This is the seventh of eight volumes presenting Tibetan views on the controversy that arose in Buddhist India over how to refute production from self. The controversy revolves around the opening phrase of the first stanza of the first chapter of Nāgārjuna’s Fundamental Treatise on the Middle Called “Wisdom”:

Not from self, not from others,
Not from both, not causelessly
Do any things
Ever arise anywhere.

Nāgārjuna’s principal Indian commentators, however, explain the refutation of production from self in varying detail, the differences engendering the split between what came to be called the Autonomy School and the Consequence School.

Tsong-kha-pa’s focus in his Great Exposition of the Stages of the Path is on the material in the final phase of the controversy between Buddhapālita, Bhāvaviveka, and Chandrakīrti on the topic of compatibly appearing subjects. His intricate long analysis of that phase appears in volumes 5 and 6, for which Jam-yang-zhay-pa’s three volumes, 1-3, serve as introductions.

The current volume 7 on Tsong-kha-pa’s The Essence of Eloquence, which Tsong-kha-pa published six years later, contains a revised but much shorter presentation of the same materia. This newer presentation for the most part are staccato overviews of the gist of Chandrakīrti’s text, which he cites only once.
The early twentieth-century commentator Jig-me-dam-chö-gya-tsho helpfully identifies the relevant passages in Chandrakīrti’s Clear Words and rephrases Tsong-kha-pa’s meanings in sequences familiar to monastic textbooks and occasionally draws out issues.