The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2765 page)

(6th/5th cent. BCE).
Post-exilic Jewish leader. Zerubbabel worked with Joshua the
high priest
as leader of the returned exiles from Babylon and as builder of the
Temple
in
Jerusalem
. Zerubbabel's activities are described in the books of
Ezra
,
Nehemiah
,
Haggai
, and
Zechariah
.

 
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Zhen dong
(
gzhan.stong
, ‘Emptiness of Other’
).

At one time a heretical theory in Tibetan Buddhism that contributed to the downfall of the
Jonang
school, but which was later resurrected to underpin the great eclectic
Rimé
movement of the Tibetan Renaissance. The theory asserts that the two levels of truth—ultimate truth (
param
rtha satya
) and conventional truth (
sa
rti satya
)—are two distinct ‘entities’, in other words that ultimate truths (i.e. emptinesses) are empty of being the objects that are the basis of their imputation, and that objects (e.g. tables) are empty of being the emptiness that may be imputed on them. This involves the belief that a conventional truth (tables are just tables) is true from a conventional point of view, and that an ultimate truth (emptiness is empty of any phenomenal basis of imputation) is only true from a standpoint of meditative insight at which point all phenomena apparently cease. The
Geluk
, who adopt the
rang dong
theory and who condemned the Jonang for heresy, point out several errors, notably that the separation and independence of the two levels of truth amounts to substantialism by reifying the ‘absolute’; that their understanding of an ultimate truth contradicts the Prajñ
p
ramit
(
Perfection of Wisdom
) by separating emptiness from form; and that the absence of emptiness can never be true at any level.

 
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(Heb., ‘remembrances’). A
benediction
in the
Musaf
prayer of
Rosh
ha-Shanah.

 
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