| Two Schools of Chinese Buddhist Philosophy | |
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Introduction of Buddhism to China |
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This is
just one story of many in the same vein. The story of the early days of
Buddhism in China is largely one of Chinese monks travelling to far off
places to retrieve the scriptures that they needed to properly understand
the teachings of the Buddha, and of scholars travelling from Central Asia,
Persia, Bengal and elsewhere to spread the word in China and to translate
those scriptures into Chinese. The records of some of these efforts still
make good adventure yarns. One of the most famous is the
Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms
(佛国记,
Foguo Ji) by the monk Faxian (法显) (337-422), who
walked through the Takla Makan desert and across the Pamir Mountains to
India. Going through that desert, he despaired in his diary that gazing
on all sides as far as the eye can reach in order to mark the track, no
guidance is to be obtained save from the rotting bones of dead men, which
point the way And of
course, they could hear the terrifying moans and cries of ghosts all
around them. After some years in India collecting manuscripts he came home
through storms and shipwrecks via Java. There was also the scholar
Kumārajīva (鸠摩罗什,
Jiūmóluóshí) (344-413) from Kashmir, who gained such a reputation by his
work in Kashgar,Turfan, and Kucha that the Qin emperor sent a general with
an army to conquer Kucha and bring him back as a prize. The general took
him prisoner but held him for years as a prize of war, until another
emperor sent another army to ‘liberate’ him. On the plus side he had
plenty of time to learn Chinese which he then used to translate many
important texts. |
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Buddhism with Chinese Characteristics
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The
difficulties in translating the doctrines of the Buddha to China were more
fundamental than just getting the texts into the country and finding
someone proficient in the two languages to translate them, though even
that was hard enough. There was also the fact that the assumptions on
which the philosophy was based and the problems it was designed to address
(solve, dissolve, etc.) were quite alien to the Chinese. They did not, for
example, believe in reincarnation. There being no reincarnation, there was
no endless cycle of birth and rebirth trapping us in a pointless eternal
life. There being no absurd eternity to escape, the achievement of nirvana
interpreted as non-existence (at last!) was much less attractive – in fact
it was exactly as unattractive in the ancient Confucian or Taoist Chinese
context as it is in the modern Christian or Scientific Western context.
The Mahayana version that proved most popular in China downplayed these
elements in favour of the aspiration to Bodhisattva-hood by which great
power to help others in this world might be gained, and in favour of the
possibility of meriting a kind of heaven by one’s works in this world. At least
equally obstructive were the many metaphysical concepts essential to the
Buddhist ideology which were unfamiliar to the Chinese and for which they
consequently lacked a vocabulary. It is not enough to simply translate one
term in Sanskrit by its etymological equivalent in Chinese, because these
terms come with a freight of philosophical baggage, associated meanings,
implied concepts, an understood place in historical controversies, and so
on. (The problem is familiar to us from attempts to understand ancient
Greek philosophy, filled as it is with problematic notions of
psyche,
logos,
hyle, syllogism, etc., and
which is yet nowhere near as far from us as Indian was from Chinese.) The
initial solution was to use Taoist terminology to talk about Buddhist
concepts; a tendency motivated by a perceived similarity between the two
philosophies, so that Taoism’s Great Oneness could be equated with
sambodhi, and the Buddhist
sunyata (emptiness) with wu
(non-being), and so on. It will be recalled that the problem of
yu and wu was a principal
focus of the Neotaoists of the time.) This method of finding equivalences
was called géyi (格义) or
analogy. The felt association
with Taoism was so strong that the Taoists promoted a legend that Laozi
had travelled to India and taught his doctrines there as the Buddha
himself. We shall
see later that the association with Taoism would find a more sophisticated
expression in the development of Chan Buddhism. In the early stages of the
introduction of Buddhism to China, however, the schools which arose there
were philosophically speaking relatively uninteresting, being little more
than vehicles for the transmission of ideas that had arisen in India. Thus
Xuanzang, for example, founded a school called the Fǎxiàng (法相宗,
Dharma characteristics) which taught the Yogacara philosophy and
Kumarajiva founded the school called Sānlùn (三论, three documents)
or Kōng (空,
emptiness) which taught Madhyamaka. Eventually, however, Chinese thinkers
began to make their own contributions. We shall now look briefly at two
schools that were important in this regard. |
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Tiantai: The Three
Truths |
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The school called Tiantai (天台,
Heavenly Platform) after the mountain that was home to its founder
Zhìyǐ (智腿) (538–597) was well
known for several doctrines that were developed by its own
thinkers. Most of these are specific claims about the
periodisation of Buddha’s teachings or methods of instruction and
so on, but one at least has a more general philosophical interest:
the claim that there are three truths in each of the Buddha’s
teachings.
