190 CHAPTER EIGHTChih-i), which became one of the standard texts of the school. Beginning in
the eleventh century, T'ien-t'ai was established as the main surviving doctrinal
school, but its earlier preeminence in meditation was totally eclipsed by Ch' an.
The school's Japanese offshoot, Tendai (see Section 10.4), proved to be insti-
tutionally much stronger than the parent stock.
8.5.2 Hua-yen
Hua-yen, the second great multisystem school, took its name from the Avataf!1-
saka (Flower Ornament = Hua-yen) Sutra, whose teachings formed the basis
for many of the school's doctrines. It is a difficult school to define, not only
because of the inherent complexity of its teachings, but also because those
teachings changed so radically over the course of the three centuries from the
school's first patriarch to its last. To convey a sense of this change, we will dis-
cuss the teachings of two patriarchs: the third, Fa-tsang (643-712), who was
the school's first great architect; and the fifth, Tsung-mi (779-840), a Ch'an
patriarch who recast Hua-yen thought in a way that made it relevant to Ch' an
practice.
The first four patriarchs of the Hua-yen school differed with the T'ien-t' ai
school on the issue of the One Vehicle taught in the Lotus Sutra (see Section
5.5.2). According to T'ien-t'ai, the One Vehicle was a blanket term for the
three vehicles of sravaka, pratyeka-buddha, and bodhisattva. According to the
Hua-yen patriarchs, the One Vehicle was actually a separate vehicle, superior
to all the others. Although it shared some common points with standard
Mahayana, it also possessed special doctrines of its own. This point was made
most succinctly by the fourth Hua-yen patriarch, Ch'eng-kuan (738-839), in
his theory of the fourfold dharmadhatu, or Dharma-realm, which lists four dif-
ferent ways of viewing reality. The first view, that of the H!nayana Abhi-
dharma, sees reality in terms of shih (differentiated phenomena). The second
view, that of Madhyamika and Yogacara, sees reality in terms of the nature
(hsing) underlying all phenomena. The third view, that of such Sutras as the
Lotus and The Awakening <f Faith, sees reality in terms of the unimpeded inter-
penetration of principle and phenomena (li), whereas the fourth view, ex-
pounded in the Avata111saka Sutra and exclusive to the One Vehicle, sees reality
in terms of the unimpeded interpenetration of phenomena with all other phe-
nomena in the cosmos. The image illustrating this view is that of Indra's net: a
net of fine filaments stretching in all directions with a jewel at each interstice
of the net. Each jewel reflects all the other jewels in the net, which means that
each reflects the reflections in all the other jewels, and so on to infinity. This
viewpoint is said to be that of a Buddha. Thus, much ofHua-yen metaphysics
is concerned with the phenomenology of Awakening: what the cosmos looks
like to an Awakened one.
Although this fourth viewpoint is supposed to be entirely separate from
the others, it depends logically on the third, that of the unimpeded interpene-
tration of principle and phenomena. This dependence is brought out even in
the writings of Fa-tsang, who of all the Hua-yen patriarchs lay the most stress