Chapter 6: Verdict, and the Close of the Division¶

The general verdict has two items. The reading of the three truths: judged an isomorphic variant. The warrant is two sentences of Zhiyi's own gloss — that there is no separate middle way apart from emptiness and existence, and that though three statements are made, the dharma is one. At the legislator's own text the truth of the middle is a joint name and not a third domain; the Tiantai reading is isomorphic with Part 18's reading by levels of assertion; and the perfect fusion is the perfect fusion of a joint name. Reification of the truth of the middle is entered as a risk incurred by the later masters: whoever enshrines the truth of the middle as one wonderful substance outside emptiness and existence has made a D3-type claim, which falls within the scope, by the rule — and this verdict does no damage to the original text. The classification enterprise: judged the fully constituted form of pedagogical-parameter engineering. Its grading of the four doctrines carries real logical content and can be set beside this book's tools; and the five-period narrative, read as gathered up under pedagogy, is safe. Each item leaves one open case. The unclassifiability of the position at the perfect summit is nowhere expressly set down as an invariant; and the positive text for the doctrine of nature-evil waits upon the Guanyin xuanyi's entry into the corpus for its evidence. These, with insentient things possess the nature from Zhanran's Jin'gang bei, make three cases filed together, marked as points to be thickened in the full treatment: registered, and registering is not adjudicating.¹

The Tiantai contribution ledger runs to four lines. The grammar of the three truths carries the dispute over the two truths forward into a threefold format, and at the point of legislation it brings with it its own footnote against reification. Three thousand in one thought supplies a solution in the science of machinery that sets up no storehouse: the vertical and the horizontal are barred together, and the index point is by the school's own ruling a conventional designation. Doctrinal classification becomes an institution, and doctrinal grading and pedagogical parameters are for the first time registered systematically apart. Calming and contemplation writes the whole theory out as an operating procedure, and teaching and contemplation close the loop.

The handoff. After Tiantai the Chinese perfect teaching has one further form. The Huayan school sets up a classification of its own, the five teachings and ten schools, drawn up against the five periods and eight teachings; it founds its position on nature-origination, facing nature-inclusion across the field; and with dependent origination from the dharmadhātu it states the non-obstruction of phenomena with phenomena, this and three thousand in one thought each carried to a limit of its kind. Classification collated against classification, and perfect teaching against perfect teaching, is the main business of the next part; and this book's Part 18 instruments of sameness and difference have a head-on engagement waiting for them at Huayan's six characteristics and ten mysteries. The general close of Part II moves with it, to the last chapter of the next part.

References¶