Chapter 1. The founding of Tiantai: from Huiwen to the Wise Master¶

Guanding sets up a monument to the whole work in the opening sentence of Great Calming and Contemplation: "Calming and contemplation, lucid and still, unheard of in earlier ages."¹ The four Chinese characters 前代未闻, "unheard of in earlier ages," make an immense claim. When Zhanran vouches for it in the Aids, he adds something more open to verification: "Gathering the teachings of the Buddha's lifetime and assembling the purport of the Lotus Sūtra, it forms the inconceivable ten vehicles and ten objects … Hence Nanshan exclaimed: Only Hengyue and the cliffs of Tiantai have jointly disseminated meditation and wisdom."² Nanshan is Daoxuan of the Vinaya school. This exclamation from someone outside the school is corroborating testimony to its founding.

Two lineages, two forms of registration. Great Calming and Contemplation gives Tiantai's descent two lines. One is succession recorded by the Buddha's golden mouth. The lineage of the Account of the Transmission of the Dharma Treasury begins with Mahākāśyapa: "Beginning with Kāśyapa and ending with Siṃha, twenty-three persons … All these masters were recorded by the golden mouth, and all were noble ones."¹ The other is the succession of the present masters. The Wise Master studied with Huisi of Nanyue, who in turn studied with Huiwen. Huiwen attained understanding without a teacher, on the warrant of a book: "Master Wen's application of mind relied entirely on the Explanatory Treatise, a treatise taught by Nāgārjuna." The Wise Master's Treatise on Contemplating the Mind declares, "I pay homage to Master Nāgārjuna." Calming and Contemplation immediately concludes: "This establishes that Nāgārjuna is the founding ancestral master."³ The two ways of registering descent deserve to be placed side by side. The golden-mouth line is a genealogy of the religious community, transmitted from person to person; the present-master line takes a treatise as its teacher. Its proof of the founding ancestor rests on reading, not face-to-face instruction. Registering its own descent in texts shows a degree of self-awareness rare among the schools. The next chapter will show this awareness bearing directly on doctrine. Zhiyi calls the three contemplations in one mind, without qualification, "what the Middle Treatise teaches." Succession through reading and judgment on how to read are henceforth bound together.

Teaching the dharma-gates practiced in his own mind. Having set out the lineage, Guanding characterizes the source of the entire work's content in a single sentence: "In this calming and contemplation, the Wise Master of Tiantai teaches the dharma-gates he practices in his own mind."¹ This is a methodological declaration. The work takes the author's own practice and realization as its source; scriptural evidence supplies subsequent ratification. Compared with the format of earlier treatises, the center of gravity has shifted. Abhidharma and Madhyamaka treatises make scriptural exegesis and doctrinal argument their business, with the author standing behind the text. In teaching what he practices in his own mind, the author steps in front of the text. Since Essay 13, this book has repeatedly weighed each school's textual self-awareness. This sentence belongs on Tiantai's account. At the outset, it places responsibility for justifying the entire work on the path of practice. It sets the tone for the school's pairing of excellence in doctrine and contemplation.

The architecture of five summaries and ten expansions. Calming and Contemplation opens by establishing five summaries for its own structure: "Arousing great resolve, cultivating great practice, attaining the great fruit, tearing apart the great net, and returning to the great place."¹ Resolve leads to practice, practice to fruit, fruit to breaking the net of attachments to the sūtras and treatises, and finally to the great place. The ten expansions unfold into ten chapters that give the full exposition. Zhanran specifically reminds the reader how the five summaries relate to the ten expansions: "In this passage, if we reason from the meaning, the ten vehicles are already complete in brief."² The five summaries have rehearsed the whole book on the framework of the ten vehicles. The work provides two levels of writing, an outline and a full text. The outline shows the plan, and the full text its fulfillment, another expression of the school's institutional character.

The three major works and the fate of the texts. The three major works have clear assignments by genre. The Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra explains the title, unfolding the sūtra's meaning through fivefold profound meaning. Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra expounds the scripture, explaining it sentence by sentence. Great Calming and Contemplation establishes practice, setting out the whole body of doctrine as a procedure of calming and contemplation that can be put into practice. Excellence in both doctrine and contemplation is how the school describes itself. Doctrine without contemplation leaves one bewildered; contemplation without doctrine leaves one in peril. This essay gives one chapter to each apparatus: the three truths, the three thousand, doctrinal classification, and calming and contemplation. Its organization follows these four rather than the chronology of texts.

The fate of the texts deserves a separate entry, for it explains the provenance of one of this essay's source texts. The account of origins appended to the beginning of the Outline of the Four Teachings records that, at the end of the Tang, King Qian of Wuyue was reading the Yongjia Collection when he came upon "jointly eliminating the four abiding grounds" and failed to understand it. He summoned Yiji of Tiantai to ask. Yiji replied that it came from the Wise Master's Wondrous Profundity, then reported a fact of textual history: "At that time there was devastation from the armies of An and Shi; more recently there was the burning and destruction under Huichang. China's doctrinal corpus is damaged and incomplete, almost entirely lost. Now only in Goryeo, east of the sea, is the exposition of the teaching flourishing. The complete books are there."⁴ King Qian dispatched an envoy bearing a letter. Goryeo sent the monk Diguan on a return visit, and the doctrinal corpus returned east: "Guan was able to explore the major sources and extract the text of the Outline of the Four Teachings, completing two fascicles."⁴ The introduction to Tiantai doctrinal classification in general use today was written by a Goryeo monk. Behind it lies the loss and return of a doctrinal corpus. In surveying the texts of the schools, this book has attended throughout to what survives and what is lost. Tiantai presents this problem most sharply. The Outline of the Four Teachings used here is a text transmitted back to China; the Profound Meaning of Guanyin and others also passed through this calamity. Once a textual lineage is registered in books, the survival or loss of the books becomes the survival or loss of the school. This school experienced that connection firsthand.

The doubter's question. Calming and Contemplation itself first tests the quality of this registration of descent. Not far from the opening, it poses a doubter's question: "The Middle Treatise clears away; Calming and Contemplation establishes. How can they be the same?"³ The Middle Treatise sweeps things away throughout, while Calming and Contemplation fills its pages with things established. On what grounds do they count as one family? This is precisely the principal question this essay must judge. The text raises it itself, sparing this book the effort of opening the case. Calming and Contemplation answers on the spot by introducing that verse on dharmas arising from causes and conditions. Chapter 2 examines how the two sides read the verse.

As for Zhanran's revival and the Song dispute between Shanjia and Shanwai, this essay's scope centers on Zhiyi. Zhanran's and Zhili's substantive appearances have been moved to the two cases of inherent evil and "taking principle as object and cutting off the nine"; see Chapter 3 and Essay 22, Chapter 5. Reserved for a full exposition are the Wise Master's life and practice in his Separate Biography, the complete inventory of the fivefold profound meaning in the Profound Meaning, and the detailed lineages connecting the various meditation sūtras.

References¶