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As there is craving, there is suffering.
As there is the cessation of craving, there is the cessation of suffering.
Gautama the Buddha discovered the nature of reality as conditioned co-origination (pratiitya-samutpaada) or "As this is, that is also." He would neither reduce all effects to one ontological source (satkaaryavaada) or regard the effects to be so random as to have no necessary linkage with what went before. He trod the Middle Path between eternalism and annihilationism. China, on the other hand, had no concept comparable to cause and effect on a mechanical model before the arrival of Buddhism. In an earlier article[1], I have shown how this had led to a peculiar system of four causation theories leading to the infinite, organic and self-generative universe of the Hua-yen[a] school. In the short piece below, I will examine four fairly early appreciations of pratiitya-samutpaada in China, two of foreign masters and two of native sons: Kumaarajiiva, Buddhabhadra, Tao-sheng[b] and Fa-yao.[c] The purpose is to show the available options and the sinitic responses; the Chinese seemed to prefer their own innovative approaches.
1. Kumaarajiiva. Kumaarajiiva was a prince of Kucha who studied Sarvaastivaada at Kashmir before his conversion to Mahaayaana by way of `Suunyavaada (Emptiness) under Sutyasoma at Kashgar. His biography relates this change of heart and the bone of contention between the two schools:
When he heard that the skandhas (heaps: form, sensation, perception, will, consciousness), the aayatanas (the six faculties) and the dhaatus (the six faculties plus their respective objects and the connecting awareness) were empty, lacking any characteristics, he was taken aback. He asked (Satyasoma) what the (Mahaayaana)suutras could possibly have to permit them to so destroy (such rational) dharmas,
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realities. He was told that the eye-organ and the various dharmas are indeed not real. Since Kumaarajiiva considered them otherwise, the two parties debated over and over again until at long last, Kumaarajiiva recognized the truth of his opponent. Henceforth he devoted himself to the Vaipulya suutras, confessing that he had till then known only Hinayaana like a person who cannot recognize the worth of gold and who mistakes as precious ore the mere sand.[2]
It appears that as a Sarvaastivaadin, Kumaarajiiva considered reality to be breakable into discrete parts. The eye-organ that becomes aware of the object-form is real. The organ, the awareness (consciousness) and the form are interdependent, but, as components, rationally discrete. He was told that they were in fact uniformly empty. The story goes that he was converted and he excelled in his study of the Maadhyamika philosophy. However, as his fame spread, his former Sarvaastivaada teacher, Bandhudatta came to inquire how he could have so changed his heart. Kumaarajiiva replied, "Because Maahayaana is profound and pure; it recognizes the emptiness of all things, whereas Hinayaana is biased and arrested in name-and-form." His former teacher however charged Kumaarajiiva with nihilism.
Awesome indeed your teaching about the emptiness of all sounds. However, could that not be abandoning reality in an obsession with nihilism? There was once a madman who demanded that his weaver make him a cloth with the finest of threads. The weaver complied and wove one with threads as fine as dust itself. The madman was not satisfied, saying how coarse that was. In frustration, the weaver pointed to the empty air, claiming that was the finest of threads. "How is it that I cannot see it? " asked the madman. The weaver answered, "If I as a man of the trade cannot see it, how much less can you?" The madman was well pleased. He accepted the man's wisdom and paid him well for the woven cloth. I am afraid your talk about this (illusive) emptiness amounts to much the same.[3]
It took Kumaarajiiva a month of patient explanation to convince his teacher
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who then willingly placed himself as his student. The ineffable paramaartha (highest truth) was shown to be no deception. We do not know what Kumaarajiiva's understanding of Emptiness was from these biographical notes. We do regard him to be standing in the tradition of Naagaarjuna himself. We may grasp his position somewhat through an unfortunate incident.
2. Buddhabhadra. Arriving in Ch'ang-an[d] in 410, Buddhabhadra came into conflict with Kumaarajiiva and had to leave. Several factors were involved: personality, attitude toward precepts and meditation as well as doctrinal preferences. Buddhabhadra came from Kashmir, a strong Sarvaastivaada center and his biography contains the following tale of a possible friction between the two masters over the understanding of emptiness:
The Prince of Chin, Hung,[e] wanted to hear Buddhabhadra teach, so he summoned a meeting of the various monks for a discussion at the Eastern Palace. Kumaarajiiva and Buddhabhadra conversed several rounds. Then Kumaarajiiva asked, 'Why are the dharmas said to be empty? " Buddhabhadra answered, "Tiny atoms constitute form; the form has no self-nature. Therefore even as there are forms, they are always empty."[4] "If you so destroy (both) form and emptiness by reliance on these atoms, what then destroys the atom? " "There are those who insist on destroying the individual atoms, but I would not do so." "Are you saying that they are permanent? " Buddhabhadra answered, "By the one atom are the various atoms emptied. By the various atoms is the one atom emptied." At the time, Pao-yun[f] who translated this sentence did not fully understand the meaning, and the monks and laymen in attendance thought Buddhabhadra to be proposing permanency for the atoms. Some days later, the learned monks of Ch'ang-an invited Buddhabhadra to speak and he said, "The dharmas are not caused by themselves; they are born of the confluence of conditions. Conditioned by the one atom are the various atoms. The atom has no self-nature; it is therefore empty. Can it still be said that the one atom is not destroyed, that it is permanent and not empty?" This would seem to be the real intention in his previous exchange.[5]
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It appears that Kumaarajiiva reacted to Buddhabhadra because the latter reminded him of his former attachment to the atom (anu) theory of reality. There are scholars who think that perhaps Buddhabhadra still carried that legacy. However, Buddhabhadra was clearly not trying to reduce reality to eternal atoms. His refusal not to destroy the atom was to avoid the nihilist bias. He would, as Kumarajiva's lead-off remark recognizes, "destroy (both) form and emptiness (or: the thesis that form is empty)."[6] Instead, he proposed how one atom can destroy as well as establish all the other atoms and vice versa This would suggest that he had in mind the worldview of the Avata.msaka-suutra, which he did later translate. Here, pratiitya-samutpaada does not so much mean "emptiness" or "relativity," but rather "holism" and "interrelatedness.'' Thus Kumaarajiiva's understanding of Emptiness was from the standpoint of one systematically negating the realist's misperception of phenomenal realities as somehow real; for Kumaarajiiva, all forms and names are indeed empty. Buddhabhadra however seems to operate on a different level, what might be called the more noumenal Dharmadhaatu in which the elements (dhaatus) of realities (dharma) are some how transmuted to become one with Dharmadhaatu, holistically interfused with one another. This is the "higher" causality the Hua-yen (Avatamsaka) school would later prefer.
3. Tao-sheng. China did not have words for 'cause' and 'effect' as we or as the Indians understood by those terms. She had to use the words "yin"[g] (cause, base) to translate hetu (cause) and "kuo" [h] (literally fruit) to render phala (effect). For pratyaya (the in-between variable, the condition) China used "yuan"[i] (the edge, to go along). Instead of mechanical cause-effect, China was more charmed by the biogenerative pen-mo,[j] base-and-end, or, trunk-and-branch. The one naturally grows into the other, like parents would to their offsprings. Or else China spoke of kan-yin,[k] stimulus-and-response, such as an increase in the yin[l] (feminine), cold, element in the cosmos touching off a response in the yin element in man. It is inevitable that as the Chinese learned to appreciate the Buddhist causation theory, they should also try to blend that insight into their native one. Kumaarajiiva had taught the emptiness of all phenomena; Buddhabhadra had underscored the interlacery of all elements. . . and the Chinese would try to figure out how, on a more personalistic scale, the Buddha who embodied Emptiness
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would respond to things in this world.
Tao-sheng proposed a theory of yin-yu-yuan,[m] responses having a condition. The world yin is taken from kan-yin (stimulus and response); the word yuan is taken from yin-yuan (cause and condition); their fusion should tell of a Sino-Buddhist innovation. We have lost Tao-sheng's thesis, but Chun-ch'eng's[n] Ta-ch'eng shih-lu hsuan-i[o] recalls:
The Dharma master Sheng used to say, "(The Buddha) responds(chao:[p] literally, to "reflect" like a mirror would) to conditions (yuan) based upon his wisdom." This reference to response being (a function) of wisdom means that it is (the Buddha's) activated mind (tso-hsin)[q] that responds. Present masters all agree with this.[7]
From the context, it seems that the subject is the Buddha and his transcendental wisdom, praj~naa Ideally speaking, by itself, the Buddha is wu-hsin,[r] no-mind. He is impartial. Out of his compassion, he responds to the mundane conditions of men, like a mirror would reflect worldly images. This is done through his activated mind (tso-hsin), and he would so interrupt his no-mind composure because he was empathetic toward men. Thus Hui-ta[s] in his Chao-lu-shu[t] recalls:
Dharma master Sheng says kan-yin yu yuan, stimulus and response have conditions. Maybe it is because both (Buddha and men) were born in the realm of suffering and therefore he can commiserate with us, or, because of cravings (assumed by the bodhisattva), both are in bondage, or, because as there is the Good Dharma, the way (to liberation) is so revealed. All these are, however, due to the mind that responds.[8]
The mindless cannot respond. The Buddha willingly responds by adopting a mind commenceable with men's. That empathy is the yuan, the condition or pre-condition for divine responses. Although this is not exactly a theory of causality in the Indian sense, it is a theory of how the transcausative or nirvanic Buddha can nonetheless function, out of his psychic compassion, with the human condition.
