Chapter 6: The Huayan School¶

Tiantai’s perfect interpenetration of the Dharma-realm principally unfolds at the level of thought: three thousand realms in a single thought, the Three Truths simultaneously present, radiating from each present thought to touch the whole. Huayan’s vision is larger. Beginning from the cosmology of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, it extends the insight “all is one and one is all” into the structure of existence as a whole. The discussion is no longer limited to thought. Every thing in the cosmos reflects and includes every other thing. This is perfect interpenetration in a cosmological sense, whereas Tiantai’s tends more toward epistemology and the theory of practice.

I. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra and Huayan’s Textual Foundation¶

What is the Avataṃsaka Sūtra?

The Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra, the Flower Garland Sūtra, is the work of Indian Mahāyāna literature richest in cosmological imagination. Its central image is the infinitely adorned cosmic vista manifested at awakening by Vairocana, the Buddha of the Dharma-body: layers upon layers of buddha lands, numberless buddhas and bodhisattvas, all mutually including one another without end.

Structurally, the Avataṃsaka was not a single unified Indian source. It is a vast collection assembled from several independent works, the most important being the Daśabhūmika Sūtra, on the ten stages of bodhisattva practice, and the Gaṇḍavyūha, recounting the youth Sudhana’s journey among fifty-three spiritual friends. These circulated independently in India before being compiled into a single great scripture.¹

Chinese translations

The eighty-fascicle version was the principal text used by the Huayan school and remains the commonly circulated version today.

II. Historical Origins of the Huayan School¶

Dushun (557–640)

Tradition regards Dushun as Huayan’s first patriarch. No large work of his has been transmitted; what stands under his name is a single piece, the Gate of Contemplating the Dharma-realm, and he himself was known for teaching contemplative practice. The Gate sets up a threefold contemplation: contemplation of true emptiness, seeing that all phenomena are empty; contemplation of the nonobstruction of principle and phenomena, seeing their identity; and contemplation of universal inclusion, seeing the nonobstruction among phenomena. The text of the contemplations has no independent circulating edition today. What survives is the full text as cited in Chengguan’s Huayan fajie xuanjing and in Zongmi’s Zhu Huayan fajie guanmen, and the quotations in this book follow those two commentaries.² These three gates of contemplation are matched with the four Dharma-realms that Chengguan later established; Section III gives the matching.

Zhiyan (602–668)

Dushun’s disciple and the second Huayan patriarch, Zhiyan was the thinker who truly began to organize Huayan doctrine. The work that establishes the headings of the ten mysterious gates is his Huayan yisheng shixuan men, which carries beneath its title the author’s own note, “transmitting what the reverend Dushun said,” tracing the provenance of the list back to Dushun.³ His remaining writings are chiefly the Record of Searching the Mysteries of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and the Kongmu zhang, his miscellaneous notes on the scripture.

Fazang (643–712)

Fazang, also known as Master Xianshou, was Huayan’s third patriarch and the figure who truly constructed Huayan thought as a complete philosophical system. Descended from Sogdians and born in Chang’an, he had an exceptionally close relationship with Wu Zetian, who reigned 690–705. She was Huayan’s most important political patron. Fazang repeatedly lectured at court, supplying her with religious resources from the Avataṃsaka Sūtra to justify the legitimacy of her rule.⁴

Fazang’s principal works are the Huayan jing tanxuan ji, the Record of Exploring the Mysteries of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra; the Huayan yisheng jiaoyi fenqi zhang, commonly called the Treatise on the Five Teachings, the programmatic statement of Huayan doctrinal classification; the Treatise on the Golden Lion of Huayan, a short piece written for Wu Zetian on the simile of a golden lion; and the Treatise on the Dependent Origination of the Dharma-realm. The Tanxuan ji comments on the sixty-fascicle Avataṃsaka. The chapter title glossed in its sixteenth fascicle is “the Nature-Origination of the Jewel-King Tathāgata,” the chapter name of the old translation, and the same chapter is retitled “the Manifestation of the Tathāgata” in the eighty-fascicle text. The extensive commentaries on the eighty-fascicle Avataṃsaka are Chengguan’s, namely the Commentary on the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and the Suishu yanyi chao. One further work must be added to the list, the Dasheng qixin lun yiji: the treatise on which nature-origination is seated is the Awakening of Faith, Fazang wrote a commentary on it and placed it at the summit of the final teaching, and Part 22, Chapter 5 of the second division collates that commentary with the Tanxuan ji.⁵

