Introduction

 
Up to this point in the story, the story of Chinese Philosophy – or of philosophy in China – has not had to refer to any external influences. With the arrival from India of Buddhism, ideas were introduced into the Chinese conceptual universe, which were quite different from any ideas which had developed locally; they came from a quite alien cultural background, were based on quite different assumptions, and addressed quite different concerns. Nevertheless these ideas and concepts were able to establish themselves in China, which indicates that they met some need or performed some welcome function that the native philosophies either could not or would not. Nothing like this would happen again until the impact of the West in modern times.

About the Buddha

Buddhism is based on the theories propounded by Siddhārtha Gautama in North India in the 5-4^th C BC – so roughly contemporaneously with Confucius and Socrates. He is supposed to have been born at Lumbini into a family of wealth and power who tried to protect him as a child from all the evils in the world – even preventing him from knowing that they existed. Eventually, however, he evaded his guardians and discovered that there were such things as infirm old age, sickness, death, and ascetic self-denial. The shock of this realisation that there was such pain in the world inspired him to renounce his former life and to go forth seeking the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After years of effort he finally came to an epiphany while seated under a pipal tree at Bodhgaya, after which he believed he knew how the world was, why the world was the way it was, and how we should behave in it. As the Buddha or ‘enlightened one’ he taught the lessons he had received to any who would listen until his death in a park at Kushinara.

The Doctrinal Common Ground
 

As far as we can tell, Buddha’s original teachings were relatively straightforward: the more sophisticated doctrines came later and were implausibly fathered upon him. These original teachings are still the fundamental claims that all Buddhists believe (though their precise understandings of them may differ.)

1.         The Four Noble Truths (四圣谛, sì shèngdì)

First we need to recognise the four noble truths about the world, which Buddha presents almost as the diagnosis and treatment of a medical condition:

1.       Duḥkha, or ‘suffering’ is an essential characteristic of the world
2.       Suffering is caused by trsnā, ‘craving’ or ‘desire,’ because desire is itself discontent with the way things are, and will inevitably lead to disappointment or the fear of disappointment – all of this is painful
3.       Cessation (nirodha) of suffering requires the renunciation of one’s cravings.
4.       This renunciation can be achieved by following the Noble Eightfold Path (āryāṣṭāṅgamārga.) 

2.         Nirvāṇa (涅槃, nièpán)

Now if suffering is an essential part of the world and Buddha is offering us a path out of suffering, then he is essentially offering a path out of the world. We might think that there is rather an easy solution to being in the world that is open to anyone: death. Unfortunately, the Buddha accepted the standard Indian belief in the endless cycle of reincarnations. In order to escape the pain of the world therefore it is necessary to end one’s participation in that cycle. This was generally thought of at the time as a kind of ‘liberation,’ but Buddha called his version nirvāṇa, or ‘extinction’ and he likened it to the blowing out of a candle flame so that no further candles may be lit by it. Upon extinction one has no further existence at all – in particular, one does not continue in a blessed and pain-free state as a soul in Heaven. It is this extinction that the eightfold path is supposed to make possible.

3.         The Noble Eightfold Path (八正道, bā zhèngdào)

The rules marking the eightfold path are rather simple.

There are 2 rules of wisdom, being:

1. Right View: know the Four  Noble Truths
2. Right Intention: reject desires, welcome friendship, and show compassion

3 rules of conduct, being:

3. Right Speech: no lying, no divisive, hurtful, or useless speech
4. Right Conduct or Action: no killing, no stealing, and no sexual improprieties
5. Right Livelihood: maintain oneself while observing the rules of the Path

And 3 rules of meditation, being:

6. Right Effort: be pro welcome states and contra unwelcome ones
7. Right Mindfulness: be aware of your body, feeling, mind, and dharma,
8. Right Concentration (samadhi): practice the four stages of dhyāna (‘meditation’)

It’s at least arguable that following these rules will lead to a reduction of desires, and therefore of pains, but the link to actual extinction isn’t as clear. In order to understand how extinction is supposed to be possible we need to know something about how Buddha viewed the metaphysical and causal structure of the world.

