Tao-shengs Commentary on the Lotus Sutra:

·期刊原文
Tao-sheng's Commentary on the Lotus Sutra: A Study and Translation.
By Young-he Kim

Reviewed by George J. Tanabe, Jr
Philosophy East and West

Volume 42, No.2

1992:04

Pp.351-355

Copyright by University of Hawaii Press

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P351

Tao-sheng (ca.360-434)holds an important place in the history
of Chinese Buddhism as one of the earliest proponents of the
theory of sudden enlightenment and the universality of the
Buddha nature. Almost all of his works, unfortunately, have
been lost or survive only in excerpted, fragmentary form, and
the only complete work that has come down to our own time is
his commentary on the Lotus Sutra. Young-he Kim, assistant
professor of philosophy at Inha University in Korea, presents
a complete translation of this difficult text, and adds to it
an introduction (PartI)and a critical study (PartII). One
reviewer (cited on the back cover)

P.352

says that Kim "has exhaustively and carefully reviewed all
the existing research in English, Chinese, and Japanese. He
presents the material in a straightforward manner, tightly
reasoned, and fully documented."

A careful reading of the book, however, does not bear out
this praise. Following the Preface is a Prolegomena in which
Kim raises the first of his two main concerns: Tao-sheng's
identity as a Buddhist in the light of his heavy reliance on
Neo-Taoist and, to a lesser degree, Confucian, terms and
ideas. We are given two alternatives: "Either...Tao-sheng was
far ahead of his time in grasping the essence of the Buddhist
doctrines, or he deviated from the traditional Indian
Buddhist presentation and thinking" [p. xiii). The question
is raised repeatedly (pp.48, 84-86, and 105-106)and is
answered repeatedly along predictable lines: Tao- sheng was
essentially a Buddhist using Neo-Taoist terms to explain his
Buddhism. The issue is an old one, largely resolved, and is a
reflection of kim's use of work done by scholars from the
1930s to the 1960s. Having shown Tao-sheng to have been a
true Buddhist, Kim apparently regards him as having being
"ahead of his time."

As background, chapter one gives us Tao-sheng's "prehistory,"
in which we are told that Buddhist studies before Tao-sheng
was largely a syncretic attempt to overcome the differences
between that foreign religion and indigenous thought, and
that Northern Buddhism was more practical than the largely
philosophical Southern Buddhism. The brief biography in
chapter two also employs broad generalizations that describe
Hui-yuuan as a conservative,"more or less a dualist," while
Tao-sheng is more liberal and has a "somewhat monistic tinge"
(p.16). Both the dualist and the monist embrace Maadhyamika
philosophy. The description of Tao-sheng's writings in
chapter three is straightforward but unaware of another
opinion concerning the date of the Lotus Suutra commentary.
Kim dates it at 432 and thus regards it as a statement of
Tao-sheng's mature thought, and makes no reference to Whalen
Lai's dating of 406-413 and his characterization of the
commentary as being unrepresentative of his later thinking.'

Kim's second and primary concern centers on an apparent
contradiction he discovers and then tries to resolve. Rather
than deal with the problem in a direct manner, Kim spreads
out his discussion over several chapters. As indicated in the
Prolegomena (p.xv), the problem is that while Tao-sheng is
known for his theory of sudden enlightenment, he advocates a
gradual approach in his commentary to the Lotus Suutra. In
chapter four, "Tao-sheng's Doctrines," kim characterizes the
idea of sudden enlightenment as Chinese and Mahaayaana in
contrast to the gradual approach, which is more Indian and
Hiinayaana (pp.30-31), and again does not refer to previous
researchers on this issue, mainly Whalen Lai, who regards
Tao-sheng's early subitism as being "by no means Mahaayaana
inspired."(2)or Luis O. Gomez' observation that the whole

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sudden-gradual dichotomy was "a part of Chinese culture and
not an idea introduced with Buddhism."(3)A final discussion
of the problem of Tao-sheng's internal contradiction is left
for chapter eight. Part I ends with chapter five, a
description of Tao-sheng's influence on other schools.

Part II, "A Critical Study of Tao-sheng's Commentary on
the Lotus Sutra," begins with a description of how Tao-sheng
was probably introduced to the Lotus Suutra through
Kumaarajiiva in Ch'ang-an. Kim notes that Tao-sheng wrote his
commentary using material from other writers, and that
therefore there is a problem with identifying just which
ideas are Tao-sheng's and which are from others. Having
raised the issue, Kim characteristically postpones his
examination until later.

Chapter seven, "Literary Aspects," is somewhat of a
misnomer, since it deals with some of Tao-sheng's major
ideas, the subject also of the next chapter. The most
important idea is li, but Kim's main discussion of it does
not come until chapter eight. Other ideas are discussed to
demonstrate once again that Tao-sheng was a Buddhist
appropriating Neo-Taoist terms for his purposes.

