Chapter 5: Jizang — The Twofold Truth in Four Tiers¶

The learning of the Three Treatises passed south from Kumārajīva's disciples, was kept up through three generations by Senglang, Sengquan and Falang, and was gathered into a system by Jizang. Jizang's writings would stand as tall as the man; this chapter takes from them only the three things that answer the question of this part: the distinction between truth-for-someone and truth-as-teaching, the twofold truth in four tiers, and the doctrine of the middle and the provisional.¹

The division of truth-for-someone is the ground floor of the Three Treatise doctrine. The Erdi yi says: "What the ordinary man understands is conventional truth; what the sage understands is the truth of the ultimate sense." The same set of things is understood as existent by the ordinary man and as empty by the sage; a truth hangs upon the party for whom it stands as a truth, and is therefore called truth-for-someone. Above truth-for-someone a further layer is set up, truth-as-teaching: "What is relied upon is truth-for-someone; the preaching delivered upon it is truth-as-teaching." The Tathāgata preaches in dependence upon the two kinds of truth-for-someone, and the two gates of verbal teaching so delivered are what truth-as-teaching means.² The move gives the truth predicate a treatment in two layers. At the layer of truth-for-someone, the true is relativized to the hearer; at the layer of truth-as-teaching, the two truths are moved out of the domain of objects altogether and become a classification of verbal teachings.

The Dasheng xuanlun carries the second layer as far as it will go: the two truths "are only gates of teaching and have nothing to do with objects or with principle." Not two worlds, not two layers of objects, but two ways of speaking.³ The formal placing that Chapter 6 of Part 18 gave the two truths was a division of levels of assertion; fourteen hundred years lie between the two sentences, and they say very nearly the same thing. Kinship and difference are formally tabulated in the next chapter.

A gate of teaching, being expedient, admits of ascent. The four tiers of the twofold truth stand in the text of the first fascicle of the Dasheng xuanlun. Tier one: "others take existence alone as conventional truth and emptiness as ultimate truth." Tier two: "both existence and emptiness are conventional truth, and only neither-empty-nor-existent is then called ultimate truth." Tier three: "emptiness and existence make the two, and neither-empty-nor-existent makes the not-two; both the two and the not-two are conventional truth, and neither-two-nor-not-two is called ultimate truth." Tier four: "all three of these twofold truths are gates of teaching; these three gates are preached in order that one may awaken to what is not three, and only where there is nothing to depend upon and nothing to obtain is it called principle" — capped by the sentence, "only where words are forgotten and thought is cut off is there ultimate truth."³ Three features of the structure deserve notice. First, each tier demotes the whole of the distinction drawn on the tier below it to conventional truth: this is the mechanization of the emptiness of emptiness, clause (c) of the hierarchy made into a ladder that can be climbed rung by rung. Second, the ladder carries an index of opponents. The text annotates itself: the first tier answers the Abhidharma masters, the second the Chengshi masters, the third and the fourth the consciousness-only masters of the day. The ultimate truth of each tier is exactly some school's ultimate demoted into one's own conventional, and the ladder is therefore at the same time a history of doctrinal classification. Third, the topmost tier is not a higher object: only where there is nothing to depend upon and nothing to obtain is it called principle, and only where words are forgotten and thought is cut off is there ultimate truth. Principle occupies no slot, and the ruling keeps time with that of Part 18: silence at the level of situations belongs to the office, and ultimate truth is the invariant, not a higher domain of objects. Jizang has besides one fine sentence of self-awareness about the gates of teaching: "one must not point at the moon with the moon; one should point at the moon with a finger." The teaching is the finger and not the moon, and whoever grasps at the two truths as an object is pointing at the moon with the moon.³

The doctrine of the middle and the provisional may be given in a sentence. The middle way is not set up as a third kind of object; after the middle comes the provisional and after the provisional comes the middle, the middle being spoken in order to break one-sidedness and the provisional in order to keep function. The reading is of one structure with the section of Part 18 on the verse of the three "it is": the middle way is the joint name of two rejections plus one layer of preservation, and not a new metaphysical position.

The Three Treatise report card: it moved the two truths off objects and principle and onto verbal teaching; it made the emptiness of emptiness into a workable ladder; and it supplied, in the name of a gate of teaching, the very measure that Sengzhao's age had lacked — how to speak emptiness without its turning into the view of annihilation, how to negate without setting anything up. One doubt is entered exactly as it stands: the ladder rises and falls with the capacity of the hearer, while the hierarchy of Part 18 is marked out by the domain of application. Whether the two are one thing in two notations is what the next chapter opens court upon.

References¶