Preface¶

This volume is concerned with the classification of the teachings.

The classification of the teachings is an established tradition within Buddhism. Tiantai bases its classifications on the Lotus Sūtra, and Huayan on the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. Drawing on the doctrines of their chosen scriptures, each classifies the many teachings as higher or lower, definitive or nondefinitive. In modern times, the monk Yinshun proposed a classification into "three systems": "emptiness of intrinsic nature and mere naming" (性空唯名, Madhyamaka), "delusion and consciousness-only" (虚妄唯识, Yogācāra), and "true permanence and mind-only" (真常唯心, tathāgatagarbha). He took foundational Buddhism, the Āgamas and Nikāyas, as his standard, and held reservations about the system of true permanence and mind-only. This volume continues precisely that tradition of classifying the teachings. Its stance has affinities with Yinshun's three-system account, but its angle differs. Yinshun concentrates on distinguishing historical strata and doctrinal origins and developments. This volume asks more directly what kind of attachment lies within the philosophical motivations of each tradition's soteriology.

One difference between this volume and traditional classifications of the teachings also needs stating. After ranking the teachings, Tiantai and Huayan still bring them all under the Buddha's word, assigning them places as expedient or ultimate. This volume does not take that step of inclusion. Its form of classification comes from the tradition; its basis is philosophical argument. Whether a claim holds depends only on its reasons, not on its origins.

A point must be made at the outset. This volume makes no pretense of being fair and impartial. Volume 1 is history. In surveying the history of Buddhist philosophy, it seeks to restrain judgment and show where each school's thought came from and where it led. Volume 2 is argument. Beginning from Volume 1's historical findings, it judges those teachings directly and does not evade taking a position. This is no breach of scholarly norms. Classifying the teachings has always meant judging from a fundamental position of one's own. It has never meant neutral description.

But the absence of neutrality does not remove the obligation to argue. This volume follows two rules of exposition. It states each tradition's central soteriological claims and strongest defense before offering criticism, and uses premises the system itself accepts wherever possible. A further point must also be stated honestly. The volume does not confine itself to internal criticism. Its ultimate criterion is the early Buddhist baseline established in the introductory essay. The reasons for that choice will be stated openly, without a pretense of neutrality. Nor are its tools of examination confined to the resources each tradition recognizes as its own. It will also draw on phenomenology, psychology, and the philosophy of science. Readers can accordingly examine two things. Does each essay criticize the best version of its object? At each point of criticism, is the criterion shared by all parties, or does it belong to the baseline alone?

This volume's basic position favors early Buddhism, and the scope of "early Buddhism" here needs precise definition. From the southern transmission, it takes the four Nikāyas, together with a small number of texts in the Khuddaka Nikāya generally recognized by scholars as belonging to the earliest strata, represented by the Aṭṭhakavagga and Pārāyanavagga of the Sutta Nipāta. These two chapters have parallel texts, including the Chinese Yizu jing, that allow comparison. Early verses from the Itivuttaka, Udāna, and Dhammapada are cited as appropriate. Most of the other texts of the Khuddaka Nikāya belong to later strata and are excluded from the baseline. From the northern transmission, it takes three of the four Āgamas, excluding the Ekottarikāgama: the Dīrghāgama, Madhyamāgama, and Saṃyuktāgama. The Ekottarikāgama's sectarian affiliation has long been disputed. It incorporates later material with tendencies closer to Mahāyāna, and may serve as corroborating evidence, but not as the baseline.¹

It must be made clear that this baseline is not an "original text" free of sectarian coloring. The Saṃyuktāgama comes from the Sarvāstivāda transmission, the Dīrghāgama from the Dharmaguptakas, and the four Nikāyas likewise underwent compilation and editing within the Vibhajyavāda lineage. Taking the earliest stratum whose northern and southern transmissions can be checked against each other means choosing "early" and "open to comparison," not "unedited."²

The more consequential point is that the earliest textual stratum gives us "early," not "true." Moving from "this is the earliest teaching that can be historically established" to "this should be the standard for classifying the teachings" requires philosophical reasons. This volume does not pass that step off as a direct conclusion of philology. There are three reasons. First, this teaching is practical. It is directed throughout toward the sequence of practice, without constituting an explicit, independent metaphysical system. I say "explicit" because, on this book's consistent reading, the teaching has a metaphysical outline. That outline appears precisely at its boundaries, in the questions the Buddha refuses to answer, the fourteen undetermined questions, and the concepts he refuses to establish (see Volume 1). But the outline remains silent. It is never positively stated as a doctrinal system. Much of the work of later traditions consists precisely in filling in this boundary with positive claims.

