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BUDDHISM IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY
Whalen Lai
INTRODUCTION: BUDDHIST MIND AND BUDDHIST REALITY
Within the larger context of the history of Chinese philosophy, the major contribution of
Chinese Buddhism can be said to be its insight into the working of the human psyche and
the structure of ultimate reality, in short, psychology and metaphysics. Chinese
understanding of these two areas has not been the same since the medieval Buddhist
period. As the Qing scholars charged, the Neo-Confucian philosophers of the Song and
Ming period (which came after the Buddhist era) had been so heavily influenced by
Buddhism in their inner cultivation and in their metaphysics as to be crypto-Buddhists.
Before Buddhism came to China, the two dominant traditions were Confucianism and
Daoism. In Confucianism, man sees himself as a social being tied from birth to family
and state; to be human is to be son of one’s father and subject to one’s lord and king. In
Daoism, man sees himself as part of nature; to be true to nature, it is sometimes necessary
to renounce the artificiality of human culture, even to reject society and return to the hills.
In the Han Confucian synthesis of these two traditions under the rubric of so-called YinYang
Confucianism, the ideal was to integrate man into the family, the family into the
state, and the state into the cosmos under the guidance of the emperor, the Son of Heaven
who binds heaven, earth and man together. There was no need then to look for a very
subtle self like the Chan (Japanese Zen) idea of ‘your original face before you were born’
or to seek an escape from both society and nature to some acosmic Beyond higher than
the limit of heaven itself.
It is Buddhism that led the Chinese to scrutinize the innermost reaches of their psyche
while promising a personal deliverance to a transcendental realm beyond the natural
cosmos. Not only that: it is in the nature of this medieval philosophy that this depth
psychology is a reflection of the new heights reached by the new metaphysics. The
classic Buddhist universe organized around Mount Sumeru and divided into the triloka
(the three realms of desires, form and formlessness) is in fact a psychic universe. Mind
and reality correlate. As a salvific or liberating religion, Buddhism had its leading zv576
practitioners, the monks, turning their attention away from the social and natural
definition of man towards discovering the pneumatic mind and some acosmic Beyond. It
is no accident that the Chinese word for ‘transcendence’, like the English one, came into
philosophical usage largely from this period on. Just as the Buddhists would introduce
into Chinese many more senses of ‘mind’ than it had words for before, they would also
give to it the idea of ‘transcendence’ based on the verbs ‘to leave, to go above, to shed, to
be released from’. It is this medieval flight of the spirit in philosophical expression that
this chapter will describe.
THE NEW PARAMETERS OF DISCOURSE
To accomplish this explication of the inner reality and its lofty end, Chinese Buddhist
philosophy, while building on the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition that went before,
transformed Chinese thought in the following three crucial areas:
1 Understanding MahƗyƗna Emptiness as a more profound wisdom-reality than the naïve
realism of the Confucian world of Being as well as the nihilism of the Daoist NonBeing
or Nothingness.
2 Uncovering a corresponding non-self (anƗtman) through an emptying of the empirical
self or selfhood as such…until this dual approach, still predicated upon a negative
rhetoric, reverses itself during…
3 The final MahƗyƗna transvaluation of the same into a positive, direct and immediate
identity between the Buddha-nature self and the Suchness nature of reality.
Using the above as a framework, this chapter will recapitulate the major developments of
Chinese Buddhist philosophy, namely: the maturation of the insight into Emptiness from
the early PrajñƗists to Sengzhao (AD 384–414?); the development of the Nirvana School
from Daosheng (AD 355–434) to Jizang (AD 549–623); and the flowering of Sinitic
MahƗyƗna from Tiantai to Huayan, i.e. from Zhiyi (AD 538–97) to Fazang (AD 643–
712).
The discovery of Emptiness as transcendental
The Buddhist teaching of cessation of the passions and of life’s sufferings had initially
defined nirvƗ a negatively as ‘extinction’. This negativism had, however, the positive
function of eroding the reality of this world of rebirth (sa sƗra) and opening up a
dimension of the ‘other shore’ (nirvƗ a). This set up in HƯnayƗna a dualism of sa sƗra
and nirvƗ a. But the rise of MahƗyƗna with the Wisdom Snjtras (PrajñƗpƗramitƗ Snjtras)
challenged that dualism with the new wisdom of Emptiness.
Emptiness denies the duality. It negates the opposition of sas Ɨra and nirvƗ a, Form
and Emptiness, or, in Chinese shorthand, Being and Non-Being. Both sa sƗra and zv577
nirvƗ a are empty; both Being and Non-Being are relative. Emptiness even empties
itself to guard against those who cling on to it as another, real absolute. This is because
true freedom is freedom from the fixities of mind, from habits of thought, and mental
defilements that created those distinctions in the first place. In more positive terms, it is
freedom to realize the interdependence of all things, to see the non-dual, the nature of
what truly is. This Emptiness philosophy (ĞnjnyavƗda) is therefore not nihilistic. It just
happened to retain the negative rhetoric associated with early Buddhism.
These Wisdom or Emptiness Snjtras reached China in the late second century AD. By
the third century, they struck a chord among those Chinese philosophers, the NeoDaoists,
who were then interested in the mysteries of the Yijing, the Laozi and the
Zhuangzi. At first, ‘Emptiness’ was mistaken for just another word to express the Daoist
idea of Nothingness or Non-Being. In fact, it was translated as such.
Buddhism in chinese philosophy 521
Before the rise of Neo-Daoism, though, Non-Being was not a central concept in
Chinese thought. During the Han Dynasty (206 BC—AD 220), it was assumed that
beings with forms and shapes somehow arose from some formless Non-Being. But then
Non-being meant not absolute Nothingness but rather some nebulous ‘stuff’, some
materia potentia. It was the Neo-Daoist Wangbi (226–49) who discovered the importance
of Nothingness.
