Chapter 1: The Founding, from Huiwen to Zhiyi¶

The Tiantai lineage is recited by the Mohe zhiguan (Great Calming and Contemplation) in its own voice, at the opening of the work: Zhiyi served Huisi of Nanyue as his master, and Nanyue served Huiwen; and Huiwen's learning came to him with no master to teach it, its warrant being a book — "Master Wen applied his mind in sole reliance upon the Shilun [the Dazhidulun, the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom], and that treatise was spoken by Nāgārjuna." Zhiyi's Guanxin lun says of itself, "I take refuge in Master Nāgārjuna," and the Mohe zhiguan thereupon delivers its ruling: "from this it is verified that Nāgārjuna is the founding patriarch."¹ The build of this lineage is worth seeing clearly before anything else is said about it. The golden-mouth succession, the roll of twenty-three patriarchs counted from Mahākāśyapa down to the venerable Siṃha, is a genealogy belonging to the history of the order; but this other branch, the present-master succession, takes a treatise for its line of descent, and the verification of a founding patriarch rests not upon instruction received face to face but upon reading. That a school should register its own bloodline in a text is a rare piece of self-awareness among the schools.

How good that registration of descent is, the Zhiguan was the first to ask. Not far into the opening the text stages a doubter's question: "The Treatise on the Middle sweeps away; the Zhiguan sets up. How can the two be the same?"¹ The Treatise on the Middle demolishes from one end to the other, and the Mohe zhiguan is construction on every page: on what ground do they count as one house? That question is exactly the question this part has to adjudicate, and it is put by the text itself, which spares this book the labour of framing the case. The Zhiguan's answer on the spot is to bring out that verse, the verse on whatever arises from causes and conditions; how the two houses each read it, Chapter 2 opens for trial.

The three great works divide the labour between them by genre, and the division is perfectly clear. The Fahua xuanyi (Profound Meaning of the Lotus) expounds the title, opening the sense of a whole sūtra by way of the fivefold profound meaning. The Fahua wenju (Words and Phrases of the Lotus) expounds the sūtra, disposing of the text phrase by phrase. The Mohe zhiguan establishes practice, writing the entire body of doctrine out as an operable programme of calming and contemplation. Teaching and contemplation as twin excellences is this school's placing of itself: teaching without contemplation leaves one in the dark, contemplation without teaching leaves one in peril. This part is organized by device (the three truths, the three thousand, doctrinal classification, calming and contemplation, one chapter to each of the four), and not by the chronology of the literature.

Zhanran's revival and the Home-Mountain and Off-Mountain dispute of the Song are logged here and no more: the scope of this part is centred upon Zhiyi, and Zhanran comes on stage, in selected points only, among the open cases of Chapter 6.

References¶