Chapter 2. Chinese systems: Tiantai and Huayan¶

Classification of the teachings established the framework; the systems followed. Something without precedent in Indian Buddhist history occurred here. The unit of a system changed. Indian doctrinal learning took the treatise as its unit. Nāgārjuna, Asaṅga, and Dharmakīrti all established their positions through treatises. Sūtras were the authoritative source of citations; treatises were the body of thought. China had followed the same practice in the age of translation workshops. The Abhidharma masters, Mahāyānasaṃgraha masters, and Tattvasiddhi masters were all masters of treatises. Tiantai and Huayan changed the basis for founding a school. Zhiyi founded his on the Lotus, Fazang his on the Avataṃsaka. Allegiance to a sūtra replaced allegiance to a treatise as the declared basis for establishing a school.

Precision is needed here. Treatises were not bypassed. On the Tiantai side, the authority for Huiwen's learning was itself a treatise: Master Wen's practice of mind relied entirely on the Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom, and that treatise was spoken by Nāgārjuna. Zhiyi's Treatise on Contemplating the Mind pays homage to Nāgārjuna as teacher; the Mohe zhiguan then concludes that Nāgārjuna is the founding patriarch. In the very passage establishing the three contemplations in one mind, Zhiyi identifies their source as the Middle Treatise's inconceivable three contemplations in one mind. On the Huayan side, the treatise supporting nature-origination was the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna. Fazang wrote a commentary on it and ranked it as the summit of the final teaching. The distinctions of the initial, final, sudden, and perfect teachings within the five teachings were themselves built on that treatise (Volume 1, Part II, Essay 21, Chapters 1 and 2, and Essay 22, Chapters 1 and 5). What changed was therefore the declared basis of the school and the main body of the system, not the mediation of Indian masters of treatises. For the first time, the Chinese did more than comment: they constructed systems of their own, though the arguments within those systems still came from treatises. Essay 9, Chapter 2 said that the unit of the translation workshop was the treatise. The unit of China's own creation was the sūtra.

Volume 1 has described the contents of the two systems: Tiantai's perfect interfusion of the three truths, three thousand realms in a single thought, inherent inclusion, and inherent evil; Huayan's four dharma realms, ten mysteries, six characteristics, and the dharma realm of nature-origination.¹ This volume identifies only two structural facts. First, the true and eternal supplied both schools with a shared vocabulary. The claim that it was the shared basis of both schools' first principles, however, holds only for Huayan; Tiantai needs to be distinguished. On the Huayan side, the first principle was indeed a further development of the true-and-eternal line. Nature-origination was Huayan's school name for the tathāgatagarbha line, supported by the Awakening of Faith.

Tiantai was different. In the Mohe zhiguan, Zhiyi took up the Northern and Southern Dynasties' dispute over support directly. The Daśabhūmika masters posited support in Dharma-nature; the Mahāyānasaṃgraha masters posited support in the ālaya. He judged both groups to hold only one side. Their common premise, that a bearer had to be established among dharmas, was rejected as a whole. Mind itself has only a name and is called "mind." The text also explicitly says that it does not place one mind first and all dharmas afterward. The summary table in Volume 1, Part II, Essay 21, Chapter 6 separates the schools. Tiantai establishes no entity, has no warehouse, and leaves the point of reference itself empty. Huayan establishes an entity: principle, nature-origination, and the dharma realm.

The straightforward half of the account must be recorded too. Under identity in principle in the six identities, the original text says precisely that a single thought-mind is identical with the principle of tathāgatagarbha. Tathāgatagarbha vocabulary is indeed present in Tiantai. Taken together, Tiantai inherited the vocabulary of the true and eternal while rejecting that tradition's model of support outright when establishing its principles (Volume 1, Part II, Essay 21, Chapters 3 and 6). Volume 2 has now added this boundary as well. The judgments in its five chapters on tathāgatagarbha apply only to the branches sharing the grammar of adventitious defilements. Tiantai's inherent inclusion falls outside that scope. Volume 2's judgment that tathāgatagarbha was a tributary in India but the actual common foundation of East Asian Buddhism still holds. It concerns the source of vocabulary and demand, not the identity of each school's first principle. Several of the most important texts in it were composed in China: the Awakening of Faith, Śūraṅgama, and Perfect Awakening. Their degrees of suspected spuriousness differ, but their Chinese origin is shared; the evidence is in Essay 9, Chapter 2. The reversal described in Essay 6 is completed here.

