Appendix One　Comparison with Yinshun's Doctrinal Classification: Two Roads Back to the Original Concern

The preface acknowledged an intellectual lineage: this volume continues Yinshun's threefold classification, close in position but different in angle. With the main text complete, that lineage is owed a direct comparison. Where do his classification and this volume's agree, where do they part, and at what level does their difference originate? The comparison belongs in an appendix because it changes none of the main text's verdicts. It does something else: lets two classifications illuminate each other's criteria.

The framework of Yinshun's classification

Yinshun divides Mahāyāna into three lines: “empty nature, names only” (性空唯名, Madhyamaka), “false appearance, consciousness-only” (虚妄唯识, Yogācāra), and “true permanence, mind-only” (真常唯心, the tathāgatagarbha line).1 Their ranking is explicit. Empty nature and names only is the Buddha's definitive Dharma; false appearance and consciousness-only comes next; true permanence and mind-only is furthest from dependent origination's original meaning, Buddhism deformed within the current of Brahmanization. Esoteric Mahāyāna inherits the last stream of true permanence: Brahman and Buddha as one, Brahmanization at its extreme. His criterion is doctrinal. Taking dependent origination and emptiness of nature as Buddhism's fundamental profound meaning, he measures each system's fit with it. Behind this classification stands a programmatic sentence from his preface to Buddhism in India: “Ground ourselves in the simplicity of foundational Buddhism; broadly expound the practice and understanding of middle-period Buddhism, while guarding against tendencies toward Brahmanization; take what is sound from later Buddhism: might this suffice to revive Buddhism and give free expression to the Buddha's original concern?”2

Three points of alliance

Record the alliance first, because it is substantive. First, both take the early period as reference. “Ground ourselves in the simplicity of foundational Buddhism” and this volume's early Buddhist baseline (Introduction, Chapter One) make the same methodological choice: doctrinal classification needs a reference point not self-reported by the parties being judged. Second, the verdicts on true permanence almost coincide. Yinshun judges Brahmanization: mind-only in true permanence is the return of tathāgatagarbha and Buddha-nature teachings toward Brahman and self. This volume judges an advance claim and a reopened door: tathāgatagarbha makes an endpoint awaiting realization its premise and pushes open the door of “permanence, bliss, self, and purity” that the three characteristics closed (tathāgatagarbha essay). One verdict comes from doctrinal history, the other from soteriology; both point to the same lesion. They can corroborate one another. The historical trajectory of return explains the advance claim's conceptual source; structural soteriological analysis explains why Brahmanization is more than a question of pedigree. Third, both reject harmonious incorporation of everything. Yinshun's classification does not blur distinctions with “all was taught by the Buddha; every gate is supreme”; this volume likewise declares its nonneutrality in the preface. Whoever classifies teachings must accept responsibility for judgment.

One disagreement: Madhyamaka's place

The disagreement concentrates on one point: where Madhyamaka sits in the classification. Yinshun places it at the summit. Empty nature and names only is definitive; Madhyamaka is the ultimate elucidation of dependent origination, as in A Contemporary Account of Madhyamaka. He goes further in Tracing the Sources of the Study of Emptiness of Nature, tracing emptiness back to the Āgamas. Emptiness was already part of their contemplative practice—viewing formations and the world as empty. Nāgārjuna logically discloses their profound meaning, rather than offering a later innovation.3 This volume places Madhyamaka elsewhere: the first station on the five systems' trajectory, suffering's first migration (Madhyamaka essay, Part II, Chapters One and Two).

What matters is to see that the source-tracing work can hold in full without refuting the migration argument. The Āgamas certainly contain emptiness; that is undisputed. Yet their emptiness belongs to contemplation: an adjective and an antidotal use, contemplating the five aggregates as masses of foam, as bubbles and phantoms, contemplating emptiness to leave greed. Madhyamaka's emptiness is what argument establishes, a universal proposition: all dharmas lack own-nature. From contemplative use to established thesis, the word continues but the site of work changes. The former leaves greed through contemplation, working on feeling and appropriation; the latter breaks views through views, working at the cognitive level. Source tracing proves that the two ends connect, and connected ends are precisely what “migration” presupposes. Without continuity there could be no migration. Yinshun's philology thus marks the starting point and endpoint of this volume's structural judgment.