Chengguan (738–839)

The fourth Huayan patriarch, Chengguan was the principal commentator on Huayan doctrine after Fazang. The extensive commentaries on the eighty-fascicle Avataṃsaka are his, the Commentary on the Avataṃsaka Sūtra and the Suishu yanyi chao. He also wrote the Huayan fajie xuanjing, which cites and glosses Dushun’s three gates of contemplation; the headings of the four Dharma-realms are established at the opening of that book (see Section III).

Zongmi (780–841)

Huayan’s fifth patriarch, Zongmi was also an important inheritor of Heze Chan. He explicitly attempted a synthesis of Huayan and Chan, discussed in Section IX. His principal writings include the Prolegomenon to the Collection of Expressions of the Chan Source and Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity.

III. The Four Dharma-Realms: The Basic Framework of Huayan Ontology¶

The four Dharma-realms are Huayan’s most fundamental ontological framework. Their headings are established at the opening of Chengguan’s Huayan fajie xuanjing, matched there with Dushun’s three gates of contemplation. The correspondence runs thus: the contemplation of true emptiness contemplates the Dharma-realm of principle, the contemplation of the nonobstruction of principle and phenomena contemplates the Dharma-realm of their nonobstruction, and the contemplation of universal inclusion contemplates the Dharma-realm of nonobstruction among phenomena.⁶ The contemplations are three while the realms are four in all, and the reason the Xuanjing gives is that the Dharma-realm of phenomena is “differentiated past all setting out”: every single phenomenal characteristic can be made into a contemplation of its own, so none is singled out, and the whole Dharma-realm of phenomena withdraws into the position of the substance on which the three contemplations rest.⁶ The headings of the four realms and what each refers to, in tabular form:

Correspondences for the first three Dharma-realms can be found to varying degrees in other Buddhist philosophies. The realm of phenomena corresponds to conventional truth, the realm of principle to ultimate truth, and their nonobstruction to Madhyamaka’s parallel two truths.

The fourth is Huayan’s distinctive contribution. “Nonobstruction among phenomena” means that things mutually include one another without the least obstruction, the most radical claim in Huayan philosophy. The mechanism that generates it is written into the first two gates of the contemplation of universal inclusion in the Gate of Contemplating the Dharma-realm: because phenomena are not different from principle, a phenomenon pervades as principle pervades, so that “a single mote of dust comes to pervade the Dharma-realm”; and because all phenomena are alike as one principle, each is within the others and includes them.⁷ Every step of the transmission goes by way of principle, and between phenomenon and phenomenon there is no direct passage. The load of this derivation therefore rests entirely on the standing of principle. If principle occupies the position of a rule, nonobstruction among phenomena is relational description pushed to its limit; if principle is read as an entity standing behind appearances, the whole fourth level must answer the old charge of substantialism. The words of the contemplation text itself, “principle is empty and has no substance,” shut the second reading out at the door. A world in a grain of sand, a cosmos in a flower.

IV. The Perfect Interpenetration of the Six Characteristics¶

The perfect interpenetration of the six characteristics, developed by Zhiyan and systematically elaborated by Fazang, is an analytical framework explaining how each appearance simultaneously possesses six opposing yet interpenetrating characteristics. They form three mutually inclusive pairs:

All six exist simultaneously within any appearance. The key is their “perfect interpenetration.” They are not contradictory opposites, but different aspects of one appearance, mutually identical and all indispensable. Their philosophical significance lies in explaining how “one” and “many” coexist within the same appearance; they are also one logical foundation for the nonobstruction among phenomena.

