THE BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHERS the Foregoing Was a Beginning

CHAPTER FOUR

THE BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHERS

The foregoing was a beginning sketch of Mou’s opinion of what the Buddha wanted to teach and how he went about gradually commu- nicating it. However Buddhist philosophers have not been able to agree on precisely what the Buddha meant to teach us. When Mou reads through the history of their scholastic disputations, his eyes pick out what he thinks is a very signiﬁcant constant: though the Bud- dhist philosophers concur on some important things, particularly how the universe looks when viewed with prajñā, they disagree very conse- quentially on the topic of “buddha-nature” ( foxing 佛性), namely how much ordinary creatures like us have in common with buddhas and how it is that we can attain buddhahood.1 This may sound aridly metaphysical, but to Mou and the Buddhist commentators, it is extremely weighty and deeply practical too. Trans- lated into concrete terms, the question of buddha-nature amounts to asking, If I want to be a buddha, how much do I have to change? What are the conditions and constraints? Do I have to acquire a special kind of body, or will any body do? Do I have to radically renovate the structure of my mind, or is it enough just to make relatively minor changes to the one I have now? Will it take aeons, or could it happen soon? Will I have to go to a different world? Will my chances depend on luck, or can I exert much control over them?2

1 Mou sometimes refers to these as, on the one hand, the question of how to medi- tate or or contemplate things ( guanfa 觀法), which I have been explaining as the question of how prajñā sees things, which is the subject matter of “prajñā learning” (boruo xue 般若學), and on the other hand the “ontological” questions of liberation ( jietuo 解脫) and buddhaphala ( foguo 佛果) (FB, 625–47). At other times Mou analyzes the topic of buddha-nature into “the question of how the attainment of buddhahood is possible” (chengfo zhi suoyi keneng zhi wenti 成佛之所以可能的問題) and “the question of the form in which the attainment of buddhahood is ultimate” (chengfo yi he xingtai er chengfo fang shi jiujing de wenti 成佛依何形態而成佛方是究竟的問題) (FB, 180). 2 In this he parts company with medieval Tiantai exegete Fadeng (法登), author of Yuandun zongyan (圓頓宗眼), number 58 in Kawamura Kōshō 河村孝照, ed., Shinsan Dai Nihon Zoku Zōkyō 新纂大日本続蔵経 [Revised Japanese Supplement to the Tripitaka] (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 1975–89). According to Mou, Fadeng mistakenly pres- ents the essential Tiantai contribution as the “threefold contemplation” (三觀 sanguan), 92 chapter four

Taking his lead from Tiantai Zhiyi, Mou interprets the Buddha’s final message as meaning that buddhas are essentially like us in body and mind and experience the very same things we do, only in a truer way. This means that buddhas are not literally “otherworldly.” To say that a Buddha “leaves the world” should really be a figurative way of saying that he leaves behind delusions about the universe of objects and sees it more truly but still dwells in our same universe and in fact in our same subjective life-worlds. When Mou reads other Buddhist scholastic authorities, he measures them by how closely they match this understanding of buddha-nature. Then, using a scheme inspired by Zhiyi, he divides their philosophies into five ranks:

Formal name Representative tradition 1 Tripitaka Theory (藏教)Hīnayāna 2 Shared Theory (通教) Madhyamaka, the emptiness tradition (空宗) 3 Beginning Separation Theory Late Chinese Yogācāra (始別教) 4 Mature Separation Theory Shelun School (攝論師) (終別教) Huayan tradition 5 Perfect or Complete Theory (圓教) Tiantai tradition

Hīnayāna, the Tripitaka Theory

We will recall that, according to Mou’s view, after the Buddha decided to abridge and simplify his message for deluded creatures, he began by giving the sermons that became the three-part canon, or “Tripitika,” of what is sometimes callled the Hīnayāna, the “Lesser Vehicle” to

which Mou regards as being, in substance, common property of the entire Mahāyāna (FB, 1030–1032). Mou’s focus on the decisiveness of buddha nature also sets him apart from with such inﬂuential modern-day Japanese and Japanese-inﬂuenced inter- pretations such as Andō Toshio 安藤俊雄, Tendai shōgu shisōron 天台性具思想論 [On Tiantai ‘Nature-Inclusion’ Thought] (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1953) and Tamura Yoshirō and Umehara Takeshi 田村芳朗, 梅原猛, Zettai no shinri: Tendai 絶対の真理 <天台> [Absolute Truth: Tendai] (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1970), which take the Threefold Truth and Threefold Contemplation as the central features. See Ng Yu Kwan, T’ien-T’ai Buddhism and Early Mādhyamika, 40, 224 n.5.