Chapter 2: Matching Concepts and Early Interpretation¶

The preceding chapter examined the earliest work of translation. An Shigao and Lokakṣema brought a large body of Buddhist texts into China, but how Chinese readers understood those texts was another matter. This chapter examines that encounter: how early Chinese intellectuals approached and explained Buddhism through the frameworks of xuanxue and Daoism already available to them, what this understanding made possible, and what it misread.

I. The Meaning of “Matching Concepts”¶

What is geyi?

The literal sense of geyi is “measuring meanings by categories or standards.” It can also be rendered “matching concepts” or “analogical explanation of doctrine.” It refers to an early Chinese Buddhist method of interpretation: when teaching Buddhist scriptures to a Chinese audience, the teacher used concepts already present in Chinese thought—principally Daoist and xuanxue concepts—as points of reference and explained corresponding Buddhist concepts by analogy with them.

The clearest historical record of the method appears in the Biographies of Eminent Monks, in its account of a dispute between Dao’an (312–385) and Sengguang, also called Sengxian. Dao’an held that “the old matching of concepts frequently violated the principles” and urged that the analogical method be abandoned. Sengguang defended the old approach out of respect for earlier masters, treating it as an expedient means for guiding beginners. The exchange shows that both the term and the practice were already matters of explicit discussion and dispute.¹

Matching concepts was not an idea invented by any single person. It was the natural response of the entire intellectual world of early Chinese Buddhism to a newly arrived body of thought. Understanding the unknown through the known and describing unfamiliar ideas through familiar language occur in every cultural encounter. Geyi is simply the Chinese name for this universal phenomenon.

II. The Rise of Xuanxue: The Soil of Matching Concepts¶

The Three Profound Texts and xuanxue

To understand why matching concepts took Daoist and xuanxue vocabulary as its framework, we must first consider the dominant intellectual current from the end of the Han through the Wei and Jin periods, roughly the second through fourth centuries: xuanxue, literally “the study of the profound and subtle.” The term xuan, “dark,” “mysterious,” or “profound,” comes from the Laozi’s phrase “mystery upon mystery, the gateway to the manifold secrets.” It denotes an ineffable first principle beyond concrete things. Xuanxue was the Wei-Jin philosophical tradition that examined such ultimate questions through the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Book of Changes.

These three works were known as the Three Profound Texts. Interpreting them became the central undertaking of xuanxue, which emerged as the mainstream philosophy of the intellectual class after the decline of Han Confucian authority.

Wang Bi and the “exaltation of nonbeing”

The most important xuanxue thinker was Wang Bi (226–249), who wrote commentaries on the Laozi and the Book of Changes. He advanced an enormously influential philosophical position: the foundation of the cosmos is “nonbeing” (wu). Here wu does not literally mean that nothing exists, but the ineffable ultimate ground upon which the generation of the myriad things depends. “Being”—the myriad concrete things—arises from and depends upon nonbeing. The position was later called the “exaltation of nonbeing” or “taking nonbeing as the root.”

Wang Bi’s “nonbeing” roughly corresponds to the ineffable Dao in the Laozi’s statement, “The way that can be spoken is not the constant Way.” It is not a particular thing but that upon which the generation of all things depends. Mundane “being” must find its ground in “nonbeing.”

Guo Xiang and “solitary transformation”

Guo Xiang (252–312), in his commentary on the Zhuangzi, proposed a different position. The myriad things each undergo “solitary transformation,” arising spontaneously on their own, without a single unifying “nonbeing” as their source. The existence of each thing is its own self-affirming “rightness” and requires no external ground. This became known as the “exaltation of being,” in opposition to Wang Bi’s “exaltation of nonbeing.”

The encounter between xuanxue and Buddhism

To Wei-Jin intellectuals, such Buddhist concepts as emptiness (śūnyatā), wisdom (prajñā), and Nibbāna (nirvāṇa) bore striking superficial resemblances to the xuanxue concepts of nonbeing, the Dao, and non-action. Both discussed something like a fundamental condition beyond concrete things, and both contained an epistemic dimension of “not clinging to being.”

This superficial resemblance was both the condition that made matching concepts possible and the source of all its misreadings.

III. How Matching Concepts Worked: Conceptual Pairing¶

The concrete procedure of matching concepts was to construct a “correspondence table,” pairing Buddhist ideas one by one with ideas from xuanxue and Daoism and explaining the former through the latter:

These pairings were not utterly devoid of similarity. In a broad spirit of “transcending grasping,” the two did resonate. The real problem is that pairing concealed decisive differences, compressing the distinctive claims of a new philosophical framework into the outline of an existing one.

The example of “emptiness of mind”

One concrete and revealing example is the matched-concept interpretation known as “emptiness of mind.” It explained the Buddhist “absence” or emptiness as the “mind’s nonattachment to external things,” thereby avoiding the questions whether external things are themselves empty and whether phenomena lack intrinsic nature. In a Daoist or xuanxue context, the reading was natural: the sage moves through the world without allowing the mind to be bound by external things and responds through non-action. Buddhist emptiness concerns both psychological attitude and the mode of existence of all phenomena, and the latter is crucial. To read emptiness as “a mind without attachment” turns an ontological proposition into a psychological one and loses the core of Buddhist philosophy.