4.         The Three Marks of the World (三相, sān xiàng)

Buddha took as his primary facts – based on arguments that were common enough in his day, and which we’ve seen in circulation in China amongst the Neotaoists too – the following characteristics of the world

1. Suffering – which we’ve already mentioned as one of the Noble Truths about the world
2. Impermanence (anitya.) The world is in constant flux and nothing is permanent, in fact it may be that there is nothing that has any duration in the world.
3. No-self (anatman.) There is no such thing as a permanent and enduring self. Nor is there any essence by which we can identify selves through time.

So how are we to understand the things that do seem to appear and endure in the world if there is no such thing as endurance or identity through time?

5.         The Five Aggregates (五蕴, wǔ yùn)

We have to think of things at each moment as being collections of qualities that are collocated for an instant and then are no more. The Buddha identifies 5 types of quality that go to make up instantaneous things in the world (including selves.) They are the 5 skandhas, or ‘aggregates’ of qualities

1. Form: the physical facts of a thing.
2. Sensation: the quality of pleasantness, unpleasantness, or indifference of an experience.
3. Perception: the identification and processing of sensory objects.
4. Formation: mental states apt to initiate actions
5. Consciousness: awareness, consciousness, discrimination, etc.

Despite their clear inadequacy, each of these aggregates might be proposed by someone ignorant of the truth of no-self as the essence of a self; in fact each is apt to be the object of ‘grasping’ (upadana) or ‘attachment’ by one who seeks to establish a permanent identity for himself.

6.         Conditioned Arising (緣起, yuánqǐ)

Such is the basic outline of the metaphysical content of the world – in particular, the nature of a person in the world. It remains to consider how the Buddha envisaged the causal structure of the world and how causal relationships between these objects gave rise to the endless cycles of existence. His theory is summarised in the twelve links (nidana, ‘cause’) of the chain of ‘conditioned arising’ (pratītyasamutpāda.) Each link in the chain is responsible for the conditions which lead to the arising of the next link in the chain. (Note that these conditionings are a more general concept than strict or direct causation, as can be seen from the clarification “That being,, this comes to be; from the arising of that, this arises; that being absent, this is not; from the cessation of that, this ceases.”[1]) The links in order of their conditioning are:

1. Ignorance (of the Four Noble Truths.)
2. Formations.
3. Consciousness.
4. Name and Form. (‘Form’ is the first of the 5 aggregates and ‘Name’ denotes the other four collectively.)
5. The 6 senses. (Indians typically include the intellect as a sense.)
6. Sense contact. (The concert of sensed object, sense faculty, and sensory awareness.)
7. Feeling.
8. Craving.
9. Grasping.
10. Becoming. (Perhaps a state between incarnations or perhaps referring to the development of our preferred ‘ways of being’ while still not in the world. Note that illustrations of the ‘Wheel of Life’ often show a scene of conception or pregnancy for this link.)
11. Birth.
12. Aging, pain, and death.

The arguments in support of each of these supposed conditioned arisings needn’t detain us here; all that is required is that we observe that if any one of the links is eliminated then in theory the next link will also be eliminated and so all succeeding links will be eliminated and so the final links of Becoming, Birth, Aging, pain, and death will be eliminated, and so the cycle of samsara will be ended. This is what can be achieved by following the eightfold path; principally, I suppose, by eliminating ignorance, but also at least by eliminating craving and grasping.

7. Two Truths (二谛, èr dì)

According to the early commentators on Buddha’s teachings, it seems that his words often allowed (at least) two levels of interpretation. Presumably, this was because the Buddha was well aware that his theories of impermanence and non-self made it rather difficult to talk coherently about the world that one experiences as enduring and in which one acts as a self, and equally that his task of enlightening the world was going to be impossible if he could not get anyone to listen and begin to understand him. Therefore he chose to speak in a way that could be understood naïvely by those who were at the beginning of the path but could be understood differently by those who had progressed further along the path. This gave rise to the interpretive doctrine of the two truths in Buddha’s words; i.e:

1. Conventional truth (saṁvṛti-satya:) which characterizes statements that are true by convention and by which we may describe our daily experience of a concrete world, and
2. Ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya:) which characterizes statements that disclose the true nature of things and by which we may describe the ultimate reality.

