The Five Teachings and the Ten Doctrines
Opening Up the Tenets by Classifying the Teaching分教開宗
Everything in the previous four parts has been building toward this: Fazang's own answer to the question that occupied ten predecessors in Part 4. Sorted by the Dharma itself, the whole of Buddhist teaching comes down to five ranked categories — Hīnayāna, Initial, Final, Sudden, and, at the summit, his own school's Perfect Teaching. Sorted by underlying doctrine instead, it comes down to ten — six of them internal divisions within early Buddhist scholasticism alone. This is the single most quoted passage of the entire Wujiao Zhang, the classification against which every other Chinese Buddhist school's teaching would be measured within the Huayan tradition for the rest of its history.
The Text
1. Five Teachings, Named 五教
◎第四分教開宗者。於中有二。初就法分教。教類有五。後以理開宗。宗乃有十。初門者。聖教萬差要唯有五。一小乘教。二大乘始教。三終教。四頓教。五圓教。初一即愚法二乘教。後一即別教一乘。以經本中下文內為善伏太子所說名為圓滿修多羅故。立此名也。
Fourth, opening up the tenets by classifying the teaching: this has two parts. First, classifying the teaching in terms of the Dharma, of which there are five kinds. Second, opening up the tenets in terms of principle, of which there are ten.
As for the first gate: the sagely teaching, in all its ten thousand differences, comes down essentially to just five. One, the Hīnayāna Teaching. Two, the Initial Teaching of the Great Vehicle. Three, the Final Teaching. Four, the Sudden Teaching. Five, the Perfect Teaching. The first of these is simply the Dharma-ignorant two vehicles' teaching; the last is simply the One Vehicle as its own Separate Teaching. This name is established because, in a later passage of the sūtra text itself, what was taught for Prince Well-Subdued is named "the Perfect and Complete Sūtra."
判教, "panjiao" or doctrinal classification, is the project this whole part belongs to: sorting the entire, historically disordered mass of Buddhist scripture that had reached China — sūtras and treatises translated across seven centuries, from wildly different regions, schools, and periods of Indian Buddhist history, all arriving in Chinese with no indication of their relative date or rank — into a single ordered hierarchy. Every major Chinese school eventually built one, because every school needed to answer the same practical question: given that the canon appears to disagree with itself, which of its teachings is provisional and which is final, and where does our own foundational text sit? Part 4 surveyed ten such answers. Fazang's own answer, given here, became so influential within Huayan that "the Five Teachings" is still the standard shorthand, inside the tradition, for its whole account of how Buddhist teaching develops.
The five in order: the Hīnayāna Teaching 小乘教, meaning the teaching of the two vehicles who never accept the Great Vehicle at all; the Initial Teaching 始教, the early Mahāyāna emphasis on emptiness, exemplified by the Perfection of Wisdom literature; the Final Teaching 終教, the mature Mahāyāna teaching of the tathāgatagarbha, buddha-nature present in every being; the Sudden Teaching 頓教, not a body of doctrinal content at all but a manner of teaching that dispenses with words and stages entirely; and, at the summit, the Perfect Teaching 圓教, Fazang's name for the Avataṃsaka's own One Vehicle as its Separate Teaching — everything this treatise has been calling別教一乘 since Part 1. As flagged already in Part 4's reading notes, this name was not new: Guangtong, Hushen, Qishe, and, most consequentially, Zhiyi's Tiantai school had all already claimed "the Perfect Teaching" for their own summit. Fazang is not innocently borrowing a label here — he is contesting the single most prestigious name in the entire panjiao tradition.
The identification of "Prince Well-Subdued" and "the Perfect and Complete Sūtra" 圓滿修多羅 is Fazang's own citation of a passage later in the Avataṃsaka itself; we have not been able to independently place the precise passage he has in mind, and flag this rather than silently smoothing it into a more familiar name.
2. The Middle Three, Grouped Three Ways 中間三教・三義
Fazang immediately complicates the tidy list of five: the three teachings in the middle — Initial, Final, and Sudden — can also be counted as one, or as two, depending on what distinction is being drawn. This is where the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, the Ratnakūṭa Sūtra, the Mahābherī Sūtra, and the Awakening of Faith all get folded in as supporting witnesses.