Second, perfect interfusion is the metaphysical extension of classification of the teachings. Classification places sūtras in a sequence; the perfect teaching places dharmas in a dharma realm. Classification says contradictions are stages; perfect interfusion says contradictions are levels. The same method is applied first to the scriptures, then to the world.

How was a system founded on sūtras transmitted? India's unit of transmission was the treatise. China replaced this layer with three substitutes. First, patriarchs' commentaries served as the basket of treatises. The "treatises" Tiantai would read for the next thousand years were Zhiyi's three great works, the Profound Meaning of the Lotus, Words and Phrases of the Lotus, and Mohe zhiguan. Huayan read Fazang's and Chengguan's commentaries and subcommentaries. Zhanran alone wrote a commentary on each of the three great works, the Shiqian, Shuji, and Fuxing chuanhong jue. Commentary was added to commentary; subcommentary grew outside subcommentary. Indian masters commented on the Buddha's scriptures; Chinese doctrinal learning commented on patriarchs. The function of the "treatise" had not vanished. It had passed to the patriarchs' commentaries. This also supplied the institutional premise of the controversy between the Home Mountain and Off Mountain groups. The dispute concerned authority to interpret patriarchal texts, not Buddhist scriptures.

Second, the lecture platform served as the academy. The institution of scriptural exposition placed the Dharma teacher and the dujiang opposite one another, one chanting and one explaining. Its audiences were clearly stratified. Doctrinal monks inside the monastery were the core audience; palace chapels and scholar-officials formed a separate layer. Huayan in the Tang was especially a philosophy of the literati. Li Tongxuan's commentary on the Avataṃsaka as a layman is one example. The public had another path, popular preaching. Tang popular preachers turned scriptures into stories. For preachers such as Wenxu, "listeners packed the monastery buildings." Dunhuang sermon texts are the surviving lecture manuscripts. Popular preaching, however, expounded narratives of causes and conditions and similes, not doctrine. The two tracks in Essay 9, Chapter 1 were reproduced intact in the lecture institution: doctrine followed a chain of commentaries within small circles; the public followed popular preaching in story form.²

Third, retrospectively recognized patriarchal succession served as the chain. Tiantai's Huiwen and Huisi and Huayan's first patriarch Dushun belonged to genealogies largely filled in by later people. The method was the same as that of the Chan and Pure Land family trees in the next two chapters. Yet this chain had no character of formal monastic acts. It transmitted neither ordination nor initiation. It depended only on the continuation of the lecture platform and the preservation of commentaries.

The shared property of the three substitutes was softness, and the test came quickly. Who read the treatises? Very few people from beginning to end. The Abhidharma, Tattvasiddhi, Daśabhūmika, and Mahāyānasaṃgraha masters of the Six Dynasties were small circles establishing scholarly lineages around a single treatise. They were later incorporated into Huayan and Yogācāra respectively, the earliest instance of classification absorbing the losers. In the Tang, readers of Indian treatises were concentrated in a few official monasteries in the two capitals. From the Song onward, apart from residual courses in the Abhidharmakośa and Yogācāra, the Indian treatise layer largely left circulation in China. The unit of doctrinal learning was wholly replaced by patriarchal commentaries.

The test came in the late Tang. After the Huichang persecution and the wars of the Five Dynasties, Tiantai's commentaries had almost entirely disappeared at home. At Yiji's request, Qian Chu, king of Wuyue, sent envoys to Goryeo. Chegwan brought the teaching texts to China, and Tiantai revived only through texts preserved overseas.³ Essay 8 said that copies of India's scholarly tradition had already reached Tibet before the great monasteries burned. After Chinese doctrinal learning lost its own texts, it too relied on copies preserved abroad and returned. The lifeline of doctrine depended on paper, paper on urban lecture platforms, and lecture platforms on peace. This three-level dependence is the structural reason why doctrinal schools suffered most in the Huichang inventory in the next essay. Chinese Buddhism's doctrinal systems rested on sūtras that had come from abroad and on commentaries written at home. Those who actually studied them were always few.

