Our plan, talk a little bit about the development of Huayan, the crucial ideas of interpenetration and the relational nature of all phenomena.
Then we'll look at these two texts which attempt to explain this through extended metaphors.
First, we have the Golden Lion and then The Rafter Dialogue.
Huayan is a uniquely Chinese form of Buddhism, it didn't exist in India.
Though it's based on a text which is supposed to have come from India, there are some doubts about that and this is called the Huayan Sutra or Flower Garland Sutra.
It developed in China starting around between the fifth and sixth century and it's most noted philosopher is this monk
Fazang who was known as the third patriarch of Huayan.
He was quite successful and in fact attracted the attention of the Empress Wu Ze Tian who became an important supporter of his and in fact, was the impetus for the Golden Lion Essay, where she expressed puzzlement about
Huayan and asked if Fazang could simplify it.
So he gave her the explanation using the golden lion statue in the palace.
The key idea is interpenetration, this is the particular Huayan understanding of emptiness.
Emptiness, the basic meaning is lack of independent existence and the Huayan take on this, they emphasize how everything is constituted through its relations to other things.
This is true of all phenomena, so what their denying is that there's any starting point.
Everything is what it is because of its relations to something else.
The radical statement of Huayan is that there aren't pre-existing individuals that come into relationships with each other, right?
Maybe a common sense way of understanding our relationship, for example, would be,
I existed before the first day of East Asian philosophy and you existed for the first day of East Asian philosophy.
When you took this course and when it started at the end of January, we had two pre-existing individuals who had a new relationship, we're now professor and student.
The Huayan understanding is no, we actually became new individuals through this relationship.
We are constituted by our relationship and our relationships with other things.
There's no such thing as an individual who comes into a new relationship.
The relationship creates the individual.
As I create you, and the same way, you create me, we make each other what we are through this relationship.
This applies to all relationships that we have with everything throughout the entire universe.
That's what the universe is, the universe is the totality of all relations.They explain this, this is what they call the pattern.
The pattern is the sum total of all relationships of everything.
The universe is these relationships, as new relationships are created, we have a new universe.
A common image that Huayan likes to use to explain this is the image of Indra's net.
All right, Indra was one of the Hindu Gods and he had this net and at the node of each of the strands, there was a jewel.
A very reflective jewel, it's represented here in this picture.
You can see how each of these reflects the other jewels.
This is the Huayan understanding of how everything is.
We're all one of these jewels that reflects everything else.
Everything is in us, makes us what we are.
What they mean by interpenetration is that I'm not something distinct from everything else.
I'm not set apart, but actually everything else in the universe penetrates into me because it makes me what I am.
Now this still is a form of Mahayana Buddhism so these phenomena and relations are not ultimately real.
The phenomena are not real because they're constituted by the relations.
They are not independent of the relations and the relations aren't real because they have to be something that relates.
Just to take a very simple example, let's take the relationship between this remote control and this table.
Well, their relationship is one is on top of the other this time but you need to have the remote and you need to have the table for them to have that relationship. Therefore, the phenomena depend on the relationships, the relationships depend on the phenomena, neither are independent.
Huayan extends this, again, very comprehensively.
Everything is part of everything else.
We may not feel like it, we may not realize it but we depend on everything in the whole universe.
A star a billion light years away, makes me who I am right now, even if I'm not aware of it.
Again, their understanding of emptiness is this relationality, this interpenetration, where there's no independent phenomenon that can be identified anywhere.
[NOISE] All right, so that's a mouthful.
Let's look at the first text, this golden lion, which attempts to make these ideas a little bit more understandable.
Fazang was using the example of a lion statute like this, common in Chinese palaces and temples.
Again, this is when the empress asked him to try to make sense of Huayan philosophy, it was a little too confusing for her, can't really blame her.
The lion and its parts represent phenomena in general. Any particular thing in the universe.
The gold, the substance of the lion represents emptiness.
This metaphor is trying to explain the relationship between emptiness and phenomena.
