Chinese Buddhist Philosophy

This essay is an investigation into the concept of insentient things possessing Buddha-nature with a focus on Jingxi Zhanran’s thoughts. In the history of Chinese Buddhism, Zhanran was not the originator of such a concept; however, he was the first Tiantai thinker to advocate this idea. He strongly argues that according to the Tiantai Perfect Teaching, Buddha-nature certainly extends to insentient things, which refers to inanimate objects without a nervous system, i.e., tangible or formless nonliving existents. This essay therefore aims at revealing this intent of Zhanran by exploring his argument of insentient things’ Buddha-nature.
For Zhanran, the key quality of Buddha-nature is all-pervasiveness, and thus naturally, not only animate beings but also inanimate things are imbued with Buddha-nature. According to the principle of mutual inclusion, each dharma realm includes the other nine realms. Also, because body and land are mutually identical, the bodies and lands of Buddhas are interfused with those of the dwellers in the other nine realms. Thus, the inanimate lands also have Buddha nature.
Lastly, mutual inclusion reveals a two-way relationship between the sentient and the insentient, thereby giving the possibility of reversing the positions of the subjective observer and the objective phenomenon. As such, it is conducive to my conclusion that insentient things can also take up an active role on the path of Buddhahood, as Zhanran contends that they
inherently possess the threefold Buddha-nature.

Fazang's arguments in his Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan provide a philosophical foundation for the Avatamsaka Sutra's rich and suggestive imagery. This chapter focuses on one of Fazang's central arguments in that treatise, namely, his argument that mutually reliant dharmas are mutually identical. The chapter presents the background context for Fazang's argument, reconstructs the argument's logical structure, interprets the central concepts appearing therein, and explains why Fazang might have found plausible his argument's premises. Specific discussion points include: the non-duality of existence and emptiness; relations between causes and their conditions; the meaning of creation and identity; connections with the ti-yong paradigm; Fazang's analogy of the ten coins. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of Fazang's metaphysics for contemporary discussions of substance and ontological foundations.

Introduction (not abstract):
Different views on the relation between phenomenal reality, the world as we consciously experience it, and noumenal reality, the world as it is independent from an experiencing subject, have different implications for a collection of interrelated issues of meaning and reality including aspects of metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical methodology. Exploring some of these implications, this paper compares and brings together analytic, continental, and Buddhist approaches, focusing on relevant aspects of the philosophy of Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida, Dharmakīrti, and Dōgen. Prima facie, these philosophers have little in common, and indeed the differences are vast. Even in case of the two Western thinkers there is a fundamental difference between Davidson’s anti-dualist identification of phenomenal, experienced reality with the noumenal, real, external world on the one hand, and the bracketing or elimination of noumenal reality at the base of Derrida’s thought on the other, which lead to radically different ideas with regards to (the possibility and nature of) objectivity and our linguistic access to the real/external/noumenal world. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between Dharmakīrti’s theory of apoha and Davidson’s and Derrida’s theories of triangulation and différance respectively, and these similarities can be exploited to bridge some of the differences and attempt a constructive engagement. After briefly introducing analytic and continental approaches to meaning and reality (and Davidson’s and Derrida’s theories in particular) in section 2, and some relevant Buddhist approaches (including  Dharmakīrti’s and Dōgen’s) in section 3, it will be argued in section 4 that Davidson’s theory of triangulation as a connection between the noumenal and the phenomenal needs Dharmakīrti’s theory of apoha as a complement, and that apoha is best understood through Derrida’s différance in turn. A further investigation into the implications of the resulting triangulation-différance-apoha integration in section 5 (and the concluding section 6) leads to a view on meaning and reality similar to the perspectivism advocated by the Japanese Buddhist philosopher Dōgen: the phenomenal is (mostly) necessarily noumenally real, but partial, one-sided, or incomplete.

This paper is the first in-depth study of Shi Sengwei’s 釋僧衛 (fl. late fourth and early fifth centries) “Shizhu jing hanzhu xu” 十住經含注序 (Preface to the Comprehensive Commentary on the “Daśabhūmikasūtra”), where I argue that Sengwei's Daśabhūmika scholarship influenced the compilation of the Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論 and its thesis of "one mind and its two aspects" (yi xin er men 一心二門).