The Huayan School of Chinese Buddhism

Translation of Nagarjuna's -Treatise on the Twelve Gates- as well as fazang's commentary on that treatise.

Few would deny that something ontologically depends on something else. Given that something depends on something, what depends on what? Huayan Buddhism 華嚴宗, a prominent Chinese Buddhist school, is known for its extensive thesis of interdependence, according to which everything depends on everything else. This intriguing thesis is entangled with seemingly paradoxical claims that everything is not only identified with everything else but also contained within it. Moreover, the radical thesis of interdependence entails that dependence is pervasive and symmetric. In (...) this paper, I first develop a contemporary interpretation of Huayan interdependence by employing the definitional account of essence and the essence-based account of dependence. Through these contemporary resources, I elucidate and unify the theses of interdependence, mutual identity, and mutual containment within Huayan Buddhism. I then propose a unique framework of ontological dependence that suggests varying degrees of ontological dependence, aimed at accommodating and explaining away our intuitions against pervasive and symmetric dependence. By contemporizing Huayan Buddhism, I explore its potential and facilitate engagement between contemporary metaphysics and Huayan Buddhism. (shrink)

Buddhism is a tradition that set itself decidedly against theism, with the development of complex arguments against the existence of God. I propose that the metaphysical conclusions reached by some schools in the Mahayana tradition present a vision of reality that, with some apparently small modification, would ground an argument for the existence of God. This argument involves explanation in terms of natures rather than causal agency. Yet I conclude not only that the Buddhist becomes a theist in embracing such (...) explanations as legitimate, but also ipso facto abandons their metaphysical project and ceases to be a Buddhist. (shrink)

This paper elaborates upon various responses to the Problem of the One over the Many, in the service of two central goals. The first is to situate Huayan's mereology within the context of Buddhism's historical development, showing its continuity with a broader tradition of philosophizing about part-whole relations. The second goal is to highlight the way in which Huayan's mereology combines the virtues of the Nyāya-Vaisheshika and Indian Buddhist solutions to the Problem of the One over the Many while avoiding (...) their vices. (shrink)

This study deals with the tensions between old and new Yogācāra, as seen in the Huayan sources, which, in turn, reflect discontinuity between Indian Yogācāra and its reception in China. Its particular focus is on the concept of karmic appearance , as developed in the Awakening of Faith and further elaborated on by many Huayanmasters. This concept illustrates the sudden arising of deluded thoughts and provides us with a paradigm for the approach to the problem of delusion, a problem that (...) is deeply rooted in Tathāgatagarbha Thought and addresses the origin of deluded thoughts against the backdrop of the pure mind. This Huayan solution resembles the concept of free will, as developed in mainstream Christian theology after Augustine attempted to solve the problem of evil, and the concept of playfulness found in Indian Vedānta theology to explain the creation of the illusory world. (shrink)

In his _Treatise on the Golden Lion_, Fazang says that wholes are _in_ each of their parts and that each part of a whole _is_ every other part of the whole. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of these remarks according to which they are not obviously false, and I use this interpretation in order to rigorously reconstruct Fazang's arguments for his claims. On the interpretation I favor, Fazang means that the presence of a whole's part suffices for the (...) presence of the whole and that the presence of any such part is both necessary and sufficient for the presence of any other part. I also argue that this interpretation is more plausible than its extant competitors. (shrink)

The article uses sinological and archaeological research to highlight the origins of the term "goblet words" (zhiyan 卮言) in Zhuangzi, and then offers a philosophical reading of the nature of the trope in the context of Zhuangzi's linguistic skepticism.

Chengguan (738–839), the fourth patriarch of the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism, declared the primacy of Buddhism over Confucianism and Daoism and criticised these philosophies from a Buddhist stance. In his subcommentary to the Avata?saka Sutra, he defines ten differences between Buddhism and indigenous philosophies, which are discussed in this paper. However, he also often quoted from Chinese Classics to clarify the meaning of a Buddhist tenet. On these occasions he sometimes adds that he only borrows the words but not (...) their meaning. We investigate how he places these words into a new, Buddhist context. (shrink)

One of the interpretive devices that Ch'eng-kuan (澄 觀) is famous for having employed to distill the essence of the vast Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra (Tafang-kuang fo-hua-yen ching 《大方廣佛華嚴經》 was a series of variations on the contemplative theme (kuan-men 觀門) of the complete interfusion (yüan-jung 圓融) of the scripture's three chief protagonists (san-sheng 三聖) ── the Buddha Vairocana (Pi-lu-che-na 毘盧遮那) and the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī (Wen-shu-shih-li 文殊師利) and Samantabhadra (P'u-hsien 普賢). By aligning these three powerful sacred persons with a number of philosophical (...) categories that he believed to be central to the sūtra ── categories like "cause" (yin 因 ), "fruition" (kuo 果 ), "faith" (hsin 信 ), "understanding" (chieh 解), "insight" (chih 智), "practice" (hsing 行), "principle" (li 理), etc. ── he provided a focal point at which the rich and vivid meditative and liturgical lives of Hua-yen devotees could be made to converge with their philosophical reflections. -/- Although Ch'eng-kuan invoked this device in several of his writings, his most concerted development of it is a short essay entitled San-sheng yüan-jung kuan-men, which appears to have been written relatively late in his long career. Like many important Hua-yen texts, this essay seems to have been lost in China not long after its author's death. However, it was preserved in Korea and Japan and from the latter country was reintroduced to China in the last years of nineteenth century. Neither in China nor in the West has it yet been adequately studied. -/- The core of the present article is a critical edition of the Chinese text of the essay based on a careful comparison of all available versions and presented together with a copiously annotated English translation. The edition translation are preceded by a brief interpretive introduction and followed by an appendix in which are given: a detailed discussion of the work's textual history, detailed accounts of its various editions, and descriptions of its several surviving paraphrases and commentaries. (shrink)

English translation and annotation of Fazang's Treatise on the Golden Lion.