It might be stated, for example, that the achievement of nirvana
will lead to the person exiting samsara, and this could be
understood under a conventional interpretation as a discussion of
the fate of persons; but it could also be understood at another
‘higher’ level as using the non-referring terms ‘person’,
‘samsara,’ etc. and referring to a process that cannot occur in
the way indicated. The point of making the statement to an
audience that will apply the conventional interpretation is to
convince the hearer that there is a reason to follow the Buddha’s
teachings to the point that they will be capable of making the
second interpretation. The point of the statement is therefore
not to convey a truth
about the world but to achieve some objective, and the point of
claiming that the conventional interpretation gives a
‘conventional truth’ is no more than to validate in conventional
terms the worth of the statement to the audience.
In fact, this being the case, we should say that the teachings of
the Buddha are not intended to be evaluated in terms of their
truth or falsity, but rather in terms of whether or not they lead
to success in the Buddha’s intended project of liberation. But if
this pragmatic or instrumental attitude towards truth is the
proper understanding of the Buddha’s method, then his method is a
very risky one, because, of course, once you have allowed that
your statements are not to be thought of as true in the ‘standard’
way – even if you now insist that
this statement is true
in that way – it becomes impossible to make any statement that the
audience may reasonably be expected to accept at face value. Even
statements of so-called ‘ultimate truths’ may be suspected of
being only instrumentally true rather than truly true; and we
cannot know what the statements are instrumental for: the Buddha
may state that he intends to
end suffering and that his teachings are directed towards that
end; but maybe that’s just a statement intended to lead us to
behave or believe in a certain way, and doesn’t describe Buddha’s
real intentions. Who can tell?
In the Mulamadhyamakakarika
at c. 24 v. 18, Nagarjuna says
Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation,
Is itself the middle way.[1]
Based upon this and statements like it, the Tiantai developed a
theory of levels of Truth. The Tiantai doctrine does not refer to
kinds of truth directly
as the Two Truths Doctrine does, but makes a claim about the
grounds upon which the truths of statements can be evaluated.
Statements can be evaluated as true or false on the basis of a
presupposition about the way the world is, and Tiantai identifies
three such presuppositions which are all taken to be true, which
each refer to something essential about the world (according to
the Madhyamaka philosophy,) but which are on their face
contradictory. Thus
1.
Void.
Referring to the claim that nothing has independent
reality, but has only a
The levels of truth in this case are not to be thought of as steps
toward more sophisticated understandings, but rather as reflecting
attention being paid to different aspects of the universe. One way
of interpreting it is by noting that the first statement is one
concerning the noumenal
aspect of the universe – which is to say, the way things are ‘in
themselves’ – and is denying that anything has self-existence, an
existence independent of external factors such as ‘being
perceived;’ whereas the second statement concerns the fact that
there is a phenomenal
aspect to things – which is to say, that there is a way that they
are to us – and that there must logically be something to be
experienced; and the third statement is expressing the fact that
if there is no noumenon independently of
phenomenon, then there is no distinction between
noumenon and
phenomenon and the thing
in itself is exactly the experience of that thing.
Whether this is a reasonable interpretation of the three truths
doctrine, and whether it is a reasonable position in itself, are
different questions. As to the latter point, there is still room
to doubt whether it is possible to have a phenomenon without an
independently existing noumenon, unless, that is, the phenomenon
is simply an illusion. And even if it were an illusion, we would
still require there to be an existing mind available to be
‘illuded’.
[1]
Garfield, J.
L. (1995) The
Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Oxford, UK: OUP,
p.304
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Huayan: Interpenetration |
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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 Fǎzàng,
(法藏
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,
理, in the Huayan
tradition) and phenomena (shi,
事) 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 (華嚴一乘教分齊章), T1866.
[3]
Calming and Contemplation in
the Five Teachings of Huayan
(華嚴五教止觀)
T1867. Tr. by Fox, A (2015) ‘The Practice of Huayan Buddhism’,
漢傳佛教研究的過去現在未來,
(pp. 259-286,) p. 265
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Conclusion |
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