V. The Ten Mysterious Gates and Indra’s Net¶

The Ten Mysterious Gates

The Ten Mysterious Gates are the operating rules for nonobstruction among phenomena, each gate explaining one dimension in which appearances mutually contain one another. The work that establishes the headings is Zhiyan’s Huayan yisheng shixuan men, which carries beneath its title the note “transmitting what the reverend Dushun said.”³ Fazang’s Treatise on the Five Teachings keeps this old list and reworks its procedure, while the Tanxuan ji sets up a new list, so that two sets of headings run side by side under his name.⁸ Two of the changes between old and new are substantive: the gate of the pure and the mixed each with its own virtue is exchanged for the gate of the unobstructed freedom of the broad and the narrow, and the gate of the good accomplishment of the turning of mind-only is exchanged for the gate of host and retinue, perfectly luminous and each with its own virtue.⁸ The weight of the second change is this. In the old list, the gate of the turning of mind-only assigned the mechanism of the preceding nine gates entirely to what is “established by the pure true mind that is the nature of the tathāgatagarbha”; after Fazang’s revision, not one of the ten gates takes mind for its heading.³

Their detailed content is highly technical; only their spirit need concern us here. Each gate explains a specific relation of mutual identity between the one and the many. The one is within the many and the many within the one; the large is contained in the small and the small in the large; this time contains another time and the other time contains this one; a single thought contains an eon and an eon contains a single thought. The ten gates describe the same reality of nonobstruction among phenomena from ten directions.

Indra’s Net

Indra’s Net (Indrajāla) is the most famous image this grammar has. The second gate of the old set of ten mysteries takes it for its heading, and Zhiyan already glossed it by the mutual reflection of many mirrors:³

In the palace of Indra hangs an infinite net of jewels, with a jewel at every knot. Each jewel reflects all the others. Each reflected jewel in turn reflects every other jewel, and so on through infinitely layered reflections without end.

The metaphor renders the realm of nonobstruction among phenomena intuitively. Every thing, each jewel, reflects all other things within itself, and every reflected thing in turn contains the reflections of all others—layer after endless layer.

In Chapter 5.1 on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, this book used Indra’s Net as an intuitive image of the emptiness of dependent origination. In Huayan’s framework, the metaphor is developed much more fully into a cosmology. One gap in the simile must be recorded here: what a jewel takes in is a reflection, and the mutual taking-in of images is an affair at the level of appearance, whereas what mutual identity and mutual entry announce is an affair at the level of existence. What carries the argument is not this simile but the counting of ten coins, which follows.

The counting of ten coins

The mechanics of mutual identity and mutual entry are written out in the section on counting ten coins. The fourth fascicle of the Treatise on the Five Teachings takes ten coins numbered one to ten for its demonstration, dividing first into the gate of identical substance and the gate of distinct substance, and then into two operations, emptiness and existence on the one hand and having force and lacking force on the other: from the sense of emptiness and existence comes mutual identity, and from the sense of force and its lack comes mutual entry.⁹ Mutual identity, at the position of substance, sets up one item at a time: if the self has, the other must be empty, and since the other has no nature of its own and is made by the self, the other is the self. Mutual entry, at the position of function, is an alternation of full allocation and zero allocation: what has force entire includes the others, and what wholly lacks force enters the self.⁹ A positive argument is on file as well. Suppose one were not identical with ten: then many ones piled together would not make ten, and if ten does not stand, the one loses what it is correlated with. Fazang’s closing line is “if there were no ten, whose one would it be?”⁹

These operations carry an operating condition of their own. Fazang states repeatedly that mutual identity and mutual entry run entirely on the absence of intrinsic nature: “the one that is spoken of is not a one by intrinsic nature,” and “it is only through the absence of nature that the dependent origination of one and many is accomplished.” The heaviest sentence is a declaration of malfunction: “were it not so, dependent origination would not be accomplished, and the fault of intrinsic nature and the rest would follow.”⁹ Intrinsic nature has, in this operating manual, the standing of a fault condition: should any item hold on to a substance of its own, the two operations of yielding place and acting in another’s stead cannot be performed at all, and dependent origination fails along with them. The Huayan legislator wrote the absence of intrinsic nature into the operating clauses of his own apparatus, and the use of that clause comes in Section XI.

