Steve Watson

Sengzhao’s Arguments are Weak

The doctrines and attitudes and practices that are thought of as typical of the Chan school arose early but gradually after Buddhism had been introduced to China. In particular, the early Chinese Buddhist scholars Sengzhao and Daosheng are considered to have laid the philosophical groundwork for the Chan school. So far as we can be sure of them, however, their arguments for these doctrines are rather weak.

We shall consider just the first of these. Sengzhao (384-416,) was, so it is said, originally a Taoist who upon reading an old translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra became an enthusiastic Buddhist, and eventually a disciple of Kumarajiva – one of the most productive of the earliest translators and interpreters of Buddhist documents. In Xi’an (which was then the capital Chang’an) Sengzhao assisted his master in the translation and interpretation of Indian texts but he also began to make his own contributions. These can be found in his Book of Zhao (Zhao Lun,) a collection of essays, of which three are of primary significance in preparing the ground for Chan. It is particularly worth noticing that the arguments made in all three essays might be made in essentially the same way by a Neotaoist as easily as by a Buddhist.

1. Objects Do Not Move

In the essay on mutability and immutability Sengzhao argued the paradoxical point that there is at once no change and no immutability; or equivalently, that everything is both changeful and immutable; or even better that changefulness and immutability are equally vacuous terms referring to nothing. To make this claim he observes that any entity that is in the past never becomes an entity in the present because it is always in the past. Everything is therefore absolutely immutable, frozen in the instant of its existence (whether present or past.) On the other hand, since the passage of time must necessarily involve the sequential being and non-being of all things absolutely, there is nothing but mutability. By way of a clarifying example he gives us the man who left his village as a youth and returns as an old monk. We observe here that everything about the man has changed so he is a different entity, but he is nevertheless still the same man (called Fanzhi) so he is the same entity, so what is the same and immutable is also different and mutable. Unfortunately, this is just the old problem of the preservation of identity through change that we recognise from such classic examples as the Ship of Theseus, and rather detracts from than advances the purely conceptual argument that it is supposed to illustrate.

2. Unreal Emptiness

In the essay on Being and Not-being he argues that nothing purely exists or does not exist; in everything that exists there is the quality of non-existence and in everything that does not exist there is the quality of existence. Of everything, whether it exists or not, it may therefore be said that it both exists and does not exist. His argument is that if something purely exists and has no quality of non-existence, then it would always be so qualified and so could never fail to exist. In particular, its origination is not dependent on the operation of causes in the world – contrary to what the Buddha claimed about all existent things. Similarly, for anything that does not exist, if it has no quality of existence within it then it can never do other than not exist, with all the same unwelcome consequences as for necessary existence. This is a marvellously paradoxical result, but its conviction for modern audiences is undermined by the inadmissibility of the assumption upon which the argument is based: that existence – and non-existence too, for that matter – may be treated in the same way as property predicates like ‘tall’, ‘happy’, or ‘blue.’ This assumption is known to lead to all sorts of problems and is almost universally rejected now.

3. Wisdom Has No Knowing

Finally, in the essay on wisdom he argued that that could not be considered as a kind of knowledge – or at least not any kind of propositional knowledge. Such knowledge, we observe, is knowledge of something – we cannot speak of having that sort of knowledge without acknowledging that there is an object of knowledge. Such knowledge essentially involves an apprehension of the qualities of a known thing. If prajña (bo re), or sage-wisdom (shèng zhi) as Sengzhao calls it, is an apprehension of the Absolute Truth, then, given that the Absolute Truth is that there is nothing to be apprehended, sage-wisdom cannot involve the apprehension of the qualities of some object, and therefore cannot count as knowledge in the normal sense. In fact sage-wisdom is more like knowledge by acquaintance of Non-being, or even an actual identification with that state, a kind of knowing how to be non-existent. Of course, it was not established that any such knowledge was possible at all, so the move to understand what form that knowledge could take rather begs the question.