中間三者有其三義。一或總為一。謂一三乘教也。以此皆為三人所得故。如上所引說。二或分為二。所謂漸頓。以始終二教所有解行並在言說。階位次第因果相承從微至著。通名為漸。故楞伽云。漸者如菴摩勒果漸熟非頓。此之謂也。頓者。言說頓絕理性頓顯解行頓成一念不生。即是佛等。故楞伽云。頓者如鏡中像頓現非漸。此之謂也。以一切法本來自正不待言說不待觀智。如淨名以默顯不二等。又寶積經中。亦有說頓教修多羅故。依此立名。三或開為三。謂於漸中開出始終二教。即如上說深密經等三法輪中後二是也。依是義故。法鼓經中以空門為始。以不空門為終。故彼經云。迦葉白佛言。諸摩訶衍經多說空義。佛告迦葉。一切空經是有餘說。唯有此經是無上說。非有餘說。復次迦葉如波斯匿王常十一月設大施會先飯餓鬼孤貧乞者。次施沙門及婆羅門。甘饍眾味隨其所欲。諸佛世尊亦復如是。隨諸眾生種種欲樂。而為演說種種經法。若有眾生懈怠犯戒不勤隨順。捨如來藏常住妙典。好樂修學種種空經。乃至廣說。解云。此則約空理有餘。名為始教。約如來藏常住妙典。名為終教。又起信論中。約頓教門顯絕言真如。約漸教門說依言真如。就依言中。約始終二教。說空不空二真如也。此約法以分教耳。若就法義如下別辨。
The three in between have three senses. One, they may be gathered together as a single one — namely, simply as the three-vehicle teaching — since all three are attained by the three kinds of persons, as already cited above.
Two, they may be divided into two, namely Gradual and Sudden: because the understanding and practice possessed by the Initial and Final Teachings alike remain within verbal expression, with stages and sequence, cause handing on to fruit, advancing from the subtle to the manifest, they are together named "Gradual." Hence the Laṅkāvatāra says: "The gradual is like the āmalaka fruit, ripening by degrees, not all at once" — this is what is meant. As for "the Sudden": verbal expression is cut off all at once, the nature of principle is revealed all at once, understanding and practice are accomplished all at once, not a single thought arises — this is itself the state of a buddha, and the like. Hence the Laṅkāvatāra says: "The sudden is like an image in a mirror, appearing all at once, not by degrees" — this is what is meant. This is because all dharmas are, from the very beginning, correct just as they are, not needing to wait upon verbal expression, not needing to wait upon contemplative wisdom — as when Vimalakīrti revealed non-duality through silence, and the like; and the Ratnakūṭa Sūtra, too, speaks of "a sūtra of the Sudden Teaching" — it is on this basis that this name is established.
Three, they may be opened out into three, namely opening the Initial and Final Teachings apart from within the Gradual — this corresponds to the last two of the three Dharma-wheels described above from the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra and the like. On this basis, the Mahābherī Sūtra takes the gate of emptiness as the Initial and the gate of non-emptiness as the Final. Hence that sūtra says: "Kāśyapa said to the Buddha: 'The various Mahāyāna sūtras mostly teach the meaning of emptiness.' The Buddha told Kāśyapa: 'Every sūtra on emptiness is a teaching with something still left over; only this sūtra is the teaching beyond which nothing remains, not a teaching with something left over. Moreover, Kāśyapa, it is like King Prasenajit, who every eleventh month holds a great almsgiving assembly: he first feeds the hungry ghosts, the orphaned, the destitute, and the beggars; then he gives to the śramaṇas and brāhmaṇas fine food of every flavor, according to what they desire. The buddhas, the World-Honored Ones, do just the same: following the various desires and pleasures of sentient beings, they expound for them sūtras and teachings of every kind. If there are sentient beings who are indolent, who violate the precepts, who do not diligently follow along, who abandon the eternally abiding, wondrous scripture of the tathāgatagarbha, and delight instead in studying various sūtras of emptiness...'" and so on at length.
Explanation: this is a case of taking the principle of emptiness as "something left over," and naming it the Initial Teaching; and taking the eternally abiding, wondrous scripture of the tathāgatagarbha as the Final Teaching. The Awakening of Faith likewise, in terms of the gate of the Sudden Teaching, reveals suchness cut off from words, and in terms of the gate of the Gradual Teaching, speaks of suchness as expressed in words — and within what is expressed in words, in terms of the Initial and Final Teachings, it speaks of the two kinds of suchness, empty and non-empty. This is classifying the teaching in terms of the Dharma. As for classifying it in terms of the meaning of the Dharma, this is discussed separately below.
The Sudden Teaching is the one member of the Five Teachings that is not, strictly, a body of doctrine at all — it is a manner of teaching, defined entirely by the absence of stages, words, and gradual cultivation. Its two proof-texts are telling: Vimalakīrti's famous silent response, when every other bodhisattva has just given a lengthy verbal account of non-duality, and an otherwise unspecified "sūtra of the Sudden Teaching" mentioned in passing within the Ratnakūṭa collection. Because it is defined by manner rather than content, the Sudden Teaching sits awkwardly between the Final Teaching and the Perfect Teaching in Fazang's ranking — not obviously "more advanced" in doctrinal content than the Final Teaching's tathāgatagarbha, but ranked higher because it more fully embodies the idea that ultimate reality does not, in the end, depend on being spoken at all. Readers who come to this scheme expecting a straightforward ladder of increasingly sophisticated ideas should notice this: rank in Fazang's system tracks several different axes at once — content, manner of teaching, and completeness of host-and-retinue interpenetration — not a single scale of "more profound."
The Awakening of Faith, quoted here for its own account of suchness spoken-of versus suchness beyond words, is translated in full elsewhere on this site as the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna; the Laṅkāvatāra, cited twice here for its similes of the ripening fruit and the mirror's sudden image, likewise has its own full translation as the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra.
3. Ten Doctrines 十宗
Fazang now turns from classifying by teaching to classifying by underlying doctrine — a finer-grained cut that reaches back into the internal disputes of early Buddhist scholasticism before it ever reaches the Mahāyāna at all. Six of the ten doctrines below belong entirely to pre-Mahāyāna Abhidharma schools; only the last four correspond to the Initial, Final, Sudden, and Perfect Teachings just discussed.
二以理開宗。宗乃有十。一我法俱有宗。此有二。一人天乘。二小乘。小乘中犢子部等。彼立三聚法。一有為聚法。二無為聚法。三非二聚法初二是法。後一是我。又立五法藏。一過去。二未來。三現在。四無為。五不可說。此即是我。不可說是有為無為故。二法有我無宗。謂薩婆多等。彼說諸法二種所攝。一名。二色。或四所攝。謂三世及無為。或五。謂一心。二心所。三色。四不相應。五無為。故一切法皆悉實有也。三法無去來宗。謂大眾部等。說有現在及無為法。以過未體用無故。四現通假實宗。謂法假部等。彼說無去來。現在世中諸法。在蘊可實在界處假。隨應諸法假實不定。成實論等經部別師亦即此類。五俗妄真實宗。謂說出世部等。世俗皆假。以虛妄故。出世法皆實。非虛妄故。六諸法但名宗。謂說一部等。一切我法唯有假名。都無體故。此通初教之始準知。七一切法皆空宗。謂大乘始教。說一切諸法皆悉真空。然出情外無分別故。如般若等。八真德不空宗。謂如終教。諸經說一切法唯是真如。如來藏實德故。有自體故。具性德故。九相想俱絕宗。如頓教中顯絕言之理等。如淨名默顯等。準知。十圓明具德宗。如別教一乘主伴具足無盡自在所顯法門是也。
Second, opening up the tenets in terms of principle: the tenets are ten.
One, the doctrine that self and dharmas both exist. This has two parts: one, the vehicle of humans and gods; two, the Lesser Vehicle. Within the Lesser Vehicle, the Vātsīputrīya and similar schools establish three categories of dharma: one, conditioned dharmas; two, unconditioned dharmas; three, dharmas that are neither of the two. The first two are "dharmas"; the last is the "self." They also establish five treasuries of dharma: one, the past; two, the future; three, the present; four, the unconditioned; five, the inexpressible. This last is the self — it is called inexpressible because it is neither conditioned nor unconditioned.
Two, the doctrine that dharmas exist but the self does not — the Sarvāstivāda and the like. They say all dharmas are gathered under two categories: one, name; two, form. Or under four: the three time-periods together with the unconditioned. Or under five: one, mind; two, mental factors; three, form; four, factors dissociated from mind; five, the unconditioned. Hence all dharmas, every one, truly exist.
Three, the doctrine that dharmas have no past or future — the Mahāsāṃghika and the like. They say only the present and the unconditioned dharmas exist, since past and future have neither substance nor function.
Four, the doctrine that the present is shared between the provisional and the real — the Prajñaptivāda and the like. They say there is no past or future; among the dharmas of the present world, what belongs to the aggregates may be real, while what belongs to the sense-realms and sense-fields is provisional — each dharma's being provisional or real is not fixed, but varies accordingly. The Satyasiddhi-śāstra and certain independent masters of the Sautrāntika school likewise belong to this same category.
Five, the doctrine that the mundane is false and the supramundane real — the Lokottaravāda and the like. They say everything mundane is merely provisional, since it is false; while the supramundane dharma is entirely real, since it is not false.
