Pāli FoundationsThe Earliest Chinese TranslationsEarly MahāyānaThe Three Pure Land SūtrasThe Great Mahāyāna SūtrasTwo StreamsThe Flower OrnamentCoda
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Part 6 · Two Streams
Recollection · 5 papers
At the close of the last part we saw it: that buddha-name of "tether the mind to one buddha, devotedly call the name, recollection-upon-recollection unbroken" was originally one th[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
20The Pure Land Patriarchs IWhen Anglophone readers encounter 'other-power' (tariki 他力) in Pure Land scholarship, they typically meet it through the Jōdo Shinshū reception mediated by Shinran (1173–1263) and made available to Western audiences by Suzuki Daisetsu. Yet the Chinese term 「他力」 predates Shinran by some seven centuries, and its first systematic use is a Tang-era philological invention attributable to one master. This paper advances two interlocking theses about Tanluan (曇鸞, 476–542) and Daochuo (562–645). First, as an opening philological move: Tanluan did not inherit the 自力／他力 binary from Nāgārjuna's Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā (T1521). Nāgārjuna's chapter nine, the Easy Practice chapter (易行品), contains no such binary, classifies easy-practice as a cowardly concession (níng-ruò qiè-liè 儜弱怯劣), and lists no 「他力」 vocabulary. Tanluan at T40.826b05 adds a fifth obstacle to difficult-practice — '唯是自力、無他力持' — absent from his source, and silently drops Nāgārjuna's pejorative valence; the binary is Tanluan's creation, attributed retroactively. Second, and more foundationally: the deeper innovation is not the vocabulary but the anthropological redefinition of who is saved. The three Pure Land sūtras (T0360 Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha, T0365 Contemplation, T0366 Smaller) and Vasubandhu's Treatise (T1524) together anchor a new soteriological subject — the fánfū 凡夫, the ordinary unliberated being unable to undertake conventional cultivation. Tanluan's 劣夫跨驢 (cripple-rider-on-donkey) metaphor and Daochuo's 置草引牛 — the latter preserved as Tanluan's own self-description in Anle Ji 卷下 第四大門 — crystallize this subject. Daochuo then re-anchors the 凡夫 to an empirical 末法 time frame grounded not in eschatological speculation but in the fifty-year-proximate communal trauma of the 574 北周武帝 persecution. §IV stages Robert Sharf (primary, anti-Shin-projection) and Charles Jones (secondary, anti-school-essentialism) as structurally integrated interlocutors rather than dismissed foils. P20 opens Part VI's Two Streams arc; P21 will take up Chan's counter-move to the vocabulary invented here.21The Chan Counter-ThesisAnglophone readers meet the relation between Chinese buddha-recollection (niàn-fó 念佛) and Chan (禪) almost entirely through the "Zen vs Pure Land" binary consolidated by Suzuki Daisetsu (1870–1966) in his mid-twentieth-century English writings — Chan as self-power, sudden awakening, anti-image; Pure Land as other-power, name-invocation, ritual devotion. That binary is a twentieth-century Japanese sectarian projection carried into English, not a description of the Tang–Song Chinese scene. Building on P20's documentation of Tanluan's (曇鸞, 476–542) invention of the self-power/other-power vocabulary and the anchoring of the fánfū 凡夫 as the Pure Land soteriological subject, this paper traces the Chan tradition's three-layer response to that same vocabulary and subject. The first response is Daoxin's (Dàoxìn 道信, 580–651): in his Entry into the Path of Pacifying-the-Mind (Rù-dào ānxīn yào fāngbiàn fǎmén 入道安心要方便法門), preserved at T85n2837, Daoxin takes the eka-vyūha-samādhi (yī-xíng sānmèi 一行三昧, one-practice samādhi) passage from the Mañjuśrī-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (T0232, the P19 lodestone) as his charter and reads "recollection of one buddha" as "recollection of one mind," completing the semantic turn in the fourteen characters 「念佛即是念心，求心即是求佛」 — recollecting the buddha is recollecting the mind, seeking the mind is seeking the buddha. The second is Huineng's (Huìnéng 慧能, 638–713) direct handling, in the Inquiry chapter of the Platform Sūtra (T48n2008), of a lay official's question about name-invocation for rebirth in the West: the four Pure Land names — Guanyin, Mahāsthāmaprāpta, Śākyamuni, Amitābha — are preserved (not abolished), but re-anchored to inward virtues in the hinge formula 「平直即彌陀」 (the upright-and-direct is Amitābha). The third is Zongmi's (Zōngmì 宗密, 780–841) absorption through gradient: in the Sub-commentary on the Practices and Vows Chapter Commentary (Huáyán jīng xíngyuàn pǐn shū chāo 華嚴經行願品疏鈔, X05n0229), Zongmi builds a four-kinds-of-buddha-recollection typology (name-invocation 稱名 / image-contemplation 觀像 / visualization 觀想 / reality-contemplation 實相) arranged as an insight-depth ladder, and thereby replaces Tanluan–Daochuo's self-power/other-power axis with a gradient of root-capacity and view-depth — accommodating name-invocation as the legitimate entry-stage. All three responses share one scriptural charter (T0232) and one soteriological subject (the fánfū) with P20, but move that shared material in the opposite direction. The paper stages Bernard Faure, John McRae, and Robert Sharf as structural interlocutors — handling the rhetoric/institution distinction, Chan's plurality, and chronological hygiene respectively. §V supplies three middle-way corrections centered on the anti-caricature thesis of redirection, not rejection (再定位而非廢除), documented through the niàn-fó office in the Chǐxiū Bǎizhàng qīngguī (敕修百丈清規, T2025), Hongren's (Hóngrěn 弘忍, 601–674) value-hierarchical "surpasses" grammar in the Treatise on the Supreme Vehicle (Zuìshàngshèng lùn 最上乘論, T2011), and Daoxin's own acknowledgment that "the buddha directs dull-faculty beings toward the West." The earliest attested fixed-string occurrence of 「念佛是誰」 (who is recollecting the buddha?) is Lianchi Zhuhong's (Liánchí Zhūhóng 蓮池袾宏, 1535–1615) 1599 preface to Gaofeng's Discourse Record, a matter belonging to P24's late-Ming synthesis; the present paper's §3.4 sketches only the Song–Yuan arc (Dahui's seed-citation, Zhongfeng's who-pivot installation, Gaofeng's non-engagement with niàn-fó) with forward hand-off to P24. Part VI's structural symmetry lies precisely here: P20 records the other-power stream reading T0232's "binding the mind to one buddha, solely invoking the name" as warrant for turning toward the other; P21 records the Chan stream reading the same T0232 passage's "dharmadhātu of a single mark, binding to the dharmadhātu" as warrant for turning toward the mind. Same words, same passage, two directions — this is structural isomorphism within the Chinese tradition, not a retrospective projection of later sectarian opposition.22The Pure Land Patriarchs IIAnglophone introductions to Pure Land Buddhism routinely attribute the doctrinal proposition that ordinary unliberated beings enter the recompense land (fánfū rù bàotǔ 凡夫入報土) to the Japanese Kamakura tradition — above all to Hōnen's (法然, 1133–1212) Senchakushū (1198) and Shinran's (親鸞, 1173–1263) absolute-other-power philosophy in the Kyōgyōshinshō. This reception-history retrojection has, for over a century of Anglophone scholarship, displaced the seventh-century Tang anchoring at its scriptural source. The present paper takes Shandao's (善導, 613–681) Guanjing Sitie Shu (觀無量壽佛經疏, T1753) — specifically its first-fascicle Xuányì fēn (玄義分, profound-meaning section) — as the documentary skeleton for arguing that Shandao's doctrinal moves on fánfū rù bàotǔ and yīxiàng zhuānchēng (一向專稱, single-hearted recitation) rest upon the doctrinal warrant established by Tanluan (曇鸞, 476–542) and Daochuo (562–645), but complete a discontinuity-not-development by means of two further moves: exclusivization of name-recitation as the singular axis, and the lifting of the samādhi ceiling that had still bounded Daochuo's seven-fold niàn-fó menu. Shandao's discontinuity is institutional, not doctrinal rupture; it is also not the radicalization that Kamakura Pure Land would later inherit. The paper's three conclusions: Shandao's act is institutionalization, not bare commentary; his relation to Tanluan–Daochuo is inheritance of warrant + completion of exclusivization, not linear progression; his relation to the later Japanese tradition is that of the scriptural anchor, not the indirect ancestor of a Kamakura invention. Three Anglophone scholars are staged as structurally integrated interlocutors: Julian Pas (1995, anti-rupture-claim), Charles Jones (2019, integrated-matrix), and Kenneth Tanaka (1990, pre-Shandao baseline). The productive tension among them sustains the paper's third position: doctrinal grammar is continuous, the practice matrix is integrated, but the institutional center has shifted.23The Tiantai