In the first section of the text, the gold lacks self nature.
Gold here represents emptiness.
It's not a particular thing because we don't find gold just in itself.
Gold has to have a form, has to have a shape.
In this case, it's in the form of a lion, doesn't have to be a lion, but it has to be something.
At least it's a block of gold or a ball of gold.
It has to be in some form, there's no such thing as just gold that doesn't have any shape at all.
What we find are gold things, not just gold.
We have golden lions, golden earrings, golden silverware.
Yes, that would be gold-ware or golden-ware, not just gold.
There's no emptiness apart from phenomena.
Emptiness is not a thing, that's what Fazang's getting at here.
The lion's shape, it has particular causes and conditions. It needs a substance, it needs the gold, it needs someone to shape it, the craftsman who makes it into the statue.
It's not an independent thing.
All right, so you try to show neither the lion nor the gold are independent.
The statue can't be separated from the gold, we can't take the gold statue and say,
''okay let's just take the gold out and we'll leave the statute'', you'd have nothing left.
Phenomena cannot be separated from emptiness, these are interpenetrated and intertwined.
Emptiness needs to be in something, there needs to be phenomena, emptiness refers to the fact that phenomena are empty.
If there were no phenomena, there would be nothing to be empty and phenomena couldn't exist without emptiness.
You can't have a lion statue without the gold.
It's got to be made out of something.
In sections four and five of the text, here Fazang emphasizes that emptiness doesn't change.
When you take the lump of gold and make it into a lion, it's still gold.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument, that the craftsmen just didn't even take away any of the gold.
Used a mold so the exact same amount of gold that he had before is still there, just in a different shape so, there's no change to the substance of the gold, when emptiness becomes phenomena,
It doesn't change, it's still empty and that's the point here.
Now where things begin to get a little bit more complicated, In section seven,
Fazang emphasizes that the parts of the lion are both the same and different.
They are the same in that they're all gold.
There's no distinction in the substance but they're different because there's one part' s the ear, one part's the eye.
There's the mane, they look different.
They have different functions so they're simultaneously the same and different.
This points to the way phenomena in general are the same and different.
They are different in terms of function.
My cup has a certain function, the mouse has a certain function, the remote control has yet another function.
They're all different but they're all the same in virtue, the fact that they're all empty.
Now, this interpenetration idea means we have to think of cause and effect differently.
Normally in a common sense understanding is that the cause happens before the effect.
How can you have a cause that happens after an effect?
That doesn't make any sense.
So something like lighting a match, the match, and the match book have to exist before they can be lit.
That would be a typical way of understanding cause and effect.
But interpenetration means we have to understand it differently.
Because in the Huayan understanding of things, that's a different match.
The match that's not on fire and the match that's on fire are not the same thing.
A way they explain this is through the parent-child analogy.
This idea that everything is mutually constituting.
Nothing remains the same over time.
Because when we think about a parent and child, well, in a sense, the parents have to exist before the child.
They can't exist after. But what's a parent?
A parent is someone who has a child.
Before the child's born, those two people are not parents.
And they become parents at the moment they have a child.
Whereas we would normally say, the parents cause the child to exist,
Huayan would say, yes, and the child also caused the parents to exist.
Because before the child was born, they weren't parents.
So cause and effect works in both directions.
The cause produces the effect, but the effect also makes the cause a cause.
It's not a cause before the effect happens.
So again, trying to undermine the notion of stability, persistence, everything's always becoming something new.
Let's kick it up a notch.
The Rafter Dialogue adds in a few other dimensions.
So this is another metaphor, another way of explaining interpenetration, the relation between parts and holes, the relation between parts and parts.
Trying to use a fairly concrete example to make this comprehensible.
In this text, Fazang is identifying six characteristics, or six ways of understanding these relationships between the rafters in the building, which can represent any part in any whole.
In fact, the building can really stand in for the whole universe. Then in that case, the rafter represents any phenomenon, anything that's part of the universe, which pretty much covers everything.
We'll go through each of these.