Six, the doctrine that all dharmas are merely names — the Ekavyāvahārika and the like. They say that self and dharmas alike have only provisional names, and are entirely without any substance at all. This already touches on the very beginning of the Initial Teaching, and should be understood accordingly.
Seven, the doctrine that all dharmas are entirely empty — the Initial Teaching of the Great Vehicle. It says that all dharmas without exception are truly empty, yet, beyond ordinary sentiment, are free of discrimination — as the Perfection of Wisdom literature and the like teach.
Eight, the doctrine that the true virtues are not empty — as with the Final Teaching. Its sūtras say that all dharmas are nothing but suchness, since the tathāgatagarbha's real virtues are present in them — because it possesses its own substance, because it is replete with the virtues of its own nature.
Nine, the doctrine that both characteristic and conception are cut off — as in the Sudden Teaching, which reveals the principle cut off from all words, and the like — as with Vimalakīrti's revealing through silence, and the like. This should be understood accordingly.
Ten, the doctrine of perfect clarity replete with virtue — as with the One Vehicle in its own Separate Teaching, the Dharma-gate revealed through host and retinue fully present, inexhaustible and self-mastered. This is what is meant.
The Five Teachings and the Ten Doctrines side by side, so the correspondence is visible at a glance:
| Doctrine | School | Corresponding Teaching |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Self and dharmas both exist | Vātsīputrīya and the vehicle of humans and gods | the Hīnayāna Teaching |
| 2. Dharmas exist, self does not | Sarvāstivāda | |
| 3. Dharmas have no past or future | Mahāsāṃghika | |
| 4. The present is shared, provisional and real | Prajñaptivāda; some Sautrāntika masters | |
| 5. The mundane is false, the supramundane real | Lokottaravāda | |
| 6. All dharmas are merely names | Ekavyāvahārika | |
| 7. All dharmas are entirely empty | Madhyamaka / Perfection of Wisdom | the Initial Teaching |
| 8. The true virtues are not empty | tathāgatagarbha sūtras | the Final Teaching |
| 9. Characteristic and conception both cut off | Vimalakīrti's silence | the Sudden Teaching |
| 10. Perfect clarity, replete with virtue | the Avataṃsaka alone | the Perfect Teaching |
Notice how the weight of the classification falls: six of the ten doctrines, and by extension the entire content of the single Hīnayāna Teaching, are devoted to distinguishing early Buddhist scholastic schools from one another — chiefly on the single question of how the past, present, and future exist, and whether the person (pudgala) is anything more than a name for the aggregates. This is inherited Abhidharma doxography, the record of centuries of dispute among non-Mahāyāna schools over the metaphysics of time and personal identity, absorbed wholesale into Fazang's scheme as its lowest and most finely subdivided rank. Only the last four doctrines correspond one-to-one with the four higher Teachings — which is itself a judgment: the entire Mahāyāna, on this classification, contains only as much internal doctrinal variety as all of pre-Mahāyāna Buddhism put together minus five.
Fazang's finished ranking, from bottom to top: Hīnayāna (doctrines 1–6) → Initial (doctrine 7, emptiness) → Final (doctrine 8, tathāgatagarbha) → Sudden (doctrine 9, wordless realization) → Perfect (doctrine 10, the Avataṃsaka's own One Vehicle). Everything this treatise has argued in Parts 1 through 4 — the ten proofs that the Avataṃsaka's One Vehicle outranks even the Lotus Sūtra's, the careful counting of the vehicles, the survey of nine other classification schemes — exists to justify placing a single sūtra alone, unaccompanied, at the very top of this ladder. Every other scheme surveyed in Part 4 puts something else in that position, or shares it between two texts (the Nirvāṇa Sūtra and the Avataṃsaka together, in several of the six- and five-doctrine schemes); Fazang's own contribution is to give the Avataṃsaka the summit entirely to itself, with the Nirvāṇa Sūtra's tathāgatagarbha doctrine demoted one full rank, into the Final Teaching, to make room.
Part Five Complete
This closes Part Five: the Five Teachings that classify Buddhist scripture by content and manner of teaching, the three ways their middle members can be grouped, and the Ten Doctrines that classify the same material by underlying philosophical position, reaching back through six schools of pre-Mahāyāna scholasticism before arriving at emptiness, tathāgatagarbha, wordless realization, and, at the summit, the Avataṃsaka's own Perfect Teaching alone.
Part Six turns from ranking the teachings to combining them with the vehicles counted in Part 2, and then asks a new question entirely: not what was taught, but when — tracing every teaching in this scheme back to the exact moment after the Buddha's awakening it was first delivered.