The Greater Vehicle

 
With time Buddhism developed a vast number of different schools, but most of them can be said to belong to one or other of two major traditions called the Lesser Vehicle (Hīnayāna) and the Greater Vehicle (Mahāyāna.) It is the Mahayana tradition that made its way to China, so we’ll need to summarise some of its most significant philosophical developments. Again, let it be emphasized that those aspects of Buddhism that are of a primarily religious significance are not relevant to our concerns and will not be dealt with here. In particular, much speculation concerning the Buddha’s nature and the Bodhisattva ideal – not to mention the various heavens that believers can aspire to inhabit – can be ignored, even though those religious aspects seem to be what primarily motivate the distinction between Mahayana and Hinayana.

1.                   Emptiness (空, kōng)

One of the principal speculations characteristic of Mahayana is on the so-called ‘emptiness’ (śūnyatā) of everything that is supposedly in the world. In this context, to say that something is ‘empty’ is to say that lacks something essential to being a really existing thing – it fails to exist in the fullest sense of that word. We can discern three relevant stages of development of the Emptiness doctrine.

a)         Beyond Dharma

In the Abhidarma (Beyond Dharma) collections of the Buddhist canon it was theorized that the experienced world really consists of arrangements of psychophysical ‘atoms,’ primary existents called dharmas,^[1] and that the objects of experience that we are accustomed to talk about – like tables and pens and selves – are merely conceptual constructions, secondary existents, built from these basic building blocks. Such things were described as ‘empty’ of real existence because an analysis of secondary existents could discover their conceptually distinct component parts, whereas that could not be done for primary existents, which were therefore necessarily existent. But Abhidharma texts also used the term ‘emptiness’ to describe the fact that none of the secondary existents – such as the aggregates – could be said to ground a self, and it was applied to the primary existents in the same sense.

b)         The Perfection of Wisdom

One prominent strand of Mahayana thought is found in the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) literature, which attempts to further improve our metaphysical understanding of the world. It accepts the claim of the Abhidharma  texts that the dharmas are ‘empty’ in the sense that they do not ground a self, but also argues that because they lack self-existence (svabhāva) they are also empty in the rather stricter sense that the Abhidharma uses for attributing emptiness to conceptual constructs as secondary existents  In fact, this literature argues that the dharmas lack self-existence just because they too are no more than conceptual constructions. There are no primary existents with self-existence. The dharmas are not really real; they are like an illusion, like a dream.

On the plus side, this means that dharmas aren’t available as truths which one might reasonably ‘grasp’ or form an ‘attachment’ to,  thus interfering with the progress to liberation; but on the other side there is the obvious problem that if there are no primary existents then how are there be secondary existents. How can there be conceptual constructions without the psychophysical material of construction? How is there anything at all? There cannot be only ‘secondary’ existents because that concept itself presupposes ‘primary’ existents. The danger then of nihilism is very real.

c)          The Middle Way

In the 2^nd-3^rd C AD the philosopher Nagarjuna developed what he called a Middle Way (Madhyamaka) between ‘eternalism’ – a contradiction of the axiom of Impermanence (one of the Three Marks mentioned above) to which those who held that some things really and permanently existed seemed committed – and ‘nihilism’ – which is a danger for those who say that everything is empty of real existence. Nagarjuna agreed with the Perfection of Wisdom theorists that the dharmas were ultimately empty, but his reasons for saying so were rather different. He argued that if something is involved in the causes and effects of Conditioned Arising (pratītyasamutpāda) then it cannot exist just in virtue of itself, but must exist in virtue of the (prior, necessary) existence of something else. As it does not exist in virtue of itself, it lacks self-existence and is therefore empty. In this case we are talking about self-existence as inherent or intrinsic or perhaps necessary existence, which is more than the Perfection of Wisdom literature required and much more than the Abhidharma required. In any case, it’s clear that this position avoids ‘eternalism,’ and the Madhyamikas also claimed that it was not ‘nihilist’ because it was not claiming that the dharmas don’t exist at all, only that they don’t inherently and necessarily exist with some kind of essence.

