May 12, 2021 – 9:44 am
The idea that phenomena and noumena are the same thing also featured in the doctrines of the Huáyán (??) school, in which it appears as a consequence of a more general claim concerning the interpenetration of all levels of reality. This school is another of those Chinese schools which made an original contribution to Buddhist philosophy. Its name is just the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit avata?saka , or ‘Flower Garland,’ which is the name of a sutra which it regards as especially important and from which it claimed to have derived it’s particular philosophical positions. The doctrine of interpenetration (??, yuán róng,) which we shall now investigate, is supported, for example, by such passages as the following.
They . . . perceive that the fields full of assemblies, the beings and aeons which are as many as all the dust particles, are all present in every particle of dust. They perceive that the many fields and assemblies and the beings and the aeons are all reflected in each particle of dust.
The interpretation of this is that nothing exists as itself independently of every other existing thing, but that everything participates in every other thing. But a mere statement of a position has little value, it requires some support or justification in order to count as more than speculation. In this case the observation is made that no dharmas (psycho-physical atoms) have self-existence, because their existence is dependent upon extraneous conditions. You might remember this as one of the standard claims of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna. The inference is drawn from this, however, that ultimately the existence of anything is dependent upon everything else. Presumably this is partly because it seems plausible that if A depends on B and B depends on C, and so on, then eventually, the world being finite[1], Z will depend on A; and therefore, dependence being transitive, every member of that sequence will depend on every other member of that sequence. Of course, there are quite a few assumptions in there: apart from the two mentioned we would also need to suppose that the world is not partitioned into mutually exclusive cycles of dependency. (We might also have to answer the objection that if A ultimately depends on A, then A has self-existence, but let that pass.)
The argument is also made that since the existence of anything – and thus its identity – is dependent upon the existence – and thus the identity – of some other thing, that ‘one is all’ and ‘all is one.’ Again, the exact steps by which the premisses support the conclusion are somewhat obscure, but if we focus on the ‘identity’ part of the claim, we might be dealing with a kind of semantic holism in which the meaning of the name of a thing – and thus presumably, the identity of a thing – is what it is in virtue of its (conditioning) relationships with all the other named things (and thus their identities.) In the philosophy of language this sort of holism amounts to the claim that ‘dog’ means what it does because that word exists in a particular network of relationships with other words in the language, like ‘cat’, ‘chase’, ‘bone’, ‘pat’, ‘horse’, ‘wolf’, etc. Quite how that holism would work in the ‘identity’ case would be left as an exercise for the reader, but there is a clue to how we might think about it in the use by one of the school’s leaders (the patriarch F?zàng, (?? 643–712)) of a simile involving a rafter and a building.[2] He argues that the building is the rafter because the building is the sum of all its parts and the rafter is one of its parts; and the rafter is the building because the rafter is only a rafter because of the relationship it has to the building. That’s not particularly convincing as an example of the claim that ‘all is one and one is all,’ but if we say that the building is in the rafter and the rafter is in the building, which seems closer to what the interpenetration claim would support, then the arguments from semantic holism would fit better.
A famous image that is used to illustrate this doctrine is that of Indra’s Net
The manner in which all dharmas interpenetrate is like an imperial net of celestial jewels extending in all directions infinitely, without limit. … As for the imperial net of heavenly jewels, it is known as Indra’s Net, a net which is made entirely of jewels. Because of the clarity of the jewels, they are all reflected in and enter into each other, ad infinitum. Within each jewel, simultaneously, is reflected the whole net [3]
The identity of noumena (referred to by li, ?, in the Huayan tradition) and phenomena (shi, ?) which was mentioned above follows from the interpenetration doctrine. It’s easier to see how this might be made plausible if we overstate the case to begin with: thus, if every dharma A contains dharma B and every B contains A, then every A is really the same as B. (This is like the result in set theory that if A is a subset of B and B is a subset of A, then A and B are the same set.) Now if every dharma is the same as every other dharma, and both noumena and phenomena are classes of dharma, then every phenomenal dharma is a noumenal one and vice versa. The Huayan position doesn’t in fact seem to be that every dharma is identical – thought I don’t quite see why it isn’t – but the fact that every noumenal dharma interpenetrates every phenomenal dharma indicates that the two classes are not in fact distinct classes of dharma and so noumena and phenomena are the same thing.
A famous image that is used to illustrate this doctrine is that of the Golden Lion. Fazang used this to explain the point to the empress Wu. He pointed at a golden statue of a lion and said that the statue appears to be a lion, and this is a fact we need to accept, but we also have to accept that there is no lion there, only particles of gold. The gold of the lion is like li, the noumenon, and the lion-appearance is like the shi, phenomenon. The lion-appearance is dependent upon the gold, and each particle of gold is the same as every other particle, so the identity of each particle – in so far as it is distinguishable – can only depend upon the lion-appearance to which it contributes.
[1] In fact, book 30 of the Avatamsaka Sutra appears to deny this.
[2] In Paragraphs on the Doctrine of Difference and Identity of the One Vehicle of Huayan (????????), T1866.
[3] Calming and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of Huayan (??????) T1867. Tr. by Fox, A (2015) ‘The Practice of Huayan Buddhism’, ?????????????, (pp. 259-286,) p. 265
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