Wangbi made much of chapter 40 of the Laozi, which says ‘and Being comes from
Non-Being’. Whether he knew the Emptiness Snjtras or not we cannot be certain. (The
word Ğnjnya in Sanskrit does denote the mathematical zero.) Wangbi made Non-Being the
ground and substance of all beings. When it became fashionable to read Buddhism by
matching its concepts with the Daoist ones (geyi), most assumed that the teaching of
universal Emptiness also reduced all things to some primal void. Even Dao’an (312–85)
did not entirely avoid that error.
The mistake was not corrected until the early fifth century by KumƗrajƯva (344–413),
who not only translated more Emptiness Snjtras but also introduced the ĞƗstra
commentaries of NƗgƗrjuna. With his guidance, Sengzhao came to the first proper
reading of Emptiness. Emptiness is not Non-Being; it is not a conceptual device for
‘reducing Being to Nothingness’. If it were, it would have committed two fallacies: (a)
the retention of a dualism of Being and Non-Being and (b) a confusion of an epistemic
wisdom with an ontic faith in some nihilistic reality.
The proper understanding is that Being and Non-Being—conceived of as selfsufficient
entities—are equally empty; that the goal of philosophy is to expose the antinomies of
reason; and that by such destructive dialectics, one attains freedom from all
misconceptions and misrepresentations of the real. With this, Sengzhao exposed the
limits of Neo-Daoism. Wisdom is not something known (gnosis); it is more a way of
knowing (gnoma). It is realizing that all positions staked out as absolute are ultimately
false, delimiting and biased. The true position is a positionless position.
Sengzhao offered his own reading of Emptiness in the essay ‘The Emptiness of the
Unreal’: Being is empty because this (claim to a self-nature of) Being turns out zv578 to be
Unreal. Sengzhao also demolished three current schools of or opinions on Emptiness. He
censured the School of No Mind by charging it with a subjective bias. The school would
empty only mind and not the physical reality. He then faulted the School of Abiding with
Form for trying to sit astride two worlds. This school proposed that a person should abide
physically in form while roving psychically in Emptiness. He then criticized the School
of Original Nothingness, noting how it prized Non-Being at the expense of Being. This
amounts to missing the Middle Path.
The issues behind this exchange are actually more complicated than this. The School
of Original Nothingness appeared first. It was indeed guilty as charged. But the School of
No Mind had already disputed that school’s ontological nihilism. Arguing rightly that the
snjtras never asked one to annihilate reality, it went on to propose that what one should
do—and what one can only do in the circumstances—is to empty the (wrong) concepts
(about the real) in the mind. Reality is not changed, but our perception of it should be.
Reality now appears empty as the mind is emptied. The School of Abiding with Form in
turn tried to improve on this view. It agreed that one should not reduce Being to NonBeing,
i.e. one should remove the distinction Being versus Non-Being created by the
mind. So doing, one can abide physically in the world of forms while mentally roving in
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the mysteries. One proponent of this school, Zhidun (314–66), however, believed that the
mystery involved a higher self, a spirit. It is this refined spirit that roves in the vacuous.
In this, Zhidun believed, as even did Dao’an, that Buddhism accepted the existence of a
soul that transmigrates from rebirth to rebirth. Only the School of No Mind dared to
imagine the possibility of no-mind, i.e. no-soul, anƗtman. For that, it became the most
maligned and misunderstood of the early PrajñƗ schools.
When we examine the evolution of these three schools, we see that Sengzhao’s
dialectical negation of them was simply an extension of their tradition of internal
criticism. After Sengzhao, the same dialectics would unfold, almost always keeping to
the triadic structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
The early Emptiness spokesmen were, however, better at applying Emptiness to reality
than to mind. Even Sengzhao’s description of the mind drew more on the native Daoist
ideas of the psyche. The mind should be emptied of thought so that it can mirror all
things impartially. By coincidence the metaphor also appeared later in YogƗcƗra
psychology.
The discovery of the transcendental Buddha-nature
One reason why the Chinese were not very well informed about Buddhist psychology is
that they were not exposed to the Indian reflections on the mind until relatively late. It
was Sa ghadeva who first really introduced the Abhidharmic literature in the last decade
of the fifth century. Soon KumƗrajƯva taught MƗdhyamika and discredited zv579 the HƗnayƗna
scholarship of Sa ghadeva. But KumƗrajƯva did not anticipate that soon after he died, the
MahƗparinirvƗ a Snjtra would arrive and introduce the still higher notion of a Buddhanature
in man. In a short space of time, the Chinese had to adjust to doctrines of soul, nosoul,
universal Emptiness, and universal Buddha-nature.
Daosheng (355–434) tried to reconcile these various notions of the psyche. Armed
with the still incomplete translation of the MahƗparinirvƗ a Snjtra, Daosheng foresaw its
final teaching concerning the presence of a seed of enlightenment in all sentient beings.
But what is this Buddha-nature? Although the snjtra called it Ɨtman (permanent self), it
also specified that it is not the Ɨtman of the Hindu Upani ads and that it is not other than
wisdom or Emptiness. And indeed, Buddha-nature is not the Hindu Ɨtman. It retains that
traditional Buddhist criticism of atmanic self-sufficiency and endorses the self only in the
context of the interdependence of all realities.
It is well to review briefly the history of the Buddhist understanding of the self. The
Buddha had taught anƗtman and dependent co-origination, in opposition to the Upani
ads. Then the HƯnayƗna Abhidharmist tried to give rational support to this teaching by
breaking down the self and the elements of causation, by arguing that there is not the
whole called the self; there are only these elements or dharmas. MahƗyƗna came along
and its Emptiness philosophy criticized even that, noting that there is no reason to deny
the reality of the whole while believing in the svabhƗva or self-sufficiency of the parts.
Both dharma and Ɨtman, part and whole, are empty. For a time, that seemed to be the last
word on the matter.
To see how the Buddha-nature concept arose, it is necessary to remember its source.
