Hua-yen. One of the major schools of Chinese Buddhism, whose highly abstract philosophy is generally accepted as the highest expression of Buddhist thought in China. Two aspects of this school's teachings are notable: doctrinal classification and the theory of unobstructed interpenetration of all phenomena.

History

The school derives its name from the scripture that forms its primary object of study, the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Chin., Hua-yen ching), a text notable for its effort to describe the way the world appears to an enlightened Buddha. Indeed, the sūtra was said to have been preached by Śākyamuni directly after his attainment of enlightenment (bodhi). The scripture had been known and studied in China at least since the year 420, when Buddhabhadra completed the first translation in 60 fascicles. A group of scholars around Tu-shun (557–640) were attracted to the ‘Chapter on the Bodhisattva Grounds’ in the eighth fascicle of this translation. Consequently, they were called the Ti-lun (‘discourse on the grounds’) school, and this is commonly taken as a forerunner of the Hua-yen school itself. Tu-shun's disciple Chih-yen (602–68) also specialized in study and preaching the sūtra. However, credit for the foundation of the Hua-yen school proper goes to Chih-yen's disciple Fa-tsang (643–712; also called Hsien-shou), although, in deference to his illustrious predecessors, he is listed as the school's third patriarch. Fa-tsang, perhaps because of his central Asian ancestry, had some facility with Indian languages, and so was called to the capital Ch'ang-an to work in Hsüan-tsang's translation bureau. He broke with the latter, and later was asked by Empress Wu Tse-t'ien to assist the Indian monk Śikṣānanda with a new translation of the Avataṃsaka, which came out in 704 and consisted of 80 fascicles. However, it was not Fa-tsang's skill as a translator, but his facility in expounding the abstruse philosophy of the sūtra in accessible language and appealing metaphors that helped attract imperial patronage and consolidated the school's position.

After Fa-tsang, the line of patriarchs continued with Ch'eng-kuan (738–820 or 838). Also versed in Indian languages, Ch'eng-kuan assisted the monk Prajñā to produce a 40-fascicle version of the last section of the sūtra, the Gaṇḍavyūha, which added new material to the end and helped bring the sūtra to a more satisfying conclusion. In addition, Ch'eng-kuan's teaching activities and his prolific commentaries on the sūtra further established the school on a secure basis.

The fifth and last patriarch was Tsung-mi (780–841), who was also acknowledged as a master in the Ch'an school. Like his two predecessors, he achieved great eminence for his learning and teaching, and served in the imperial court, assuring continued patronage. However, four years after his death, the next emperor instigated the most wide-ranging persecution of Buddhism in China prior to the Cultural Revolution in the 20th century, and this school, dependent as it was on royal patronage for maintenance of its academic facilities and the upkeep of its masters, perished at that time.

Doctrine

Before the foundation of the Hua-yen school, Chih-i (538–97), founder of the T'ien-t'ai school, had already established criteria for taking the highly varied corpus of Buddhist texts and teachings and placing them into an overall structure that brought order and explained discrepancies (see p'an-chiao). However, his system had developed some deficiencies: it used three different criteria to generate three different schemes, and it failed to take into account the teachings of the Fa-hsiang school, which had not been established until after Chih-i's death.

Fa-tsang therefore constructed a Hua-yen scheme of doctrinal classification, or p'an-chiao, in order to correct these problems. He established a single hierarchy of teachings that included Fa-hsiang in the following list. (1) The doctrine of the Hīnayāna, which was lowest because it recognized only the lack of selfhood in living beings, but not in other phenomena, and also because it lacked compassion for others and set as its goal only the liberation of the individual. (2) The elementary Mahāyāna recognized the lack of selfhood in both beings and phenomena, but it still lacked compassion because it failed to discern Buddha-nature in all beings, and thus taught that some beings could never attain Buddhahood. This was the level in which Fa-tsang placed the Fa-hsiang school, because of its teaching on the eternal entrapment of the icchantikas due to their lack of the seeds of Buddhahood. (3) The advanced Mahāyāna covered the doctrines of the T'ien-t'ai school, which recognized the emptiness of both beings and phenomena, acknowledged the universality of Buddha-nature and thus the potential of all beings to become Buddhas, and its teachings of the Three Truths reaffirmed the provisional existence of things even as it taught their ultimate emptiness. (4) The Sudden Teaching covered texts and schools that inculcated the experience of sudden enlightenment, which appeared at once without prior doctrinal or scriptural study. This included the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra and the Ch'an school. (5) The Perfect (or Round) Teaching, as found in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra affirmed the perfect interfusion of all phenomena within the One Mind and within each other, and the simultaneity of past, present, and future. This doctrine revealed completely the content of the enlightened mind.

