Essay Twenty-Two Huayan in Brief: A Guide¶
The place of this essay. This is the last of the essays devoted to reading treatises in Part II, and it examines the second Chinese form of the perfect teaching. Its coordinates are set by its confrontation with Tiantai: doctrinal classification against doctrinal classification, the five teachings and ten positions against the five periods and eight teachings; system against system, dharmadhātu dependent origination against three thousand in a single thought; the distinctive character of one school against that of the other, nature-arising against nature-inclusion. There is also a direct confrontation with this book's own position. Huayan makes sameness and difference, wholeness and particularity, integration and nonintegration into characteristics of the dharmadhātu: the perfect interfusion of the six aspects. Yet Essay Eighteen's definition-boundary clause establishes sameness and difference as logical constants, laying down their laws without defining them. Are sameness and difference tools of conceptual grammar or patterns in reality? That battle begins in Chapter Four. Nowhere else in the book does its toolkit come so close to a classical system.
Length and standard. This remains a brief exposition; selection bears the burden of compression. Its framework follows the standard of a detailed exposition. All seven chapters have now been expanded in place, from over eight thousand to over forty thousand Chinese characters, matching Essay Twenty in scale without changing the structure. This is the last essay in the sequence of treatise readings, and its final chapter closes Essays Thirteen through Twenty-Two. Essay Twenty-Three, on Mahāyāna sūtras, follows under a different arrangement from the preceding twenty-two essays. It reads sūtras, and its list of texts will grow as work continues.
The materials available. The twenty works used comprise the three sūtra translations—the sixty-, eighty-, and forty-fascicle Huayan Sūtra; ten doctrinal works by the patriarchs—the Five Teachings, Calming and Contemplation of the Five Teachings, Ten Mysterious Gates, Fifty Essential Questions and Answers, Kongmu Chapters, Contemplation of the Exhaustion of Delusion and Return to the Source, Golden Lion, Mystic Mirror of the Dharmadhātu, Commentary on the Gates of Contemplation of the Dharmadhātu, and Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity; four commentaries—the Record of Searching the Mysteries, Record of Exploring the Mysteries, Chengguan's Commentary, and his Subcommentary Elaborating the Meaning; and, in addition, the Awakening of Faith with Fazang's Commentary on Its Meaning, and Li Tongxuan's Commentary on the New Huayan Sūtra. The wealth of Chinese sources is comparable to that in Essay Twenty. Here too, selection bears the burden of compression.
The route through the seven chapters. Chapter One moves from scripture to school: the history of the three translations and the classification into five teachings and ten positions, including Maitreya's tower and the complete list of the ten positions. Chapter Two examines dharmadhātu dependent origination: the ladder of four dharmadhātus, the complete record of the three contemplations in the Gates of Contemplation, and the statement that principle is empty and has no substance. Chapter Three examines the ten mysterious gates: the grammar of interidentity and interpenetration, including a comparison of the old and new lists and the mechanics of counting ten coins. Chapter Four examines the perfect interfusion of the six aspects: the direct confrontation over sameness and difference, and the first main verdict. The three exchanges in the house analogy—the small-contribution objection, the boards-and-tiles objection, and integration through not making—are all included in the main text. Chapter Five examines nature-arising: the Huayan form of the tathāgatagarbha line, set against nature-inclusion, and the second main verdict. Expanded to the standard of a detailed exposition, it includes the ten gates of nature-arising in the Record of Exploring the Mysteries, the dispute over receiving perfuming in the Awakening of Faith, and the three steps toward a philosophy of mind in Chengguan and Zongmi. With both sides' texts available, the charge of contemplating principle and cutting off the nine realms has now been heard in this chapter. Chapter Six examines the Golden Lion: a short text that traverses the entire system, providing this brief exposition with its shortcut. Each of its ten gates is accompanied by the original wording, and the historical layers of the root text and the Classified Explanation are weighed separately. Chapter Seven delivers the verdicts and closes the sequence: three overall judgments, a table of fourteen clauses against own-nature, an inventory of hazardous statements and unresolved questions, the list of contributions, and the conclusion to the ten essays from Thirteen through Twenty-Two.