All the talk about the psyche mentioned above emerged from Buddhist reflection on the
Dharma (Reality, Truth). The Wisdom Snjtras were Dharma-centric in that regard. But
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there is a different strand in MahƗyƗna, the one that focused not so much on the Dharma
Jewel as on the Buddha Jewel. MahƗyƗna had idealized the Buddha into a transcendental
(lokottara) reality and showered him with infinite, real attributes. Given the Buddha’s
omniscience and omnipresence (a boundless body), it was only natural that speculation
about the presence of his wisdom in all sentient beings would arise. And indeed it did, in
snjtras that are more Buddha-centric than Dharma-centric. A subgroup of these snjtras is
now recognized as the TathƗgatagarbha (Buddha-nature, womb of the Buddha) corpus.
The MahƗparinirvƗ a Snjtra is one of those. It pictured the presence of the transcendental
wisdom in man as a buddha-seed (buddhagotra). So stated, this positive doctrine would
in time reverse the negative vocabulary about the self as anƗtman in early Buddhism.
Now we may return to Daosheng.
Daosheng, who discovered this doctrine of a universal Buddha-nature, noted that there
is in man not the self of the eternal soul (Ɨtman), but this Buddha-nature. This true self is
expressive of the omnipresence of wisdom. It appears as seminal enlightenment in all
sentient beings. What this means, in the later Chan-inspired appreciation of Daosheng, is
that it removes any need of mediation between the innermost Self zv580 and the highest Good.
Such a one-step identity of the two is more radical than anything in classical China—
more than the moral metaphysics of Mencius or the oceanic selfloss in Zhuangzi. Thus to
Daosheng is attributed the first theory of ‘sudden enlightenment’ based on his having
‘seen into the Buddha-nature’. Later Chan (Zen) would do the same.
This Chan-inspired reading of Daosheng has to be qualified, however, for there are
actually some important differences:
1 Unlike Chan, Daosheng never said that there is a full-grown Buddha-nature. Buddhanature
is only the seed, the beginning, of an eventual perfection of wisdom.
2 It follows then that his ‘sudden enlightenment’ was predicated upon gradual cultivation.
Sudden or total insight refers only to the final break with sa sƗra.
3 Daosheng still analysed the issue from the side of man more than seeing it from the side
of the Buddha. His is a relative instead of an absolute perspective.
Finally, despite all caution, the NirvƗ a (Snjtra) School that Daosheng brought into being
often lapsed back into confusing self, soul, anƗtman, Emptiness, and Buddha-nature.
Thus a common assumption then was that Buddha-nature was still some ontic entity
located within man. At its worst, as in the writing of Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty
(502–56), it was confused with the immortal soul that transmigrates. However, it is the
third point above that is definitive. In simple terms, a mature understanding of Buddhanature
is not just that man possesses it in himself; it is rather that all humanity is
‘possessed’ by it. We ‘store’ the tathƗgatagarbha in us, but we are also ‘stored’ in that
cosmic womb of the One Thus Come. This Buddha-centric reading did not mature in
China until the sixth century, however.
The first volley of fire against the shortcomings of the Nirvana School of Daosheng
came, however, from Jizang (540–623). Heading a Sanlun (MƗdhyamika) revival, he
looked like a latter-day Sengzhao. Jizang criticized the mistaken reading of an ontic
Buddha-nature. Buddha-nature, he said, is not an entity; it is a state of mind free from all
definition of the self or no-self. It is the wisdom of Emptiness. In this way, Jizang
brought the understanding of Buddha-nature squarely back into the fold of MƗdhyamika.
Unlike Sengzhao, though, he had a better grasp of the One Vehicle.
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‘EkayƗna’, or ‘One Vehicle’, was introduced as a synonym for ‘MahƗyƗna’ in the
Lotus Snjtra. When the Emptiness Snjtras first declared the path of the bodhisattva to be
MahƗyƗna, they set MahƗyƗna apart from the Two Vehicles of the ĞrƗvaka and the
pratyekabuddha, which were HƯnayƗna. Later, though, the Lotus Snjtra—the earliest of
the Buddha-centric corpus—came up with an ‘inclusive MahƗyƗna’ idea. It subsumed all
three Vehicles under the one, inclusive EkayƗna. Sengzhao failed to see this. In a 410
essay entitled ‘NirvƗ a is Nameless’, now reauthenticated as his, Sengzhao defended the
discreteness of the Three Vehicles against the EkayƗna thesis of Daosheng. He was using
TriyƗna (Three Vehicles) to support gradual enlightenment as Daosheng was using
EkayƗna to support sudden enlightenment. That failure to zv581 recognize EkayƗna is probably
the reason why Sengzhao was not counted by Jizang as belonging to the true lineage of
the Sanlun masters.
Beyond the Two Truths towards the One Vehicle
The impulse towards an EkayƗna, ‘monistic’ philosophy in the late sixth century would
lead to Zhiyi (538–97) of the Tiantai or Lotus Snjtra School. But Jizang, a defender of
MƗdhyamika, non-dual Emptiness, did not go that far. Nevertheless, he was instrumental
in criticizing current readings of the Two Truths theory by NirvƗ a School thinkers, who
were then sidetracked into following a reading in the treatise called ‘To establish the real
truth’ or Satyasiddhi.
The Two Truths theory originated in NƗgƗrjuna. He had noted how the Buddha taught
the Dharma with recourse to the Two Truths: the Mundane Truth for living in the
mundane world and the Highest Truth for gaining nirvƗ a. The former grants the world a
nominal ontic reality; the latter finds it truly empty. In this original form, the ‘two’ does
not refer to two realities. There is only one reality. The ‘two’ are just two ways of looking
at it. The Chinese Buddhists were new to such theories of knowledge and were not able
to keep the ontic and the epistemic apart. They sometimes naïvely thought that the
Mundane Truth was sa sƗra; the Highest Truth was nirvƗ a. If so, since there is
wisdom insight into how ‘nirvƗ a is none other than sam Ɨra’, should not the Two
Truths meet in that higher union of sa sƗra and nirvƗ a? If so, should there not be a
Third Truth?
