INHERENT ENTAILMENT (XINGJU) AND NEGATIVE PREHENSIONS
Givenness, The
Agency of the Past, and the Presence of the Absent in Whitehead and the T'ien-t'ai Reading of the Lotus Sutra
By
BROOK
ziporyn
Journal of Chinese Philosophy
v.28 n.4 (2001.12) pp399-414
Copyright 2001 by Journal of Chinese Philosophy
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The obvious affinity between Whitehead's process philosophy and certain sinitic Buddhist ideas, in particular those of the Hua-yan and T'ien-t'ai school, has sparked the need for a closer examination of the divergences between the two, and the opportunity for dialogue provided thereby. In particular, the notion of interfusion, or the co-presence of all actualities in the universe in each actuality, provides a tempting point of comparison and contrast between these two traditions of thought. One of the first scholars to attempt this, Steve Odin, comparing Hua-yan Buddhist thought with Whitehead, criticized the former for "having no adequate conceptual apparatus by which to argue both for the retention of a single determinate form by each dharma, and for the total 'fusion of all that is.'[1] Hua-yan thought, Odin charged, lacked any category to do the work that Whitehead's notion of "negative prehension" performed, that is, to account for how each entity can in one sense include and involve all other entities, while at the same time maintaining its definiteness and distinctness. As Whitehead had written, "A mere fusion of all that there is would be the nonentity of indefiniteness."[2] For this reason, Whitehead introduced the notion of negative prehensions—yes, every actual entity in the universe is what it is due to its definite bond with every other entity, its prehension of every other entity, but among these prehensions there are some which are purely negative, that is, the mere subjective fact of elimination, neglect, exclusion. Without this principle of limitation and selection, Whitehead thought, there would only be indefiniteness, ambiguity, a confused mass, not an actual occurrence, the latter being by its nature, for Whitehead, definite, atomic, and really what it is once and for all. Whitehead further claims that, in each actual occurrence's self-constitution, all other actual entities are positively prehended, but not all eternal objects. It is some of these eternal objects— ideal Platonic forms of qualitativeness: redness, blueness, largeness, small-
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ness, and so forth—determinate aspects and qualities—that are negatively prehended, and thus positively excluded from further relevance.
Whitehead's account of process is notable for its emphasis on atomicity and definiteness. Reality is atomic, said Whitehead[3]; every actual occurrence is a process that prehends the universe through its subjective feeling, according to the categoreal obligations, in order to reach its satisfaction, which for Whitehead is identical with its definiteness. This of course does not mean an exclusion of relation and complexity, for Whitehead, quite the contrary, and this is the advance he makes on previous atomic theories of reality. As he notes, "atomism does not exclude complexity, and universal relativity. Each atom is a system of all things."[4] What is still atomistic about this all-inclusive atom, however, is its definiteness, its exclusion of ambiguity, its being simply what it is, period. "An actual entity has a perfectly definite bond with each item in the universe. This determinate bond is its prehension of that item."[5] Process, greatly simplified, may be described as a transition from appetite to emphasis (or exclusion, negative prehension, and selection of modes of positive prehension), and finally to the satisfaction of definiteness, in which the superject is at last fully formed and at once perishes. This actuality, however, does not only perish; it also enjoys an "objective immortality"—that is, it may and must be prehended by further occasions, for each of which it will present a possibility of relevance. Hence, its actuality is in one sense limited to the moment of its active appetition, selection, and satisfaction; henceforth, this particular entity can be actual only through its being prehended by further, novel occurrences.
Several things are to be stressed about this account of interpervasion of all entities, before we turn to the Lotus Sutra and the T'ien-t'ai doctrine of inherent entailment (xingju) inspired by it. The first is this notion of definiteness as satisfaction. This means that an event achieves real satisfaction of aesthetic harmony in its subjective form when its original appetition is definitely made actual; the appetition is construed here as having a single, definitive aim, which, when matched, spells the satisfaction and perishing of that atomic occurrence. The second point is the passivity that seems to pertain to the objective and to the past. As Whitehead says explicitly, "Agency belongs exclusively to actual occasions."[6] This means that the present actual entity is the real agent who prehends, and the past objectively immortal entities and eternal objects are definitively only prehended. There is no possibility of ambiguity about which is the prehended and which the prehender here. The third is what may, with certain qualifications, be called the givenness of the eternal objects. Whitehead, to be sure, is careful to stress that "the total multiplicity of Platonic forms is not 'given.' But in respect of each actual entity, there is givenness of such forms. The determinate definiteness of
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each actuality is a statement of a selection from these forms. It grades them in a diversity of relevance."[7] It would not be fair to say that Whitehead is merely equivocating here; the distinction he makes is quite crucial.