Here's roughly what he's talking about.
So you've get your rafter here, and this is an integral part of the building.
So first is the characteristic of wholeness.
Here he says the rafter is the building.
Not just is part of the building, is the building.
Because you got to have the rafter to have a building.
What's a building? Building's got to have a certain function.
Keeps out the wind, keeps out the rain.
And pretty crucial to that function is having a roof.
What we've got here is not a building.
If you went to buy a house and what the real estate agent showed you was this, you would say, no that's not a house.
It may become one at some point, but that's not going to do the job.
So the rafter holds up the roof.
The rafter is crucial to the building functioning as a building.
And that's why Fazang says the rafter is a building. Take out the rafter, you've got big holes in your roof.
You don't have a building. You have a ruined building, but not a building.
Then this opponent says, well, if the rafter is the building, then when the rafter's lying on the ground there, that should be a building, if they're identical.
Fazang says, no, because when the rafter's lying on the ground over there, it's not a rafter, it's a piece of wood.
What distinguishes a rafter from a piece of wood?
A rafter has a certain function.
It's in a building holding up the roof.
That eight-foot long piece of wood on the ground isn't holding up a roof.
At that point, it's a piece of wood, not a rafter.
Again, this interpenetration idea.
The rafter makes the building, but at the same time, the building makes that piece of wood a rafter.
Because if the rafter does not constitute the building, where does the building come from?
Because if you think about if each part is just a part, how do you ever get a whole?
When does the whole building come into existence?
Because what you have is a collection of parts. If that's all you have, there should be no whole.
And this is why Fazang says the rafter has to constitute the whole building.
So in this text he's always pointing out the twin errors of annihilationism and eternalism.
He says anything other than the Huayan view leads to one of these errors.
If the rafter doesn't constitute the building, well then you've got no building.
You're denying the building exists.
That's the error of annihilationism.
Or your other possibility, if there's the building, but the rafter didn't make it, then you got a building that has no cause.
Because if the rafter doesn't make the building, then no single part can make the building.
If the building exists anyway, you've got a building with no cause.
And for Buddhists, that's unacceptable.
The rafter has to make the building, otherwise it leads to the error, either of eternalism or annihilationism.
Then we have the characteristic of particularity.
The rafter is the building, but it's also a part.
It's still a rafter. Because if it weren't a part, there would be no building.
Buildings have to have rafters.
If the rafter weren't a part of the building, there would be no building, and then we would have a problem.
Since it is part of the building, then it's a part.
It's only a part when it's in the building.
The eight-foot piece of wood lying on the ground is not a part.
It's not a rafter. It's only a rafter when it's functioning as a rafter when it's forming the building.
The rafter is the building, but it's also still the rafter at the same time. Identity.
Here we're talking about the relation between parts.
We got the rafters, we got the nails, we got the roof tiles.
All of these things make the building and all of them are sole conditions for the building.
The rafter is the building and the planks is the building, the roof tiles is the building, everything is the building.
In terms of being conditions for the building, they are identical. That's what the characteristic of identity focuses on.
All of these distinct parts are all equally conditions for the building and in fact, soul conditions for the building.
Take out a rafter you got no building, take out a nail you got no building.
That's how Fazang understands it.
Now, since the rafter is only a rafter when it's functioning in the building, it needs the other parts.
Without the other parts, you couldn't have a building and if you don't have a building, you can't have a rafter.
This is how the other parts constitute the rafter as a rafter.
Of course the rafter does the same thing for the other parts.
The nail is not a nail, it's just a piece of iron until it's in the building, when it's holding up the rafter or whatever it's holding up.
These relations, these parts mutually constitute each other, as well as constituting the building.
Yet they also have to be different and that's the characteristic of difference. The parts have to have different functions.
You can't have a building made out of just rafters.
It's not going to hold together, it's not going to function as a building.
Though, as he says in the text, if they were all identical, then the rafters are eight feet long and those nails would be eight feet long and the roof tiles would be eight feet long and you'd have no building, they wouldn't fit together.
