laristic concrete and abstract philosophical doctrines. The whole took an
idealist turn with the assertion that all 3,000 worlds are found everywhere:
“In every particle of dust, in every moment of thought, the whole universe is
contained” (Ch’en, 1964: 310). All phenomena of possible experience were
revealed as categories of an absolute mind embracing the universe.Hua-yen Metaphysics of Reflexivity
After 600 c.e. the intellectual field reorganized. T’ien-t’ai absorbed most of the
earlier schools, with the exception of the Pure Land sects, which were just then
undergoing their great expansion in the rural hinterlands; after this time we
hear of no more developments in the Three Treatise school, Sautrantika, or
independent specialists in the Nirvana sutra or the Lotus sutra. At the time of
renewed struggles between Buddhism and Taoism over support of the new
T’ang emperor in the 620s, the monk Hsüan-tsang secretly left China against
imperial orders to make a pilgrimage to India. The situation of intellectual
realignment no doubt made it seem a propitious time to import new intellectual
capital. Hsüan-tsang spent 16 years (629–645) studying at the great Buddhist
center at Nalanda, where he learned the sophisticated Yogacara idealism
directly from the lineage of Vasubandhu and Dignaga, as well as the systematic
Hinayana realism of the Abhidharmakosha. Like other famous importers of
foreign ideas (Kumarajiva, Cicero, the medieval Arab and Christian transla-
tors), Hsüan-tsang seems to have been more concerned with the sheer quantity
of materials than the tensions among them, for he brought both of these
complex systems into China, setting up a bureau at the capital Ch’ang-an to
translate the Indian texts.
The philosophical efforts of Hsüan-tsang and his disciple K’uei-chi (632–
682) concentrated principally on the idealist side, formulating the Fa-hsiang,
or “Consciousness-Only,” school. Based on the work of the great Indian
logicians, it was the most sophisticated level of philosophy yet seen in China,
making many distinctions and arriving at high levels of abstraction. Despite
Hsüan-tsang’s fame, the Consciousness-Only tradition was not carried beyond
his immediate followers. It has been suggested that technical philosophy of this
sort was too abstract for the Chinese mind, but this begs the question why the
Chinese philosophical mentality did not develop further in this direction.^4
The weakness of the school was structural. Hsüan-tsang publicized not one
but two philosophies (Consciousness-Only and Abhidharma), and antithetical
ones at that, muddying rather than clarifying the intellectual field. Hsüan-
tsang’s philosophies were upstaged by a proliferation of new developments,
and two of Hsüan-tsang’s own pupils split off to create their own sects. If we
defocus from the individual to the network, we see a network in transforma-
tion. Figure 6.2 shows Hsüan-tsang and his group in the midst of lateral con-286 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths