肇論 心要連讀

The Preface to the Zhaolun is not Sengzhao's own preface. It is the guide written by Huida, Śramaṇa of the Small Zhaoti Monastery, after more than twenty years in halls of teaching, for the Fundamental Thesis and the four treatises beginning with On the Immutability of Things. Its general preface first sets the treatises within the lineage of transmitting the sūtras through Kumārajīva's community: Dao'an and Kumārajīva opened traditions and proclaimed their guiding principles; Sengrui, Xie Lingyun, and the monastic and lay community corrected languages and closely investigated meanings; amid these worthies, Sengzhao could mark the root while reaching the branches, go beyond speech while according with silence. Huida also records the Six Houses and Seven Schools and the marketplace jeers, thereby making clear the orientation from which he protects the Zhaolun.

The particular preface then lays out a path of reading. The Fundamental Thesis marks true reality. On the Immutability of Things and On the Emptiness of the Unreal open ultimate and conventional truth. Prajñā is the cause of complete realization, and nirvāṇa is the ultimate fruit. Yet as soon as the root is established, Huida says that no root can be named; as soon as the two truths are spoken, he says that they are spoken only by following names. Prajñā discloses illumination by being without knowing, and nirvāṇa discloses its virtue by being nameless.

The heart of this preface, then, is not only its praise that Sengzhao is foremost in understanding emptiness. It teaches the reader to know the sequence of the four treatises without becoming trapped by sequence or names: enter through transmission and read by the Fundamental Thesis; open the gate through the two truths; pass through prajñā to nirvāṇa; establish words in order to guide, then release words so as not to become stuck.

The Fundamental Thesis establishes, in a short chapter, the doctrinal backbone of the four treatises. All dharmas arise when conditions come together and cease when conditions disperse. If they possessed a fixed intrinsic entity, they should not cease; thus, although they presently appear, their nature has always been empty. Intrinsic-nature-emptiness, dharma-nature, true reality, and fundamental non-being are names reached step by step from this one fact of conditions coming together. Neither being nor non-being is not a compromise between two sides: it neither grasps the determinate being of a view of permanence nor the determinate non-being of an annihilationist view. One contemplates being without grasping a characteristic and contemplates dharmas without retaining annihilating non-being; the sage's mind thereby abides without anywhere fixed in which to abide. The three vehicles alike contemplate intrinsic-nature-emptiness, differing only in the measure of mind. Prajñā contemplates emptiness without being stained, while skillful means engages with being without taking realization as an immediately possessed fruit; within a single thought, each is present in the other. Nirvāṇa is simply the exhaustion of the afflictive bonds and the permanent ceasing of birth-and-death, not another place of exhaustion. From fundamental non-being and true reality to neither being nor non-being, from the mutual presence of prajñā and skillful means to the exhaustion of the bonds without a separate place, the four treatises unfold separately while all flowing from this one doctrinal backbone.

The world is plainly in motion, yet Sengzhao asks: what fixed thing is there that migrates from a former time into the present? Because a past thing does not reach the present, ordinary sentiment calls it moving. Starting from the very same fact, the author sees instead that the past thing is of itself in the past and the present thing is of itself in the present, and calls this stillness. The immutability of things does not deny difference between before and after. It denies that one fixed and unchanging identity migrates from here to there. Thus the whirlwind fells the mountains, the rivers race in torrents, the mirage drifts and surges, and the sun and moon traverse the heavens: the more forceful the motion, the more clearly the former is not the latter. From moment-by-moment alteration, one speaks of going; from each remaining in one time, one speaks of abiding. The two formulations of going and abiding return to one event. The teaching of impermanence has not been canceled: going is taught to dispel attachment to permanence, and abiding is taught to dispel attachment to annihilation. Nor must a cause be transported into its fruit. The cause remains in the past without perishing; the fruit arises through the cause; though before and after are not simultaneous, the efficacy of deeds is not lost. Stillness is therefore not outside motion, and motion does not destroy stillness. Once one ceases tacitly to establish a fixed thing crossing ancient and present, one can see “immutability” in the very midst of the torrent.

Emptiness is not the nothingness left after the myriad things have been cleared away, nor is it a stillness found by shutting out sight and hearing and fleeing beyond things. Because the myriad things depend on conditions in order to be, they are not true being established on their own. Because they do appear as conditions come together, they are not annihilative non-being. Thus one speaks of being and yet not being, non-being and yet not non-being. No-mind quiets the mind without yet seeing that things are unreal; Matter-as-such sees that form does not make itself form without yet exhausting the point that form is not truly form; Fundamental-Non-being draws both “not being” and “not non-being” toward non-being. Sengzhao, by contrast, discerns the unreal in phenomena themselves. The illusory person shows this most clearly: one cannot say that no illusory person appears, yet no real person can be found. Appearance blocks annihilation; unreality blocks true existence. Names, too, are established only according to convention. “This” and “that” can exchange places; a name cannot acquire the real thing, and the real thing does not become true through its name. Ultimate truth is therefore not outside the myriad things, and emptiness is not added to them from elsewhere. No other nothingness is borrowed in order to make things empty; one sees that the myriad things are already conditionally constituted, provisionally designated, and unreal. The Way is therefore not far away: the place of establishment is itself the true, and in encountering affairs one meets the true.