The Chinese also tended to apply the ‘substance-function’ relationship to analysing the
Two Truths. Substance and function are categories that Wangbi brought to his analysis of
Non-Being and Being. Non-Being is said to be the substance of Being and Being is seen
as the function of Non-Being. Previously, during the Han Dynasty, Non-Being was
origin, and Being was end. In this old origin/end model, Non-Being temporally preceded
Being. In the new substance/function model, Non-Being is the eternal ground of Being.
Applying this to the Two Truths, the Chinese Buddhists misconstrued Emptiness as some
actual substance supporting mundane forms which act as its function. Since function is
other than but not exactly separate from substance, this also led these Chinese Buddhists
to assume that substance/function well described the non-duality nature of sa sƗra and
nirvƗ a.
Closer scrutiny reveals that this is not exactly what NƗgƗrjuna meant. The non-dual in
NƗgƗrjuna is the Neither/Nor of the two extremes; it is synonymous with the Middle
Path. But in the substance/function model, substance subsumes function under itself. (It is
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closer to the Hindu bhedƗbheda than to Buddhist advyava.) Being asymmetrical,
substance/function does not offer two real extremes for the Middle (Path) to avoid. This
subtle difference between Indian and Sinitic non-duality was noticed by Jizang, who
launched a sharp critique of the Two Truths theories then current.zv582
Jizang first noted how the Two Truths are not supposed to describe reality. They
pertain only to two ways of discourse on reality. Since they are a didactic device with no
ontic substance of its own, there is no reason to dream up a Third Truth to unite the Two
Truths. Then Jizang corrected the misperception of the Higher Truth as the substance of
the Lower Truth. If indeed something has to be designated as ‘substance’ upon which
everything else hangs, it would be the Middle itself.
No dialectician, however, could ignore the structure of thought already in place. So,
since his Chinese contemporaries had already piled up, like steps in a pyramid, higher
and higher unions of Two Truths, Jizang countered with his own Threefold and Fourfold
Two Truths. The purpose there was not to build more castles in the air. It was to undercut
the assumptions of his opponents. Jizang’s pyramids did not ‘build up’; they just
‘undercut’. The so-called Ultimate Emptiness topping his system serves only to bring the
whole scaffold down. In it, one realizes that ‘there is nothing (definite or absolute) to be
gained’.
So destructive is Jizang’s dialectics (prƗsa gika) that it is sometimes said that his
school could not have survived in China for that reason. China knew negations before.
Zhuangzi and Wangbi had known how words cannot exhaust reality. There is a silence
beyond words. But the MƗdhyamika art of ‘using words against words’—demolishing
words not by silence but by the words themselves—is arguably something new. Even
now, reading Jizang, most of us would find it unnecessarily mind-bending. Jizang keeps
pulling the rug from underneath us just when we think we know what he is talking about.
That, however, is his intention: to bend minds that have become too comfortable.
Jizang’s school did not last, but recent scholarship has shown that the cutting edge of
his razor-sharp intelligence actually persisted in the Ox-head branch of early Chan. Led
by Fayong (599–657), this school disseminated the art of saying an Eternal Nay into all
surviving Chan sects. The spirit of that resolute ‘No!’ is still captured in the Wumenguan
(Japanese Mumonkan) headed by the Gong’ an (koan) of Master Zhaozhou: ‘Does a dog
have Buddha-nature?’ ‘No!’
A different symmetry of mind and reality
In the late sixth century, there was more than one way to react to the NirvƗ a School and
its Two Truths theory. Besides Jizang, there was Zhiyi. Regarding Emptiness as the
Middle Path, Jizang would not take EkayƗna as implying monism. Critical of the
selfsufficiency of mind, he would not make mind absolute either. Zhiyi felt differently.
He came up with the first theory of a symmetry between the structure of one Mind (with
three yogic stances) and the structure of one Reality (with its own three truth aspects).
In this, Zhiyi took in more of the NirvƗ a School’s teaching than Jizang would. His
Lotus [Snjtra] School absorbed the NirvƗ a [Snjtra] School. The NirvƗ a School zv583 had
been speculating on the whereabouts of the Buddha-nature. Since the snjtra said that all
sentient beings have Buddha-nature, and since sentience (sattva) meant having
consciousness or mind, the Nirvana School generally located Buddha-nature in the mind,
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above all, of men. Zhiyi, who was a yogin cognizant of the need to cleanse the mind,
inherited this reading of the Mind as the locus of enlightenment.
Building on abhidharma, Zhiyi also accepted a correlation of subject mind and objectrealm.
To this, he added his own MƗdhyamika reading of the Three Aspects of One
Reality being correlated to the Three Meditative Stances of One Mind. (On the triads, see
the next section.) This symmetry of Mind and Reality gave his Tiantai school a stability
that Jizang scrupulously shunned in his. Symmetry is not identity. Rnjpa and citta (form
and mind) are two, perceived and perceiver. The goal of wisdom is to capture the whole
of the universe (the trilocosm) in the unity of the mind (as one); it is not to absorb matter
into mind or reduce mind to matter. Those two extremes of idealism and materialism
Zhiyi considered to be contrary to the Middle Path. In this, he continued the Indian
MƗdhyamika criticism of YogƗcƗra.
It should be remembered that YogƗcƗra—the second major MahƗyƗna philosophy,
which traces all representations of reality to the storehouse consciousness
(ƗlayavijñƗna)—originated later than MƗdhyamika. It also arrived in China late, i.e. a
century after KumƗrajƯva. Committed to MƗdhyamika and suspicious of the recent
arrival, Jizang and Zhiyi would not include the latter’s idealist tendency in their own
systems. That was left to the later schools of Huayan and Chan: under Fazang (594–657)
and Daoxin (580–651), the symmetry of Mind and Reality ended not just in correlation
but in identity. Reality is Mind Only; Mind is the True Suchness.
