Chapter 5: Calming and Contemplation¶

Tiantai's system of practice begins with the three gates the Mohe zhiguan sets up on its opening page: "Tiantai transmits from Nanyue three kinds of calming and contemplation: first the gradual, second the indeterminate, third the perfect-and-sudden."¹ The gradual is a ladder, climbed one rung at a time. The indeterminate is a vajra jewel set in the midday sun. Of the perfect-and-sudden it is said that "at the outset it takes the real aspect as its object, and the object it reaches is the middle," that "not one colour and not one scent is other than the middle way," and, at the limit, that "birth-and-death is nirvāṇa."¹ What the Mohe zhiguan sets up from beginning to end is the third of the three.

The architecture stands in three tiers. The twenty-five preparations lay in the provisions for the road ahead; the ten objects fix what is contemplated; the ten modes of contemplation fix that by which the contemplating is done. The first of the ten modes is the very theme of Chapter 3: "The contemplation of mind comprises ten dharma-gates: first, the contemplation of the inconceivable object."² Three thousand in one thought was doctrine in Chapter 3; here it is the object set before the practitioner. This school carries its own metaphysical inventory onto the meditation cushion unaltered. Theory and operation close into a single loop inside one and the same book, and the four words teaching and contemplation as twin excellences are here made good.

Two comparisons are to be drawn. Against the dhyāna line of Part 13: the gradual gate of dhyāna takes over the old ladder of the four dhyānas and the nine attainments, whereas perfect-and-sudden calming and contemplation declares that the real aspect is its object from the first and that the first step and the last are not two, the ladder compressed into a single step. That step is a genuine revolution in the history of religious practice; what it is worth philosophically hangs upon the ruling of Chapter 2 on perfect fusion. Against the transformation of the basis of Part 20: the exit into operation on the consciousness-only side is a rewriting of the storehouse, with the seeds waxing and waning; the exit into operation on the Tiantai side is the disclosure of the thought now present, the three thousand there to be pointed to at a single moment. Two sciences of machinery, two theories of practice, one and the same E2 level.

One sentence places all this against the theorem. The vocabulary of the whole book of calming and contemplation (object, contemplation, mode, stage) is operational and process vocabulary throughout, and this is one more place where the Preservation Theorem is redeemed, here on the side of practice. Sentences of the form birth-and-death is nirvāṇa, read as the idiom of the perfect-and-sudden gate of practice, are safe; read as declarations of identity of substance, they are merged into the case of the standing of the truth of the middle in Chapter 2 and disposed of along with it. The object of sickness, the object of demonic affliction, and the other entries of that kind are logged here as they stand: a point to be thickened in the full treatment.

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