Second, it lies closest to experience. The reduction of suffering and the loosening of greed, hatred, and delusion are changes practitioners can examine in their own experience during this life. Such examination is also influenced by conceptual frameworks. Every first-person report is shaped by expectations and doctrine, a problem the essay on Yogācāra will address directly. Yet compared with later traditions, this teaching posits the fewest untestable things, and its central claims lie closest to experience. The weightiest of those untestable commitments, rebirth, is shared by all subsequent traditions. Chapter 2 of the introductory essay will account for that commitment specifically.

Third, it concentrates on the cessation of suffering. From beginning to end, the structure of the four noble truths addresses just one matter, how suffering arises and how it ceases. It does not enter into ontological questions unrelated to the cessation of suffering. By this standard, this volume holds that subsequent developments, whatever their philosophical depth, depart from that path to varying degrees.

This volume takes an instrumental attitude toward southern Abhidhamma, including Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga. In an age already exceedingly remote from the fruition of arahantship, the Abhidhamma's analyses of mind and matter, processes of cognition, and sequences of meditation provide one of the most systematic surviving tools for guiding meditation. This should be acknowledged and put to good use. What this volume rejects is its ontological narrative. Analyzing "dhammas" down to "ultimate dhammas" and endowing the latter with intrinsic nature is a step the early discourses never state explicitly. It is a philosophical commitment developed by the Abhidhamma system itself. This volume regards it as the first substantive departure from the early teachings.

The following three sets of judgments all use the word "attachment," whose sense needs defining first. It refers to structural inducements. Taken together, what forms of grasping do a system's framing of problems, forms of argument, and institutional setting encourage? The object of diagnosis is the system's structure, not individual practitioners' psychology, still less the motives of the tradition's theoreticians. To say that Madhyamaka contains intellectual craving is to say that its form of argument makes intellectual progress easy to mistake for practice itself. It does not say that Nāgārjuna was enamored of cleverness.

Madhyamaka comes closer to pure philosophical judgment, a metaphysical speculation directed against metaphysics. Through the most exacting reductio arguments, it dismantles every view of intrinsic nature. Yet it eventually develops those arguments themselves into an enormously intricate doctrinal system that requires extensive intellectual training even to enter. There is a subtle craving here, for intellectual activity itself. Arguments for emptiness grow ever finer and harder, until they become a game that clever people enjoy performing. Amid the unfolding layers of argument, the cessation of suffering becomes quite secondary.

The mechanism of this attachment is not hard to recognize in people engaged in metaphysical thought. Thought proceeds in this way. It fixes on one angle, exhausts it, and discovers another. Once a line of thought settles, thought takes that line itself as its object and adds another, "deeper" layer of reflection. Each advance brings real satisfaction, while the next layer of reflection always beckons ahead. Thought can thus sustain itself endlessly. This experience is extremely common among people who study, and especially gratifying to "clever people." Immersion in it is precisely the subtle attachment meant here. It is subtle because it disguises itself as diligence in practice. Outwardly, one seems to be seeking the path more deeply. In fact, the pleasure of intellectual activity is feeding itself, while the cessation of suffering recedes further and further away.

Yogācāra's attachment points in a different direction. It is attachment to a "foundation," and to explanations that give certainty. Human beings have an almost irresistible craving for "the ultimate" and "the foundation." We keep asking "why" and "what is really going on," wanting to know what lies at the bottom of time, space, and consciousness. This craving has something in common with the self-sustaining reflection described in the previous paragraph, but closer examination shows that they deepen in different ways. The intellectual craving of that paragraph is recursive. Thought continually takes itself as its object, one layer nested within another, extending endlessly in a self-similar pattern. Craving for a "foundation" is iterative. It does not turn back on itself, but keeps moving downward in the same direction, as though one more layer would reach the ultimate bottom. The former has no end because it coils around itself. The latter has no end because that "bottom" does not exist. Of anything identified as a "foundation," one can ask again what grounds it.

This attachment to foundations is not unique to Buddhism. One clear piece of corroborating evidence is that, in the intellectual traditions of the Abrahamic religions, "there is no first cause" is almost an unacceptable line of thought. The universe must have a starting point that is not questioned, or explanation can find no resting place. The craving for an ultimate ground is thus a general tendency of human thought, regardless of culture.

Yogācāra falls squarely under this tendency. It demands a complete, logically consistent account of the mechanisms by which all phenomena arise, seeds are perfumed, and the transformation of the basis occurs. The account must withstand further questioning. The ālayavijñāna is consequently required to bear the full weight of explaining the arising of all phenomena. This mechanistic account has its rigor. Yet rigor itself has almost become the goal, as though liberation were guaranteed once the "foundation" had been made clear.