The Mind as Suchness in the Awakening of Faith
That equation of Mind with Suchness (tathatƗ, the ultimate reality and nature of all
things) was not spelled out as much in Indian YogƗcƗra as it was in a text compiled in
China called the MahƗyƗna Awakening of Faith. Appearing around AD 550, it stated in
no uncertain terms how all of Reality is One Mind. (The formula was taken freely from
the Huayan (Avata saka) Snjtra, where the triloka (three realms) are said to be of One
Mind.) Suchness and Mind are One. That being the case, there is an a priori identity of
the mind of sentient beings and the truth of Suchness, such that we are all de facto
enlightened. That we do not see this simple fact is due to an accidental, deluded thought.
With this, the text overcame the limitations of Daosheng’s understanding of Buddhanature
and sudden enlightenment noted earlier. Now (a) the essence of a priori
enlightenment in man is total, not seminal; such that (b) gradual cultivation is now
predicated upon sudden enlightenment, not just leading up to it; and (c) the mode of
discourse is no longer anthropocentric but rather Buddha-centric, i.e. not from the side of
mundane cause but from the side of transmundane effect.zv584
Thereupon, this philosophy permits the telescoping of all Reality into the One Mind.
Mind here is no longer just a human faculty, the perceiver of the perceived, but is rather
the Suchness Mind manifested as the tathƗgatagarbha (Buddha-nature) in us. This
tathƗgatagarbha is empty (Ğnjnya) in terms of mundane self-natures, but it is not empty
(aĞnjnya) in that it is endowed with transmundane powers to liberate itself from bondage.
This formula came from the ĝrƯmƗlƗdevi Snjtra and is indicative of the higher awareness
that it is not man possessing the Buddha-nature but the Womb (garbha) of the Buddha
(tathƗgata) possessing all men. On this note, MahƗyƗna reversed the premiss of early
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Buddhism, where life is suffering and nirvƗ a is a Beyond. Now, to put it simply,
suffering is an illusion and bodhi is here and now.
This radical idealism of the Awakening of Faith did not catch on immediately. Zhiyi
and Jizang avoided it. The work was even suspected by some to be a forgery because it
contradicted other Sanskrit YogƗcƗra texts in translation. The pilgrim Xuanzang (602–64)
even went to India in the hope of finding a judgement for or against. In 645, he brought
back from NƗlandƗ the YogƗcƗra of DharmapƗla, which contradicted the Awakening of
Faith’s teachings. His Weishi (Consciousness Only, VipñaptimƗtratƗ) School won the
day.
But then, as another ideological legend has it, Fazang (643–712) was working on
Xuanzang’s monumental translation project when he broke away because of a
disagreement, and that led to his formulating the Huayan philosophy. Fazang’s basic
charge is that Xuanzang’s YogƗcƗra idealism was fixated with a deluded ƗlayavijñƗna
(storehouse consciousness) tied to phenomenal reality. It is one grade lower than the Pure
Mind immediately identical with the noumenal Suchness. Weishi’s ƗlayavijñƗna itself is
a devolution of this Suchness Mind; it represents the tathƗgatagarbha-in-bondage (to the
world). So successful was Fazang’s campaign against Xuanzang that we now have a
distinction made only in Chinese Buddhism between the higher philosophy of ‘Mind
Only’ (meaning Huayan and Chan) and the lesser philosophy of ‘Consciousness Only’
(Xuanzang’s Weishi).
In the process Fazang also uncovered in Indian MahƗyƗna a separate tathƗgatagarbha
corpus. The Huayan School then claimed for itself a knowledge of DharmatƗ (Dharma
essence) and berated Xuanzang’s expertise in knowing only Dharma-lak a a (Dharma
phenomena or Faxiang). Hence Faxiang was used pejoratively to describe this ‘cryptoHƯnayƗna’
school of Weishi. Many buddhologists still labour to prove that Fazang was
right, but to date no one has found even a Sanskrit or Tibetan reference to the Awakening
of Faith or a theory of Mind and Reality in India or Tibet that is anything like the one
Fazang developed.
The Awakening of Faith also had an impact on the two other Sinitic MahƗyƗna
schools: Chan and Pure Land. The historical (as distinct from the mythical) beginning of
Chan came with Daoxin (580–651), now counted as the Fourth Patriarch. He had
apparently popularized his meditative practice using the philosophy of this text. But with
Xuanzang back and the authenticity of this text in question—plus the fact that zv585 it is only a
ĞƗstra and not a snjtra—it seems that his circle eventually came up with a more
respectable name for his emerging school. It called itself the lineage of the Masters of the
La kƗvatƗra Snjtra. This is the snjtra considered in China to be the inspiration behind the
ĞƗstra that is the Awakening of Faith. The proclamation of this lineage is the first
indication of a Chan movement.
The Awakening of Faith’s impact on the Pure Land School is more indirect. The final
section of this text encouraged a meditation on AmitƗbha Buddha as the most expedient
means of realizing the Suchness Mind for most people. One meditates here on the
DharmakƗya manifested through this Buddha’s icon. I shall conclude this section with a
problem which the Awakening of Faith left for them. If the Mind is indeed Suchness, how
did illusion, suffering and sa sƗra arise in the first place? The answer offered by the text
creates more problems than it solves. It says: ‘Suddenly, a deluded thought arose’—and
there was the illusion of sa sƗra. This is the beginningless Ignorance. But since
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Suchness or enlightenment is also beginningless, are we now left with two irreducible
and opposing principles? If so, how can one speak of there being just One Mind? In AD
681, a treatise by the monk Fuli asked even more pointedly: did not the Buddha himself
teach that all things have causes? Only things with causes and conditions can be brought
to a cessation. If indeed ignorance is beginningless (causeless), how can we ever effect its
cessation so as to achieve enlightenment?
The character of the Sinitic MahƗyƗna schools
By the ninth century, the Buddhist schools in China with obvious Indian antecedents had
disappeared as distinct entities. Weishi YogƗcƗra had been discredited by Fazang.