The Hua-yen school considered its great advance over the achievements of the T'ien-t'ai school to be found in its teaching of perfect interpenetration. This school had already shown that all particular phenomena subsist completely in the unity of the absolute or One Mind, and that the latter was not to be found apart from or transcending particular phenomena. Thus it taught the perfect interpenetration of the absolute, called ‘principle’, and phenomena. Fa-tsang went further and, following the sūtra, asserted the perfect interpenetration of all phenomena with each other. To illustrate this, he resorted to many images and metaphors to make his meaning clear. One was the parable of Indra's net, which described the world in terms of the fishing net of the Hindu god Indra. At each node of the net was a jewel, and each jewel reflected the light of every other jewel perfectly, thus causing its own light to be part of their light and accepting their light as part of its own. He also used the example of a house and one of its rafters as metaphors for the whole and the parts, or principle and phenomena. The rafter is part of the house, and since a house is nothing other than its parts, and the parts cannot be parts unless they are integrated into the whole, the house and the rafter create each other. This would be the T'ien-t'ai view of the interpenetration of principle and phenomena. However, since the house does not exist apart from its parts, the rafter then depends upon all the other parts of the house being in place for the house to exist and give it its meaning as a rafter. Furthermore, based on the axiom that any change in a thing makes it an unrelatedly different thing, Fa-tsang asserted that if the rafter were removed and another one put in its place, the house would then be a different house, and all its other parts would then undergo a complete change of state from being part of one house to being part of another. Thus, the rafter (or any individual part) totally determines the being of all other parts. In this way, Fa-tsang demonstrated that every particular phenomenon in the cosmos exercises a complete and determinative role in the being of all other particular phenomena, and in turn has its own being completely determined by all other particular phenomena. In such a manner, it was thought, all phenomena interfuse without obstruction. See also Kegon.

Hua-yen (Jap., Kegon, lit., ‘Flower Adornment’ school). A major school of Chinese Buddhism, which derived its name from the title of the Chinese tr. of its main text, Buddhāvatamsaka-sūtra (see AVATATAṂSAKA). Its main organizer was Fa-tsang (3rd Patriarch) (643–712), although its roots are earlier (e.g. Tu-shun). Important teachers were Cheng-kuan (737–820), regarded as the incarnation of Mañjuśrī, and Tsung-mi (780–841). Hua-yen was taken to Japan in 740 by Shen-hsiang, where it is known as Kegon.

Hua-yen regarded itself as the culmination of the Buddha Śākyamuni's teaching after his enlightenment. This teaching maintains the interdependence and equality of all appearance, the ‘teaching of totality’. Appearances may be in different states, but they are necessarily interdependent in constituting the universe of phenomena, and in equally manifesting the Buddha-illumination of enlightenment. Thus when Fa-tsang was summoned by the formidable empress Wu to expound the sūtra, he took a golden lion in the room as illustration: the lion is the phenomenal world, shih, but it is constituted by gold, li, the underlying principle which has no form of its own. By analysis into shih and li, every manifestation is identical to every other, and is an expression of the buddha-nature (buddhatā). This key perception of the interpenetration of all existences is expressed in Fa-Tsang's image of Indra's net, which spreads across the universe, with a perfect jewel in each of its links: each jewel reflects every other jewel in the whole net.

Hua-yen Buddhism [Chin.,=flower garland], school of Chinese Buddhism centering on the Avatamsaka Sutra [flower garland sutra]. This school has no Indian counterpart. Hua-yen classifies Buddhist scriptures and doctrines on five levels, with its own teaching as the highest and most complete. According to the school, all phenomena arise simultaneously from the universal principle of the Dharma -realm. The ultimate principle and manifested things mutually interpenetrate without obstruction. At the same moment all phenomena both embody the Absolute, and reflect and are identified with each other. The first master of the school was Tu-shun (557–640); he was succeeded by Chih-yen (602–668), Fa-ts'ang (643–712), Ch'eng-kuan (737–838), and Ts'ung-mi (780–841), who was also a master of the Ch'an or Zen school. The name also appears as Hwa-yen.

Bibliography: See C. C. Chang, The Buddhist Teaching of Totality (1971); F. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism (1977).