It is not quite true to say that the eternal objects are not "made," that they are exceptions to the general law of creativity and the exclusive actuality of occurrences; nonetheless, it would seem that they are "made" just once, and are never henceforth truly novel. From a Buddhist perspective, at least, the eternal objects thereby certainly enjoy a considerable degree of relative givenness, a non-negotiability vis-à-vis any non-God actual entity that relates directly to their putative definiteness. They pertain to what Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God, which is to be sure an actual occurrence in its own right, but certainly one that has a unique position among all occurrences. It is these three features I want to use as comparison points to the notion of inherent entailment as disclosed by the Lotus, leading on to a comparison between that scripture's notion of Buddhahood and Whitehead's notion of God.[8]
Unlike Hua-yan Buddhism, perhaps, T'ien-t'ai Buddhism does have an account of the simultaneous nondisclosure of some entities in the universe and their complete mutual interfusion, which I would like to compare to Whitehead's account, based on the idea of negative prehensions as premised by the above three points. This is the doctrine of "inherent entailment," as expressed through the notion of "opening the provisional to reveal the real" (kaiquan xianshi), derived from the Lotus. The Lotus tells us that there is only one Buddha-vehicle, that the sravaka and pratyeka-buddha vehicles are in reality the Buddha-vehicle. All teachings, indeed, are the Bodhisattva path, and all practices, even those of the sravakas that explicitly reject or "negatively prehend" the Bodhisattva path are, in fact, instances of the practice of the Bodhisattva path (as can be seen, for example, in the tale of Sakyamuni's previous incarnation as the Bodhisattva Never Disparage[9]). This means, on the T'ien-t'ai reading, to begin with, that all actions and cognitions are Buddha-actions and cognitions, and that all partial cognitions and beliefs can be "opened and revealed" to be—indeed, to have always already been—the cognition of the whole truth.[10] That is, one may believe that one is merely pursuing a certain local goal, in accordance with a particular sort of appetition (the sons running out of the house toward their promised carts,[11]the lost son digging the dirt to make minimum wage,[12] the travelers taking step after step to move closer to the illusory city[13]), but one is always doing more than one knows in doing these things: the sons are saving their lives and moving toward the great ox cart with each deluded step; the lost son is readying himself to learn of his inheritence with each day's labor; the travelers are moving
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closer to the treasure trove beyond the illusory city with each deluded step they take toward the latter.
One's satisfaction is here in decided contrast to one's initially conceived aim or appetition. Each deluded step is at once completely deluded and completely enlightened; that is, one was genuinely misguided, but precisely by being misguided and, in these cases, only thereby, one was well guided, and practicing the correct path. To be a Buddha means to be able to withhold information and thereby to more effectively disclose it: to use upaya, skillful means, and then "open and reveal" them at the appropriate time.
The principle of nondisclosure here is thus radically rewritten: If all experiences are to be understood as these upaya (as in the T'ien-t'ai reading), then what is not explicitly included in any event is not simply dismissed as irrelevant, but is, as Whitehead's idea of negative prehension would suggest, an integral part of that entity's being what it is. However, the Lotus doctrine takes a further step: It is not only made what it is by excluding certain things, and thus to be thought of as including them via this exclusion—it is also actually revealing them by excluding them. The Buddha can only fully reveal the Bodhisattva path—in all its vastness and multifariousness—by concealing it for a time; the travelers can only reach the treasure by not seeing it for awhile, the sons must go through a period of misconceiving the aims of their actions in order to achieve the true end of those actions. Otherwise the true nature of those actions can never be revealed at all. So precisely what is excluded from any entity is revealed in or even as it precisely by means of this exclusion, or as this exclusion.