IV. The Six Schools and Seven Traditions of Prajñāpāramitā: Diverse Early Understandings¶

During the Wei and Jin periods, numerous Chinese interpretations formed around the core ideas of prajñā, wisdom, and emptiness. Later literature organized them into the “six schools and seven traditions,” a classification found in later annotations to Sengzhao’s Treatises of Zhao and related texts. The classification itself was retrospective and may not reproduce each group’s self-understanding with complete fidelity, but it provides a framework for comprehending the diversity of interpretation at the time.²

The School of Original Nonbeing

Representatives: Dao’an and Zhu Fatai. Its central claim was that the myriad phenomena are “originally nonbeing”: at their foundation, all appearances are “nonbeing,” not substantial existence. “Original nonbeing” expressed the emptiness of things; at the most fundamental level, the myriad phenomena possess no substantial “being” and can be designated only through “nonbeing.”

The problem is that this “original nonbeing” was deeply influenced by Wang Bi’s xuanxue. It resembles the ontological priority of nonbeing over being more than the Buddhist claim that all phenomena lack intrinsic nature.

The Variant School of Original Nonbeing

Differing somewhat from the preceding school, this tradition held that original nonbeing is the essence of phenomena, but their appearances are not themselves identical with original nonbeing. It preserved a certain division between “the original nonbeing of phenomena” and “their appearances” and thus represented a variant treatment of the first position.

The School of Form as Emptiness

Its representative was Zhi Daolin, discussed in the next section, and it was the most philosophically creative of the six schools and seven traditions. Its central claim was that “form itself is empty.” Material appearance—form, rūpa—is emptiness; emptiness does not stand outside or above form. Form itself is empty because appearance has no substantial essence independent of its manifestation. More than the other schools, this position approaches Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka concept of emptiness.

The School of Consciousness as Containing

This tradition treated consciousness as that within which emptiness is contained. Emptiness is realized at the level of consciousness. The approach contains the germ of a Consciousness-Only tendency, though within the Chinese cultural setting of the time it remained a distinctive interpretation of the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures.

The School of Illusory Transformation

Its central claim was that every appearance is like an illusion or magical transformation, without a real substance. The metaphor of illusion is extremely common in Mahāyāna scriptures, especially the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, and this school constructed an interpretation around it.

The School of Emptiness of Mind

Its central claim was that the practitioner’s “mind” should remain unattached to external things. “Emptiness of mind” means the mind’s condition of nonattachment, not that external things are themselves empty. As noted above, this is one of the most typical matched-concept misreadings: a Buddhist ontology of emptiness becomes a practical claim about psychological attitude.

V. Zhi Daolin: The Most Complex Thinker of the Matched-Concept Era¶

Life and social circle

Zhi Daolin (314–366), whose lay surname was Guan, was the Buddhist monk most esteemed by the intellectual class of the Wei-Jin period. His social circle included leading Eastern Jin literati such as the calligrapher Wang Xizhi (303–361) and the statesman Xie An (320–385). He was at once a monk and an important participant in the “pure conversation” circles of Eastern Jin gentlemen.

A reinterpretation of “Free and Easy Wandering”

Zhi Daolin’s most famous intervention was his reinterpretation of “Free and Easy Wandering,” the first chapter of the Zhuangzi. In his commentary, Guo Xiang argued that the great Peng bird and the tiny cicada alike possess the freedom of “each fitting its own nature”: the Peng has the Peng’s freedom, the cicada the cicada’s. Freedom means simply “being commensurate with one’s own capacity,” each fulfilling its particular measure, with no superior or inferior. This applied Guo Xiang’s philosophy of “solitary transformation”: every being is complete in itself and need not seek beyond itself.

Zhi Daolin criticized this interpretation. “Free and easy wandering,” he argued, points to the Perfected Person’s absolute freedom beyond every limitation, not to “being commensurate with one’s own capacity.” Only breaking attachment to one’s own limitations constitutes genuine freedom. Guo Xiang’s version reduced freedom to “adaptation within one’s particular limits”; it was not true liberation.

Here Zhi Daolin used the Buddhist idea of liberation to reinterpret Zhuangzi. Genuine freedom does not lie in “resting content with one’s allotted place,” but in transcending every distinction and attachment. This was matched-concept interpretation at a high level. It did more than fit Buddhist concepts into Daoist vocabulary: it used Buddhist insight to correct or deepen Daoist understanding.¹

The philosophical content of the School of Form as Emptiness

Zhi Daolin’s claim that “form itself is empty” possessed an internal argumentative structure. The “form” of a thing—its material appearance—is empty not because it is “nonbeing” at some deeper level, but because form itself has no substantial essence independently existing beyond its manifestation. The “flower-nature” of a flower, for example, is not another thing called “flower-nature” existing apart from the flower’s color, shape, and scent. The flower is the manifestation of these concrete characteristics; there is no additional entity.

