Summary |
Chinese Buddhist philosophy primarily results from
traditional Chinese Buddhist thinkers’ efforts to inherit, reinterpret, and develop
theories and thoughts in various Chinese translations of Indian Mahayana
scriptures and treatises. Five Chinese Buddhist schools or traditions are of
philosophical significance: the Three-Treatise school, the Consciousness-Only school,
the Tiantai school, the Huayan school, and Chinese Zen (Chan) Buddhism. Among
them, the Three-Treatise and Consciousness-Only schools are the Chinese
descendants of, respectively, Indian Madhyamaka and Yogācāra;
however, both have all but disappeared after the Tang dynasty (618−907). The other three
schools, Tiantai, Huayan, and Zen/Chan, are indigenous and can be seen as
philosophically the most representative traditions of Chinese Buddhism.
Considerably owing to the influence of Chinese thought and culture, Chinese
Buddhist way of thinking is fundamentally nondualistic in character,
emphasizing, more than Indian Mahayana does, the mutual sameness and interpenetration
of the ultimate and the conventional. The thinking tends to be somewhat nondiscursive,
involving holistic views expressed in paradoxical language, with particular
concern on the practical. Meanwhile, Tathāgatagarbha thought receives
much attention among Chinese Buddhist thinkers, and the widespread conviction
is that all sentient beings have Buddha-nature and can attain Buddhahood. |