This involves a difference between the Whiteheadian notion of atomic events, one-way time and one-way prehension, and the Lotus/T'ien-t'ai idea of "neither sameness nor difference" as pertaining to the relation between provisional and ultimate truth. Here we must conceive time itself, or process itself, not on the model of appetition-emphasis/selection-satisfaction/definiteness, but on the model of "opening the provisional to reveal the real." Every actual event, we may say (again following T'ien-t'ai), is an opening of the provisional to reveal the real." In the first instance, this means only, in the special case of the Buddha's teachings, to reveal that all other ways were really the Buddha-way. But in the fully omnicentric T'ien-t'ai reading, this same structure applies to every moment of experience: each is an opening up of all other moments as provisional upaya which both expressed and concealed itself, and these two—expressing and concealing—as identical, as in the case of the Buddha's upayas. This is the essence of the T'ien-t'ai Three Truths: Emptiness is Provisional Positing is the Mean. Hence, the relation between any one entity and all other entities must be understood
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here on the model of the relation between provisional and ultimate truth as laid out in the Lotus.
What is this relation? I have in an earlier work used the example of the relation between the setup and punch line of a Joke to illustrate this peculiar type of identity-as-difference, where contrast and exclusion are not only means to, but in themselves already are identity and inclusion themselves. The setup is serious, the punch line is funny. But at the same time, after the dawning of the punch line, the setup is also seen to have been funny, in every molecule and in its entirety. We say the whole joke is funny, not just the punch line; the setup then is entirely permeated by this funniness, if you will. It is not just that it contains two separate things or aspects, seriousness and funniness, but that it is simultaneously funny through and through and serious through and through. But the setup is funny retrospectively, and is funny not only without effacing its seriousness and its contrast to and exclusion of the funniness of the punch line, but precisely because of this contrasting excluding seriousness. The setup is at once completely serious, in every molecule, and completely funny. These two opposite qualities are entailed in it, in full definiteness, at the same time, each pervading the whole thing.
This is how the T'ien-t'ai doctrine of "inherent entailment" must be understood; every entity is in its entirety every other entity, permeated by every other quality, readable as an instantiation of every other quiddity. Every X is also, in its entirety, every non-X. And, as in the case of the setup and punch line, this is not so in spite of the fact that X is contrasted to and excludes non-X, but precisely because it is contrasted to and exclusive of non-X; non-X is present in X as the very exclusion of non-X. Here perfect ambiguity and perfect definiteness are, we may say, combined, even identical to one another. To be determined as X is to be every non-X, and not as two separate aspects, but such that its Xness is precisely its non-Xness. An entity is non-X (expressive of non-Xness, of alternate quiddities, and qualities) precisely to the extent that it is X, and vice versa. Similarly, for the Lotus, all previous teachings are both contrasted with the Lotus's teaching of the One Vehicle, and at the same time, by this very exclusion, instantiations of it. They are simultaneously the antithesis of ultimate truth and, precisely because they are its antithesis, ultimate truth itself. Applying the same line of thought to any given entity, as the T'ien-t'ai school does, we may say that this pen contrasts with all that is not-pen in the world, and this not-pen, as the internal/external condition of this pen, turns out thereby to be revealed to be this pen itself, in the form of non-pen, or precisely by virtue of its exclusion of and contrast with pen-ness. Non-pen is pen in the form of non-penness, just as the sravakahood is Bodhisattvahood in the form of sravakahood (and it is an statement of Bodhisattvahood here, a part of the
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Bodhisattva path, only because it has forgotten its Bodhisattvahood, because it excludes it), or the setup is humor in the form of seriousness. Non-pen is pen appearing as non-pen.
Here we can see the manner in which the T'ien-t'ai Three Truths, rooted in the Lotus's proclamation that the Buddha of the root-gate "sees the marks of the triple world as they actually are, as free of both life and death, vanishing and appearing, presence and absence in the world, neither real nor false, neither thus nor otherwise, unlike the view the triple world has of itself,"[14] provides the decisive alternative to the Whiteheadian view of unambiguous atomic determinacy as the standard of actuality. Determinacy corresponds to the Truth of Provisional Positing only (jiadi) but here every Provisional Posit is also Empty (always already ambiguated, readable as every other quiddity precisely by excluding them), and these two are, precisely in their contrast, one and the same thing (the Mean), two alternate ways of stating the same fact (conditioned co-arising). There is no way to privilege the actuality of the aspect of fixed determinacy, or this thing precisely as it appears at the moment of its arising within a given context, over the further ramifications and expressions that its essential prehendability (ambiguity, objective immortality, Emptiness) entails, nor vice versa. And indeed, even the Mean, the union of determinacy and indeterminacy, or of this entity as it appears now and all the things that can henceforth be made of it, is not to be privileged over either extreme. It is on this basis that the T'ien-t'ai doctrine of "inherent entailment" (xingju) is established, which holds that all quiddities without exception are inherently entailed in any given quiddity. This does not mean merely that every actual entity prehends all other entities, but more, that the identity of the prehender and prehended in this relation can never be definitively determined; this very quiddity X here can equally validly be read as every other quiddity, as expressions of all conceivable forms of non-Xness. It is this entity right here that is all the other entities, and it is these other prehended entities that are this entity doing the prehending. This is the essence of the interfused Three Truths as understood in the T'ien-t'ai tradition, which makes the unidirectional Whiteheadian notion of prehension, as premised on the privileging of determinacy alone as actuality, untenable.
