SuttaCentral
Ah yes! I remember this line from when i was editing the wiki article. However I am not sure how close this is to the Chinese, it is the Cleary translation and though he tends to be pretty good, I am cautious in making a metaphysical interpretation from a translation.
Checking the article it is cited from
Cleary. The Flower Ornament Scripture A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, 1993, page 925.
In China and other Asian countries, it’s traditionally considered acceptable for religions to borrow from each other, and even for one person to be more than one religion at the same time:
Also, many western reference sources refuse to accept that a person can belong to more than one religion. In Asia it is quite common for one person to have two, three, or more religions. In China, it is common for a family to have a shrine in their home with statues and icons from Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism…
Global Center for the Study of Contemporary China Approx. 23% to 98% (the report lists 23% but states that as many as 98% follow more than one religion, which includes Buddhism).
https://thedhamma.com/buddhists_in_the_world.htm
It wouldn’t be surprising to me at all is the Mahayana Buddhist concept of Dharmakaya or Buddha-nature and the Taoist concept of the Tao, from an ultimate perspective, describe the same Reality:
As a living being you are equivalent to a wave, a separate entity that is moving swiftly to the shore. Eventually, however, the wave will crash into the beach and the water that was “you” returns back to the ocean. You always were water and you simply return to it, never to be formed again in that manner.
All of Tao is about impermanence and returning. The same will happen to you. This entity that is “you” is impermanent, temporary, even fleeting. And eventually you will be returned to the Tao, the energy that comprises and flows within everything.
https://laughingtaoist.com/2016/08/26/what-happens-to-a-taoist-after-death/
If one were to replace the word Tao with the word Dharmakaya or Buddha-nature in the above article, it would be a fitting description for the Mahayana understanding of Nirvana.
On this religion quiz, depending on how I answer question number 4, I am either a 100% Taoist or a 100% Mahayana Buddhist:
http://www.selectsmart.com/RELIGION/
Is there a concept of Buddha-nature outside Mahayana Buddhism?
Sure, but are Chan and Zen schools Buddhism with some Taoist influence, or are they really Taoism with some Buddhist influence?
I would make a similar argument for sunyata. In the Heart Sutra it is the realisation of the emptiness of the five skandhas, and not a metaphysical statement about interpenetration or whatever.
“Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.”
Thinking about the Second Noble Truth, I’m not sure how the idea of interconnectedness helps to reduce craving or clinging. Reflecting on interconnectedness might reduce our sense of being separate, but it might also give us something much bigger to cling to!
That’s an interesting question. What would most historians of East Asian Buddhism say about it?
A Zen teacher once said that Buddhism teaches how to practice while Taoism teaches why. Attaining Nirvana and becoming one with the Tao may ultimately describe the same non-dual, non-self experience.
Probably that the Daoistic influence upon Ch’an was hugely eclipsed by the Confucian influence, and that the persistent assumption to the contrary is due to the lingering influence of D.T. Suzuki’s and Alan Watts’ populist mythologising, rather than to any solid evidence.
What does “becoming one with the Tao” mean, practically speaking?
This might give a general idea of it:
Daoism is really diverse, and particularly in the West it is only the most ancient and venerable literature that is widely appraised, while, at the fault of no one, the living temple tradition of Daoism does not enjoy widespread exposure.
Daoism today is very, very, different from its scriptures, and often in the West what we are sold as “Daoism” is a radically reconstructed tradition trying to re-capture the ascetic Forest life that we know old Daoists used to practice. I refer to the sorts of forest ascetics whom Confucius is said to have met and practiced with.
Nowadays, unfortunately, Daoism is mostly witchcraft and wizardry, I don’t say this to insult I just say this as a matter of fact. Quite literally wizardry.
Observe, for instance, this rather young and tech-savy Daoist priest:
Combine this with the focus on life-preserving “body alchemy***” (which, sadly, does not work) and we see that sometimes contemporary Daoist practice is only tangentially related to the teachings attributed to Lǎozǐ
***Chinese body alchemy actually has related folk sub-traditions that also cross over into Tibet, where some still believe that Ārya Nāgārjuna practices dharma in a mountain cave somewhere, having preserved his lifespan with similar body alchemy.