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4. Fa-yao. It is somewhat ironic that Tao-sheng should propose yin-yu-yuan or response requiring conditions as a Buddhist theory, because in one sense, it is just the old kan-yin theory in Hen Confucianism. Heaven and the Sage are likewise impartial (wu-hsin, having no particularized mind with its usual subjective emotions), yet both can respond to human kind through an adopted mental function. The Sage can tso-hsin, activate his human mind, in response to men; Heaven has a "mind of Heaven" (t'ien-hsin)[u] that can touch off elemental responses in mortals who share the same yin-yang[v] endowments. What Tao-sheng called yuan (condition or pre-condition) is merely the shared constitution, the micro-macrocosmic parallels. However, by emphasizing this common factor, Tao-sheng injected a temporal element, a concomitant condition (pratyaya) for the cause or response to take effect. It is only natural that Fa-yao should amend this theory with a more radical yin-wu-yuan[w] alternative: response does not require any condition or mediating factor. This is how Hui-ta recalls it:
However, Dharma master Yao ardently argued for the absence of any condition. He cited as support the case of Vairocana, the Sun Buddha. All Buddha-bodies participate in this one Vairocana. It is only in the trace aspect (chih)[x] that differences appear.[9]
It would appear that Fa-yao was drawing more from the Avata.msaka tradition. The Sun Buddha is the personified Dharmakaaya in whom all other Buddhas immediately are one and the same. The substance is One;only the trace manifestations are many. Since the latter (chih or yung,[y] function) is never aside from the former (as pen, origin or basis), communications between Buddhas are magically instantaneous.[10] Or, as the Avata.msaka-suutra would put it, in the Dharmadhaatu that is the Net of Indra, the mirroring gems at every intersection of the warp and woof of the net reflect instantaneously all other mirroring gems. There is no time lapse between the kan and the yin (stimulus and response), or, cause and effect. All is One and One is All. Cause and effect fuse and understandably, there is no need to require a condition as the intermediate variable between cause and effect. Therefore, responses are without the need of condition, wu-yuan.
Conclusion. Causality is admittedly one of the central issues in philo-
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sophy for it deals with the structure and relation between events in time. In India, causality is doubly important because the understanding of the nature of karmic cause and effect holds the key to liberation from that chain. China, however, pursued a different outlook, drawn perhaps primarily on her understanding of the juxtaposition of finite patterns in the Time/Space structure of the I Ching hexagrams. Consequently she favours more an almost nontemporal, instantaneous, symbiotic stimulus-and-response between kindred elements, Heaven and men, impassive Sages and sentient humanity. China brought that more humanistic appreciation to her understanding of the almost impersonal Buddhist analysis of causality. In the above very brief survey of early options, we see first Kumaarajiiva's Emptiness philosophy and refutation of the Sarvaastivaada Realism. In an unfortunate misunderstanding, Buddhabhadra was mistaken by him to have still preserved that Sarvaastivaadin fixation with eternal atoms. However, as we argued, perhaps Buddhabhadra had a more Hua-yen-esque understanding of the total interdependence of the finest of elements in the one Dharmadhaatu. Now although Tao-sheng proposed a kind of mystical empathy between the impassive Buddha and the sentient lot, so that response grew out of shared conditions, Fa-yao had the last word in envisioning an instantaneous reaction or interaction between Buddhas in the same Vairocana. If we use later sinitic Mahaayaana categories to understand these differences, then Kumaarajiiva represents the systematic negation of phenomenal realities while Buddhabhadra the realization of the noumenal unity of all in the One. In that sense, Tao-sheng addresses the issue of the transcendental One in relation to the mundane many, while Fa-yao declares the perfect harmony of the enlightened Many in the One. So, already in the fifth century, China was groping for her Four Dharmadhaatus.[11]
1. Whalen Lai, "Chinese Buddhist Causation Theories: An Analysis of Sinitic Mahayana Understanding of Pratiitya-samutpaada," Philosophy East and West 27, no. 3, 1977.
2. T, (for Taisho Daizokyo) 50, p. 330c
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3. Ibid., p. 331ab.
4. Wei-se ch'ang-k'ung[z] : perhaps wei is chi corrupted, i.e. "As it is form, it is also always empty."
5. T. 50, p. 335a.
6. P'o-se-k'ung[aa]: not simply destroying form.
7. Cited by T'ang Yuna-t'ung, Han Wei liang-Chin Nan-pei-chao Fo-chiao-shih (Peking: Chung-hua reissue, 1955), p. 650.
8. Cited by T'ang, p. 650.
9. Cited by T'ang, p. 691, with emendations.
10. T'ang, p. 691, has a somewhat different reading.
11. Roughly: shih (Kumaarajiiva), li (Buddhabhadra), shih-li wu-ai (Tao-sheng) and shih-shih wu-ai (Fa-yao).
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