San-lun

San-lun (Chin.). An early school of Buddhism in China. The name means ‘Three Treatises’, and refers to the school's focus on three works devoted to Madhyamaka philosophy that had recently been translated by Kumārajīva (343–413): the Chung-lun (Treatise on the Middle [Way]) and the Po-lun (Treatise in One Hundred [Verses]), both by the Indian master Nāgārjuna (2nd century ce), and the Shih-erh men lun (Treatise on the Twelve Gates) by his disciple Āryadeva. After the death of Kumārajīva, the main Chinese proponent of the school was his disciple Seng-chao (374–414), although the latter did not outlive his master by more than one year. Seng-chao digested the complex and foreign thought of the Indian three treatises into a more native idiom in his brief works The Immutability of Things, The Emptiness of the Unreal, and Prajñā is Not Knowledge. In these works he criticized commonly held ideas about the way in which things exist, the sequence of events (particularly causes and effects) in time, and conventional knowledge as lacking in profound wisdom.

After Seng-chao, the main transmission of the San-lun teachings passed through a line of disciples that included the Korean monk Seng-lang, Seng-ch'üan, and Fa-lang (507–81). The school, never large, found it difficult to gain acceptance for its critique of reality, which appeared overly negative to the Chinese. Towards the end of Fa-lang's life, Chih-i (538–97) was having success in propagating his new T'ien-t'ai teachings which, among other things, analysed the final nature of reality not as a static ‘emptiness’ (śūnyatā), but as a dynamic construct that he designated ‘Middle-way Buddha-nature’. Under this name, Chih-i could speak of truth as a dynamic power in the world revealing the marvellous nature of things to all beings. Because of this competition, the last great San-lun master, Chi-tsang (549–643), brought innovative new ideas into the school's teaching, which analysed the traditional ‘Two Truths’ of Indian Madhyamaka thought into three levels. Where there was orignally the Worldly Truth of Being countered by the Absolute Truth of non-being or emptiness, Chi-tsang took two further steps. Where a Worldly version of the Two Truths could then affirm either being or non-being, the next level of Absolute Truth denied both being and non-being as artificial human constructs. Finally, where a Worldly Truth might affirm both being and non-being, Absolute Truth would neither affirm nor deny either being or non-being. Thus, the Two Truths constantly led the believer into ever-greater depths of realization in a dynamic process that might have rivalled that of the T'ien-t'ai system. However, in the end, T'ien-t'ai won out, and the San-lun school slipped into oblivion.