On this model, we have a possibility for a less-onesided understanding of the prehender-prehended relation than we find in Whitehead. For here the agent responsible for "opening" the rest of the world is no longer simply the ultimate teaching itself, but all the inferior teachings themselves. That is, once the Lotus has opened all the other teachings, these other teachings become the ultimate teaching itself. But to be the ultimate teaching means to have, like the Lotus, the ability to open up all other teachings. This point is made explicitly in the writings of the
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school of the T'ien-t'ai master Siming Zhili.[15] So it is not only that this actual entity currently in the process of reaching its satisfaction prehends all other entities in their objective immortality, such that they are merely passive raw materials for its work; on the contrary, it is impossible even to specify any exclusive agent of this operation. We can say with equal validity that the prehended entities participate in prehending themselves, or in opening themselves up (indeed, in strict T'ien-t'ai terms, any participant in the process can be adequately described as the sole agent of the process; any aspect can be the sole prehender, while all the others are the prehended, and vice versa).[16]
This point is well illustrated by the climactic scene in the Lotus where the Treasure Tower emerges from the earth. This stupa, a momument to a part of a past deceased Buddha, can be read as the past in its objective immortality, coming to form a part of the present. Its active emergence from the earth to bear witness to Sakyamuni's preaching of the Lotus already suggests the active element of this prehended element, but the parable goes farther, for the dead (objectively immortal) Buddha inside turns out not to be dead at all, and where we expected to find merely a part (as in standard Buddhist stupa worship) of this Buddha, we have instead the whole living Buddha. He speaks, he invites the Buddha of the present to open up this past, and indeed to join him in it. The live Buddha inside the stupa is a powerful image of the active participation of the past in its own prehension, and his wholeness testifies to the fact that no simple unilateral part-whole relation pertains to the relation between the prehending present and the prehended past. The objectively immortal past is here; it is not just one element or part taken into a unicentric whole that is orchestrated by the present entity. Note that the Buddha of the present, Sakyamuni, after being instructed by the Buddha of the past, is able to open the stupa and enter it only by gathering together all the aspects of his present activity, all his transformation bodies. We may read this as suggesting that when the present moment unifies the extent of its multifariousness, the multitude of prehended entities of various and contrasted forms as which it is currently expresses itself, this has the simultaneous effect of revealing the activeness of all the seemingly dead, past, merely prehended, or objectively immortal entities, and overcoming the illusion that they are merely parts within a larger whole: The stupa is revealed to have a live complete Buddha within it, Sakyamuni opens it up and, importantly, joins him inside. This suggests that not only is the past an active member of the prehending relation, but that the present has recognized itself as acting in the past as well; The deeds of the long dead Buddhas are now seen to be equally validly describable as the activities of this Buddha living now, or, in Tien-t'ai terms, of this pen here, in such a way that no definitive judg-
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ment can be made about which is the agent and which is the patient, nor what is a part and what is the whole; each is the whole of which the others are the parts, and each is the active prehender for which all the others are the passive prehended, reciprocally. It is this insight that paves the way for the true doctrinal climax of the scripture, the Buddha's revelation of his prior enlightenment and life span.
