ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I mentioned the commentator to the Awakening of Faith, Fazang. Fazang was, according to traditional reckoning, the third patriarch of the school known in China as Huayan, in Korea as Hwa2m, and in Japan as Kegon.1 The expression ‘Huayan’ means ‘Flower Garland’, and is the Chinese name of a Mahayana setra, the vast AvataTsaka SEtra.2
One feature of East Asian, in contrast to Indo-Tibetan, Buddhism was the development of schools often based on the study of particular setras. Each such school saw its scripture as the culmination of the Buddha’s teaching, his highest utterance or final word, the setras of the other schools ranked in a step-like progression to this highest expression of the Buddha’s doctrine. It was in these schools, such as Huayan and Tiantai (with its interest in the Lotus SEtra), that a truly Chinese version of Buddhist philosophy was created. This East Asian emphasis on setras contrasts with the Tibetan attitude, for example, where it was (and is) felt that setras are too difficult to understand – poetic, vague, unsystematic, or superficially contradictory, perhaps – without approaching them through a thorough grounding in Madhyamika and Yogacara philosophy. In the great Chinese schools philosophy arises out of reading the setras; in Tibet Indian schools of philosophy, thoroughly mastered and schematized, are used as hermeneutic tools in order to understand the setras themselves. Perhaps one reason for this Chinese emphasis on setras and their exegesis was that study of the Original Master’s utterances and commentary on their meaning was very much part of traditional Confucian learning.
