Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism

·期刊原文
Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism, by Peter N. Gregory
Reviewed by T. Griffith Foulk
The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol.114 No.3
July-Sep 1994
Pp.487-4891
COPYRIGHT American Oriental Society 1994

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This comprehensive, meticulously researched study of the life and
thought of the scholar monk Kuei-feng Tsung-mi (780-841) shines a
well-deserved spotlight on a multi-faceted thinker who was, by any
standard, a major player on the intellectual stage in medieval
China. In doing so, the book also illuminates the social, political,
and religious contexts in which Tsung-mi's writings were produced
and shows how his work represented an adaptation of Buddhist
doctrines and practices to the Chinese cultural milieu.
Previous research on Tsung-mi, most of it published in Japanese, has
focused largely on his role as a historian who chronicled the
lineages of early Ch'an (Zen) and championed his own line of
filiation (the Ho-tse branch of the "southern lineage" of Ch'an) as
the best. Considerable attention has also been paid to Tsung-mi's
contribution to the Hua-yen (Kegon) tradition, which subsequently
claimed him as its fifth "patriarch." Author Peter Gregory is very
well versed in the Japanese scholarship and uses it to good
advantage. He is not taken in, however, by its simplistic caricature
of Tsung-mi as a "syncretist" who tried to bridge the gap between
Ch'an (characterized as a "mind-to-mind transmission" of
enlightenment) and the textually based "teachings" of exegetical
traditions such as Hua-yen. Gregory's elucidation of the complex
philosophical, ethical, and social considerations that influenced
Tsung-mi's intellectual project is both broader in scope and more
nuanced than the accounts found in most previous studies.
The book is divided into four parts. Part one, entitled "Tsung-mi's
Life," collates autobiographical data gleaned from Tsung-mi's own
writings, references to the monk found in other contemporaneous
documents, and formal accounts of his life given in later Chinese
biographies. Gregory brackets the hagiographical elements and
normative judgments that are found in both the classical Chinese and
modern Japanese biographies of Tsung-mi and declines to engage in
the gratuitous psychologizing sometimes found in modern Western
biographies of religious figures. The result is a thorough and
judicious recounting of the historical evidence: a biography of
Tsung-mi which, though sparse, comes as close as possible to
attaining the ideals of objectivity and reliability. Gregory takes
special care to present the evidence for Tsung-mi's classical
Confucian education as a youth and to document his subsequent
interactions with various Buddhist teachers, scholar-officials, and
political figures. He also describes the monastic centers and
traditions of Buddhist practice in Tsung-mi's native Szechwan that
the monk knew most intimately. Part one thus provides a social and
historical context for the interpretation of Tsung-mi's thought in
the remainder of the book.
Part two comprises four chapters on "Doctrinal Classification"
(p'an-chiao), which is widely regarded by scholars today as one of
the most distinctive features of medieval Chinese Buddhist thought.
Gregory's primary aim is to elucidate Tsung-mi's p'an-chiao scheme,
but his treatment of its antecedents is so thoroughgoing that part
two could stand alone as a monograph on the background and
progressive development of doctrinal classification in the Hua-yen
tradition. Gregory carefully details the various ways in which
Tsung-mi's p'an-chiao differed from those of his Hua-yen
predecessors, most notably Chih-yen (602-68) and Fa-tsang (643-712).
His main thesis is that Tsung-mi's formulation was essentially
soteriological in intent: it mapped out stages of understanding on
the path to Buddhahood. Earlier Hua-yen thinkers, in contrast, were
either preoccupied with the hermeneutical problem of how to
reconcile the apparent contradictions between different sutras that
were all presumed to be the word of the Buddha, or intent on
proving, for sectarian purposes, the superiority of the Hua-yen
Sutra. Gregory concludes that Tsung-mi's concern with soteriology
reflected the influence of Ch'an on Chinese Buddhism in the eighth
and early ninth centuries, and that it represented a radical shift
in Hua-yen hermeneutics.