If the "trace-gate" of the sutra may be read as asserting that all practices of sentient beings are in reality readable as Bodhisattva practices, the revelation of the "root-gate" may perhaps be understood as taking the next step, namely that the activities of a Bodhisattva may be equally validly read as the activities of a Buddha. In the chapter "Emergence of Bodhisattvas from the Earth" Sakyamuni says, "Since the time when I reached supreme enlightenment at the town of Gaya, at the foot of the tree, and put in motion the all-surpassing wheel of the law, I have brought to maturity all of them [the Bodhisattvas of the Earth] for superior enlightenment."[17] In this verse, any notion of a dichotomy between the "recent enlightenment" and the "original enlightenment" of the Buddha is completely effaced; Sakyamuni asserts in the same sentence both that he was enlightened at the foot of a tree in the town of Gaya forty-odd years previously, and that his activities as a Buddha extend to the ancient past, to the maturation of these myriads of advanced Bodhisattvas. It is in this way that we must understand his "infinite life span." For the implication here is that, once he became a Buddha at Gaya, he realized also that he had already been a Buddha, or rather that the activities of all Buddhas of the past were in fact none other than his own activities. These activities were necessarily done in the form of not knowing he was a Buddha, just as the Bodhisattvas must at times forget that they are Bodhisattvas, and believe they are sravakas, in order to fulfill their Bodhisattva vow.
The parable of the doctor in the "Life span" chapter illustrates this point well: The Buddha's deeds are sometimes better accomplished by his absence—his death—than by his presence. That is, he is all the more present in his own absence, all the more active and efficacious. Hence, upon enlightenment he is able to see that all his previous (and perhaps future) moments of "non-enlightenment"—the absence of his own awareness of Buddhahood—were precisely Buddhahood, the functioning of enlightenment, which has been enlightening beings for countless ages. Non-enlightenment is enlightenment in the form of non-enlightenment. Delusion is Buddhahood in the form of delusion, as delusion, included in it precisely by being excluded from it. Here not only does the prehended share in the work of prehending, but the prehender sees the prehended—the past deeds when he was not yet thus and so—as aspects of his present prehending, or the activity of this very actual
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entity which he is at this moment, and vice versa. Those past moments of otherness are not merely passively prehended; They are this very moment of prehending itself, all the more active, all the more efficiently prehending all into the actuality of the Buddha-vehicle, by being apparently passive and absent. The dichotomy between activity and passivity that has plagued so much occidental thought is here overcome.
Intriguingly, Whitehead describes his modification of the antithetical terms "universal" and "particular" in favor of "eternal objects" and "actual entities" as an attempt to overcome precisely this sort of one-sided relationship: "The notion of a universal is of that which can enter into the description of many particulars; whereas the notion of a particular is that it is described by universals, and does not itself enter into the description of any other particular.... [However,] an actual entity cannot be described, even inadequately, by universals; because other actual entities do enter into the description of any one actual entity. Thus every so-called 'universal' is particular in the sense of being just what it is, diverse from everything else; and every so-called 'particular' is universal in the sense of entering into the constitutions of other actual entities."[18] This would suggest, however, that the eternal objects and objectively immortal past entities need not be conceived merely as the prehended, and the present actual entity merely as the prehender; in line with the position of the Lotus Sutra outlined above, we can perhaps see a way clear here toward reconfiguring the relation so that the prehended is also in a sense the prehender, and vice versa; that all actual entities are constantly prehending each other, serving as both universal and particular to one another, agents whose activity can never be closed off once and for all, who can recenter all reality around themselves under certain conditions—as the treasure tower takes in the present Buddha Sakyamuni once all his transformation bodies have gathered together in one place.
