Tiantai and Huayan: Two Great Systems of Chinese Buddhist Thought

Reading the whole through a single moment

Two ways into a spacious tradition

Tiantai and Huayan offer ways of reading Buddhist teachings together. Their teachers ask how a particular scripture, a moment of meditation, and the aspiration to awaken for all beings belong within one path. You can enter this world through two manageable readings: Zhiyi’s account of calming and insight, and Fazang’s explanation of a golden lion. Keep an ordinary question beside them: how does something become intelligible through its relationships?

Tiantai takes its name from Mount Tiantai in Zhejiang. Its teaching gives the Lotus Sutra a central place. Huayan takes its name from the Avataṃsaka, or Flower Garland Sutra. Each tradition developed methods of doctrinal classification, called panjiao, to explain the purposes of different Buddhist teachings. Their classifications also guide practice: understanding a teaching includes understanding whom it addresses and what it helps a person learn.

Zhiyi, Mount Tiantai, and Guoqing Temple

Zhiyi, who lived from 538 to 597, studied with Huisi and taught both in the southern capital and at Mount Tiantai. His disciple Guanding recorded and edited major works associated with his teaching. Guoqing Temple at Mount Tiantai became a central home of the tradition. The mountain and monastery give a geographical setting to writings that can otherwise seem quite abstract.

The Great Calming and Contemplation, or Mohe zhiguan, is numbered T1911 in the Taishō canon. Its opening records lectures delivered at Yuquan Temple in Jingzhou in 594. The title joins zhi, calming or cessation, with guan, contemplation or insight. Settling attention and understanding experience belong together throughout the work. Paul L. Swanson’s BDK translation provides an English companion.

Begin with the opening account of the three approaches to calming and contemplation: gradual, variable, and perfect and sudden. Then turn to the four kinds of samādhi, organized around constant sitting, constant walking, a combination of sitting and walking, and neither exclusively walking nor sitting. This range helps you see the breadth of the work. Its treatment of practice includes posture, attention, recitation, and activity beyond the meditation seat.

For a shorter entrance, read Essentials for Practising Calming and Insight in Seated Meditation, T1915. Start with its opening explanation of why calming and insight need each other. On a first reading, follow this relationship before attempting to retain every technical list.

Five periods, eight teachings

The traditional Tiantai scheme of “five periods and eight teachings” presents the Buddha’s teaching career as a course adapted to different capacities. Its familiar compact form appears in Chegwan’s tenth-century Outline of the Four Teachings, T1931. This is a traditional interpretive arrangement of scriptures.

The five periods are the Flower Garland teaching; the Deer Park teachings associated with the Āgamas; the broader Mahāyāna teachings called vaipulya; the Perfection of Wisdom teachings; and the Lotus and Nirvāṇa teachings. Read the sequence as an account of how understanding matures. Ask what a learner can grasp at each point and what the next teaching opens up.

The eight teachings comprise two groups of four. Sudden, gradual, secret, and indeterminate describe modes of teaching. Tripiṭaka, shared, distinct, and perfect describe doctrinal content. “Secret” here concerns different hearers benefiting without knowing one another’s experience; it does not name the esoteric rituals of Tang Buddhism. Keeping the two groups separate makes the scheme much easier to follow.

Zhiyi’s threefold truth gives a more intimate point of entry. A phenomenon is empty of independent existence, provisionally present through conditions, and understood through the middle that holds these insights together. The Mohe zhiguan brings emptiness, provisional existence, and the middle into one contemplation. Try reading its passage on “perfect faith” with a particular feeling in mind. Notice the feeling’s presence, its dependence on circumstances, and the difficulty of fixing it into an unchanging thing.

Dushun, Zhiyan, and Fazang

Tradition holds that Dushun, 557–640, was the first Huayan patriarch and Zhiyan, 602–668, the second. Fazang, 643–712, studied under Zhiyan and became the tradition’s third patriarch. His teaching brought Huayan thought into the world of the Tang court as well as the monastery.

The library’s Flower Garland Sutra is the eighty-fascicle Chinese version, T279. For an initial visit, read the opening assembly slowly. Attend to its many figures, places, and forms of activity. You need not master every name to notice how the scripture invites a reader to imagine awakening on an expansive scale.

Fazang’s Treatise on the Golden Lion provides a smaller object to contemplate. The library presents T1881, which includes commentary by Chengqian. After the introductory material, find the first of the treatise’s ten sections, on dependent arising. Gold takes the form of a lion through the work of a craftsman. The text uses this simple scene to explore how a visible form depends on conditions.

Continue with the second section, on form and emptiness, and then the seventh, on the ten mysteries. The lion’s eyes, ears, limbs, and hairs allow Fazang to discuss whole and part, one and many. Keep returning to the object rather than collecting slogans. Ask what changes when you attend to the lion’s shape, and what changes when you attend to the gold throughout it. Distinguish Fazang’s brief statements from the explanations woven around them in this edition.

Four ways of understanding the dharma realm

Chengguan, 738–839, gave Huayan a systematic account of four dharma realms. Dharmadhātu, translated here as “dharma realm,” concerns reality as encountered and understood. The four are phenomena; principle; the unobstructed relationship of principle and phenomena; and the unobstructed relationship of phenomena with one another. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s account explains this development in its section on Chengguan.

These are four ways of apprehending reality. Begin with distinguishable things and events. Then consider their common emptiness of independent nature. The third perspective sees this principle throughout particular phenomena. The fourth considers how phenomena include and relate to one another without losing their particularity. Return to the golden lion after reading these terms: its many distinct features make a useful companion to the vocabulary.

Zongmi and the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment

Zongmi, 780–841, joined Huayan learning with training in the Heze lineage of Chan. His work on the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment, T842, provides a bridge between doctrinal study and the questions of a practitioner. The library also holds his abridged commentary, T1795.

Read Samantabhadra’s question about practising when experience is illusory. The answer compares practice to producing fire through the friction of wood: the fire consumes the wood that supported it. Next read the question of Universal Vision, which asks about stages and methods. Placing these passages together lets you hear both immediate awakening and careful cultivation within the same scripture. Zongmi’s commentary offers a patient guide to the relationship.

Where to go next

Texts to read

Masters

  • Zhiyi 智顗

    Zhiyi (538–597) studied under Huisi before teaching in the southern capital and at Mount Tiantai.

  • Dushun 杜順

    Dushun is regarded in Huayan tradition as its first patriarch.

  • Zhiyan 智儼

    Zhiyan was a Tang Buddhist scholar regarded as the second Huayan patriarch.

  • Fazang 法藏

    Fazang (643–712) was born in Chang'an to a family of Sogdian ancestry and studied under Zhiyan.

  • Chengguan 澄觀

    Chengguan wrote a major commentary and subcommentary on the eighty-fascicle Avataṃsaka Sūtra.

  • Zongmi 宗密

    Zongmi combined the Huayan scholarship of Chengguan with Chan training received from Suizhou Daoyuan in the Heze lineage.