One of the interpretive devices that Ch'eng-kuan (澄 觀) is famous for having employed to distill the essence of the vast Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra (Tafang-kuang fo-hua-yen ching 《大方廣佛華嚴經》 was a series of variations on the contemplative theme (kuan-men 觀門) of the complete interfusion (yüan-jung 圓融) of the scripture's three chief protagonists (san-sheng 三聖) ── the Buddha Vairocana (Pi-lu-che-na 毘盧遮那) and the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī (Wen-shu-shih-li 文殊師利) and Samantabhadra (P'u-hsien 普賢). By aligning these three powerful sacred persons with a number of philosophical (...) categories that he believed to be central to the sūtra ── categories like "cause" (yin 因 ), "fruition" (kuo 果 ), "faith" (hsin 信 ), "understanding" (chieh 解), "insight" (chih 智), "practice" (hsing 行), "principle" (li 理), etc. ── he provided a focal point at which the rich and vivid meditative and liturgical lives of Hua-yen devotees could be made to converge with their philosophical reflections. -/- Although Ch'eng-kuan invoked this device in several of his writings, his most concerted development of it is a short essay entitled San-sheng yüan-jung kuan-men, which appears to have been written relatively late in his long career. Like many important Hua-yen texts, this essay seems to have been lost in China not long after its author's death. However, it was preserved in Korea and Japan and from the latter country was reintroduced to China in the last years of nineteenth century. Neither in China nor in the West has it yet been adequately studied. -/- The core of the present article is a critical edition of the Chinese text of the essay based on a careful comparison of all available versions and presented together with a copiously annotated English translation. The edition translation are preceded by a brief interpretive introduction and followed by an appendix in which are given: a detailed discussion of the work's textual history, detailed accounts of its various editions, and descriptions of its several surviving paraphrases and commentaries. (shrink)

Recently I have read in succession the four articles on formal logic and dialectics in the current year's Hsin chien-she: Mr. Chou Ku-ch'eng's "Formal Logic and Dialectics" in the second issue, Mr. I Chih's "A Criticism of Confused Concepts on Problems of Logic" in the fourth issue, Mr. Shen Ping-yuan's "A Discussion of ‘Formal Logic and Dialectics,’ " and Mr. Chou Ku-ch'eng's "Further Discourse on Formal Logic and Dialectics," both in the seventh issue. In my opinion, in Mr. Chou's (...) articles, several main theses on formal logic and on the relationship between formal logic and dialectics are erroneous; basically, I agree with the criticisms of Messrs. I and Shen. Nonetheless, I believe that Mr. Chou's errors have had their source in the theory of cognition in that he has unilateralized and absolutized certain aspects that were originally correct, thus leading himself in the wrong direction. In criticizing Mr. Chou, both Messrs. I and Shen failed to proceed from this premise, so they could not make others see where Mr. Chou's errors basically lie. Based on this approach, I am merely offering some personal views on several main problems concerning formal logic and the relationship between formal logic and dialectics as mentioned in Mr. Chou's article. It is hoped that Mr. Chou and other comrades will correct me. (shrink)

On the seventh page of the People's Daily for April 15, 1958, Ma T'e published an article entitled "Discussions of Problems of Logic." In his conclusion he critically evaluates many people and even classifies me as a revisionist who must be criticized. I have studied this article closely and feel that it is shot through with difficulties.

"Now we have heard that, as for those sages before Confucius, if it had not been for Confucius, there would have been no way for them to be known, and as for those sages after Confucius, if not for him, there would have been no one for them to emulate. He is called the one who transmitted Yao and Shun as if they were his own ancestors, who took as his model Wen and Wu, patterned himself after the hundred kings, (...) and served as the pattern to be imitated for ten thousand generations." This is an important passage of an edict issued in the eleventh year of the Ta-te Emperor of the Yuan dynasty which bestowed upon Confucius the exclusive title of Fully Perfected Great Sage [ta-ch'eng chih-sheng]. Obviously, in terms of human attainment, Confucius was truly a great person of great learning, character, and usefulness. For two thousand years, his doctrines and his behavior as a man have had a great role and influence in China's cultural and material systems, scholarly thought, social morality, and even her order or disorder, prosperity or decay. If we were to remove his role and influence, then could two thousand years of China's history and culture have developed as it has, with a tradition still present? This is a good question. From this it is clear that Confucius' relationship to Chinese culture was most important. (shrink)