2.                   Mentality

The analysis of the dharmas thus arrived at many extreme conclusions concerning what there was not in the world, but seemed to have little to say about what there was. Moreover, the Madhyamaka arguments that it was not tantamount to nihilism were felt by many to be unconvincing, and so something had to be said about what there was. In response the school of Yogācāra (Yoga Practice) developed a theory of experiences – which undoubtedly do exist – for which the question of the nature of the outside world and its existence could be set aside as irrelevant.

There are two main parts to the theory of Yogacara.

a)         Eight Kinds of Consciousness

The first part of the theory is a refinement of the prior theory of consciousness. Previously it had been common for the Aggregate of consciousness (the last of the Five skhandas) to be analysed in terms of six types; five types of sense-awareness – which is to say awareness as conditioned by the eye, ear, nose, tongue, or body – plus an awareness called manovijñāna (Mind Consciousness) conditioned by the mind-organ whose task was to discriminate the parts of the sensory object presented by the other five awarenesses. We can think of these six as constituting the conscious ‘surface’ of the mind – that part of our awareness which we are typically able to access by introspection. The Yogacarins, however, recognised that the supposed functioning of this surface consciousness required a psychological infrastructure that could not be part of the surface mentality: there would have to be a sub-surface addition to the psychology of consciousness. In fact, the Yogacarin solution was not only to make such a sub-surface addition, but also to extend (or clarify?) the function of manovijñāna to include the experiencing of simple cognitions such as our thoughts and ideas, and to add as well a special faculty of self-consciousness that is also at the surface level. The two added consciousnesses require some explanation.

1. Defiled Mind

The first of these (the seventh kind of consciousness and the completion of the surface-level psychology) is the kliṣṭamanas (Defiled Mind.) This consciousness is responsible for our erroneous self-conception – erroneous because there is no self – and is characterized by the defilements of the belief in individuality, the belief that ‘I am,’ the clinging to self, and delusion. The delusional conception of self that characterizes the Defiled Mind and the erroneous conceptions that go with that delusion are the result of that Mind’s ‘observation’ of the sub-surface consciousness which it mistakenly interprets as a self.

2. Store Consciousness

The sub-surface consciousness that is the eighth consciousness of the Yogacarin theory is the ālayavijñāna (Store Consciousness.) The ‘store’ is so-called because it is the site where the ‘seeds’ (bīja) that result from past karmic actions and contain the potential for future karmic effects, whether defilements or otherwise, are gathered. These seeds develop in the store according to the appropriate rules for the development and unfolding of karma until they are eventually processed as a flow of experiences through the Defiled Mind. That Mind imposes a (false) distinction in these experiences between the experiencing ‘self’ and the experienced ‘world,’ and these latter experiences are further processed via the particular sense-consciousnesses creating the particular forms of sensed/experienced objects. Thus the experiences of any person are the products of that person’s particular psychology and karma. These experiences that a person has will then in turn determine the karma that produce the seeds that are then stored in the eighth consciousness. And around and around we go!

b)         Three Natures

The second main part of Yogacara theory is an analysis of the three natures (trisvabhava) of experience.

1. The unenlightened accept the Constructed nature of experience. They experience things as themselves in an enduring external world. This is however a false discrimination: the objects which they thus experience, including their selves, are mere conceptual constructs or imaginings. Since language is primarily a tool for communication amongst the unenlightened, these conceptual constructs are the objects to which language refers. It follows that language is only able to have unproblematic meaning in reference to the constructed nature of experience.

2. Those who have a better understanding accept the Other-Dependent nature of experience. They are aware of their experiences as a stream of ideas, thoughts, etc. arising according to the rules of the eight consciousnesses operating upon those and other mental states. However, since the experience of objects at this level is also not an experience of things as they ultimately are, no statement describing such objects or the experience of them can be an absolutely true statement. The best that can be hoped is that such statements can be ‘relatively true.

3. Those who have seen the ultimate truth of things, which cannot be expressed in language, accept the Perfected nature of experience. For them there is no distinction of self and other, subject and object. Nor is the experience one of concepts and ideas, which are all constructions and thus have been left behind. It is the goal of the yogin to achieve this acceptance of pure experience (which at last explains why the school is called ‘Yoga Practice’) and thus by seeing through attachments and grasping to achieve nirvana.