The emptiness that is form: Developing the body of Buddhahood in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Tantra

This thesis engages the two realities (conventional and ultimate) in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought, as addressed in the Mahayana Buddhist formulation "Form is empty, emptiness is form." The Tibetan master Je Tsong Khapa (1357--1419) elaborated both sides of this nondual formulation---the "empty side" and the "perception side"---but concerned to address the over-negating climate of his day he chose particularly to emphasize the perception side in his own writings. I propose that this decision led him in his Tantric exegesis to emphasize deity yoga (devatayoga, lha'i rnal 'byor) in general and the "Creation Stage" (utpattikrama, bskyed rim) of Unexcelled Yoga Tantra in particular. In this thesis I seek to demonstrate how Tsong Khapa's master work on tantra, The Great Stages of Mantra (sngags rim chen mo or NRC), addresses this concern, elaborating deity yoga as an esoteric correlate to his exoteric emphasis on "conventional validating cognition," locating the domain of radical personal- and world-transformation squarely within the conventional sphere.; In the earlier chapters I define the broader context for this study by sketching an overview of the "empty side" in Buddhist history and developing a critical methodology whereby Buddhist and modern deconstructive methodologies in philosophy and the social sciences can be meaningfully compared. In the later chapters I then examine how it is specifically only " intrinsic reality" (svabhava, rang bzhin) that is negated in an exoteric context in ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological spheres, and I then trace how Tsong Khapa carries his exoteric findings regarding such negations into the esoteric sphere in his NRC. We see that just as in exoteric contexts emptiness does not negate relativity, so in esoteric contexts thoroughgoing emptiness yoga need not eliminate the development of the extraordinary, pure perceptions of deity yoga. I then conclude by elaborating the practice of the Creation Stage itself, showing that it is indeed not only compatible with but in fact necessary to the full embodiment of emptiness that is buddhahood. Appendices then include a critical edition and translation of chapters 11--12 of the Great Stages of Mantra upon which this dissertation is based.