I don’t know about that. Derek Lin seems to be keeping true Taoism alive:
As does Chungliang Al Huang:
Here is a list of modern Taoist teachers:
I see it now. The folly is mine, but in my defence, the sūtra is rather massive! I also confused Book 30 with Chapter 30.
EDIT: XXXIII is 33. I have no excuses. My apologies to everyone.
As a general note, since this seems to be a sort-of Mahāyāna-EBT contextualization and comparative thread, I should clarify on what at least I am able to from an informed perspective, with regards to some understandings of “interconnected/interpenetrating” that might be present, or perhaps better clarify some correct presumptions that were being made.
The tradition of Mahāyāna philosophy (note, philosophy, not necessarily Buddhadharma) that I am most familiar with is, as Javi already pointed out, us knowing eachother online already, the Tiāntāi school of China headed by Ven Zhìyǐ.
The Tiāntāi school of Buddhism is founded on what Ven Zhìyǐ referred to as “the integrated teaching”. Some would later call this “the Tiāntāi synthesis”.
Unlike how Mahāyāna (& Vajrayāna) entered into Tibet, and unlike how Indian Buddhism developed into its late complex stages in India, the entirety of the dispensations of the EBTs, the later sects, & Mahāyāna, all enter into China at more or less the same time, or at least in a very truncated timeframe as compared to the native development of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent.
As a result, early Chinese Buddhists received these texts in more-or-less a freely distributed jumble, and often without commentarial material. For instance, over on DharmaWheel, Malcolm often says that the Tibetans learned their dharma from the commentaries, and the Chinese from the sūtras. How accurate he is in saying this I cannot say.
“The integrated teaching”, or “the Tiāntāi synthesis”, is, IMO, the logical outcome of how the Chinese inherited the dharma. If Ven Zhìyǐ had not undertook such a project, someone else would have. From the perspective of many here, understandably, it is a pity that Ven Zhìyǐ incorporated some apocryphal (even by Mahāyāna standards) material into this synthesis. From that same perspective, it is unfortunate that Ven Zhìyǐ placed the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra as the definitive teaching of the Buddhas, rather than the āgamāḥ or something of the like.
As a result, there are some elements of the teaching that can reasonably be traced to earlier Buddhisms, and some that cannot. For instance, this thread’s language, “Buddha-nature is the universe itself”, or “the universe is Buddha-nature”, is apparently rooted in the way that the thought of the Japanese people expresses itself in language. Or perhaps Ven Dōgen was simply wrong to assert what he asserted, even in the thought-realm of Japanese philosophy. Similar language of ‘this world is the Pure Land of the Buddha’ can also be found in Tiāntāi, and I am sure that a Zen teacher has said something similar in the past. What it means here is that the rock “is mind” (note, only Ven Dōgen AFAIK goes further and asserts the rock’s sentience on account of this) in the sense that it makes up the world that is within the mind. If sentience is understood as Buddha-nature, than the phenomenological realm of the ordinary mind is the Pure Land.
As such, interpenetration is solely one of emptiness, not appearance. In Tiāntāi, interpenetration is predicated on the relationship between appearance/aspect and emptiness. It is not that all appearances/aspects interpenetrate and are ‘one’, if I may refer back to the quote from Ven Zhìyǐ: “[when the first type of fool hears that ‘all dharmāḥ are empty’] they take it to mean that all dharmāḥ are inseparable from emptiness and that even if one were to traverse the entire universe, everywhere would be the same suchness [i.e. emptiness] as that found here as the suchness of, for example, this vase.” It should lastly be noted that there is no such word as “interpenetration” found in any of the writings of Ven Zhìyǐ. “Interpenetration”, as applied here, is purely a construct of Western academia.