Part three, entitled "The Ground of Practice," contains the most
ambitious and potentially controversial chapters in the book. It
begins by outlining what Gregory refers to as Tsung-mi's "cosmogonic
map." This is a five-stage diagram of the process of "phenomenal
evolution" through which: (1) the ultimate ground of being -
identified with the "one mind" of perfect enlightenment, the true
dharmadhatu, and the tathagatagarbha (2) divided against itself and
produced an aspect of mind that is subject to birth-and-death as
well as one that is unconditioned and unchanging, (3) allowed a
differentiation in the mind of birth-and-death between the (relative
and conditioned) states of enlightenment and delusion, (4) produced
in the deluded mind a false sense of separation between a perceiving
subject and perceived objects, and (5) gave rise in that framework
to (a) mental discrimination, (b) awareness of pleasure and pain,
(c) attachment, (d) conceptual elaboration, (e) activity (karma)
based on such attachments and concepts, and finally (f) the
suffering of karmic bondage in which ordinary beings find
themselves. Gregory calls this schematic diagram of the etiology of
deluded sentient existence a "cosmogony" because it is a theory
"regarding the birth or creation of the universe" or a "description
of the original order of the universe" (p. 175, n. 5). In Tsung-mi's
view, each of the stages in the process of phenomenal evolution
could be countered and undone by bringing to bear a particular set
of Buddhist doctrines and practices, thus reversing the process in a
systematic manner and enabling one eventually to move from the state
of suffering in karmic bondage (stage 5) "backwards" to a
realization of the original state of perfect enlightenment (stage
1). Gregory holds that Tsung-mi's five-stage diagram, when viewed
from the perspective of a practitioner, thus appears as a "map" of
the path to liberation.
The central thesis of part three is that Tsung-mi devised his
five-stage "cosmogonic map" (as well as a similar "etiology of
delusion" formulated in ten reciprocal stages) in order to "provide
an ontological ground for Buddhist practice." In particular, Gregory
argues, Tsung-mi valued the doctrines of the tathagatagarbha and
"one mind" because, by positing an ultimately real ground of all
phenomena (including both deluded and enlightened states), it
allowed him to counter the antinomian and negative conative
implications of the San-lun (Madhyamaka) doctrine of emptiness and
to subordinate the radically apophatic rhetoric of emptiness to a
kataphatic (positive) mode of discourse. As Gregory demonstrates,
Tsung-mi's Confucian training and native conservatism put him in
opposition to the more radical tendencies in certain Ch'an movements
(especially the Pao-t'ang and Hung-chou schools), which seemed to
reject traditional Buddhist forms of cultivating morality,
meditation, and wisdom. By portraying those modes of cultivation as
tools that were indispensable for the progressive dismantling or
reversing of the cosmogonic process, Gregory argues, Tsung-mi was
able to provide them with a firm "ontological" underpinning that had
great appeal to native Chinese sensibilities.
Gregory does an excellent job of laying out the contents of
Tsung-mi's theoretical formulations, but his interpretation of them
as a "cosmogonic map" and his thesis that they provided an
ontological basis for practice are open to debate. The process
described by Tsung-mi in his five-stage and ten-stage diagrams was
indeed an "etiology of delusion" (Gregory's term), but not an
account of any quasi-substantive "evolution" (again Gregory's term)
of the phenomena of sentient existence. The diagrams, in other
words, represent a type of speculation which, if we want to use
Western philosophical terms, is more "epistemological" than
"ontological." Insofar as Tsung-mi presents an ontology, it is to
claim that only the "one mind" is ultimately existent: all other,
conditioned phenomena are "merely the ever-changing images reflected
on the surface of the mind, nothing more than the epiphenomena (mo)
of the intrinsically enlightened true mind" (p. 252). Thus, the
reversal of the five-stage (or ten stage) process that Tsung-mi
envisioned was essentially a question of successively lifting the
overlaid veils of delusion by cultivating insight into the
appropriate, countervailing Buddhist doctrines. It was not a matter
of systematically suppressing or undoing, say through transic
meditation (dhyana) or ascetic practices, any psychophysiological
processes or entities that might be understood to have evolved in
some substantive way. Viewed in this light, one could question the
interpretation of Tsung-mi's formulas as "maps" in the sense of an
aid to movement or a plan of action, although the metaphor of a map
as something that conveys knowledge of a territory in and of itself
(thereby obviating the need to go anywhere or do anything other than
read and understand it) may be apt. As with the Indian Buddhist
doctrine of the twelve-link chain of conditioned origination
(pratityasamutpada), which Gregory (following the dubious lead of
Frank Reynolds) holds up as another example of a "cosmogony,"
Tsung-mi's schemata might better be compared to the diagnosis,
etiological study, and prescription for the treatment of a disease.
