Chapter 4: The Zhaolun — China's First Digestion¶

When the proof entered Chinese it ran up against a difficulty earlier than any of the household quarrels of India: the Chinese language of that day had as yet no words in which to conduct this business. Two centuries and more of scripture translation had gone by, in which the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures expounded emptiness by matching concepts and rendered emptiness by the nonbeing of Laozi and Zhuangzi; out of that soil the six houses and seven schools grew up. Then Kumārajīva entered Chang'an, and the Treatise on the Middle, the Hundred Treatise and the Treatise in Twelve Gates were translated one after another, so that for the first time the syntax was complete. Sengzhao, the youngest of the assistants in the translation bureau, wrote as the translating went forward, and his essays were afterwards gathered into the Zhaolun. The preface at the head of the collection puts the whole book into a single sentence: "Non-shifting answers to the conventional, and the conventional does not arise; the Unreal answers to the real, and the real is but a matter of naming."¹

Sengzhao's clearing of the ground begins with three of the schools. The school of the nonbeing of mind: "As for the nonbeing of mind, it is to have no mind toward the myriad things, while the myriad things have never been nonexistent." Sengzhao's verdict upon it: "What it gets right lies in the stilling of the spirit; what it gets wrong lies in the emptiness of things." Emptiness is worked upon the mind, and the side of the object is left exactly as it stood; in the language of Part 18, this mistakes a proposition of semantics for an instruction in the cultivation of the mind, and the ruling upon E3 is not touched by so much as a step. The school of matter as such: "As for matter as such, it makes plain that matter is not matter of itself, and that therefore, though it be matter, it is not matter." That matter is not matter of itself has already laid a hand on the door-ring of not being established in dependence on anything other than itself; and Sengzhao still finds it half a step short ("it has not grasped that matter is not matter"), holding that to say matter is established in dependence upon another does not go far enough, and that one must say that matter's being matter is from the outset nothing but designation. The mechanism of individuation has not been handed over. The school of original nonbeing: "As for original nonbeing, its disposition inclines toward nonbeing, and at the touch of almost any word it defers to nonbeing." Hearing emptiness, it grasps at nonbeing, and so reads a rejection as a counter-assertion: this is a textbook violation of the weak-rejection lemma, ⊣ of existence read as ⊢ of nonexistence. The three schools disposed of, the correct sense is gathered into eight characters: "the myriad things are not real, and have long stood as provisional designations." The myriad things are not really existent, and are established by provisional designation; the unreal is precisely the empty, and emptiness does not obstruct existence. The first casting in Chinese of the distinction among the senses of existence lies in those eight characters.²

"On Things Not Shifting" is at once the most perilous of the essays and the most famous. It opens by laying down a method: "Consider the working of what does not move: does one release motion in order to seek stillness? One must seek stillness within the motions themselves." Not to seek stillness apart from motion is to secure the everyday level first, and that half sentence sits at the same table as the Preservation Theorem. The argument that follows cuts going and coming open along the axis of time: "the things of the past are of themselves in the past and do not come from the present to reach the past; the things of the present are of themselves in the present and do not come from the past to reach the present" — whence "the whirlwind that levels mountains is always still, and the rivers that race in torrents do not flow."³ Read against the chapter on motion, the target is the same, the real nature of going and coming, and the handling is the same, going sought through the three times and not to be had. But the syntax of the conclusion runs the other way. Nāgārjuna closes upon a rejection: no goer is to be found. Sengzhao closes upon non-shifting and constant stillness, which sound like assertions, and he goes so far as to write a sentence such as "each event abides by its nature in a single one of the times." Abiding by its nature is precisely the syntax of the Sarvāstivāda's real existence in the three times; Chapter 2 of Part 18 checked the place, and the phrase "each abiding in its own intrinsic nature" occurs once only in the whole Mahāvibhāṣā, standing in the very slot where real existence is defined. What Sengzhao means is that the past does not come into the present and that there is therefore no real shifting; what he has said sounds like a garrison posted in each of the three times. The verdict: the intention is that of the chapter on motion, while the syntax walks a tightrope along the boundary drawn by the weak-rejection lemma. The later controversy over things not shifting, which Zhencheng opened at the end of the Ming, has the root of its complaint buried in this layer of syntax.

"Prajñā Without Knowing" applies the same measure to epistemology: "the sage's mind is without knowing, and therefore there is nothing it does not know"; "he empties his mind and makes solid his illumination, and knows all day long and yet has never known."⁴ Without knowing is not the absence of cognition; it is the absence of the knowing that grasps at marks. No really existent object is set up and no really existent substance of knowing is held to, while illumination and its use go on unimpaired. Set this against the two layers of no thesis in Chapter 5 of Part 18 and the columns line up: at the object level there is no thesis, and not one E3 item is set up; at the meta-level everything turns as before, and speech, contemplation and the liberating of beings are each of them present and accounted for. The sage's knowledge that does not know is the epistemological profile of the two layers of no thesis.

The report card of the first digestion runs to three lines. The clearing of the ground: the verdicts upon the three schools file each mistaken view of emptiness under the head of its own disease, and they run in the same direction as the rejecting face of the theorem; the criticism of original nonbeing is in substance an independent discovery of the weak-rejection lemma. What was set up: the two words provisional designation had a Chinese name ready for the preserving face. The gap: the boundary between reductio and counter-assertion, and the procedure of qualification (the very measures that were then being forged on the Indian side) had not yet reached Chang'an, and the syntactic risk run by things not shifting follows from that. The gap waits upon the Three Treatise line to close it; the next chapter, Jizang.

References¶