VI. Dependent Origination of the Dharma-Realm and the Theory of Nature-Origination¶

Dependent origination of the Dharma-realm

In early Buddhism, dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) is a linear causal chain: when this arises, that arises; when this ceases, that ceases. In Madhyamaka, it is the argumentative basis for the absence of intrinsic nature. In Huayan, dependent origination expands into the dependent origination of the Dharma-realm (dharmadhātu-pratītyasamutpāda). It is no longer a linear causal chain, but the simultaneous mutual inclusion of all appearances. Every appearance takes all others as its conditions while also being contained by them all. This is “horizontal” interdependence rather than “vertical” temporal causation.

The theory of nature-origination

Nature-origination is the name Huayan gave the tathāgatagarbha line on making it its own tenet. Glossing the chapter title “the Nature-Origination of the Jewel-King Tathāgata” in its sixteenth fascicle, the Tanxuan ji sets the doctrine up in a single sentence: “what does not change is called nature; the manifesting of function is called origination.” Nature is what does not change; origination is the manifesting of function.¹⁰

The gate of definition, among the ten gates on tenet and aim in the Tanxuan ji, is Fazang’s own positive gloss on the point. He sets himself a question: the scripture says plainly that “it is not by few conditions that perfect awakening is accomplished,” so, since conditions are involved, why speak of nature-origination alone? He gives four senses, and the third has the hardest grammar: “although origination takes hold of conditions, conditions must be without nature, and the principle of the absence of nature is manifested at the site of the conditions; therefore, with respect to what is manifested, it is called nature-origination and nothing more.”¹⁰ The word “nature” in that sentence refers to the principle of the absence of nature, and nature-origination is that principle manifesting itself at the site of the conditions. One and the same matter is called dependent origination when viewed from the side of the conditions and nature-origination when viewed from the side of the principle manifested; principle adds no further thing.¹¹

Fixing the word “origination” upon manifestation rather than upon production has very different consequences. Manifestation requires no producer set up outside the thing that undergoes it; production does require one. In this gate Fazang chose manifestation, and the pure nature therefore need not serve as the producer of the myriad phenomena.

The difference between nature-origination and nature-inclusion

Chapter 10.5 identified their central difference; the table below elaborates it.

The usual account commonly takes one further step here and says that Huayan speaks of the pure only and does not gather in the defiled. That step has no warrant in Fazang’s own text. The gate on the defiled and the pure in the Tanxuan ji sets its own question, asking whether sentient beings and afflictions are nature-origination; the answer is “they all are,” the reasons given are that they are what is to be saved, what is to be cut off, and what is to be known, and the closing line runs “therefore there is nothing at all that is not nature-origination.”¹⁰ The same gate offers the simile of a boot worn as a hat, saying of defiled phenomena that “because they run counter to the true they cannot be apart from the true, and because they run counter to the true they do not belong to the function of the true”: a boot worn on the head is still a boot and so is not apart from the boot, while wearing it in that way does not count as a boot’s function and so does not belong to the function of the true.¹⁰

The parting of the two schools must therefore be stated more precisely. The disagreement is not over whether nature-origination gathers in the defiled, for both schools gather it in. The disagreement is over whether defilement counts as a virtue of nature. Tiantai numbers evil within nature, whence the doctrine of nature-evil; Huayan enters defilement as an object to be counteracted and gives it no place in the content of nature. This is a difference between two registers, one drawn wider and one narrower.

Huayan’s nature-origination carries on the main line of the tathāgatagarbha tradition (nature is pure and defilement belongs to delusion), and Tiantai’s nature-inclusion is a revision of that line; the point at which the revision bears is exactly this, whether the register of nature admits evil.

VII. The Treatise on the Golden Lion of Huayan¶

The Treatise on the Golden Lion is a short work Fazang wrote for Wu Zetian, using a golden lion statue in the palace to illustrate Huayan philosophy’s central concepts. It is the most approachable introduction to Huayan thought.⁴

The metaphor follows this logic:

Gold equals principle, Dharma-nature or emptiness. Gold is the substance, the lion’s essential material. It possesses no fixed shape of its own and can be cast into any form.

The lion’s shape equals phenomena. Its specific form (claws, teeth, ears, and eyes) is the shape into which gold has been cast. Each part possesses its particular appearance, the characteristic of difference, but every part is gold, the characteristic of identity.

