Song of the Profound View [Paperback]

Geshe Rabten's "Song of the Profound View" is a remarkable and haunting book, and it is unique among the many available discussions of the Prasangika-Madhyamaka in offering an extraordinarily intimate view of one Lharampa Geshe's struggle to understand the most subtle aspects of the view.

The book consists of twelve verses written by Geshe-la in the course of a meditation retreat on emptiness he conducted in a hermitage near Dharamsala under the direction of his root lama Trijang Rinpoche, along with an autocommentary explaining the context and meaning of each verse. It offers a startlingly personal and detailed account of his reflection and meditation, particularly concerning his Herculean effort to understand what is meant by nominal designation and imputation by thought.

I find it odd that Wisdom Publications markets this book in their "Intermediate" series, as it deals with the most complicated and subtle aspects of the whole vast enterprise of Gelukpa Madhyamaka. It makes a marvelous companion piece to Kensur Yeshe Thubden's "Path to the Middle", which covers the same material in much more depth from a doctrinal perspective.

Generally when one reads presentations of wisdom teachings in Tibetan Buddhism the material is offered as though it's completely settled and clear, but understanding what these terms really mean in reference to one's actual experience is incredibly difficult. One gets the flavor of the process of coming to that understanding in this extraordinary and beautiful little book. This is one of my favorite treatments of Gelukpa Madhyamaka, and I highly recommend it for students of the Middle Way.

Within Buddhism there are endless collections of such songs and their commentaries. What this short text adds is a more personal view of Geshe Rabten's retreat situation and meditative approach. This will probably appeal most to students within his particular lineage. (I think his Echoes of Voidness (Wisdom Intermediate Book - White Series) did a better job elucidating the standard Geluk view of sunyata, and feel there are more inspiring and helpful instructions for realizing the view by others like the contemporary Nyingma masters Namkai Norbu and Tulku Urgyen.)

Geshe Rabten (1920-86) was a very down to earth and sincere Tibetan monk. A simple farmer until his late teens, he entered the spiritual path relatively late in life and through austere perseverance worked his way up to earning the geshe degree with highest honors at age 43. This book is a rather nicely done printing of a song he wrote during a retreat in 1969. The 12 verse song is pretty short (pages 19-43) and could have easily fit on just a couple of pages. Instead here only one verse is printed per page (with the Tibetan script shown on the facing page). So there is a lot of space around the words. This is fitting for a retreat song on emptiness... It is also a helpful format for the student knowing or learning Tibetan.

This graphic spacious quality is the most attractive aspect of this book for me. Words only do so much after all, and the encouragement to experience such realization is what we're really interested in here. Both the actual style of Geshe's poetry and commentary (pgs 45-84) and Stephen Batchelor's translation are a different matter. They are simple and direct (in keeping with the tone of retreat and the subject), but they are also on the dry side, and so express a very traditional Tibetan approach.

For a glimpse of emptiness via the mental approach of a serious yogi this book gives a middle way between the dry mind-full rigors of a Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti or Tsongkhapa treatise, and the flowing experiential mind-blowing lyrical insights of a Milarepa, Longchenpa or Shabkar poem. All three approaches are important to study, but this text will be most helpful as either a reminder within one's own retreat meditations (literal Cliff notes perhaps), or as an inspiration to dig deeper into the teachings. Like the following quote shows, such a verbal expression of emptiness is at best an approximation (but in reality as false and hollow as a drawing of a flower is to the beauty and fragrance of the real thing):

"I reflected upon the mode of being of phenomena;
How can they be different from the example of space?
The manifold things that briefly appear in a variety of ways
Are like drawings on water, they cannot stay forever.
Being the nature of water, they arise from water;
They repeatedly arise from and dissolve back into it." (verse 4, pg 27)

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