The disagreement's root appears at the level of criteria. Yinshun's criterion is doctrinal fit: whoever is most faithful to dependent origination's profound meaning is definitive. This volume's criterion is soteriological efficacy: what level diagnosis targets, whether mechanism can guide practice, and what warrants recognition in verification. The criteria measure different things, so the classifications do not directly conflict. Yet this volume must explain why it does not adopt his criterion. Making doctrinal fit supreme tacitly presupposes that “the most correct view must provide the best soteriology,” precisely Madhyamaka's own central assumption, the epistemological optimism of the Madhyamaka essay, Part I, Chapter One. That assumption is what this volume's five questions test; it cannot serve beforehand as the test's standard. In placing Madhyamaka at the summit, Yinshun also inherits its central assumption as his classification's foundation. This volume avoids that step, at the cost of tediously asking every system about mechanism and verification.

Three systems and five

Taxonomic differences follow the criteria. Yinshun's three lines are doctrinal genealogies, classified by forms of interpreting dependent origination and emptiness of nature. Esoteric Buddhism belongs to the last stream of true permanence, while Pure Land is distributed among easy-path skillful means. This volume's five systems classify proposals for liberation by mechanisms of “getting from suffering to its cessation.” Enactment makes esoteric Buddhism a distinct system; Pure Land becomes a structural exception by moving beyond soteriology. Neither classification replaces the other. Doctrinal genealogy can read thought's pedigree but not the five-system table's two rows on objects and mechanisms of attachment. Classifying proposals for liberation measures mechanism and verification, not layers of doctrinal history. One aside: Yinshun likewise judged Pure Land on doctrinal grounds rather than sectarian loyalties, and his A New Account of Pure Land provoked fierce reactions within Buddhism.4 He personally paid a price for the principle that classification must accept responsibility for judgment.

Closing: the same original concern

The declaration on classification ends with “give free expression to the Buddha's original concern”; the conclusion of Essay Seven in this volume is titled “Back to the Original Concern.” The same words in two places look coincidental but name the endpoint both classifications share: Buddhism's original concern. What separates them is the road back. Yinshun returns through doctrinal origins and development, using doctrinal history to identify the layer closest to the original meaning. This volume returns through mechanism and verification, asking by soteriological criteria which system still answers “how does suffering cease?” If correct view alone suffices to promise liberation, Yinshun's classification is already complete. If mechanism and verification still stand as questions between view and cessation, the more tedious road cannot be spared. This volume takes the latter. The comparison seeks to show that those taking it owe the former road real respect; this appendix has stated why.

References

References

  1. For the threefold classification—empty nature and names only, false appearance and consciousness-only, true permanence and mind-only—see Yinshun's Buddhism in India (1942) and his late A History of Indian Buddhist Thought (1988). Chapter five of The Way to Buddhahood, expanded annotated edition, also classifies Mahāyāna by these three lines. “Brahman and Buddha as one” appears in the preface to Buddhism in India, which describes the fifth period of Buddhism as “Brahman and Buddha as one, with the Tathāgata as basis.” The phrase occurs three times in the book. Chapter seventeen, “The Rise of Esoteric Buddhism and the Extinction of Buddhism,” also says, “Esoteric practitioners take deified Buddhas and bodhisattvas as the basis of worship.” The commonly cited four characters “天佛一如” (deities and Buddhas as one) do not occur in this work; “天佛” (deities and Buddhas) has zero occurrences throughout. The phrase may come from another work by Yinshun, which has not been checked against the original publication; it is not used here. ↩

  2. Yinshun, preface to Buddhism in India (1942). He reaffirms the declaration late in life in Humanistic Buddhism in Accord with Principle and Circumstances (1989), saying his position is unchanged: “In fact, my thought was already very clear in the preface to Buddhism in India, written in Republican year thirty-one.” The original sentence follows in full, in the opening essay of Flower Rain Collection, volume four. ↩

  3. Tracing the Sources of the Study of Emptiness of Nature traces emptiness to Āgama contemplation and disputes among the Buddhist schools, judging “emptiness of nature” a disclosure of the Āgamas' original meaning. Its opening note states, “Lectured in autumn of Republican year thirty-three at the Sino-Tibetan Institute of Buddhist Studies, Beibei”: lectures in 1944. Its opening words are “Emptiness of nature is rooted in the Āgamas.” A Contemporary Account of Madhyamaka takes Madhyamaka as dependent origination's ultimate account. Its preface says, “In winter of year thirty-six … I decided on the title A Contemporary Account of Madhyamaka, publishing as the lectures proceeded”: lectures in 1947. The claim that Nāgārjuna's teaching is a comprehensive account of the Āgamas appears in chapter two, “Nāgārjuna and His Treatises,” section two, titled “An Examination of the Middle Treatise as a Comprehensive Account of the Āgamas.” It says, “The Middle Treatise is a comprehensive account of the Āgamas: it comprehensively discusses their fundamental thought and discerns their original intent,” developing the point through the Buddha's words quoted, the objects refuted, and the middle way disclosed. (This book's old edition named a chapter “Madhyamaka and the Āgamas.” That work has no such chapter, nor does a full search find the sequence of five Chinese characters “中观与阿含”; this has now been corrected.) Both books belong to the middle series of the Wondrous Cloud Collection. A Zhengwen edition catalog now supplies evidence: Zhengwen Publishing's catalog lists “The Wondrous Cloud Collection, newly computer-typeset books, upper, middle, and lower series, complete in 24 volumes,” then enumerates each: A09 A Contemporary Account of Madhyamaka, middle series (2); A11 Tracing the Sources of the Study of Emptiness of Nature, middle series (4). National Taiwan University's Center for Buddhist Studies records the same: “24 volumes in total, divided into upper, middle, and lower series … 2-2, A Contemporary Account of Madhyamaka … 2-4, Tracing the Sources of the Study of Emptiness of Nature.” CiNii also records A Contemporary Account of Madhyamaka as “lectures by Yinshun; recorded by Xuming (Wondrous Cloud Collection, 9; middle series, 2), Zhengwen Publishing.” (The CBETA text used does not record series membership, so catalogs were separately consulted as evidence.) ↩