The relation between gold and lion. Gold is wholly the lion—gold is lion, principle is phenomena. The lion is wholly gold—lion is gold, phenomena is principle. This is the nonobstruction of principle and phenomena. Each claw and tooth contains the whole lion, through the relation between universal and particular among the six characteristics, while the whole lion is within every claw and tooth. This is the nonobstruction among phenomena.

The essay closes at its last gate, entering nirvāṇa, and what it does there is withdraw the simile rather than extend it to the whole Dharma-realm. The text reads, “one sees that the two characteristics, lion and gold, are alike exhausted”; what is exhausted is not the lion only, for the gold is included.¹² The whole essay uses gold as the simile for suchness and leans upon the substance of gold at every layer in establishing its points, and the last gate withdraws the substance of the simile along with the rest. Reading the gold as an abiding material has, within this text, one last possible footing, and the closing stroke dismantles it.

VIII. The Five Teachings, the Ten Schools, and Where Tathāgatagarbha Ranks¶

Fazang’s doctrinal classification sets up two axes, and the Treatise on the Five Teachings divides the five teachings on its opening page. The axis of teachings begins with the Hīnayāna teaching and runs through the initial teaching of the Mahāyāna, the final teaching, the sudden teaching, and the perfect teaching, the last of which he glosses himself as “the distinct one-vehicle.”¹³ The line between the initial and the final grades is drawn by Fazang precisely at tathāgatagarbha: what is confined to the principle of emptiness and leaves a remainder is judged the initial teaching, while what proceeds “by the wonderful scriptures of the abiding tathāgatagarbha” is judged the final teaching.¹³ Beside the axis of teachings he sets a second axis, “opening the schools by principle,” and establishes ten schools. The eighth is the school of true virtue that is not empty, referring to the scriptures of the final teaching, whose position is stated in one line as “all dharmas are nothing but suchness,” on the grounds that “it has a substance of its own, and is furnished with the virtues of nature.” The tenth is the school of perfect luminosity furnished with all virtues, referring to the distinct one-vehicle.¹⁴

On both axes tathāgatagarbha ranks below the place Huayan assigns to itself. On the axis of teachings the tathāgatagarbha scriptures are judged the final teaching, the third grade, while Huayan judges itself the perfect teaching, the fifth; on the axis of schools the school of true virtue that is not empty stands eighth and the school of perfect luminosity furnished with all virtues stands tenth. Two grades separate them on each axis. In its own classificatory texts Huayan treats tathāgatagarbha as a layer it has already passed.

The equation “Huayan equals tathāgatagarbha” must therefore be taken apart. Textual descent is real enough: the treatise on which nature-origination is seated is the Awakening of Faith, for which Fazang wrote his Yiji, placing it at the summit of the final teaching; and the equation quoted in Chapter 7.1 from the Śrīmālādevī Sūtra, that “tathāgatagarbha is the unconditioned Dharma-realm,” is genuinely one of the sources of dependent origination in the Dharma-realm. Descent is not sameness of rank. The rank assigned in the classificatory texts is one matter, and whether Huayan’s principle is doctrinally the same thing as tathāgatagarbha, that unified essence behind all appearances, is another.

As to the standing of principle within this framework, the Gate of Contemplating the Dharma-realm writes two sentences of its own. Its first gate on the nonobstruction of principle and phenomena, treating principle as pervading phenomena, says that “within each and every phenomenon principle is wholly pervasive and not pervasive in part,” the reason being “because that true principle cannot be divided.” Whatever is material can be divided, and when distributed among many places each place receives a portion; to claim indivisibility and yet wholeness at every place is to claim that this item does not obey the arithmetic of materials. A rule is exactly such a thing: a rule that applies in one place applies entire, and there is no applying half of one. The seventh gate, on true principle being identical with phenomena, puts it more directly still: beneath “phenomena must depend on principle” comes at once “because principle is empty and has no substance,” so that this principle is redeemed only by taking itself wholly as phenomena.⁷ A principle without substance cannot be made the underlying support of all appearances, and a reading of principle as unified essence has nowhere to plant a foot on those four words.