Jizang’s MƗdhyamika had disappeared into Ox-head Chan. Except for popular rituals,
TantrayƗna never reached beyond the initiated few either—though it did claim the thinker
Yixing (673–727). The Sinitic MahƗyƗna schools with no known Indian forerunners were
the ones that counted. Though all of them espoused theory (philosophy) and practice
(path), tradition associates theory with Huayan and Tiantai and practice with Chan and
Pure Land. By association, Pure Land feeds off Tiantai, which has more of a faith
component, as Chan draws on Huayan, which has more of a wisdom bias. The Pure Land
School knew of eschatological anxiety and the paradox of finding grace in the midst of
despair, but it had more impact on popular piety than on rational philosophy as such.
The comprehensiveness of Tiantai
Of the remaining and more philosophical three, Tiantai, the earliest, developed a unique
philosophy of the Round or in the Round. ‘Round’ refers to the circle; the zv586 closest
English translation of this yuan ideal is perhaps ‘comprehensiveness’. (I avoid the term
‘Holism’, for that is also a characteristic of Huayan.) Metaphorically, nothing escapes
this circle; everything is included in it. The root-metaphor may be Chinese; it is the old
harmony of yin-yang. But instead of the simple complement of yin and yang, we have a
much more subtle trinity of One-in-Three and Three-in-One.
The Lotus Snjtra’s idea of the Three Vehicles being in the end just One provided the
scriptural norm here, but it is NƗgƗrjuna’s MƗdhyamika-kƗrika that was credited with
working out this Three/One dialectics. NƗgƗrjuna spoke of only Two Truths, but, as we
noted earlier, the Chinese came up with the idea that if there are (1) sa sƗra and (2)
nirvƗ a and then (3) sa sƗra is none other than nirvƗ a, there should be
correspondingly the Three Truths of the Real, the Empty and the Middle. Among the
NirvƗ a/Satyasiddhi masters, this had led to the idea of a Third Truth that is the Unity of
the Two Truths. Zhiyi only inherited this triadic format. Instead of deconstructing the trio
as Jizang had done, he rearranged the pyramidal Three Truths into a circular triad in the
Round. The circle represents the One of EkayƗna, of Reality as well as of Mind. The
circle knowing no beginning and no end represents a timeless perfection. (Tiantai
traditionally disputed causation and favoured a non-causative whole.)
It is in that sense that the Round is more than the old Harmony of complementary yin
and yang. Yin-yang philosophy still distinguishes yin from yang; though they mix
(quantitatively), their quality (passive versus active) remains distinct. In Tiantai
philosophy, the Three Truths collide only to be fused, so that everything is at once
Buddhism in chinese philosophy 529
Empty, Real, Middle. Furthermore, the yin-yang philosophy admits of a Unity (the Great
Ultimate) prior to the emergence of the Two (yin and yang), but this is based on the
classic ‘origin-and-end’ sequence. In Tiantai, the Empty, the Real and the Middle blend
timelessly ‘in the Round (One)’. The One is present in the Three, though. The catchy
Tiantai dictum—‘Every form (colour) or smell (odour) is the Middle Path’—denotes that
omnipresence of the One in every phenomenon. When later the Neo-Confucians talked
about finding the Great Ultimate in every object in the world, they did so after the
manner of Zhiyi, not after the manner of the Han Confucians. In Han thought (religious
Daoism excepted), the preservation of the origin (One) intact in the subsequent (Many) is
not possible.
What does that mean in real life? Let us take a common problem in philosophy to
illustrate the efficacy of this dialectics. Whether we are sinners or images of God,
whether human nature is evil or good, cannot be answered one way or the other. There is
no lack of trying, though: thinkers, East and West, down the centuries have argued for
man being evil, not evil, both or neither. These positive, negative and inbetween answers
are manifestations of the Three Truths of the Empty, the Real and the Middle. But every
one of those positions is incomplete and biased. None is absolutely right, for otherwise
the question would have been solved long ago. The answers contradict one another
endlessly; they just drive us around ‘in circles’. zv587 The only resolution is to accept the
whole. Truth, as Hegel says, is the Whole. Freedom is learning to stop momentarily
before the Mystery. There, ‘beyond the reach of words and speech,’ says Tiantai, ‘the
karma of the mind is simply cut off.’
This is the Tiantai dialectics, a Hegelian ‘Whole of the Wholes’ without further
progress. This is NƗgƗrjuna’s ‘Non-dual Emptiness’ given a Harmonic twist. In this
DharmatƗ seen as the ‘various phenomena’s true form’, there is no essence/phenomena
divide. The Truth of Emptiness is in the Whole of the Real. And that holism can be found
in any ‘colour’ or ‘aroma’. The Whole is so important to Tiantai that this school would
not throw out any part of it, however negative. Thus in a unique phrasing of the
interdependence of all things, Tiantai would say ‘There is the Devil in heaven; there is
God in hell.’ Even the Buddha has an essential evil in him. His goodness is acquired.
(That sounds almost like Xunzi!) Perfectly enlightened, the Buddha retains that innate
evil in order to be present in all Ten Realms. In this philosophy one learns to affirm,
deny, transcend; transcend, deny, affirm everything; ad infinitum. We who live in an
imperfect world might aspire to a perfection beyond, but real redemption comes when the
bodhisattva accepts his present lot as ‘perfectly imperfect’ in the only ‘imperfectly
perfect’ world there is. This is the genius of Tiantai Comprehensiveness.
The world of infinity in Huayan
If Tiantai cultivates the perception of the Whole, it still does so in a circle. A circle has
clear boundaries. Tiantai might traffic in astrological numbers (‘3,000 worlds in a split
second of thought’), but its favourites are the prime numbers three and one. Huayan alone
truly looked into the face of infinity itself. Only it could toy with the Mystery of the
Ten—ten is a full number that is the sum of all numbers—and talk of ‘millions and
millions’ of Buddha-worlds as if they were everyday realities. Although it has been
pointed out by the leading Tiantai scholar in Japan (Andǀ Toshio) that in the later
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writings of Zhiyi, there were already intimations of such Totalistic extravagance, in the
end, its Lotus EkayƗna stopped far short of the grandiose world of the Avata saka Snjtra.
