that are mutually opposed. In the same way, it is not at all possible for both pleasure and suffering to occur in what is one and the same continuum, for one is opposed to the other.^[68]

Granted, ordinary pleasures are mixed with pain, suffering, and dissatisfaction. However, Śāntarakṣita argues that, when great bliss distinguished by insight and means is cultivated to its highest perfection, fully integrated through repeated practice, and apprehended as such, then it brings suffering to an end—precisely because bliss and suffering are fundamentally opposed to one another in the same way as heat and cold.^[69]

This helps make sense of Śāntarakṣita’s explanation of why the cultivation of bliss is one that will inevitably lead to its highest degree of perfection and thus to its irreversibility. On one hand, Śāntarakṣita is clear that the mind is completely pure by nature, and so “whatever [the mental stream] is perfumed with, and through the power of repeated practice on that, a nature that is thoroughly distinguished manifests which is characterized by the property that it cannot be turned back.”^[70] But still, because it is by nature opposed to the arising of suffering, the cultivation of great bliss is perhaps unique among mental qualities that might be cultivated. For, unlike discernment, crafts, and practical arts (or unlike the brahmins’ trained aversion to impurity, or nairghṛṇya, to use another of Śāntarakṣita’s examples), Śāntarakṣita claims that no judicious person will interrupt his or her cultivation of great bliss, since no judicious person intentionally cultivates suffering. As he writes:

For, having understood suffering and so on not to be beneficial, suffering and so on are abandoned by judicious people. And a judicious person will not look somewhere for a cause that will produce suffering again; otherwise, they are not a judicious person—they are something else, like a madman.^[71]

In the course of practicing the tantric path, even before bringing the cultivation of great bliss to its highest perfection, a judicious person sees that it is of benefit insofar as its presence is by nature opposed to the arising of suffering. Other practices will be interrupted before they are perfected, but tantric practice is special. Not only is it irreversible once it reaches its highest perfection; further, once a judicious person sets off on the path, it becomes more and more evident as the person progresses that the cultivation of great bliss, distinguished by all the marks of deity yoga, is of the highest value. So, no judicious person will turn away from it.

Even more clearly than the various citations of Detailed Commentary on the Sources of Knowledge 3.282 and 3.285 we saw above, The Accomplishment of Reality shows us what is most crucial about Dharmakīrti’s view of cultivation for tantric authors: its power to effect a permanent transformation. This is all the more pointed in the case of The Accomplishment of Reality given Śāntarakṣita’s disagreement with Dharmakīrti about how yogic perception really works. Tellingly, Śāntarakṣita never cites Detailed Commentary 3.285, and he does not argue that conceptual sorts of cultivation can result in nonconceptual awareness. Indeed, he argues explicitly that this cannot happen, as Steinkellner has shown.^[72] Based on the principle that like begets like, Śāntarakṣita argues that the omniscience of a buddha is an awareness-event that forever involves mental construction. As he begins his argument:

Is this awareness of the Omniscient Ones that occurs at cultivation’s highest perfection strictly conceptual? Or is it non-conceptual? Among these alternatives, in the first place, if it is asserted to be strictly non-conceptual, then how could it be that what is arisen from the power of a conceptual cultivation is non-conceptual? For there cannot be in any way whatsoever the generation of a non-conceptual awareness-event from a conceptual awareness.^[73]

The omniscience a buddha obtains must be, he goes on to argue in no uncertain terms, a conceptual awareness-event—or an awareness-event that involves mental constructions, a savikalpakajñāna.

Much could be said about this surprising view.^[74] But, for our purposes here, what is important is that, despite Śāntarakṣita’s disagreeing with what we might think is the basic Dharmakīrtian point about yogic perception—namely, whatever is cultivated, whether real or unreal, will result in a vivid, nonconceptual awareness-event at the culmination of that cultivation—Śāntarakṣita still considers himself to be working in a Dharmakīrtian milieu. He cites him as support by name, refers to other passages of the Detailed Commentary on the Sources of Knowledge, and structures his text around the proof that tantric practice is rational in squarely Dharmakīrtian terms. This suggests that, at least as far as Śāntarakṣita is concerned, what is most central about Dharmakīrti’s view is not the idea that a conceptual awareness-event could be made nonconceptual with enough sustained concentration. What is essential is rather Dharmakīrti’s proof of the power of cultivation to transform the mental stream of the practitioner in a way that is irreversible and the reason this gives us to undertake such cultivation. This is the case too, I think, for other authors like Ratnarakṣita or Vāgīśvarakīrti who do cite Detailed Commentary 3.285. Whatever they might think about the capacity of sustained reflection to transform conceptual awareness into nonconceptual awareness, what they in fact emphasize in their use of Dharmakīrti’s verses on yogic perception is the stability of the transformation tantric practice is able to bring about. These tantric authors, then, highlight an important aspect of Dharmakīrti’s thought about cultivation: the concern with how we can fundamentally and irreversibly change our cognitive, affective, and behavioral dispositions—how we might develop new habits that persist forever.

Parts of this paper were presented at the American Academy of Religion Conference in November 2023, at the Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy in February 2024, and at the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago in March 2024. My thanks to the organizers and audiences at each of these venues for helpful comments and conversation—especially to Thomas Yarnall for his response at Columbia, and to Jonathan Gold, Jay Garfield, Whitney Cox, Dan Arnold, and Taryn Sue for their comments. My thanks to two anonymous reviewers, as well as to Margherita Serena Saccone, for detailed comments on a near-final draft. Finally, my thanks especially to Douglas Duckworth for working through The Accomplishment of Reality together and for reading an earlier draft of this paper. What errors and infelicities remain are, as ever, my own responsibility.

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