The three intact pillars represent the substitutes; the broken Indian-treatise pillar is not a fourth substitute. Its “after the Song” label should be read as “from the Song onward,” with Chapter 2’s express exception for the surviving courses in the Kośa and Yogācāra. The chapter does not say that every Indian treatise disappeared. “Lecture chair” refers to an institution of teaching, and “assistant lecturer” to the dujiang, whose questioning and recitation supported the Dharma master’s exposition. The retrospectively recognized lineage transmitted neither ordination nor empowerment and did not constitute a chain of formal Saṅgha acts.

“Korea” here means Goryeo. The returning materials included Tiantai doctrinal texts and commentaries, not only scriptures attributed to the Buddha. As the chapter specifies, Qian Chu sent envoys at Yiji’s request, and Chegwan brought Tiantai texts to China. The three links express the stated dependence of textual survival on urban teaching institutions and of those institutions on peace; their shapes and the lightning bolts do not measure the losses caused by each disaster.

Who provided the funds? Emperors and scholar-officials again. Zhiyi and Yang Guang, Prince of Jin, each treated the other as his teacher. One received the bodhisattva precepts, the other the title "Wise One," a typical case of close relations between government and religion. Fazang taught Empress Wu using the golden lion before the palace as a simile. A Treatise on the Golden Lion turned the ten mysteries into a concise primer for the palace.⁴ The tastes of scholar-officials were equally in accord. The aesthetics of perfect interfusion had the same structure as the imagined order of a unified realm. All dharmas took their proper places and jointly formed one realm. For the literati of an empire just reunited, this picture was persuasive for reasons beyond metaphysics.

The previous chapter established one of this volume's largest conjectures: the organization of knowledge reproduces the organization of society. The perfect teaching adds a further piece of material, without establishing a separate conjecture. India's intellectual virtue was demolition. The debating arena took pride in refuting opponents (Essay 5), because the subcontinent had many competing states, each offering patronage. China's intellectual virtue was inclusion. The perfect teaching took pride in accommodating everything, because in the empire patronage had only one source, and that source wanted order. "Competing states produce debate; unity produces perfect interfusion" (列国出论辩，一统出圆融). These ten Chinese characters express the previous chapter's comparison at the level of metaphysics. The same boundary holds. Zhiyi completed his main works around the Chen-Sui transition. The account in terms of disposition explains why the perfect teaching was selected and esteemed, not where its doctrines came from.

The straightforward half of the account is that Tiantai was not purely speculative talk. The Mohe zhiguan is a complete system of contemplative practice. Its design for cultivating calming and insight together sustained a balance between doctrine and practice rare in the history of Chinese Buddhism, whose details Volume 1 has recorded. Huayan leaned toward pure theory; its contemplative practices did not become institutionalized. A chronological error must be avoided. Huayan's contemplative practices were not late developments. Dushun's Gateway to Contemplation of the Dharma Realm, with its three contemplations, is a full-fledged text attributed to the first patriarch. It contains the contemplation of true emptiness in four alternatives and ten gates, the contemplation of nonobstruction between principle and phenomena in ten gates and five pairs, and the contemplation of universal inclusion in ten gates. After matching the gates one by one in his Xuanjing, Chengguan concludes, "Thus the ten mysteries also emerge from this." The contemplative gates came first, the ten mysteries later. They belong to Huayan's earliest layer, not its last (Volume 1, Part II, Essay 22, Chapters 1 and 2). Thinness remains a defensible claim if it concerns scale and the number of practitioners. It does not hold as a claim about chronology.

The costs also fell on this gap. First, the problem of the criterion of perfect interfusion has already been judged in Volume 2's comprehensive critique. When all dharmas are originally complete, the need for practice requires an extra explanation; otherwise the reason for practicing becomes a problem. Second, the system's own burden. Precise systems such as three thousand realms in a single thought require generations of commentary to maintain them. The Song controversy between the Home Mountain and Off Mountain groups shows that disputes over a system's internal details could consume a school's entire intellectual energy. The arms race described in Essay 5 took a different form in China. The contest was over who could contain more, not who could refute more.

Once the systems became this elaborate, a reaction was only a matter of time: the more intricate a system, the harder it became to find a way into practice through it. The next chapter tells of those who rose against it.

References¶