Details aside, the catch-phrase of Huayan philosophy is ‘One is All; All is One.’ What
that claims is that in every tiny speck of the universe the whole of the universe is present
and that everything in the universe is somehow coextensive with every other thing there
is. Imagine stepping into a realm of light, where every light lights up every other light,
and each point of light is so free of substance as to be transparent to all other points of
light. This is the hall of mirrors that Fazang once used to illustrate his point to his patron,
the Zhou Empress Wu. This is Sudhana’s ‘entry into the boundless dharmadhƗtu (realm
of reality)’ only to find the seer becoming the seen and the pilgrim disappearing into and
becoming the Buddha. zv588
Once again, though one can trace some precedence for this philosophy in the Chinese
tradition in the likes of Zhuangzi or Huishi, there is a difference. The Dao ‘found in a
piece of dust’ is a certain principle; it is not the physical sum of all things. ‘The ten
thousand things in one finger (pointing, category)’ is not yet ‘millions and millions of
worlds in a speck of dust’. This is because generally speaking, classical philosophy knew
only a finite universe. Heaven had its edge; earth had its limit. But there is, in medieval
cultures, an explosion of the universe and an expansion of consciousness, although the
parties did not then have the vocabulary to account for the difference that we now have.
The simple fact is this. Mathematically speaking, a part can be immediately the whole—
as Huayan’s One-is-All equation claims—only when we are dealing with the infinite.
Any part of infinity is still infinity. That sense of the infinite, not there in Tiantai yet, is
the mark of Huayan.
An aside: answers to ‘Whence ignorance?’
Huayan philosophy is more than that. There is a dynamic and optimistic side to it that is
not in Tiantai. Scholars are divided on which is the higher philosophy. Tradition grants
Huayan superiority because Tiantai still accepts the presence of delusion in the mind.
Huayan knows only a totally pure mind. But then it is in the nature of Tiantai
Comprehensiveness not to dismiss evil, while it is the Awakening of Faith (which Zhiyi
rejected) that led Huayan to imagine a radical idealism based on the Suchness Mind. Yet
as we queried above in the case of the Awakening of Faith: whence then comes delusion?
It is in struggling with this question that Fazang arrived at new answers.
The simplest answer, one found in the tathƗgatagarbha corpus, is to leave it
unanswered. The defilements are simply accidental and inconceivable—but they are
there. But as Ignorance (avidyƗ) is privation of wisdom with no ontological reality of its
own, it can be removed by wisdom. This is the logical Indian answer.
The Awakening of Faith, however, has suggested a Chinese answer. This work has
taken in the ‘substance and function’ paradigm that Wangbi pioneered. Calling Suchness
substance, it compares it to a body of water. Ignorance is presented as the wind. The text
then has the wind of Ignorance ruffling up the water of Suchness into the waves of sa
sƗra. With the waves being the function that is not ‘separate from’ the substance of the
water, the text came up with a pseudo-MƗdhyamika reading of their non-dual
relationship: sa sƗra (waves) generated out of Suchness (water) remains ‘not other than’
nirvƗ a, because waves are still wet as water. The text used this to explain the canonical
Buddhism in chinese philosophy 531
teaching about how the pure tathƗgatagarbha could somehow possess the impure world
(both sa sƗra and nirvƗ a) within its womb.
Fazang, however, took the intent of the metaphor one step further. Since it was the
interaction between water and wave that created sa sƗra, he inferred that it zv589 was the
coming together of Suchness and Ignorance that created the world. In his commentary on
the Awakening of Faith, he treated Suchness and Ignorance as if they were yang and yin.
He mapped out, implicitly, a genesis of the phenomenal world according to the logic of
the broken and unbroken lines in the hexagrams of the Yijing. He called this elsewhere
the ‘Causation [of reality out] of the tathƗgatagarbha’ and ranked it above the causation
due to the ƗlayavijñƗna. The latter is a lower manifestation of the former.
Making the wind and the water co-creators of sa sƗra (waves) has the unintended
consequence of making light of Ignorance. This is because since the waves (sa sƗra)
are no less water (nirvƗ a), a person should realize the presence of Ignorance, but there
is not really the need to remove it (wind). This is not how the original ‘water-wave
metaphor’ in the La kƗvatƗra Snjtra intends it to be. In the original metaphor, sa sƗra as
object-realm is the wind; and the waves represent the agitated, object-clinging
consciousness. Ridding the wind of object-forms so as to calm the waves of turbulent,
subjective mentation would be imperative. This describes more faithfully the YogƗcƗra
psychology.
In the redacted metaphor of the Awakening of Faith, Ignorance as wind and sa sƗra
as waves were given more positive value. But as if that were not enough, Fazang came up
with a still higher theory known as DharmadhƗtu causation. In this theory, DharmatƗ as
essence (water) could generate all phenomenal realities (waves) from itself without even
the help of Ignorance (wind) serving as condition (pratyaya) that brought the world into
being. The elements of the whole universe, one and all, simply generate themselves by
themselves. This ‘conditionless’ co-arising (samutpƗda) happens from second to second,
non-stop, from every point in the universe. This provided the dynamic side to the ‘One is
All; All is One’ formula that Huayan has and that Tiantai never knew and, content with
the Round, never cared to acquire. But with this totalistic world-view, Fazang also
removed the last trace of evil from the world. But if so, whence Ignorance?
The subitism of Chan
Chan did not indulge in the same speculations as Huayan, but rather confronted the
question ‘Whence Ignorance?’ head on. To the question ‘If we are in fact already
buddhas, why do we not feel enlightened?’ it offered no ready-made answer. No such
answer exists. Everyone must face that paradox of life itself. Later Chan would even
intentionally precipitate this sense of crisis, this Great Doubt—why am I not enlightened
when the truth is that I am?—that when resolved would effect the Great Enlightenment.