The contemplation of true emptiness in Dushun’s Gate of Contemplating the Dharma-realm contemplates the emptiness of the Dharma-realm, and the four Dharma-realms Chengguan established place the Dharma-realm of principle at the second grade and the Dharma-realm of nonobstruction among phenomena at the summit. The structure takes up the cosmological concerns of the tathāgatagarbha line while using wording drawn from the side of emptiness: the Xuanjing glosses true emptiness as “not an annihilating emptiness and not an emptiness apart from form,” clarifying emptiness by way of what there is.⁶ Huayan rewrote the question “what is the relation between the myriad phenomena and the original nature?” into the question “how do the myriad phenomena mutually contain one another?” After the rewriting, the office that principle holds is that of a condition, not that of a source.

The conclusion therefore has to be turned in a different direction. Huayan’s relation to tathāgatagarbha is a demotion in classification and a rewriting in doctrine. The demotion appears in the ranks on the two axes; the rewriting appears in fixing “origination” upon manifestation and in placing “principle” on the side of rules. The equation of Chapter 7.1 still stands: it gives the provenance of Huayan’s dependent origination in the Dharma-realm, not the definition of Huayan’s Dharma-realm of principle.

IX. Zongmi: An Attempt to Synthesize Huayan and Chan¶

Zongmi (780–841), at once the fifth Huayan patriarch and an important successor in the Heze line of Chan derived from Shenhui, made it his life’s principal work to show that Huayan philosophy and Chan practice were two aspects of the same thing.

The Prolegomenon to the Collection of Expressions of the Chan Source

This work systematically classified the contemporary Chan traditions, including Heze, Hongzhou or Mazu, and Oxhead. Using Huayan’s classificatory framework, Zongmi placed them at different levels and finally argued that the highest Chan and Huayan’s perfect teaching point toward the same reality.

The Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity

Zongmi’s Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity is among the most intellectually original works in Chinese Buddhist history. It asks: what is a human being? Zongmi answers first through Confucian, Daoist, and various Buddhist positions, successively identifying the shortcomings of each, and finally argues that only Huayan tathāgatagarbha theory can completely answer the question “what is human nature?” Human nature is the manifestation of tathāgatagarbha or the fundamental nature of the Dharma-realm within sentient beings.

Zongmi’s attempt at synthesis had limited later influence. He died shortly before the Huichang Persecution of 845, and Huayan never again produced a synthesizing master of comparable stature. His classificatory framework and comprehensive vision nonetheless influenced the development of Song discourse on the “unity of the three teachings.”

X. Historical Influence¶

In China

Huayan’s independent institutional transmission in China essentially ended after the Huichang Persecution of 845. Its philosophy was too abstract, lacking a concrete practice like Chan and a devotional attraction like Pure Land. Yet Huayan philosophy permeated the broader Chinese philosophical tradition in diffuse form.

The “principle” of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism bears an evident intellectual affinity to Huayan “principle,” or Dharma-nature. The Cheng-Zhu proposition “one principle, many manifestations” structurally resembles Huayan’s framework of one principle extending through the myriad phenomena, although Cheng-Zhu philosophers denied Buddhist influence.

Chan, especially its later kōan collections, abounds in echoes of the phrase “all is one, and one is all.”

In Korea

Wonhyo (617–686) and Uisang (625–702) transmitted Huayan thought to Korea. Hwaeom became one of the most important Buddhist schools of the Silla kingdom, 668–935. Uisang studied directly under Zhiyan, Fazang’s teacher, and founded the Korean Hwaeom school after returning. His position in Korean Buddhist history is pivotal.

In Japan

Japanese Kegon was transmitted during the eighth century. Tōdai-ji in Nara (containing the famous Great Buddha Hall and the bronze Nara Great Buddha, Vairocana) is its center. Kegon was one of the six schools of Nara Buddhism.

XI. This Book’s Philosophical Assessment¶

Huayan is a distinctive Chinese contribution to cosmology. “Nonobstruction among phenomena,” the mutual inclusion of all appearances without obstruction, is a distinctive formulation in the history of world philosophy, with no exact equivalent easily found in Indian philosophy, even Mahāyāna. It is a unique cosmology developed in China after digesting Indian tathāgatagarbha, Madhyamaka, Consciousness-Only, and other traditions.