The "disease" in this case is the suffering of karmic conditioning;
the root and ongoing "cause" of its development is delusion; and the
"treatment" is the study and understanding of Buddhist doctrines.
It is not clear from the data presented in part three how Tsung-mi,
simply by positing the existence of the originally awakened "one
mind" or tathagatagarbha, could thereby have resisted the antinomian
tendencies in the Ch'an of his day or strengthened his case for the
traditional Buddhist practices of morality and meditation (dhyana).
To establish a truly "ontological" basis for those practices, one
would think, it would be necessary to hold that the delusions and
passions that cloud the mind are just as real as the mind-ground
itself. Such a position was in fact taken by the Northern school of
Ch'an, or at least imputed to it by Shen-hui and Tsung-mi, for it
was said to have regarded the impurities that obscure the
intrinsically pure mind (like dust on a mirror) as substantially
existent phenomena that needed to be removed by a vigorous
"polishing" of the mind in meditation. Tsung-mi himself, however,
rejected that standpoint on the grounds that the impurities are
empty (k'ung): "they lack any independent reality of their own
because they are nothing but a manifestation of the intrinsically
pure mind as it accords with conditions" (p. 233). It was precisely
such an understanding of the emptiness of delusion and its essential
identity with the Buddha-nature, moreover, that informed the
apparently radical, antinomian position taken by the Hung-chou
school. The question that arises, then, is how Tsung-mi could have
embraced essentially the same ontology as the Hung-chou school as a
means of refuting that school's laissez-faire approach to Buddhist
practice. The answer is suggested by Gregory's own account: it was
not the Hung-chou school's ontology that Tsung-mi found
objectionable, but rather its lack of concern with enlightenment as
an epistemological phenomenon. Tsung-mi charged that the Hung-chou
school, in its acceptance of the fundamental ontological identity of
the one mind and its deluded thoughts, lost sight of the fact that
cognitively (or experientially) it is still necessary to see through
the mind's conditioned functioning, actually to realize or attest to
the underlying essence, and to integrate that realization of innate
Buddhahood into one's experience of the phenomenal world. For
Tsung-mi, then, practice was necessary, not to effect any real
change at the deepest ontological level (which is immutable) but to
know the structure of being and to effect positive changes in the
makeup of the conditioned mind: to transform the "mind subject to
birth-and-death" from that of an ordinary suffering being into that
of a Buddha.
Part four, entitled "The Broader Intellectual Tradition," deals with
Confucianism and Taoism in Tsung-mi's thought and compares
Tsung-mi's attempt to provide an ontological basis for the
affirmation of traditional Buddhist practices with a similar turn of
thought taken, in opposition to Buddhist antinomianism, by the
seminal Neo-Confucian thinker Chu Hsi (1130-1200). Gregory does a
good job of explaining Tsung-mi's critiques of Confucianism and
Taoism and his incorporation of those two "teachings" into a
p'an-chiao scheme alongside, but subordinate to, Buddhism. The
comparison that Gregory draws between Tsung-mi and Chu Hsi is a
fruitful one, noting as it does a "common problematic" and certain
"structural parallels" in their respective metaphysical positions.
If, however, one views Tsung-mi's defense of moral principles and
practices as an argument couched more in epistemological than
ontological terms, then the similarities between his position and
that of Chu Hsi, while still striking in many respects, may be in
need of some further qualifications.
In conclusion, it is a measure of the excellence of this book that
it lays out the philosophical positions of Tsung-mi and many of his
contemporaries with such clarity and thoroughness that the reader is
able, without recourse to any outside materials, to formulate
interpretations of Tsung-mi's thought that may differ in some
particulars with that given by the author. With its careful,
in-depth discussion of many of the key moral and metaphysical issues
that engendered debate in medieval Chinese Buddhism, the book is an
invaluable resource not only for students of East Asian Buddhism but
of Chinese intellectual history in general.