A question deserves to be asked. Once Abhidharma's "ultimate dharmas" had called forth a checkpoint of reflection such as Madhyamaka, whose very task is to dismantle every intrinsic nature identified as a "foundation," why could Yogācāra still exert such a profound influence on Buddhism's formation? On this point, Madhyamaka is comparatively alert. It already takes a dismantling stance toward anything set up as a "foundation." But if attachment to foundations is seen as one pressure, and Buddhist thought's self-sustaining reflection (described above) as another driving force, the outcome is not hard to understand. Even after Madhyamaka has set up a checkpoint in front of ultimate dharmas, the impulse to seek a positive, mechanistic "foundation" remains strong enough to cross it and take another route. Yogācāra's far-reaching influence is better understood as confirming the tenacity of this attachment than as refuting Madhyamaka's critique.

The tathāgatagarbha tradition looks the clearest on the surface. Here is craving for eternity. "Buddha-nature," "original purity," and "permanence, bliss, self, and purity" give positive answers to questions on which early Buddhism deliberately remained silent, what happens after nirvāṇa, and whether anything is permanent. The answers point precisely in the direction early Buddhism explicitly rejected. But merely charging it with attachment to eternity does not reach far enough. Craving for eternity is largely the other side of fear, and the fear here has two layers.

The first layer is shallow and shared by everyone. People experience birth, aging, illness, death, and separation from loved ones. Impermanence itself is enough to unsettle them, so they long for a heaven or an eternal life to compensate for it. This layer of craving and fear is nothing special. It forms the common background of almost every religion that promises eternity.

The second layer is much deeper, and arises from early Buddhist soteriology itself. To many people, its promised endpoint brings a chill rather than comfort. Parinirvāṇa is like an oil lamp running out of fuel. The flame goes out and never burns again. After an arhat's body breaks up and life ends, one cannot say that he is in the three realms, nor say where he has been reborn. The Buddha refuses to answer any form of the question of "existence or nonexistence after death," as the Arrow Simile and the Discourse on Fire to Vaccha show. The supramundane state is repeatedly said to be beyond words. To someone who has not directly realized it and can only conjecture from the written words, nearly all of this sounds like annihilation. The more strictly early Buddhism keeps silent, and the more firmly it refuses to describe nirvāṇa as some kind of "existence," the less this fear has anywhere to settle. Tathāgatagarbha's "permanence, bliss, self, and purity" answer this fear directly. They promise that on the far side of extinguishing there is something originally pure, permanent, and indestructible, rather than nothingness.

There is another layer of attachment that merely identifying "craving for eternity" fails to reveal. What tathāgatagarbha harbors, setting aside here the several divergences among its formulations, is more than an eternal object. It also harbors attachment to a guarantee of liberation, and fear of the uncertain path toward it. The early Buddhist path comes without guarantees. Practice may not yield fruition in this life. The boundary between realization and its absence is elusive, and practitioners must walk alone through prolonged uncertainty. Tathāgatagarbha presupposes that the path's endpoint has already been accomplished. Sentient beings are originally Buddhas; purity and perfection need not be sought outside. Practice thus changes from "whether one can arrive" to "how to manifest what is already there." This shift greatly relieves anxiety about uncertainty. But it does so by presupposing as a premise a conclusion that has yet to be verified. In this respect, tathāgatagarbha's attachment is twofold. It craves both the eternal, indestructible object and the certainty that "the endpoint is already settled."

These four sets of judgments will be argued in the chapter on the southern transmission in the introductory essay and in the essays on Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and tathāgatagarbha, respectively. The soteriologies of esoteric Buddhism and Pure Land will likewise be judged by the same standard in their corresponding essays and chapters. The conclusions are stated here first so that readers know this volume's position from the beginning.

One final clarification concerns the volume itself. Criticism that classifies the teachings cannot exempt itself from its own analysis. Taking early Buddhism as the standard can equally be diagnosed as an attachment, a craving for "origins," for simplicity, or for the critical stance itself. This volume does not evade that diagnosis. It acknowledges it directly. Within early Buddhism's own framework, as long as one has not reached the state of one beyond training, the arhat's condition in which there is nothing further to learn and all influxes are exhausted, one must still bear attachments of one kind or another. The person making this classification is not beyond training, so this volume is naturally no exception. To expect a work that classifies the teachings to speak from a position of purity without craving is itself a misunderstanding.

The only defense this volume offers for itself is to identify the direction of its craving, not to claim that it has none. It classifies the teachings from a position directed toward the cessation of suffering and toward nirvāṇa. Its measure for every tradition remains "whether it helps suffering cease," rather than simply ranking doctrines and schools as higher or lower or sorting them by affinity and distance. If classification does no more than compare doctrinal systems for thoroughness, harmonious integration, or ultimacy, it merely replaces one intellectual preference with another. This volume asks every step of classification to answer to the single task of ending suffering. Attachment may be unavoidable, but at least it can point toward the way out.