The T’ien-t’ai Hierarchy
The official organizer of T’ien-t’ai was Chih-I (538–597), who established the
great Mount T’ien-t’ai monastery in Chekiang in 577, using revenues from an
entire district given him by the southern emperor (Takakusu, [1956] 1973:
126–141; Ch’en, 1964: 303–313; Fung, 1952–53: 360–383). Much of the
philosophical basis of the doctrine derived from his lineage of teachers, Hui-
wen (ca. 550) and Hui-ssu (515–577), who had attacked the worldliness and
corruption of the monks in the northern capital and striven to raise the
intellectual and meditative traditions of Buddhism above magical, lay-oriented
doctrines. Chih-I’s synthesis introduced an order into the proliferation of
Buddhist texts, classifying them into levels of partial truths appropriate for
teaching persons at successive stages of intellectual and spiritual development.
All existing schools, Hinayana and Mahayana alike, were interpreted as a series
of preliminary studies leading up to the crowning T’ien-t’ai doctrine. Possibly
the sequence was actually followed as a curriculum of education in the T’ien-
t’ai sect. From this time on, the great T’ien-t’ai monastery became a center for
intellectuals of all Buddhist factions; it was from here above all that Buddhist
philosophy was exported to Japan.
The T’ien-t’ai worldview built on Indian doctrines, such as the Nirvana
sutra school, which had reified the symbolism of the scriptures (dharma) as
Buddha’s earthly body into a cosmology in which the universe is literally the
cosmic body of the Buddha. The Nirvana school justified this turn toward the
phenomenal world by using the paradoxes of the Madhyamika school (i.e.,
Nagarjuna’s Indian texts), which emphasized transcending all distinctions. The
T’ien-t’ai masters interpreted this to mean that the transcendental level of
mystical experience is identical with the phenomenal world of causality and
with the realm of name. There is no noumenal world apart from phenomena;
all things are void, but at the same time all exist temporarily, and these
conditions interpenetrate each other.
Applying this scheme, T’ien-t’ai took the concrete categories of popular
Buddhist religion, from the various kinds of Buddhas down through the gods,
humans, demons, and hell; arguing (on the basis of the interpenetration of all
things) that each of these categories, 10 in all, is immanent in all the others,
T’ien-t’ai enumerated 100 realms. These in turn were cross-classified by 10
metaphysical categories (form, nature, substance, force, action, cause, circum-
stance, effect, remuneration, and the ultimate state), and again by further
distinctions, yielding an architectonic system of 3,000 worlds. T’ien-t’ai man-
aged to bring together into the same system the concrete mythology of Buddhist
religion along with a set of metaphysical abstractions. It took as its explicit
topic the current problem of Chinese Buddhism, the disparity between popu-
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