  4. A New Account of Pure Land, lectured in 1951 and collected in Yinshun's Pure Land and Chan, lower series of the Wondrous Cloud Collection, judges Pure Land teachings on doctrinal grounds. Its many reservations about popular forms of birth through reciting the Buddha's name provoked fierce reactions at the time. See Shi Chanlin, “Master Yinshun's Advocacy of a Humanistic Pure Land: An Examination through the Debate between New and Old Pure Land,” Xuanzang Buddhist Studies 43 (2025): 169–200, printed pp. 173 and 179: “aroused strong opposition among supporters of traditional Pure Land thought”; “aroused a strong backlash among those adhering to the old tradition of Buddha-recollection faith.” Yet accounts of the subsequent book burning differ over who burned books and which books were burned. Printed p. 174 sets out accounts by Jiang Canteng, Wu Youneng, and Hong Jinchun; p. 181 quotes an interview with Wu Laoze saying that Li Bingnan's side bought up nearly a thousand copies of A New Account of Pure Land from the market and burned them (Wu Laoze, The Sixty Years Development of Buddhism in Taiwan, 1943–2002: Reminiscences of Mr. Wu Lao Tzer, revised edition, Taipei: Academia Historica, 2006, pp. 113–114; Wu adds that the hundred-odd copies kept at Fuyan were buried by him and Changjue as a precaution), and a note on p. 182 cites a 2007 interview by Wu Youneng saying that A Brief Explanation of Buddha-Recollection, not A New Account of Pure Land, was burned. Page 196 even says, “They may only have spoken of burning books without doing it.” Yinshun's autobiography likewise says only “it was rumored,” linking it to the episode concerning An Introduction to the Buddha's Dharma (An Ordinary Life, revised edition, section twenty-nine). Also see Jiang Canteng, “New Directions in Contemporary Taiwanese Pure Land Thought: An Inquiry in Intellectual History,” originally in Studies in Oriental Religions 2 (1988): 163–184; this book uses a web reprint without original pagination. Jiang says the book “stirred a fierce wave of opposition in Taiwan's Buddhist community” and “even prompted many people to burn his books.” Note seven to that sentence cites Yang Baiyi's “The Content and Spirit of the Wondrous Cloud Collection,” yet when Jiang quotes Yang's own words later, the text recorded as burned is A Brief Explanation of Buddha-Recollection, not A New Account of Pure Land. Kan Zhengzong's Eminent Monks of Taiwan (Puti Changqing, 1996, pp. 47–92; this book uses an excerpt in the Digital Museum of Taiwan Buddhism), drawing on Dao'an's diary, records that in December of Republican year forty-two, Cihang nearly entered a written dispute with Yinshun over this book, stopped only by Yanpei's mediation. It also says that then, “besides fierce whispering campaigns and book-burning activity, planned secret denunciations were also carried out.” Yinshun's own account is understated. Sixty Years Wandering in the Ocean of Dharma says only that the book “seems also to have provoked resentment among practitioners of the single holy name of Amitābha,” as quoted by Kan. In Republican year fifty-four, when Fujiyoshi Jikai asked why Taiwan's Buddhist community disapproved of him, he answered only, “Perhaps it has to do with Pure Land,” as quoted by Jiang, who says that “the spirit of disappointment and helplessness is vivid on the page.” This book judges that Yinshun wished to avoid further trouble; the absence of these reactions from his autobiography therefore cannot disprove a contemporary backlash. His doctrinal placement of Pure Land and this volume's structural judgment in Essay Six, an exception belonging to the study of salvation, take different routes but point in comparable directions. ↩