In spirit, this line of thought approaches Madhyamaka’s “establishment through conventional designation”: the flower exists, but its existence is precisely its conventionally designated existence. No intrinsically existing “flower” is concealed behind appearance. Working within a xuanxue context and relying on direct reading of Buddhist texts, especially the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures, Zhi Daolin arrived closer to their original sense than did other matched-concept interpretations.

The proximity remained limited. Zhi Daolin’s understanding of emptiness chiefly remained within the question whether the essence of a kind of thing can exist independently of its appearances. It had not entered Nāgārjuna’s inferential chain: because things arise dependently, they therefore lack intrinsic nature. The two point in similar directions, but their argumentative structures differ.

VI. The Fundamental Problem with Matching Concepts¶

Dao’an’s criticism of matching concepts, introduced in the previous chapter, reached a genuine philosophical problem: using A to explain B always means filling B with A’s associations, context, and meanings. When listeners thought they understood “Buddhist prajñā,” what they actually understood was “Daoist nonbeing with the label prajñā attached.”

The method’s central misreadings can be summarized in three categories.

First, cosmological nonbeing versus emptiness as the absence of intrinsic nature. Daoist and xuanxue “nonbeing” has a cosmological meaning: “The Dao gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to the myriad things.” Nonbeing is the source and ground of the myriad things. Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā) does not ask “from what are the myriad things produced?” It analyzes “how do the myriad things exist?” All phenomena lack intrinsic nature and arise through conditions. Using the former to explain the latter makes Buddhism appear to say that “everything comes from nothingness,” while obscuring its actual concern: the mode of existence of all things is without intrinsic nature.

Second, psychological attitude versus an ontological claim. The School of Emptiness of Mind read emptiness as “the mind’s nonattachment.” It turned a claim about the mode of existence of all phenomena into a practical claim about the practitioner’s psychological state. In the context of ordinary practice, the two may appear to lead toward similar results—releasing attachment and freeing the mind—but philosophically they occupy entirely different levels.

Third, solitary transformation or spontaneity versus dependent origination. Guo Xiang’s “solitary transformation” holds that every thing arises spontaneously on its own, independently of external causes. Superficially, both it and Buddhist dependent origination reject an external sovereign. Their directions, however, are opposite: solitary transformation means “each thing is self-sufficient and complete”; dependent origination means “each thing arises and ceases through conditions and is not self-sufficient.” Explaining the latter through the former produces a diametrically opposed understanding.

A historical evaluation of matching concepts

From a critical perspective, matching concepts was the principal intellectual obstacle during Chinese Buddhism’s first several centuries. It allowed Chinese intellectuals to believe they understood the Dharma when they actually understood Buddhism filtered through Daoist concepts. After Kumārajīva arrived in 401, his new translations and oral explanations allowed Chinese audiences to encounter Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka in a comparatively direct form for the first time. This was the first systematic reckoning with the matched-concept tradition, discussed in Chapter 10.3.

From another perspective, however, matching concepts cannot be treated as pure error. It was the inevitable first accommodation between two mature cultures at the moment of contact, the beginning of dialogue rather than its conclusion. The discussions produced in its age constituted the first large-scale cross-cultural philosophical dialogue in Chinese intellectual history. Their value lies not merely in how much they eventually understood correctly, but also in the genuine philosophical questions they raised.

VII. The Legacy of Matching Concepts¶

Matching concepts was criticized as an explicit methodology and gradually abandoned during the fourth and fifth centuries, but the intellectual habits it formed left enduring traces in Chinese Buddhism.

The origin of the discourse of the “unity of the three teachings.” Xuanxue’s sense of affinity with Buddhism and Buddhism’s active borrowing of Daoist vocabulary laid the discursive foundation for the Chinese “integration of the three teachings”—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Chinese culture thereafter tended to regard the three as spiritual traditions fundamentally continuous with one another rather than mutually exclusive and competing systems. The historical root of that tendency lies in the era of matching concepts.

The Daoist coloring of Buddhism. Even after matching concepts explicitly disappeared, Chinese Buddhist doctrine always retained a certain Daoist hue. Tiantai’s “original awakening,” Huayan’s “nature-origination,” and Chan’s “no-thought, no-form, and nonabiding” all display modes of thought that resonate with Daoist nonbeing and the spontaneous Way. This is directly related to the historical accumulation of the matched-concept era, not a coincidence.

Monks’ entry into literati society. The pattern established by Zhi Daolin and others, in which monks participated in the literati practice of “pure conversation,” became an important model of interaction between Buddhism and the Chinese intellectual class. Eminent monks continued to enjoy high standing in scholar-official circles during the Tang and Song dynasties, a tradition traceable to this period.

The history of matching concepts was the first stage in Chinese Buddhism’s understanding of itself: a difficult-to-avoid misreading, yet also a genuine philosophical encounter.

References¶