This brings us back to the question of the givenness and non-negotiability of the eternal objects, and the question of God. Whitehead is intensely concerned to correct what he regards as some of the errors of traditional theistic theology's conception of God. Primary among these is the one-sided transcendence of God, the "vicious separation of the flux from the permanence" that leads to the concept of "an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world."[19] Bound up with these are God conceived in the image of an imperial ruler, as a personification of moral energy, and in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle.[20] All of these are pernicious errors, Whitehead thinks, which separate God from the world unduly, and moreover, miscontrue him. In fact, he is not an exception to general metaphysical principles but their primary exemplification. He is not
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eminently real, but rather, in his primordial form, deficiently actual. This primordial character of God, Whitehead says, is "the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character."[21] But this not only exemplifies, but also establishes the categoreal obligations. We are told that he is the principle of concretion itself—that "whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity."[22] This primordial nature of God is unconscious; he is conscious only in his consequent nature, which is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom. The primordial nature is limited by no actuality which it presupposes, is infinite, devoid of negative prehensions, free, complete, eternal, actually deficient, and unconscious. The consequent nature of God is determined, incomplete, consequent, fully actual, and conscious.[23] It is on the basis of this dipolar notion of God that Whitehead can make his famous theses of reversibility: It is as true to say that God is permanent, one, actual eminently, immanent in the world, transcending the world, and creating the world, while the world is fluent, many, deficiently actual, pervaded by God, transcended by God, created by God, as to say just the opposite.[24]
Now the question I want to raise here is whether Whitehead really makes good on this claim to thoroughgoing reversibility. For there is one traditional theistic attribute of God that he retains here, which goes hand in hand with the theses of atomism, definiteness, and givenness referred to above. We are told that in God there is no loss, that as consequent he salvages and prehends transformatively all things in the world, all persons, with a tender care that in effect saves the world. Indeed, "each actuality in the temporal world has its reception into God's nature." However, "the corresponding element in God's nature is not temporal actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, ever-present fact. An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God's nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. . . . Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the person now, and yet with his own past, so the counterpart in God is that person in God."[25] Whitehead is quite ingeniously avoiding the conclusion that this "counterpart of the person in God" is not exactly that person himself; just as the present person is a complete summation of the route of occasions leading up to it, its own past, which it both is and is not, the person in God is a still more complete summation of that same course of events. But we must ask, do we really overcome the traditional separation of God from the individual person with this move?
The worry is that God remains God, and the person the person, even
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if the latter is transmuted into an element of the former. The reason for this is that, once again, we seem to have a one-sided prehender-prehended relation here, and the unambiguously fixed whole-part relation that goes with it. God as primordial is prehended by the course of events that is this temporal person, while this temporal course itself is prehended by the consequent nature of God. This is, indeed, the means by which God becomes himself in actuality, prehends his own primordial nature, through the medium, as it were, of its prehension by the intervening actual events. God is the whole, the prehender, while these events and persons are the parts, the prehended. But in that case we must ask, why can't the list of reversible predicates be extended to the other attributes Whitehead attributes to God, particularly in his consequent nature? That is, God is "a fellow sufferer who understands," who "saves the world" with his "infinite tender care," and so on. Can these also be said of the individual person, or even of the individual person "in God"? Or just of God simpliciter, as the encompassing prehender but not as the parts prehended?
Whatever the answer may be in the case of Whitehead, it is clear that this is just what is asserted in the Lotus Sutra; each sentient being is practicing the Bodhisattva path (which, by the T'ien-t'ai reading of the "root gate," means, means also that he or she is always already a Buddha; we may say that the trace gate establishes that all activities are Bodhisattva activities, while the root gate establishes that all Bodhisattva activities are Buddha-activities; ergo. . . .), is the savior of the world, the fellow-sufferer who understands, extending his infinite tender care to enlighten all beings. Now one could of course say that here too these beings are only "revealed" to be practicing this path by the Lotus itself, and that it is really thus "the same person in the Lotus" who is the saviour of the world. But this is still different from what we have in Whitehead, for several reasons.
First, it is still the individual element so sublated or prehended into this new context who is attributed with the whole salvific function, not the prehending whole itself; each being will be a Buddha. Second, the relation between the being prior to "opening the provisional to reveal the real"—for example, before the sravakas know that they are actually Bodhisattvas—and after this revelation, differs from the relation between the individual person and that person in God. For in this case, it is unmistakably the "same person"—indeed, even the same practices, which are now reread as being instances of the Buddha vehicle, as the Buddha's own activity, precisely because they are exclusions of it, as discussed earlier. Their very partiality and one-sidedness is what does the accomplishing of the Bodhisattva work here; they are Buddhas precisely and only in that they are not Buddhas, or they are God not as the
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encompassing prehender but as the individual benighted parts that stand to be prehended. No other model will allow us to overcome the one-sided notion of sameness or difference pertaining to these two conditions, In the Lotus, the sravakas are truly saving the world while being sravakas, and precisely by being sravakas; the same goes for anyone who utters Namo Buddha with a distracted mind, slightly lowers his head, and so on. It is the condition of these beings, or of the definiteness of these beings and these specific practices, to be not merely definite, to be ambiguous, or in T'ien-tai terms, definiteness itself is necessarily also indefiniteness, precisely by being definiteness (Provisional Positing is Emptiness is the Mean); it demands to be opened up and revealed to mean more than it seemed to, not as an extra action upon it added from outside, but as a part of what it is to be definite (a Provisional Posit) in the first place. This is because just by being what they are and not being sublated, they are sublated; by excluding their own future Buddhahood (practicing the sravaka path, and so forth) they are embodying, performing, exemplifying their Buddhahood.