What carries the derivation of nonobstruction among phenomena is the counting of ten coins, not Indra’s Net. Indra’s Net is an intuitive image, jewel reflecting jewel, layer upon endless layer. What the simile supplies is a picture, and what a jewel takes in is a reflection, so that between the mutual taking-in of images and mutual identity and mutual entry at the level of existence there lies a gap. The argument is done by the counting of ten coins in the fourth fascicle of the Treatise on the Five Teachings: mutual identity hangs upon emptiness and existence at the position of substance, mutual entry upon force and its lack at the position of function, each connective with its own domain of operation, and the positive inference from one to ten runs through relations of correlation of the kind captured in “if there were no ten, whose one would it be?” Section V has already set this out. The provenance of the step to nonobstruction among phenomena is likewise given by the contemplation of universal inclusion in the Gate of Contemplating the Dharma-realm: because phenomena are not different from principle they pervade as principle pervades, and because all phenomena are alike as one principle they include one another, every step of the transmission going by way of principle. There is accordingly no gap here where a metaphor jumps straight into an ontology; there is a chain of derivation that loads the whole weight onto the standing of principle.

Fazang fixes the “origination” of nature-origination upon manifestation. The third sense in the gate of definition of the Tanxuan ji defines the word: “although origination takes hold of conditions, conditions must be without nature, and the principle of the absence of nature is manifested at the site of the conditions; therefore, with respect to what is manifested, it is called nature-origination and nothing more.” Manifestation requires no producer set up outside the thing that undergoes it, as Section VI has already set out. Nor are defiled phenomena excluded: the gate on the defiled and the pure sets its own question, asking whether sentient beings and afflictions are nature-origination, and answers “they all are,” the reasons given being that they are what is to be saved, what is to be cut off, and what is to be known.¹⁰ The old problem asked in Chapter 7.2, how a pure nature can come to have delusion, is answered here by putting defilement in the position of what is to be counteracted and giving it no place in the register of nature. That answer disposes of the registration; it does not dispose of the genesis.

The Tiantai charge of cutting off the nine realms in favour of principle does not hold against Fazang’s legislative text. In the Shibuermen zhiyao chao Zhili indicts Huayan for saying nature-origination only and not nature-inclusion, arguing that if the principle taken as object is pure and nothing else, the defilement of the nine realms has no place to be lodged within nature, and buddhahood must then proceed by cutting off the nine realms first. Checked against Fazang’s own words: what is cut off is written as deluded conditions; sentient beings and afflictions are judged to be nature-origination; buddha-nature and nature-origination “pervade the insentient as well”; and the nature of the nine realms is nowhere sentenced to death. Where the charge does hold is on the side of the history of reception, and Zhili himself named the referent: “the term numinous knowing is used exclusively by Guifeng.”¹⁵

The genuine opening Huayan leaves is the dispute over taking on perfuming. The chapter on perfuming in the Awakening of Faith lets suchness occupy both ends, receiving the perfuming of ignorance and also perfuming ignorance. The four conditions for being perfumed and the four for perfuming in the Cheng weishi lun expressly shut unconditioned dharmas out of both positions, on the grounds that an unconditioned dharma is solid and dense and does not take on perfuming, and that, being “unchanging before and after, without the function of growth,” it cannot perfume either.¹⁶ The two parties lodge one and the same word “perfuming” on different levels. Read the word in earnest as a mechanism and suchness must have a mutable side; read it merely as a way of speaking about relations of dependence and the two-way structure of the chapter on perfuming loses its real reference. One of the two must be chosen. Fazang did not choose, and this book does not choose on his behalf.

Zongmi’s ambition to synthesize reveals Huayan’s possibilities and limits. Huayan’s grand architecture makes it naturally suitable as a “final integrating framework.” Zongmi used it to integrate Chan and Huayan; Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism unconsciously borrowed from it to integrate Confucianism with Buddhist and Daoist thought.

This book’s position is that what has no rival in Chinese Buddhist history is Huayan’s systematic character and its fineness of workmanship. The items it posits are also the heaviest: the office of principle, nature-origination, and the whole net of the Dharma-realm are each of them large pieces. Matching them is the density of the clauses it files against itself. The contemplation text writes “principle is empty and has no substance”; the Treatise on the Five Teachings writes “were it not so, dependent origination would not be accomplished”; and the commentary on the Treatise on the Golden Lion writes “the gold is a simile for suchness, which does not keep to an intrinsic nature.” The heavier the items posited, the denser the limits the texts write down for themselves; this is the single most useful proportion to keep in mind when reading through the Huayan literature.