Ven Zhìyǐ himself was an East Asian Madhyamaka (a subschool of greater Madhyamaka), and his Buddhist education was generally in that milieu. Regardless of whether the above “works” with Ven Nāgārjuna’s exegeses of the empty, looking at the world on terms of the relation between emptiness and appearance/aspect, this is a very fundamentally different philosophical angle than what undergirds Buddhadharma practice as explained and attested to in EBTs.
That being said, this, what I present (not necessarily what I am presenting about), is all somewhat surface-level philosophizing. You wont find this kind of language or expression in any early Indian Buddhist text. But is it entirely unBuddhist? Personally, I do not think so necessarily, but perhaps it is so.
An entire sub-thread could be devoted to this. Ideas in the English-language dharma that are purely constructs of attempts at academic systematization and translating foreign philosophical concepts into Western terms, in accurate or inaccurate ways.
From the above, Ven Zhìyǐ never says “interpenetrate”, the word quite literally does not exist for him. Similarly, one can find “interpenetration/interpenetrate” on most English-language websites dispensing Nichiren Buddhism, but I have it on reasonably good knowledge that Ven Nichiren did not use such a word either. Since Nichiren Buddhism is a New Kamakura offshoot school of Japanese Tendai (a late descendent of Chinese Tiāntāi), they both used the language of emptiness and aspect sharing “mutual possession” of each other, rather than “interpenetrating”.
I cannot speak at all for the teachers of the Huáyán school, but it would be interesting if they did not speak of “interpenetrating X’s & Y’s” either. For instance, in the Cleary translation cited by Ven @Dhammanando earlier:
We can already here see academia and knowledge of the doctrines of later schools, perhaps, influencing translation choices. Clearly has “interrelated”. My Chinese is hardly professional, but look at this:
知一切法界中如因陀羅網諸差別事盡無有餘
knowledge of all of dharmadhātu middling as in Indra’s Net[-] myriad disparate items all with none remaining.
The verb here is 中, not “interrelated” or “interpenetrate”. Alternatively, 中 may be interacting in some eccentric way with 一切 (‘all’), since it more often comes after what it modifies rather than before.
Expanding the inquiry beyond East Asian Mahāyāna, and into Theravāda & EBT studies, I am sure the thread would proliferate greatly.
Fascinating, so does 中 have any associations with “interpenetration” or “inter-relation” in other Chinese translations? Wiki says that the Chinese for interpenetration is “yuanrong”, but it doesn’t have the character.
I guess what I am asking is, is there any logical basis for associating yuanrong with 中?
There is doctrinal basis, I suspect, but cannot assume since I know literally almost nothing substantial about the Huáyán. Save for Indra’s Net & the 4 Dharmadhātavaḥ.
Using 中 basically means, IMO it seems, ‘middling’, in the sense of ‘the middling way’. Perhaps Indra’s Net was once understood as a metaphor for middling rather than interconnectedness?
The history of Indra’s Net would make for a fascinating book. It seems quite poorly attested. The Avataṃsakasūtra makes use of the metaphor, but does not seem to greatly explore it. Is this wrong? Does this imply that it was already a well-known or well-understood metaphor/image/concept?
Does it have Vedic roots?
So many questions. So much back and forth.
It could actually mean “within”, as in “within Indra’s Net”, but this is complicated by the 如 before Indra (因陀羅), which means “like” or can be used to indicate a comparison/analogy/metaphor. If we read 中 as “within” and not “middling”, then 如 becomes complicated and strange. This is my amateur justification as to why 中 can’t be “within” here. Maybe it’s wrong.
Even if it means “within”, there is no word corresponding any closer to “interrelate” or “interpenetrate”.
It’s 圓融. 圓 is etymologically (semantically technically) related to 圍 “to gird” and 國 “country”, but in this sense means “encircling and” or “completely”. 融 gets its semantic component from 鬲 “cauldron”. It means to intermix or fuse or melt into, referring to the way that things melt into each other. Together 圓融 is “encircling and melted together” or “completely fused”.
