nections with the other main developments of the mid-600s: on one side
debating with and training monks from the meditation school, on the other
side both propagating and debating with the emerging Hua-yen school. Hsüan-
tsang’s reputation is the popular fame of the central node at the moment of
transition.^5
Of greater intellectual importance was Fa-tsang (643–712), associated with
Hsüan-tsang’s translation bureau in his youth, who opposed the Conscious-
ness-Only doctrine with a new system, the Hua-yen school. Fa-tsang brought
together the strands of several lineages. He had intellectual ancestors from both
the Pure Land and T’ien-t’ai traditions, as well as contact with several trans-
lators direct from India. As in the case of most Buddhist philosophies, Hua-yen
philosophy had predecessors in the Indian scriptures, in this case the Avatam-
saka sutra, which had received a commentary from Vasubandhu (Takakusu,
[1956] 1973: 109–113). The flowery rhetoric of the sutra, praising the Buddha
in extravagant metaphor, was transformed into a technical philosophy of great
subtlety by a chain of Chinese masters: Fa-shun (557–640; 221 in the key to
Figure 6.2), Chih-yen (600–668, 228 in the key), and above all at the systema-
tizing hands of Fa-tsang.
The Consciousness-Only school described reality as a continually changing
flow of ideas from the storehouse consciousness at the bottom of every indi-
vidual mind. In contrast to this absolute idealism, the mature Hua-yen view is
closer to an objectivist realism, but with a distinctive Buddhist twist. It distin-
guishes things as they appear from things as they really are. At the first wave
of analysis, all aspects of apparent things disappear into emptiness. Things of
the world exist only relative to one another, and thus do not exist inde-
pendently. Things which change have no absolute existence (a parallel here to
Parmenides, as well as to Kuo Hsiang’s version of Dark Learning). And ideas
exist only in the mind, not in reality. “Data are not themselves objects—they
must depend on the mind; mind is not of itself mind—it must depend on an
object” (Cleary, 1983: 24). Fa-tsang followed the path of undercutting the
reality of the empirical world as if he were leading to a Platonic idealism, but
then pushed the argument to undercut ideas as well.
There followed another wave of reflexivity. Transcendence is not to be made
an object. Emptiness itself, the ultimate reality, interpenetrates the world of
appearance; indeed it is nothing more than appearance, impermanence, and
change. Each level mutually implies and requires the other. Phenomena could
not exist if they were absolute; only their lack of inherent identity makes it
possible for them to be relative and changing. In the other direction, relativity
and emptiness could not exist either if there were no phenomena as medium;
transience cannot exist without time. Fa-tsang solved the Parmenidean paradox
not by a transcendent substance but by the lack of substance. The interdepend-288 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths