Huayan

Origins

The earliest texts associated with the Avatamsaka sutra are the Dousha jing (Taisho 280), produced by Lokaksema in the latter part of the second century CE and the Pusa benye jing (T. 281), translated by Zhi Qian in the early to mid third century. There is evidence that these small Buddhavatamsaka sutras circulated on their own as individual scriptures.^[1]

The translation of the large Avatamsaka sutra is often dated to the Southern Dynasties (420-589) when a translation team led by Gandharan master, Buddhabhadra worked on the sutra. There is also evidence of this sutra tradition in the Northern Dynasties (386-581) where a certain Xuangao (402-444) taught the Huayan samadhi.^[2]

Patriarchs

The founding of the school is traditionally attributed to a series of five "patriarchs" who were instrumental in developing the schools' doctrines. These five are:^[3][4]

1. Dushun (Chinese: 杜順; Wade–Giles: Tu-Shun), responsible for the establishment of Huayan studies as a distinct field;
2. Zhiyan (Chinese: 智儼; Wade–Giles: Chih-yen), considered to have established the basic doctrines of the sect;
3. Fazang (Chinese: 法藏; Wade–Giles: Fa-tsang), considered to have rationalized the doctrine for greater acceptance by society;
4. Chengguan (Chinese: 澄觀; Wade–Giles: Ch'eng-kuan), together with Zongmi, are understood to have further developed and transformed the teachings
5. Guifeng Zongmi (Chinese: 圭峰宗密; Wade–Giles: Kuei-feng Tsung-mi), who is simultaneous a patriarch of the Chinese Chán tradition and who also incorporated Taoist and Confucian teachings.

The five monks later honored as Huayan patriarchs were erudite scholar-practitioners who connected Buddhism with Chinese traditional culture closely, creating a Buddhist historical trend in developing multiple facets while the tradition’s essence remained the same.^[5] Based on their writings, exegeses, and oral teachings, these men each played a significant and distinct role in the development of the school, although there are certain aspects of this patriarchal scheme which are clearly contrived. For example, Chengguan was born 26 years after Fazang's death. According to Robert Gimello's dissertation on Chih-Yen (1976), "most if not all of the major themes of Huayen thought" can be found in the works of the second patriarch Chih-yen, particularly the classification of scriptures and theories on the Dharmadhatu. Thus he names the patriarch Chih-yen (602-668) as the crucial figure in the foundation of Huayan.^[6] The tradition reached the height of its influence under Fazang, who was the Buddhist teacher of the Empress Wu Zetian (684–705).^[7]

Another important figure in the development and popularization of Huayan thought was the lay scholar Li Tongxuan (Chinese: 李通玄, 635?-730), the author of the Huáyán lùn (Chinese: 華嚴論), a popular and lengthy commentary on the Avatamsaka sutra. Fazang's disciple Huiyuan (673-743) also wrote a commentary on the Avatamsaka.^[8]

Some accounts of the school also like to extend its patriarch-ship earlier to Aśvaghoṣa and Nāgārjuna.

Stagnation

After the time of Zongmi and Li Tongxuan the Chinese school of Huayan generally stagnated in terms of new development, and then eventually began to decline. The school, which had been dependent upon the support it received from the government, suffered severely during the Buddhist purge of 841-845, initiated by Emperor Wuzong of Tang, never to recover its former strength. Nonetheless, its profound metaphysics, such as that of the Four Dharmadhātu (Chinese: 四法界) of interpenetration, had a deep impact on surviving East Asian schools.

Avataṃsaka Sūtra

The Huayan school's worldview was based primarily on the content of what it considered to be the supreme Buddhist revelation, the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra is a compilation of sutras of various length. The earliest of these texts, the Ten Stages Sutra, maybe dates from the first century CE.^[9] The Daśabhūmika Sūtra describes the ten stages on the Bodhisattva-path. The various sutras were probably joined together shortly before its translation into Chinese, at the beginning of the 5th century CE.^[9]

The Avataṃsaka Sūtra integrates the teachings on śūnyatā and Yogacara thinking.^[9]

The basic idea of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra is the unity of the absolute and the relative:

All in One, One in All. The All melts into a single whole. There are no divisions in the totality of reality [...] [I]t views the cosmos as holy, as "one bright pearl," the universal reality of the Buddha. The universal Buddhahood of all reality is the religious message of the Avatamsaka-sutra.^[10]

Each part of the world reflects the totality of the cosmos:

In each dust-mote of these worlds

Are countless worlds and Buddhas...
From the tip of each hair of Buddha's body
Are revealed the indescribable Pure Lands...
The indescribable infinite Lands
All ensemble in a hair's tip [of Buddha].^[11]

All levels of reality are related and interpenetrated. This is depicted in the image of Indra's net. This "unity in totality allows every individual entity of the phenomenal world its uniqueness without attributing an inherent nature to anything".^[11]

Other texts

Other Mahayana texts such as the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana (Dasheng Qixin Lun 大乘起信論), which was a condensation of Chinese thought on awakening and ultimate reality, influenced Huayan masters like Fazang and Zongmi, who both wrote commentaries on the text.^[12] The Lotus sutra was also seen as an important text in this school, though not as important as the Avatamsaka. The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment was particularly important for Zongmi.

The Huayen patriarchs wrote numerous commentaries and original treatises on the Mahayana sutras and Huayen philosophy. Fazang for example, wrote commentaries on the Avatamsaka, the Lankavatara Sutra and the Awakening of Faith.^[13]

One of the key Huayen treatises is On the Meditation of the Dharmadhātu attributed to the first patriarch Dushun.^[14]

Another is Fazang’s Treatise on the Golden Lion which is said to have been written to explain Huayen's view of interpenetration to Empress Wu.^[15]

Interpenetration

A key doctrine of Huayan is the mutual containment and interpenetration of all phenomena (dharmas) or "perfect interfusion" (yuanrong). This is associated with what the Huayan sees as its unique contribution, the "dharmadhatu pratityasamutpada". This is described by Wei Daoru as the idea that "countless dharmas (all phenomena in the world) are representations of the wisdom of Buddha without exception" and that "they exist in a state of mutual dependence, interfusion and balance without any contradiction or conflict. This thought essentially argues that there is no relationship of cause and result among phenomena and that things are not formed sequentially. Instead, they constitute the world by the mutual interfusion of complete equality."^[18]

According to this theory, any phenomenon exists only as part of the total nexus of reality, its existence depends on the total network of all other things, which are all equally connected to each other and contained in each other.^[19]

The Huayan patriarchs used various metaphors to express this, such as Indra's net, a hall of mirrors and the world text. To illustrate the doctrine to Empress Wu, the patriarch Fazang:

"called for a candle and placed it surrounded by mirrors on every side. When lit, the candle was reflected in each mirror, and each of the reflections in every other mirror so that in any one mirror were the images of all the others."^[20]

This Buddhist doctrine also includes the views that:^[21]

• "Practicing one teaching is practicing all teachings"
• Ending one mental defilement is ending all of them
• Truth (or reality) is understood as encompassing and interpenetrating falsehood (or illusion), and vice versa
• Good is understood as encompassing and interpenetrating evil
• Similarly, all mind-made distinctions are understood as "collapsing" in the enlightened understanding of emptiness (a tradition traced back to the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna)

Li and Shi

Another important distinction used by Huayan patriarchs is that of li and shi, noumenon and phenomenon which was explained using the metaphor of gold and lions, or water and waves. According to Paul Williams:

First, noumenon and phenomena mutually interpenetrate and are (in a sense) identical. There is no opposition between the two. The one does not cancel out the other. Second, Fazang explains elsewhere that since all things arise interdependently (following Madhyamika), and since the links of interdependence expand throughout the entire universe and at all time (past, present, and future depend upon each other, which is to say the total dharmadhatu arises simultaneously), so in the totality of interdependence, the dharmadhatu, all phenomena are mutually interpenetrating and identical.^[22]

Fourfold Dharmadhatu and meditation

The theory of the Fourfold Dharmadhatu (sifajie, 四法界) is explained in the "Meditative Perspectives on the Huayan Dharmadhatu" (Huayan Fajie Guanmen, 華嚴法界觀門) and its commentaries.^[17] This theory is the central meditative framework for the Huayan tradition. Another key text is the "Cessation and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of Huayan" (Huayan wujiao zhiguan 華嚴五教止觀).^[17] The Dharmadhatu is the goal of the bodhisattva's practice, the ultimate nature of reality which must be known or entered into (ru, 入). According to Fox, the Fourfold Dharmadhatu is "four cognitive approaches to the world, four ways of apprehending reality".The four ways of seeing reality are:^{[17] [23]}

1. All dharmas are seen as particular separate events or phenomena (shi 事). This is the mundane way of seeing.
2. All events are an expression of li (理, the absolute, principle or noumenon), which is associated with the concepts of shunyata, “One Mind” (yi xin 一心) and Buddha nature
3. Shi and Li interpenetrate (lishi wuai 理事無礙)
4. All events interpenetrate (shishi wuai 事事無礙), "all distinct phenomenal dharmas interfuse and penetrate in all ways" (Zongmi).