Just as ‘suddenly a deluded thought arose to cloud the Suchness Mind’, as suddenly
would the a priori enlightenment break through. That is the subitism of Chan.zv590
The basic teachings of Chan are often expressed thus: ‘No reliance on words;
transmission outside the teachings; point directly at the minds of men; see your Buddhanature
and become enlightened.’ Those teachings really belonged to Mazu Daoyi (709–
88), but legend would attribute them to Bodhidharma in the early sixth century. But
perhaps the best-known Chan story concerns the Sixth Patriarch Huineng (538–713). One
Companion encyclopedia of asian philosophy 532
generation removed from Daoxin (580–651), Huineng supposedly succeeded Hongren
(602–75) by defeating Shenxiu (d. 706) of the so-called Northern School.
The episode of their exchange of Mind Verses told in the Platform Snjtra is now
recognized by critical scholars as mere fiction. The story has it that Huineng, an illiterate
youth from the barbaric South, upstaged Shenxiu by answering his Mind Verse:
The body is the Bodhi Tree
The mind is a mirror bright
Daily with diligence (the mirror) to clean
Let no dust upon it adhere.
(Shenxiu)
Bodhi is not some tree
Nor needs mirror a stand
Originally there being not a thing
Whence the dust to adhere.
(Huineng)
These poems about the Mind are not ground-breaking. There is nothing in them that
cannot be traced back to the basics of MahƗyƗna. If Shenxiu only described the basic
technique of removing the mental defilements (kleĞa), then Huineng only reiterated the
Emptiness dictum to deny that last duality of the pure and the impure. What is new here
is not the content. What is new is the form. The story is historically unique.
This story has encapsulated volumes of MahƗyƗna wisdom in very few words
concerning a fabled life. The form of the exchange recalls the Analects of Confucius; the
aphorism of the Laozi; the Mencian interest in human nature; and the anecdotes of
Zhuangzi. The folklore transferred wisdom from the centre of learning to the countryside.
The young, illiterate, barbaric Huineng had exposed the folly of age, learning and high
culture. Bodhi is no longer for the few. Sagehood is now within the reach of everyone.
By the mid-ninth century, when this tale gained currency, however, Buddhism was
ready to bow out to a Confucian revival. The symmetry of Mind and Reality—body/mind
and bodhi/mirror—is now set out by Zongmi (780–841), who belonged both to the
Huayan and the Chan lineage, in his Essay on Man. By making man—instead of
buddhahood or general sentience—the topic and by including Confucianism and Daoism
as legitimate, non-Buddhist, paths to the same Dharma, Zongmi paved the way for the
transition. He might believe the Suchness Mind to be the most profound of
anthropologies, yet he helped the Neo-Confucians to file their counter-claim.zv591
Buddhism in chinese philosophy 533
Figure 28.1 The later yin-yang circle
Figure 28.2 The Li Kan circle
Zongmi also capitalized on Fazang’s alignment of Huayan and the Yijing philosophy. He
produced a diagram for the ƗlayavijñƗna based on the Li Kan hexagram, which, when
modified in the twelfth century, would become the well-known yin-yang circle (see
Figures 28.1, 28.2). All that affected Neo-Confucian metaphysics. After Zongmi, the only
real thinker was the Tiantai master Siming Zhili (960–1028). Hence, Chinese Buddhism
generally gave up on speculative reason even as Neo-Confucians acquired it.
The legacy of Buddhist psycho-metaphysics
Han Confucianism knew how to integrate man into society and cosmos. Buddhism knew
how to fathom the depths of the psyche to reach acosmic heights—but usually by
bypassing family and state. Although by the high medieval era (AD 600–800), Sinitic
MahƗyƗna had already renounced renunciation and reaffirmed the goodness of the world,
Companion encyclopedia of asian philosophy 534
there was a limit to that secularization. It was left to the Neo-Confucians to emulate the
monk’s pneumatic (spiritual) independence but to redirect it to the ends of family and
state. They took over the Buddhist interest in mind and metaphysics, but looking now to
Mencius, they mapped the vocation of moral man in a moral universe. In this, they
changed the basic definitions of man and the world.
The Chan Buddhists still looked for ‘their original face before they were born’,
something aligned with a Suchness Principle that is universally self-same. For the NeoConfucians,
that ‘original face’ is so pre-natal as to be asocial and pre-moral; and that
self-same principle too uniform to take into account the differentiation in the world.
Accordingly, the Neo-Confucians modified Buddhist psychology and metaphysics. The
early Song masters would practise ‘quiet sitting’, but they meditated not on some
‘faceless (Buddha) face’, but on the mind at its moral inception—the moment zv592 when it
can freely follow the good or else let the emotions and inclinations draw it towards
selfish ends. Mystical meditation, in short, had been remade into moral introspection.
Likewise the Neo-Confucians, while accepting the presence of the One (Great Ultimate)
in all things, insisted that the same principle would and did underwrite the hierarchy of
ruler/minister, father/son and husband/wife. In the end, these neoclassicists returned their
fellow Chinese to the more rational, if limited and more Sinocentric, cosmos of the Han.
But they kept a gift from the Buddhists. Very few men ever became sages in ancient Han,
but in late medieval Song, all men had a duty to realize this sagehood in them. This was
the Confucianization of the Buddhist idea of an a priori, in toto, Buddha-nature in all
men.
FURTHER READING
Chen, Kenneth (1964) Buddhism in China, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cook, Francis H. (1977) Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, University Park/London:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Hakeda, Yoshito (trans.) (1967) The Awakening of Faith, New York: Columbia University Press.
Hurvitz, Leon (1960–2) ‘Chin-i (538–597): an introduction to the life and ideas of a Chinese
monk’, Mélanges chinois et buddhiques 12.
Liebenthal, Walter (1968) The Treatise of Seng-chao, 2nd edn, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press.
McRae, John (1986) The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch’an Buddhism, Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
Robinson, Richard (1967) Early MƗdhyamika in India and China, Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Swanson, Paul (1989) Foundations of T’ien-t’ai Philosophy, Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press.
Takakusu, Junjiro (1947) The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Zürcher, Erik (1959) The Buddhist Conquest of China, 2 vols, Leiden: Brill.
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