BridgeFor the Anglophone reader of Pure Land introductions, the formula is by now familiar: Tiantai master Zhiyi established four kinds of buddha-recollection (niànfó 念佛) — name-recitation (chēng-míng 稱名), image-contemplation (guān-xiàng 觀像), visualization (guān-xiǎng 觀想), and reality-contemplation (shí-xiàng 實相). This paper argues that this formula is, on close philological reading, not Zhiyi's authored typology at all. Zhiyi, lecturing in 594 and recorded by his disciple Guanding (灌頂, 561–632), set out in the Móhē zhǐguān (T1911) a fourfold-by-posture typology — constantly seated, constantly walking, half-walking-half-seated, neither-walking-nor-seated — and the attributed-to-Zhiyi Wǔ-fāngbiàn niànfó-mén (T1962) preserves a fivefold typology of niànfó-sānmèi, not a fourfold one. The popular fourfold scheme of chēng-míng / guān-xiàng / guān-xiǎng / shí-xiàng is, this paper contends, a late-Ming retrospective compression by Yúnqī Zhūhóng (雲棲祩宏, 1535–1615) in his Āmítuó-jīng shūchāo (阿彌陀經疏鈔, 1584+), a doxographic reorganization that collapsed Zhiyi-school's fivefold niànfó-sānmèi into a more memorable fourfold for the use of late-Ming and Qing-dynasty Pure Land instruction. The compound expression "four kinds of buddha-recollection" (sì-zhǒng niànfó 四種念佛) registers zero hits in the entire Taishō canon and only five hits in the Wàn xùzàng — all from Qing-era texts. What Zhiyi actually built in the late sixth century was a classificatory bridge: a vocabulary and architecture in which the inward turn later associated with Chan and the name-holding later associated with Pure Land could each find a non-hierarchical seat within a single contemplative matrix. The paper develops this argument in §III through four sub-sections, engages in §IV with three foundational Western readings (Stevenson 1986, Donner & Stevenson 1993, Swanson 1989/2017) in a concede-and-extend mode, and reconstructs in §V a three-strata historical correction: Sui Zhiyi (594) → Song Zhili (1021) → Ming Yunqi (1584+). The bridge is not a synthesis; the synthesis comes a millennium later, the subject of the next paper.24The SynthesisFor the Anglophone reader of Pure Land introductions, Chan-Pure Land dual cultivation (chán-jìng shuāng-xiū 禪淨雙修) names what looks like a settled, unified school stretching back through the late Ming. This paper argues that the formula is, on close reading, neither sudden in arrival nor settled in content. The synthesis (héliú 合流) of Chan and Pure Land is a six-hundred-year doctrinal-lexical-liturgical genealogy: anchored in Yǒngmíng Yánshòu's (永明延壽, 904–975) tenth-century axiom that the myriad practices arise together where principle and phenomena are unobstructed; mediated by the Yuan-dynasty Sānshí xìniàn fóshì (三時繫念佛事, X74n1464) of Zhōngfēng Míngběn (中峰明本, 1263–1323) as a Chan-hall daily liturgy; codified in Yúnqī Zhūhóng's (雲棲祩宏, 1535–1615) Āmítuó-jīng shūchāo (阿彌陀經疏鈔, X22n0424) into the architecture of shì-chí / lǐ-chí (事持／理持, phenomenal name-holding and principle name-holding) and shì yī-xīn / lǐ yī-xīn (事一心／理一心); ratified from inside Chan by Hānshān Déqīng (憨山德清, 1546–1623); and closed by Ǒuyì Zhìxù (蕅益智旭, 1599–1655) into the threefold resource xìn / yuàn / xíng (信願行, faith, vow, practice) and the perfectly-subsume-and-perfectly-transcend (yuán-shōu yuán-chāo 圓收圓超) capstone of Qing-dynasty Pure Land canon. The paper engages Yü Chün-fang (1981), Jennifer Eichman (2016), and Albert Welter (2011) in a mixed mode — two concede-and-push-back, one concede-and-extend — and corrects three philological errors: the four pithy categories quatrain (chán-jìng sì-liào-jiǎn 禪淨四料簡) attributed to Yongming is textually absent from his own works; the Sānshí xìniàn is Yuan-dynasty Zhongfeng's, not Song-dynasty Yongming's; and the Pure Land patriarchate is, in part, a Song-Tiantai retrospective construction. The synthesis is a practice of holding tension, not its resolution.書Read in the book
Recollection · in the bookcontinuous prose · apparatus removedRead from here →Tanluan and Daochuo: Dredging the Pure Land River DeepPart 6 · Ch. 1The Chan Counter-Thesis: Pressing the Buddha-Name Into the MindPart 6 · Ch. 2Shandao: Settling the Name into a RopePart 6 · Ch. 3The Tiantai Bridge: Zhiyi Sets Buddha-Recollection Out in LayersPart 6 · Ch. 4The Synthesis: Gathering the Two Rivers Back into OnePart 6 · Ch. 5
Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.