Chapter Four: The Zhaolun—The First Chinese Assimilation¶

When the proof entered Chinese, it encountered a difficulty earlier than India's family dispute: Chinese did not yet have the words for it. Over more than two hundred years of scriptural translation, emptiness in the prajñāpāramitā sūtras had been explained through the matching of concepts, using Laozi and Zhuangzi's nonbeing to translate emptiness. The six schools and seven traditions grew from this. Kumārajīva entered Chang'an, and the Middle Treatise, Hundred Treatise, and Twelve Gate Treatise were translated in succession. For the first time, the syntax was complete. Sengzhao, the translation workshop's youngest assistant, wrote as he helped translate. His treatises were later collected as the Zhaolun. Its opening preface captures the whole collection in one sentence: “Nonshifting corresponds to the conventional, and the conventional does not arise; nonreality is the true, and the true is merely spoken of by name.”¹

Sengzhao begins clearing the ground with three schools. The Absence of Mind school: “Absence of mind means having no mind toward the myriad things; the myriad things have never been absent.” Sengzhao's judgment is: “Its success lies in stilling the spirit; its failure concerns the emptiness of things.” Emptiness is made to work on the mind while objects remain untouched. In Essay Eighteen's terms, this mistakes a semantic proposition for an instruction in mental cultivation, leaving the E3 judgment wholly untouched. The Identity with Form school: “Identity with form explains that form is not form of itself; thus, though form, it is not form.” Saying that form is not form of itself has already reached the door to the question of not depending on another dharma for establishment. Sengzhao still finds it half a step short: it “has not grasped that form is nonform.” Saying that form is established through dependence on another is insufficient; one must say that form's being form was only a designation all along. The mechanism of individuation has not been supplied. The Original Nonbeing school: “Those who hold to original nonbeing prize nonbeing in their inclinations, often seizing on words to pay homage to nonbeing.” Hearing emptiness, they cling to nonbeing, reading rejection as a counterassertion. This is a textbook violation of the weak-rejection lemma: ⊣ being is read as ⊢ nonbeing. With the three schools dealt with, eight Chinese characters sum up the correct account: “The myriad things are not real; their provisional names are of long standing” (萬物非真，假號久矣). The myriad things do not really exist but are established through provisional names. Nonreality is emptiness, and emptiness does not obstruct existence. The first forging in Chinese of a distinction among senses of existence takes place in those eight characters.²

Things Do Not Shift is the most perilous and the most famous treatise. It opens by establishing its method: “In seeking the activity of nonmotion, how could one abandon motion to seek stillness? Stillness must be sought within the various motions.” Seeking stillness without leaving motion first secures the everyday level; this half-sentence sits alongside the preservation theorem. The ensuing argument dissects going and coming within time: “Past things exist in the past; they do not come from the present into the past. Present things exist in the present; they do not come from the past into the present.” Hence: “Whirlwinds topple mountains yet are always still; rivers race in torrents yet do not flow.”³ Read alongside the chapter examining going and coming, the target is the same—the real nature of going and coming—and so is the procedure: seeking going in the three times and failing to find it. Yet the syntax of the conclusion runs in the opposite direction. Nāgārjuna ends in rejection: no goer can be found. Sengzhao ends in the assertion-sounding nonshifting and constant stillness, and even writes: “Each thing's nature abides in one time.” The three Chinese characters “each nature abides” (各性住) have precisely the syntax of Sarvāstivāda's real existence across the three times. As checked in Chapter Two of Essay Eighteen, the four characters “each abides in its own-nature” (各住自性) occur only once in the entire Vibhāṣā, exactly where real existence is defined. Sengzhao means that the past does not come into the present and hence there is no real shifting. What he says, however, sounds as though the three times each have their own garrison. The judgment: his intention belongs to the chapter examining going and coming, while his syntax walks a tightrope along the weak-rejection lemma's boundary. The root of the later dispute over things not shifting, challenged by Zhencheng in the late Ming, lies in this syntax.

Prajñā Has No Knowing applies the same distinctions to epistemology: “The sage's mind has no knowing, and therefore there is nothing it does not know”; “emptying the mind while making its illumination full, it knows all day yet has never known.”⁴ No knowing means the absence of knowing that grasps signs, not the absence of cognition. No really existent object is posited and no really existent substance of knowing is held, yet illumination and its activity continue. This matches precisely the two levels of having no thesis in Chapter Five of Essay Eighteen: at the object level, no thesis, with no E3 item posited; at the metalevel, everything keeps working—speech, contemplation, and liberating others all remain. Sagely wisdom's no-knowing is the epistemological profile of the two levels of having no thesis.

The first assimilation's results fit into three lines. Clearing the ground: the judgments on the three schools address each mistaken view of emptiness at its point of failure, in the same direction as the theorem's rejection. The criticism of Original Nonbeing is, in substance, an independent discovery of the weak-rejection lemma. The constructive side: the two Chinese characters for ‘provisional names’ (假号) give the aspect of preservation a Chinese name. The gap: the boundary between reductio and counterassertion, and the procedure of qualification—distinctions being forged in India—had not yet arrived in Chang'an. This produced the syntactic risk in things not shifting. The Three Treatise lineage would fill the gap. The next chapter turns to Jizang.

References¶