The main dictionary I consult gives this “interdependence / consumate interfusion / interpenetration”, but that is rather vague. ‘Consumate interfusion’ seems to be a very popular translation for this, but it seems this is the model perhaps for the English ‘interpenetration’.
From the more detailed Digital Dictionary of Buddhism we have:
圓融
Pronunciations
Basic Meaning: consummate interfusion
Senses: Perfect interfusion; completely interpenetrated; seen more fully written as 圓滿融通 and 圓融無礙. Said of the ultimate reality as understood in Tiantai 天台 and Huayan 華嚴.
In Huayan, all existences are of themselves perfectly interfused. The absolute in the relative and vice versa; the identity of apparent contraries; perfect harmony among all differences, as in water and waves, affliction and enlightenment, transmigration and nirvāṇa, or life and death, etc.; all are of the same fundamental nature, all are thusness, and thusness is all; waves are one with waves, and water is one with water, and water and wave are one.
In Tiantai, the usage of the term is more in application to the nonobstruction among various approaches to the Buddhist doctrine, and thus we see terms such as perfect interfusion of the three disciplines 圓融三學, perfect interfusion of the three truths 圓融三諦, perfect interfusion of the unmoving 圓融無作 and so forth.
[Charles Muller, Robert Buswell; source(s): Ui, Nakamura, JEBD, Yokoi, Iwanami]Perfect, complete (Skt. pariniṣpanna, paripūrṇa, pariṇāma). [Charles Muller; source(s): Hirakawa]
I am not sure if it is suggesting that 圓融 is an occasional Chinese translation choice for the Sanskrit pariniṣpanna (et al) or not. Running a scan of the Taishō Tripiṭaka we see that 圓融 is a sparsely occuring word, with most of its instances limited to T09b–10 (the Avataṃsaka-Gaṇḍavyūha volume) & T44b–48 (Sarvasamaya, the sectarian teachings).
The oddball occurrence is in the Śuraṅgamasūtra. The rest are in minor apocryphal texts here and there.
Other than in those texts, the other place that it tends to occur is in commentarial material (like in T44b–48 like I already mentioned). Going down the list we have a bunch of commentaries, including two significant commentaries from the Tiāntāi school: Ven Zhìyǐ’s 妙法蓮華經玄義 (‘The Subtle Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra’s Profound Meaning’) & Ven Zhànrán’s 法華玄義釋籤 (‘The Dharma Flower’s Profound Meaning Guidebook’).
Ven Zhìyǐ uses it to refer to the Three Truths in the twice-above-mentioned commentary: 分別者，但法有 麁妙，若隔歷三諦，麁法也；圓融三諦，妙法也。
Interestingly, 圓融 is not a term in the Lotus Sūtra.
In the interest of full disclosure. The above was a brilliant solution, but entirely too creative. 中 is IMO still a possibility, but perhaps only IMO.
The normal usage for 中 when it appears like this is as modifying what preceded it, here 法界 (dharmadhātu).
So we get:
knowledge 知 of all dharmadhātu 一切法界, within [it] 中, likened to Indra’s Net 如因陀羅網
Perfect, complete (Skt. pariniṣpanna, paripūrṇa, pariṇāma). [Charles Muller; source(s): Hirakawa]
Is this what scholars have determined the Chinese translated from sanskrit to 圓融?
If that’s the case, that’s quite interesting, because as far as I know pariniṣpanna doesn’t have connotations of “interconnection” or “interpenetration” in sanskrit. But I’m way out of my element here lol. I know there’s a Tibetan version of the Avatamsaka, I wonder how they render the passages that are used by the Chinese to build up their theory of interconnectedness. It doesn’t seem like the Tibetans payed very much attention to this idea, this is one of the reasons I’ve always thought “interconnectedness” was a particularly Chinese idea.
No, it’s the ending of the dictionary entry, which I cannot read/understand yet. It seems the dictionary lists several possible Sanskrit parallels for given characters and character-derived compounds, and there is no reason, I don’t think, to treat these lists as exhaustive.
How’s that different from the hardcore atheist materialism? Maybe all religions really lead to the same goal…