If prajñā is without knowing, how can there be nothing it does not know? What Sengzhao denies is not illumination, but the grasping of an object's mark as “something I know”: wherever something is fixed as known, something else remains unknown; only because the sage's mind has no knowing that grasps marks is it not confined by any one mark. Thus emptiness does not lose illumination, and illumination does not lose emptiness. Knowing is not first grasping and then relinquishing; knowing itself is non-grasping, and it knows without grasping. Ultimate truth does not become an object marked by characteristics, and true wisdom does not become a knowing that grasps marks in dependence on an object. Having no fixed “this is so” and no fixed “this corresponds” does not mean an inability to discern. Precisely because it fixes in advance neither what a thing must be nor what it must correspond to, nothing fails to show itself as it is and nothing fails to be met as appropriate. To abandon being and rush toward non-being, making the signless into yet another mark, is only to flee a peak and plunge into a valley; both extremes carry the same danger. Prajñā's being without knowing also differs from knowing that knowing is empty: the former never contains deluded grasping, while the latter begins with a knowing that grasps marks and then knows its nature to be empty. In the end, functioning itself is stillness and stillness itself is functioning. Stillness is not an empty shell apart from functioning, and functioning is not an activity apart from stillness. Without knowing, then, is not without illumination: it is illumination that abides in no mark. Nor does “there is nothing it does not know” mean possessing all knowledge; it means illuminating all dharmas while grasping nothing.

Liu Yimin does not set up another doctrine outside the treatise. After praising the Treatise on Prajñā Without Knowing from the depths of his heart, he brings its three hardest points directly into view. If the sage's mind exhausts numinous illumination, why is it called without knowing? If it is merely naturally quiet and still, how can it still respond to beings and transform the world? If the sage sees the myriad changes of beings, he seems to illuminate more than the signless; if he illuminates only the signless, how can the work of tending and according with beings occur? If there is no fixed rightness yet nothing that is not right, and no fixed fitting yet nothing that is not fitted, this seems already to be true rightness and perfect fitting—why, then, still speak of rightness without fixed rightness and fitting without fixed fitting? The three questions together guard a single boundary: stillness cannot abolish knowing, the signless cannot abolish response, and the absence of fixed rightness and fitting cannot be seized again as a fixed entity. At the end of the letter, Liu also acknowledges that the doctrinal positions he and Huiyuan marked seem each to have their own grounds, without forcing every principle into complete sameness. The heart of the letter, then, is not to seize the answer in advance, but to state clearly the gates through which Sengzhao's reply must pass.

If the sage's mind is without knowing, how can it illumine the myriad changes and respond to beings? Sengzhao's reply does not choose another side between knowing and not knowing. Ordinary knowing grasps marks and takes objects; the absence of knowing in wood and stone is benighted and unaware. Noble wisdom is free of object-grasping, yet its numinous illumination never ceases. Thus emptiness does not lose illumination, illumination does not lose emptiness, and in dark stillness there is nothing to which it fails to respond. Because it is not fixed existence, it does not grasp; because it is not annihilating non-being, it does not reject. Only when a thing is not fixed as a self-standing thing can it remain before us without being sealed inside names and forms. To illumine the signless is not to avoid the myriad changes and guard a separate emptiness. Just as form and emptiness are mutually identical, change is the signless, and the signless is present within change. All day long the sage meets conditions, takes up each occasion, and comforts and teaches, yet never grasps active function as fixed existence. Even true rightness and ultimate fittingness must not harden once more into graspable names, or distinctions of beautiful and ugly arise and contention never ends. The sage therefore dwells in the domain of activity while resting in the unconditioned; he lives within names while making his home where speech is cut off. Words are like footprints: they can guide, but they are not what they point toward. This reply, sent across rivers and mountains, finally brings the reader to the same place — not abandoning the myriad affairs yet not dwelling in them, not discarding speech yet not grasping it, meeting beyond the written word where stillness and illumination are not two.

If nirvāṇa is called nameless, why are there still nirvāṇa with remainder and nirvāṇa without remainder, and why are nine rebuttals and ten expositions still needed? Sengzhao does not abolish names. He makes each name stop at responsive engagement: a manifest trace is called birth, a trace brought to rest is called death; a name can guide, but it cannot seal the true substance within itself. Nirvāṇa has that by reason of which it is not existent, and so cannot be grasped as a thing. It has that by reason of which it is not non-existent, and so cannot be described as annihilation. To say it transcends existence and non-being is to remove attachment to two mutually dependent extremes, not to establish a subtle existent outside them. To say it neither transcends nor abides within is to be immediately existence and non-being without dwelling in either. The unconditioned is not three; the differences among the three vehicles lie in practitioners' residual habits and powers of wisdom. Three birds leave the same net yet remain different birds; three arrows strike the same target and three animals cross the same river, yet their depths of entry differ. Nor does the unconditioned mean that conduct ceases. Because the sage's mind is not existent, every deluded thought is extinguished; because it is not non-existent, there is no principle with which it does not accord. The emptier the mind, the broader the conduct: though moving, constantly still; though still, constantly moving. At the end, if the five aggregates are exhausted, who attains nirvāṇa? The author does not add another attainer. He says only that truth arises through freedom from attachment and takes non-attainment as attainment. Since beings and nirvāṇa are not separate, a fixed being cannot be sent toward a fixed nirvāṇa. The nine rebuttals break the enclosing grasp of existence and non-being, one and other, sudden and gradual, motion and stillness, gain and loss; the ten expositions prevent any rebuttal from collapsing into empty absence. The purport of namelessness appears precisely in speaking without abiding in what is spoken, acting without dwelling in action, and attaining through non-attainment.