With this understanding of the T'ien-t'ai doctrine of inherent entailment (xingju), explicating a kind of presence precisely as absence itself, we can make a few further observations. First of all, we may compare inherent entailment to the givenness of the eternal objects mentioned above. Tien-t'ai famously proclaims that "all three thousand quiddities are inherently entailed in every moment of experience" (yinian sanqian); on the surface level this would seem to imply an even more inexorable and perhaps dogmatic givenness than any Whitehead could have dreamed of for his Eternal Objects, since it implies in effect that every object is an eternal object, none can ever be extricated from existence, and all are as it were "built-in" to the nature of all things. But now we can perhaps see that although the three thousand specific forms of existence are indeed in a certain sense more "given" than the eternal objects, this is to be understood in a sense that allows them also to be radically contingent, since their presence can equally be instantiated by their very absence. This makes them less given than the putative givenness of eternal objects, since givenness itself is rethought here, eliminating its dogmatic character; it is, if you will, brought to the extreme, on the venerable Chinese principle of "things brought to the extreme reverse into their opposite." Their given presence is instantiated equally by their absence.
This of course brings us to the question of Emptiness, as elaborated into the T'ien-t'ai Three Truths, and whether Whitehead's critique of substance ontology adequately covers the same ground. For what is revealed by the Three Truths is that there is more to Emptiness than an emphasis on flux or critique of substance ontology. The doctrine that
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actual occasions are "always becoming, but never are" cannot do the job of Emptiness, because the latter calls into question not only the "substance" of entities, in the Aristotelean sense of "what can exist apart," but the definite identity of what is in flux. It means not only that "this X here" is what it is only through its prehension of other entities, and perishes as soon as it establishes itself, and cannot "exist apart" from them, cannot be in any one location to the exclusion of others, and so on. The Buddhist position criticizes not only the substantiality, independence and simple location of any given X, but the notion that "X as determinate means that X excludes non-X, and cannot be equally legitimately read as non-X." On the T'ien-t'ai reading, the determinateness and indeterminateness of X, X as X and as non-X, are one and the same, are alternate names for the same fact.
This brings us back to what may be called, from a T'ien-t'ai perspective, the basic problem of process thought: the ultimacy of the categories "one," "many," and "creativity," without disclosing their reversibility. Whitehead calls these the "category of the ultimate" and implies that they cannot be further derived or reduced.[26] The T'ien-t'ai position, on the other hand, is that they can indeed be reduced—to each other. They are three ways of stating the same thing. Oneness is manyness is creativity, and to say any one of them is to say the other two. For Whitehead, it would seem, oneness and manyness are distinct but inseparable aspects of any actual occasion, always co-present and indeed merely abstractions from the occasion, to be sure, but nonetheless two different things that may be legitimately said about the occasion. This is why the active-passive and the whole-part relations within actual occasions remain unilateral. In T'ien-t'ai, on the other hand, they are identical—it is not just the case that every one is also a many, or that every entity is at once one and many, but rather that oneness itself is manyness itself. Each turns out to be the other, in accordance with Mobius strip structure of the Three Truths and the way it allows us to view the presence of the absent, and the relation of being-X to not-being-X.
The inherent self-negation of any actual entity is, we may say, its necessary inner structure; it is not merely that whatever appears also disappears, or even that it disappears as soon as it appears, but rather that its appearing is its perishing, its determination as some X is also its indetermination, its ambiguation, which overcomes Whitehead's duality of one and many as inseparable but absolutely different aspects of each occasion, which is what passivizes the prehended past and allows God to slip in as the encompassing prehender whose role differs from that of the prehended parts. And indeed, if we may say so, this is perhaps why Whitehead sometimes feels so flat and uninspiring in spite of his profundity—the "selfness" of actual occasions remains ultimately unex-
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ploded, since each is just itself. Along the same lines, we may say that the true "tragedy" of what Whitehead poignantly calls the tragic beauty of existence[27] is not adequately expressed by his notion "perpetual perishing"; the true tragic beauty of the Three Truths lies in the fact that every quiddity wants what it does not want, is what it is not, and is eternally in conflict with itself, and its "harmony" subsists only in the form of this genuine conflict, not merely an aesthetic contrast of mutual non-inhibition of genuinely distinct entities. Each entity is contrasted to itself, which is where the true tragedy and the true beauty lies. Whitehead's system turns this into merely someone or something else, another Subsequent actual occasion, contradicting this quiddity. Continuity and discontinuity are here separated; we end up with both too much "self"—each thing is just itself, period—and too little "self"—not enough for anything to bite its own tail and devastate itself.
