In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

SIX Beyond One and Many Li in Tiantai and Huayan Buddhism How Emptiness Became Li I will be considering mainly the Huayan and Tiantai schools of Chinese Buddhism here, as the two most elaborately systematic and also most “sin‑ itic” of the Chinese traditions of Buddhist doctrine, and also because it is here that the term Li is given its most distinctive, elaborate, and influential developments. Prior to the advent of these schools, Li had begun to be used grammatically in the sense of notice‑worthy coherence, as intelligibility, and, in this extended sense, as a “principle” or idea that is to be known and understood, as something that is so prior to the intervention of deliberate volitions, and thus in some cases as a pervasive fact which may or may not enter consciousness. This is true even in the more specialized and highly developed usages of Wang Bi and Guo Xiang just examined, though with important ironic twists. In Guo’s contrast of Li to “knowing” and “doing,” as what is so within the limits of a thing prior to its overstepping these limits by means of trace‑cognition and trace‑volition, the implication of a poten‑ tiality that has not yet been realized or brought to awareness is especially highlighted, a dimension of the term that will come to play a larger role in the Buddhist usages. For Guo this aspect was pushed to the point of a kind of ironic self‑overcoming: Li was not merely as‑yet‑unknown, but liter‑ ally unknowable, and thus this “potential” and “principle” ended up being no principle at all, not even a genuine “fact” with any determinate con‑ tent, but merely noncognizability per se. The Tang Daoist apocryphal text 關尹子 Guanyinzi opens with a gloss on the first line of the Daodejing that effectively summarizes the position to which Guo’s innovation has brought 185 186 beyond NENESS AND DIFFERENCE philosophical Daoism: “It is not that there is a Dao which cannot be spoken or thought: unspeakableness and unthinkability are themselves Dao” (非有 道不可言， 不可言即道；非有道不可思，不可思即道 feiyoudaobukeyan, bukeyan ji dao; fei you dao bu ke si, bu ke si ji dao).1 For Guo, Li is this very unthinkability and nothing more. Similarly, and again with highly intensi‑ fied irony, this meant that in a sense it was not merely potential, but always actual: the self‑so operates even in its opposite, in deliberate activity and knowledge. But it must be remembered especially that these usages never for an instant depart from Li’s connection with value, with soteriology in the broad sense. It is not just a principle, a common fact, a potentiality, or a coherence among and applicable to a number of particulars, but rather is one that is being asserted to be worthy of notice and attention because of the role it can play in attaining a specific human goal. In the Buddhist case, this is generally the soteriological goal of tran‑ scending samsâra, attaining Nirvana, overcoming suffering. As Aramaki Noritoshi has shown, early Chinese Buddhist thinkers such as Zhu Daosh‑ eng (360?–434) and Xie Lingyun (385–433) began to use the term Li as synonymous with “dharmatā”—法性 dharma‑nature—and by extension, Buddha‑nature: it is that which must be realized in order to become a Buddha.2 Kan’no Hiroshi has further pointed out that a certain conflation of Li with Ultimate Truth, and with Buddhahood itself, also occurs in Zhu Daosheng’s writings, mapping the 理事 Li/shi pair onto the Ultimate Truth/ Conventional Truth structure of Indian Mahayana Buddhism.3 Li is the fact about things—in this case, about all things without exception, hence the omnipresent universal universal—attention to which will lead to liberation. For those schools that consider Emptiness to be ultimate truth, or what needs to be realized in order to obtain the optimal human value—Buddhahood—Li is accordingly Śūnyatā, Emptiness, conditioned co‑arising, and with it the consequent facts of impermanence, suffering, the Four Noble Truths, and so on. It is as non‑ironic value‑laden intelligibility that this is called Li, coherence, here, but it also happens that this intelligibility is asserted to be intelligible in every single instance of experience without exception, thus bringing in the sense of coherence as unification and universality. But that the value‑aspect in particular is what qualifies this particular fact about things to be called Li is made most clear by 吉藏 Jizang (549–623), the great theoretician of the 三論 Sanlun (Three...

Share