Each of them has to have their particular unique function in order to constitute the building.
If they didn't have that function, you couldn't use them to make the building.
They're identical in terms of being conditions for the building, but they're distinct in how they do that, what their function is, and what makes it possible for them to combine to form the building.
Then we have integration.
Characteristic of integration refers to the fact that the parts in the building are mutually constituting, they're integrated.
The parts are parts because they make the building, the building is the building because it has those particular parts.
Again, remember the building here can represent the universe.
The universe is the universe because it has these particular parts and these parts are what they are because they're part of forming the universe together.
If they didn't form the building, they wouldn't be parts.
In the Huayan understanding, a rafter that's not holding up a building is not rafter, a nail that's not nailing stuff together is not a nail.
They're only parts when they make the whole.
Clearly without the parts, we wouldn't have a building.
You can't have a building that's made out of nothing.
It's got to be made out of rafters and nails and other things.
Then we have disintegration.
That's the fact that each part has its distinct character.
If the rafter didn't have the character of rafterness, it couldn't be part of the building and it wouldn't have that power of conditioning the building.
It forms the building, it gets its rafterness from the building, but it maintains its own character at the same time. Parts are identical with a whole and not identical with the whole, the various parts are identical with each other and non-identical with each other.
This is not a temporal sequence, these are just different perspectives that we can have on the same thing.
We're still talking about a building here and the various parts.
Well, what does this all lead up to?
This is really the crucial part.
Buddhism gets into some fairly complicated metaphysics certainly Huayan.
This is a very radically different way of looking at the world, but it's ultimately about what people do and how they act.
Buddhism is about compassion, relieving suffering.
That's ultimately what they're after.
This metaphysics is trying to underlie certain ethical view.
What Fazang is after is to show that every phenomenon is equally important.
The building, represents the universe.
You take one part away you don't have a building and you take one part away you don't have the same universe anymore, you've got something else.
It's trying to overcome human prejudices.
We tend to think certain things are more important than others.
Fazang is trying to undermine that, that everything's equally important.
Well known Huayan saying is that a sand fly is as important as the Emperor of China.
Most people would say the Emperor of China is more important and very influential political figure, sand fly is insignificant, but Fazang's point is both of them make the universe what it is.
Wouldn't be the same universe without the Emperor of China, wouldn't be the same universe minus one sand fly.
Both make the universe what it is.
Our own existence is equally interdependent.
I am what I am because of everything else and everyone else.
This is supposed to motivate treating people differently, treating other things differently.
Let's now suppose there's some people I don't like,
I just don't care for very much and I wouldn't be interested in helping them working for their interests.
But now I'd say I am what I am because of those people,
I wouldn't be me without these people. If I like being me, well, I should like them.
That's what makes it possible.
Now, Fazang wants us to see we're not independent, we depend on everything else.
We have certain concerns, certain obligations to the those other things, they make it possible for us to exist.
If we like our own existence and he thinks most people do, then we have to take care of those other things as well.
This leads to a very profound and universal compassion for everything.
Not even just living things, inanimate objects too.
I am what I am because of this remote control,
I am what I am because of my cup.
Now in practice, Huayan along with other Buddhists, focus more on sentient beings because my cup seems to lack the capacity to suffer.
Doesn't really feel pain, whereas people, animals feel pain.
But certainly compassion has to extend to all sentient beings equally.
They're all equally important and trying to undermine preferences partiality in much the same way that Mozi did, but whereas Mozi was only talking about human beings, Huayan is going to extend this to all sentient beings.
This is what led new confusion to criticize them, as we'll see later on.
One application of this that we can see in Huayan is very similar to how people talk about environmental ethics now.
We have to extend ethical obligations not just to other human beings, but to animals, plants, other parts of the natural world.
Huayan has a very similar view.
If we like our own existence, we have to like what makes it possible and that's everything.
This is supposed to motivate a much broader and deeper compassion than most people have.
That's the idea at any rate. We'll stop there.