Between Huayan and Madhyamaka the tension is not structurally identical to tathāgatagarbha’s. Part VII discussed the tension between tathāgatagarbha and Madhyamaka: tathāgatagarbha places a kind of pure reality at the center, while Madhyamaka emptiness is thoroughly negative and recognizes no positive substantial existence. Huayan’s situation is different. It establishes “all phenomena perfectly interpenetrate, and one is all” as a positive description, and that step does indeed go further than Madhyamaka goes; yet for the operations that support the step Fazang wrote down that they run on the absence of intrinsic nature, so that the moment intrinsic nature enters, mutual identity and mutual entry fail at once. The Madhyamaka theorem says that intrinsic nature and dependent origination cannot stand together, and what the Treatise on the Five Teachings says is the engineering version of that same sentence. The real distance lies elsewhere. Over the stretch from “mutually connected” to “mutually inclusive,” Huayan uses the whole pervasion of principle and non-difference from it; this is a derivation that can be checked step by step, and its quality depends on the standing of principle. If principle occupies the position of a rule, every step is in order; if principle is read as an entity, the whole level must be reheard.

Its distance from Buddhism’s original concern. Since Part I, this book has repeatedly identified early Buddhism’s basic problem-consciousness: the Four Noble Truths, not-self, and dependent origination; the aim is to end suffering and leave the round of rebirth; the method is an empirical diagnostic framework. From that starting point Huayan travels to “the one mind includes every phenomenon in the cosmos,” and the road is a long one. The earlier draft of this section passed a verdict here, saying that the road runs ever closer to the Brahman-ātman theory of Brahmanical religion. After Part 22 of the second division checked the original texts sentence by sentence, that verdict cannot be maintained, and it is corrected here. The core of the Brahman-ātman theory is a pervasive and permanent entity, and the texts on the legislative side of Huayan are precisely refusing that item: suchness is answered “it is not” at all four alternatives; following conditions and remaining unchanged “have two senses only and not two substances”; principle “is empty and has no substance”; and the one is “not a one by intrinsic nature.”¹³ All these sentences come from Fazang himself and from the contemplation text he relied on.

Two stretches of distance can actually be measured. The first lies in the shift of the question: the early teaching handles the ending of suffering and Huayan handles the structure of the Dharma-realm, and the latter neither follows from the former nor is required by it. The second lies in the history of reception. Chengguan set the word “knowing” up alongside nature, saying that “knowing is the substance of mind,” and drew the line between the sentient and the insentient with the phrase “unlike wood and stone”; Zongmi went a step further, saying that “all sentient beings possess the true mind of original awakening” and that this mind is “from beginningless time abidingly pure, brightly unobscured and clearly knowing at all times.”¹⁷ From Fazang’s pervading the insentient, through Chengguan’s narrowing, to Zongmi’s one true numinous nature, the wording changes three times over three generations and always in one direction: nature turns from a general characteristic into the substance of mind, and permanence turns from a permanence not different from impermanence into abiding immutability. A reading of the permanent and pervasive did indeed appear, and the place where it appeared is the history of reception in commentary and classification, not Fazang’s legislative text.

This book’s final assessment of Huayan is therefore entered on two sides. The legislative side holds: the clauses are spread across three genres, contemplation text, doctrinal treatise, and commentary, and on the three items of principle, suchness, and the one, Fazang and the contemplation text he relied on alike refuse to describe them as self-standing and self-sufficient substances, so that nonobstruction among phenomena is the product of relational description pushed to its limit. The interpretive side does not hold: from Chengguan onward the commentaries speak of nature as the substance of mind and of permanence as abiding immutability, and that drift can be traced generation by generation. The distance between Huayan and early Buddhism is therefore to be entered in two places, one at the shift of the question and one at the drift in the history of reception. The earlier draft entered it as a transgression in ontology; after the original texts were checked, that entry is struck out.

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