Zhanran and the buddha-nature of
insentient beings
The Tiantai school fell into decline in the Tang dynasty
(618–907), losing its imperial patronage and dominant
influence to the newly arisen HUAYAN SCHOOLand
CHAN SCHOOL. ZHANRAN(Jingxi zunzhe,711–782) is
credited with revitalizing the tradition, meeting the
challenges of the new schools and consolidating and
reorganizing Tiantai doctrine. The bulk of his writings
concentrate on detailed commentaries to Zhiyi’s
works, but he is also responsible for adopting and
adapting Huayan terminology into Tiantai doctrine
while reasserting the distinctiveness of the Tiantai
school, particularly noting the uniqueness of its doc-
trine of the evil inherent in the buddha-nature.
In his work Jin’gangbei (Diamond Scalpel), his
only noncommentarial composition, Zhanran makes
a frontal attack on the Huayan and early Chan doc-
trine that views the buddha-nature as an aspect of
sentience, reasserting the Tiantai view that the
buddha-nature is necessarily threefold from beginning
to end, omnipresent in all three aspects, and impossi-
ble to restrict to sentient beings only. In fact, the three-
fold buddha-nature is another name for the three
truths, which are the reality of any content of experi-
ence whatsoever, mind or matter, sentient or insentient.
To be any one among them is to be all of them, so there
can be no division of buddha-nature as the uncondi-
tioned essence of sentience and awareness as opposed
to the passive inertness of insentient beings. Whenever
one being attains buddhahood, all beings are buddha;
whenever one entity is insentient, all beings are insen-
tient. This is the interpervasion of all realms as under-
stood in a Tiantai perspective; all possible predicates are
always applicable to all possible beings.
The Song dynasty (960–1279) schism
Zhanran had imported certain formulations from
Huayan thought into his teaching, most notably an
interpretation of mind-only doctrine not found in
Zhiyi, including the phrase “unchanging but follow-
ing conditions, following conditions but unchang-
ing,” as a characterization of the mind and its nature,
respectively, as derived from the Huayan patriarch
FAZANG(643–712). In the Northern Song dynasty,
some Tiantai writers later called the Shanwai (i.e.,
“off-mountain,” or heterodox) began to adopt the
privileging of “awareness” (zhi), or mind, that char-
acterizes later Huayan and early Chan thought. Even
in Fazang a similar tendency is arguably discernible.
Here the mind in its present function is a transcen-
dent category that produces all phenomena, and of
which all phenomena are transformations; the mind
is in this sense at least conceptually prior to these
phenomena, and is their ontological base, although it
is not a definite objective entity. Realizing this all-
pervasive awareness as all things is equivalent to awak-
ening, and so this mind is also called “ultimate real-
ity.” Praxishere means to see “the three thousand
quiddities” as this present moment of mind, which is
the transformation of mind, with nothing left out.
Mind is the all-embracing “whole” that is uniquely ca-
pable of producing, determining, containing, and uni-
fying all differentiated existences.
ZHILI(Siming Fazhi fashi,960–1028) led an attack
on this interpretation of Tiantai thought, developing a
position that was later called the Shanjia (Mountain
Masters, or orthodox) position. Zhili holds fast to the
traditional Tiantai interpretation of the claim in the
HUAYAN JING(Sanskrit, Avatamsaka-sutra) that “there
is no difference between the mind, buddhas, and sen-
tient beings,” holding that this means that each of these
three may be considered the creator of the other two,
and vice versa. This interpretation rejects the assertion
that mind is the real source that is able to create, or
manifest itself, as either buddhas or sentient beings (as
the Shanwai, Huayan, and Chan putatively claim), de-
pending on whether it is enlightened or deluded. On
the latter view, although buddhas and sentient beings
could still be said to be “identical” to mind and hence
to each other, this identity would be mediated by a
one-way dependence relation. Zhili holds that this
would not be real “identity,” for mind has at least one
quality that the other two lack: It is creator, as opposed
to created. In Zhili’s view, each is creator, each is cre-
ated, and none is more ultimate than the others.
Zhili’s teaching combats a one-sidedly “idealist” in-
terpretation of Tiantai doctrine. He holds that while it
is true to say that mind inherently entails all entities,
it is equally true to say that form or matter inherently
entails all entities, and not merely because matter is ac-
tually nothing but mind. Here Zhili is echoing Zhiyi’s
teaching that reality can be spoken of equally as mind-
only, matter-only, taste-only, smell-only, touch-only,
and so on. Zhili also insists that Tiantai meditation is
a contemplation of the deluded mind, not directly of
the pure or absolute mind that is the source and
ground of all existence. The object of contemplation is
the deluded process of differentiation itself, which is
to be seen as creating the particular determinacies of
the experienced world, then as inherently including all
these determinacies, then as being identical to them all,TIANTAISCHOOL