Wu Ch'eng (1249-333) was the most innovative Confucian scholarteacher during the Mongol epoch in China, and his thought is a bridge between thinkers of the Sung und Ming eras. Having experienced the Mongol takeover in his thirties and the abrogation of the examination system, which blocked the traditional route to an official career, Wu was at first associated with Sung loyalists and did not serve the Yuan rulers until he was over sixty (in the National College and the Hanlin Academy). (...) Even then, his affinities for Taoism and individualistic strains in Confucian thought set him at odds with those who reestablished the examination system in the early fourteenth century. He was also one of the first scholars to question the legitimacy of the conquest dynasties. Wu pursued a scholarly vision that bore fruit in his searching classical commentaries, educational policies, and philosophical essays stressing intellectual enlightenment. This study of Wu's life and career examines his flirtations with official service, his disagreements with the educational establishment at the capital and locally, and how these experiences shaped his outlook. (shrink)

This comparative study argues that both Aristotle and the Ch'eng-Chu School deny that a weak-willed person truly and clearly knows what is best at the time of action, but their analyses of a weak-willed person's knowledge are rather different. It is shown that both Aristotle and the Ch'eng-Chu School believe that practical knowledge presupposes repeatedly acting on it and thus that the defect of the weak-willed person's knowledge cannot be overcome by purely cognitive training.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch'eng Wei-shih LunCharles MullerBuddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch'eng Wei-shih Lun. By Dan Lusthaus. Curzon Critical Studies in Buddhism Series. London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xii + 611. Hardcover $65.00.Western students of Yogācāra Buddhism have long been in need of a full-length work that analyzes the key Yogācāra problematic concepts in a comprehensive manner. (...) Due to the lack of such a text, many nonspecialists have been forced to rely on the accounts provided in reference and survey works, which have tended to offer vague and confusing interpretations of what the tradition actually represents. In writing Buddhist Phenomenology, Dan Lusthaus has provided us with the most comprehensive and coherent response to these needs seen in recent years. After decades spent reading descriptions of the school written by both classical and modern scholars that he considers to have missed the point in one way or another, his aim in writing Buddhist Phenomenology is to set the meaning of Yogācāra straight. In so doing, he provides a re-articulation of Yogācāra that amounts to a must-read for anyone with an interest in this seminal Buddhist system.The core thread in this work lies in treating what Lusthaus takes to be the foremost of the misunderstandings of Yogācāra-the meaning of vijñapti-mātra, commonly rendered as "consciousness-only" or "mind-only." Standard introductions to Yogācāra for several decades now have tended to explain vijñapti-mātra as either a Buddhist form of "idealism" or a Jungian psychologism wherein the store consciousness is equated with a collective unconscious. Most introductions to "consciousness-only" continue to explain it as a "kind of happy realization and valorizing affirmation of consciousness as a reality, meaning something like 'true cognition' or 'consciousness is real'" (p. 435). Lusthaus argues that Vasubandhu and his colleagues never intended such a valorizing signification, but in fact used the term vijñapti-mātra with "the intent of laying out an indictment of the problems that the activities of consciousness engender" (p. 435). The explanation of exactly how and why this is so necessitates a reexamination of a wide array of arcane Yogācāra concepts. But in a more fundamental sense—at least for Lusthaus (and, we would suppose, for Vasubandhu and Xuanzang)—it implies a reevaluation of one's understanding of the most basic concepts of Buddhism itself, including karma, dependent origination, and selflessness. Lusthaus' main vehicle for carrying out this project is Xuanzang's Ch'eng Wei-shih Lun (CWSL), which Xuanzang composed for the express purpose of clarifying the meaning of Yogācāra in his own time. Lusthaus has been working on the CWSL for decades, and so this book also represents a culmination of his studies on that text.We should not misunderstand, based on the title, that Lusthaus is attempting to write a work of East-West comparative philosophy that directly correlates Husserlian phenomenology and Buddhism. The reason for the reference to phenomenology, as explained in the first two chapters, is that despite the numerous fundamental differences that lie between Buddhism and Western philosophy, when we attempt to translate the discourse of a Buddhist tradition such as Yogācāra, which is epistemological [End Page 135] in character (and not ontological or metaphysical, as it is often construed to be), the branch of Western philosophy that has the language most applicable to the task is that of phenomenology, with such hallmark concepts as noesis/noema and hyle.In these first two chapters Lusthaus gives a welcome review of the various permutations and usages of the term "idealism," as understood by different branches of philosophy, so that we may, later in the book, see exactly why the term is not applicable to what is going on in Yogācāra. In the second part of the book (starting from chapter 3), Lusthaus shows how Yogācāra fleshes out the fundamental components of the Buddha's teaching by examining the terms and concepts located within the discourse of... (shrink)

Dharmapala's Yogacara Critique of Bhavaviveka's Madhyamika Explanation of Emptiness, The Tenth Chapter of Ta-ch'eng Kuang Pai-lun Shih Commenting on Aryadeva's Catuhsataka Chapter Sixteen. John P. Keenan. The Edwin Mellor Press, Lewiston, New York, 1997. 153 pp. $79.95. ISBN 0-7734-8615-1.