Chapter eight, "Central Ideas," is the most important
section in which Kim tries to resolve the problem of
Tao-sheng's contradiction of himself. In returning to a
discussion of li, Kim notes that its indivisibility admits of
no stages and therefore must be apprehended instantaneously
as a whole, and yet li is also conceived of as something
which, in Tao-sheng's own words, "'cannot be arrived at
instantaneously"' (p.130). Li must be arrived at in stages,
and this gradualist view "seemingly contradicts" the doctrine
of sudden enlightenment. On the reverent assumption that
Tao-sheng cannot be found to be contradictory, Kim engages in
some tortured, sometimes blind, reasoning to rescue Tao-sheng
from his inconsistency, which, oddly enough, Kim believes
himself to be the first to notice. What this means is that no
one else has noticed it before, and this in turn means that
Tao-sheng therefore could not have shifted his position to
produce the contradiction (Kimis now discovering!)because "it
is highly improbable that such a radical change in his theory
of enlightenment would have gone unrecorded anywhere,
unnoticed by any historian, and unmentioned by Tao-sheng
himself' (p.131). This is a rather astounding statement in a
book whose main contribution is to point out the existence of
something that, it is now being said, could not have existed
because no one else has pointed it out before. Tao-sheng "may
have shifted his initial position on the issue of
enlightenment" (p.130), but Kim rejects this possibility on
the grounds that "there is no record of such a momentous
shift..." (p.131). How can Kim have translated Tao- sheng's
commentary as the record of Tao-sheng's gradualist view that
contradicts his subitism, and say that there is no record of
such a momentous shift? Kim insists that what he himself is
pointing out as the shift that took place

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in Tao-sheng's thought did not really take place! Now you see
it, now you don't. Where is the tight reasoning?

Kim is apparently not aware of the contradiction in his
own statements, and thus proceeds to assume in spite of
himself that Tao-sheng's contradiction does exist and
therefore needs to be resolved. There is a desperate quality
to Kim's arguments as he shifts from one possible explanation
to another, rejecting some, recommending others. Could it be
that the li his commentary is not really the li
enlightenment? No, that cannot be true, since the range of ii
in the commentary embraces "mystic comprehension" (p.130).
Tao-sheng could not have simply contradicted himself, for
people would have noticed if he did. Maybe the "ideas in the
commentary may not necessarily represent Tao-sheng's original
thinking" (p.131). Tao-sheng did say that he used older
materials in writing his commentary, and since he could not
have shifted his position, then it must mean that the
contradictory portions represent someone else's thinking.
Kim's final answer, actually two in number, is given in his
explanation of how it is that "two apparently conflicting
theories of enlightenment need not remain incompatible" (p.
131).

The first solution is to understand that there are two
different phases in a single complex process. In this way,
Tao-sheng's gradualist theory can be seen as referring only
to the first phase of the total process, the culminating
point of which should be an instantaneous breakthrough, which
"Tao-sheng somehow does not happen to mention in the
commentary" (p.131). If Tao-sheng did not mention it, is Kim
reading in too much? Aware of this possibility, Kim claims
that the unmentioned idea of sudden enlightenment was
"intimated" by Tao-sheng (p.131). The second solution (andit
is different from the first)is to see gradual and sudden as
being "two alternative approaches merely to the first half of
a single process, the other half being equivalent to what was
to be called later culrivation...(p. 132) . The sudden
approach can thus be selected as one of two alternatives
comprising the first phase, but in the first of Kim's
solutions the sudden aspect is the second phase of the
process. Which is it? Kim seems to be unaware of the
difference.

Apparently Kim was not convinced by his own arguments,
for, in chapter nine,"Traces of Tao-sheng's Doctrines," he
raises the issue of the contradiction again. Tao-sheng's
gradualism, he notes, requires that one "accumulate one bit
of goodness after another" (p.138). Earlier Kim had said the
opposite: "salvation consists not so much in an increment of
positive elements as in a decrement of negative ones, not in
progression but in retrogression" (p.88). Nothing new is
proposed as a solution for the contradiction, and the book
ends with chapter ten, "Conclusions," in which Tao-sheng is
hailed for being faithful to the Lotus Suutra and Indian
Buddhism (whateverthat might be), for synthesizing Indian and
Chinese thought, for being a practitioner as well as a
theoretician, and for his

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"probable" impact on other writers whether they "realized or
acknowledged it" (p.145)or not.

Though he lists Peter Gregory's book on sudden and
gradual enlightenment in his bibliography, Kim does not cite
from it. Had he used Gregory's book, much of the torture
could have been taken out of his arguments, for there he
would have found sophisticated explanations of how "the
subitist on one occasion may well espouse a number of
doctrinal positions held by the gradualist on another,"(4)or
how "any doctrine that satisfactorily 'accounts' for sudden
enlightenment becomes thereby a
gradualist doctrine."(5)

In contrast to the first part of the book, which is
confusing, contradictory, and uninformed, the second half
comprising the translation is a real contribution to
scholarship. We give far too little credit to translators, as
if somehow translating is a mechanical process requiring no
thought. Kim has made Tao-sheng easily accessible in English,
and for that he deserves our respect and gratitude. As if Kim
does not have enough of his own problems in the book, he
could have been spared the many typographi- cal errors (pp.
xiii, 33, 43, 49, 97, 105, 123, 127, 137, 140, 145, 146, 147,
189, and so on)that threaten to become one of the trademarks
of SUNY Press.

Notes

1- Whalen Lai,"Tao-sheng's Theory of Sudden Enlightenment
Re-examined, " in Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to
Enlightenment in Chinese Thought, ed. Peter Gregory
(Honolulu:University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp.
181-182.

2-- lbid., p. 77.
3-- Luis O. Gomez, "Purifying Cold: The Metaphor of Effort
and Intuition in Buddhist Thought and Practice," in Sudden
and Gradual, p. 69.

4-- Peter N. Gregory, "Introduction," in Sudden and Gradual, p.6.

5-- Luis O. Gomez, "Purifying Cold," p. 85.