Chapter 4: The Five Periods and Eight Teachings¶

This book has taken in three forms of doctrinal classification along the way. The three turnings of the Saṃdhinirmocana, dividing by two aspects, the hidden and the explicit. Jizang's four tiers, demoting tier upon tier an opponent's ultimate truth into a conventional truth of one's own. And then, with Tiantai, a panoramic institution: the five periods and eight teachings. The five periods set out the teaching of a whole lifetime in the order in which beings are led along (the Avataṃsaka, the Āgamas, the Vaipulya, the Prajñāpāramitā, and the Lotus with the Nirvāṇa), and to them is fitted the simile of the five flavours, milk, cream, curds, butter, and so up to ghee, which the Fahua xuanyi glosses in its own words: "it is by way of the gradual that the five flavours are made plain."¹ The eight teachings run on two axes. The four modes of instruction record the manner of the preaching: sudden, gradual, secret, and indeterminate. The four doctrines record the grade of the doctrinal content: the tripiṭaka teaching, the shared teaching, the distinct teaching, and the perfect teaching.

Set the three lines side by side and the logic they share is plain enough. Each fits the several teachings into a single directed ladder, and each sets at the top what its own school holds to. The differences are in the volume of engineering and the degree of self-awareness. The three turnings are a narrative in three stages; the four tiers are a polemical demotion into the conventional, taken rung by rung; the eight teachings are a matrix on two axes with a full set of criteria attached. Doctrinal classification became in Tiantai an instituted discipline.

The assessment in the form of the theorem falls into two entries. First, the logical content. The tripiṭaka, shared, distinct, and perfect of the four doctrines make a graded table of doctrinal strength: the shared teaching sees things as at once empty, the distinct teaching takes the three truths one by one and held apart, the perfect teaching has the three truths in perfect fusion. Set against this book's tools, this is broadly three grades of reading cast into the form of a classification of teachings (the rejecting face, the tier at which the truths are held apart, and the perfect fusion that is the joint name), and the grading itself carries real logical content; it and the layering of the results won by the strong, middle, and weak versions in Part 18 corroborate each other. Second, the pedagogical content. Read as historical assertions about the Buddha's biography, the succession of the five periods conflicts with what the study of the scriptural catalogues shows; read as an arrangement that gathers up the order in which beings are taught, it is the pedagogical parameter adjudged in Chapter 6 of Part 19, and carries no new logical content. The syntax of opening the provisional to reveal the real is of the same kind. The Fahua xuanyi has: "if the provisional is opened and the real revealed, all dharmas are the substance."¹ Gathering the three vehicles into one is safe when read as a pedagogical gathering-up; read as an assertion of historical fact it is a separate case.

The suspicion of self-exemption is entered on the record as it stands. The classifier places himself at the perfect summit; who then is to classify the classifier? By the principle of one and the same door in Chapter 5 of Part 18, a standard of grading applied only to other schools while one's own is let off is a tailored exemption. Half of Tiantai's self-checking clause is present. The perfection of the perfect teaching has perfect fusion for its content, and perfect fusion is itself an operating rule against holding the truths apart, not a new domain of objects; the Fahua xuanyi's ruling on the wonderful dharma may be entered in evidence for it. The other half is not present. Whether the unclassifiability of the position at the perfect summit is accounted for as an invariant rather than as a superior domain, the original text nowhere says in so many words; it is registered as an open case and handed to Chapter 6.

References¶