This leads us to a conclusion that is perhaps surprising in its very unsurprisingness, for it simply restates what everyone teaches his students the first day when indicating the difference between Buddhism, even in its most wildly devotional Mahayana forms, and any kind of theism. The issue is not one of anthropomorphism; for the ultimate nature of the universe, the source and ground and end of all entities is in T'ien-t'ai certainly as anthropomorphic as it is non-anthropomorphic; man is the end of all, the source of all, and the same can be said even of this particular man, or this particular aspect of this man—but it can equally be said that it is, say, just as penomorphic as it is non-penomorphic; this pen is the source, ground, and end of all entities. Anthropomorphism, then, is not the issue. Rather, the decisive line that divides sinitic Buddhism from any kind of theism lies in the doctrine of universal Buddhahood. As the clichéé has it, in Buddhism any one may (must) become a Buddha, while in theism the created being can never become God himself. This cliché, it would seem, holds true even in the relation between the most expanded, Buddhistically-inclined forms of theism and the superficially most theistic form of Buddhism. We may say that the notion of universal Buddhahood here continues to separate Buddhist thinking decisively from any approximation in theistic-influenced philosophy, whatever other similarities there may be.
endnotes
[1].
Steven Odin, Process Metaphysics
and Hua-yen Buddhism: A Critical
Study
of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration
(Albany; State
University of New York Press, 1982), p.110.
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[2]. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 94.
[3]. "Thus the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. ..." (Whitehead, Process and Reality, [New York: Harper, 1929], p. 53; hereafter cited as PR).
[8]. It should be noted that post-Whitehead process thought has often taken Whitehead to task for the latter two of these three points (that is, the passivity of the past and the reality of the Eternal Objects), which are often modified in more recent process philosophy and theology. The first point, on the other hand, concerning definiteness as satisfaction, seems to be accepted by all process thinkers.
[9]. See chapter 20 of Kumarajiva's version, T9.50b-51c.
[10]. As Zhiyi says in the Fahuaxuanyi, "Once the gate of the provisional upaya has been opened up to reveal the true real-mark, precisely the former body is seen to be the perfect eternal body, precisely the former teachings are the perfect leaching, and precisely the former practices and the former principles and ideas all turn out to be the true and real ones" (T33.691.b.9-ll).
[14].Ibid.,T9.42c. Kern translates the analogous passage from the Sanskrit version: "For the Tathagata sees the triple world as it really is: it is not born, it dies not; it is not conceived, it springs not into existence; it moves not in a whirl, it becomes not extinct; it is not real, not unreal; it is not existing, nor non-existing; it is not such, not otherwise, nor false" (Kern, Lotus of the True Law [Oxford: Clarendon, 1909], p. 302).
[16]. Compare, for example, Zhili's assertion that when Guanyin responds to the stimulus of sentient beings, it is equally adequate to say that both stimulus and response come from the self, or that both come from the other, or that the two work together as both stimulus and response, or none of the above (Ibid., T34.892b, 920b). In other words, the agency of the event can be located at any point within it, or in the whole, or nowhere; none of these are exclusively true, but all of these are provisionally true and equally adequate descriptions for certain sentient beings.
[17]. Kern's translation from the Sanskrit (True Law, p. 293). A literal translation of the corresponding verse in Kumarajiva's translation would read: "I attained supreme enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree near the city of Gaya, and turned the supreme wheel of the Dharma; thus did I teach and transform them, and bring about their initial arisal of bodhicitta.... Now I tell you truly,) have been teaching and transforming them for long ages" (Fahuaxuanyi, T.9.41b).
[27]. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Mentor, 1955), pp. 294-295.
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chinese glossary
Hua-yan 華嚴
Kaiquan xianshi 開權顯實
Jiadi 假諦
Sandi 三諦
T'ien-t'ai 天台
Xingju 性具
Zhili 知體
Zhiyi 智顗