The three levels of Huayan meditation on the Dharmadhatu correspond to the last three views of the Dharmadhatu are:^[17]

1. Meditation on “True Emptiness”
2. Illuminating the non-obstruction of principle and phenomena.
3. Meditation on “universal pervasion and complete accommodation.”

According to Fox, "these dharmadhatus are not separate worlds – they are actually increasingly more holographic perspectives on a single phenomenological manifold...they more properly represent four types or orders of perspectives on experience."^[17] Furthermore for Huayan this practice is the solution to the problem of samsara which lies in the "fixation or attachment to a particular perspective. What we think are the essences of objects are really therefore nothing but mere names, mere functional designations, and none of these contextual definitions need necessarily interfere with any of the others."^[17]

Other practices

According to Paul Williams, the reading and recitation of the Avatamsaka sutra was also a central practice for the tradition, for monks and laity.^[24]

Another practice which is highlighted in the Avatamsaka sutra is that of Buddhānusmṛti or nianfo- mindfulness of the Buddha.^[25]

The tradition also mentions two key samadhis, the ocean-seal samadhi (Ch. haiyin sanmei) and the huayan samadhi (huayan sanmei).^[26]

Layman Li Tongxuan developed a unique meditative practice based on the 9th chapter of the Avatamsaka sutra. The practice, named 'the contemplation of Buddhalight' (joguang guan), focused on tracing the universal light which is radiated by the Buddha in one's mind and expanding it further outwards.^[27]

Sudden enlightenment

Huayan favored the teaching of sudden enlightenment. This is because the Buddha nature is already present in all sentient beings and also because their theory of interpenetration entails that Buddhahood is already present at the first stage of a Bodhisattva's path.^[28] According to Li Tongxuan:

[T]he first access of faith in the mind of the practitioner is in itself the culmination of the entire path, the very realization of final Buddhahood.... ‘Faith’ or confidence in the possibility of enlightenment is nothing but enlightenment itself, in an anticipatory and causative modality.^[29]

Buddhahood was seen as beyond language and stages of practice. Because practices cannot create something that is already not imminent, they were seen as simply revealing what was already there. The patriarch Zongmi formulated his own theory of awakening which was "immediate awakening followed by gradual cultivation" and the view that "immediate and gradual are not only not contradictory, but are actually complementary".^[17]

Paradox

Huayan makes extensive use of paradox in argument and literary imagery. All three types of paradox originate in the tension between conventional and absolute truth. Huayan uses three types of paradox:

1. Emphasizing the concept of śūnyatā, first is asserted that a phenomenon X is empty, which implies that X is not X. An example from Fazang is the assertion:

[W]hen one understands that origination is without self-nature, then there is no origination.^[30]

2. Reversing the first paradox by asserting that any empty phenomenon is an expression of the absolute non-duality between emptiness and form, or the identity between conditioned, relative reality and the ultimate truth of tathatā. This paradox is derived from two doctrinal sources:

• The Hua-yen concept of "true emptiness"
• The Hua-yen interpretation of the dialectic of the One Mind in the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana.

Fazang's paradoxical assertion illustrates this second type:

When the great wisdom of perfect clarity gazes upon a minute hair, the universal sea of nature, the true source, is clearly manifest.^[30]

3. The third variation of paradox is grounded in the Hua-yen doctrine of the "nonobstruction of all phenomena" (shih shih wu-ai(k)). Each phenomenon is perceived as interpenetrating with and containing all others. This paradoxical violation of the conventional order of time and space is exemplified by Fa-tsang's famous "Essay on the Golden Lion":

In each and every hair [of the lion] there is the golden lion. All of the lions contained in each and every hair simultaneously and suddenly penetrate into one hair. [Therefore], within each and every hair there are unlimited lions.^[30]