The Two Gates, and the Four Errors of the Outsiders
Jizang opens by drawing the whole treatise's map before filling in a single square of it: two gates, refuting the false and revealing the true, and within refuting the false, four sects to be taken down in turn — the outsiders, the Abhidharma masters, the Satyasiddhi school, and a mistaken reading of the Mahāyāna itself. He then defends, at some length, why a Buddhist treatise should bother refuting anyone at all, before turning to the first sect: the outsiders of India, whose entire account of the world he reduces to four possible positions on cause and effect, each one taken up, stated in full, and broken.
Translation Method
The Sanlun Xuanyi — "The Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises" — is Jizang's own apologia for the school he founded on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Twelve Gate Treatise, and the Hundred Treatise — all three already translated in full on this site. Unlike those three, this is not itself a commentary on a root verse text: it is Jizang writing in his own voice, defending the three treatises against rival schools of his own time and explaining, system by system, what the "three treatises" actually teach and why they deserve the name. Because Jizang is the recognized founder of the school and the acknowledged authority on what these three treatises mean, we have not manufactured a separate ancient commentator for these pages. His prose is the primary text; the reading notes below are Ru-Yi Meditation Center's own structural and cross-referential observations, offered honestly as such.
Classical text is set in the left-hand column below, our English in the right. Jizang argues throughout in a rhetorical question-and-answer form — 問曰 and 答曰, "Question" and "Answer" — a single author staging an objection to himself and then answering it, not a transcript of two debaters as in the Hundred Treatise. We render the labels plainly, as Question: and Answer:, without further ornament. See also this site's note on translation method.
1. The Whole Treatise in One Paragraph
The very first sentences of the Sanlun Xuanyi lay out its entire architecture: a general preface covering the overall drift of the argument, and then a detailed exposition of each individual topic. The general preface itself has two gates. Everything that follows for the rest of the treatise — all fourteen parts of it — is simply the unfolding of this one short paragraph.
三論玄義 慧日道場沙門吉藏奉命撰
總序宗要。開為二門。一通序大歸。二別釋眾品。初門有二。一破邪。二顯正。
The Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises. Respectfully composed, by imperial command, by the śramaṇa Jizang of the Huiri Monastery.
To set out the overall drift of the doctrine in general, this treatise opens into two gates: the first is a general preface covering the overall tendency of the whole; the second is a detailed exposition of each individual topic. The first gate itself has two parts: the first is refuting the false; the second is revealing the true.
"Huiri Monastery" (慧日道場) was one of the imperial monastic academies of the Sui court, and "by imperial command" (奉命撰) tells us this treatise was not a private tract but state-sponsored scholarship — Jizang, by this point in his career, had become something close to the empire's authority on what the newly reunified Sui dynasty's Buddhism should teach. That context matters for how sweeping the rest of the treatise is willing to be: it sets out not to persuade one rival teacher but to adjudicate, on behalf of the tradition as a whole, which schools count as having gotten the Buddha's teaching right.
Only "refuting the false" (破邪) and "revealing the true" (顯正) are named here as the treatise's two moves — the "detailed exposition of each individual topic" promised in the same sentence never actually arrives as a separate section. What we have under that name, this treatise's own commentators and translators over the centuries agree, is simply the enormous elaboration of "refuting the false, revealing the true" that fills the rest of the book. The map drawn in this first paragraph is the whole territory.
2. Why the Three Treatises Were Written
Before naming names, Jizang states the motive: a Buddha appears when beings are suffering and confused, and disappears into apparent silence when his teaching decays into competing sects. The three treatises exist to fill exactly that kind of gap.
夫適化無方。陶誘非一。考聖心。以息患為主。統教意。以通理為宗。但九十六術栖火宅為淨道。五百異部縈見網為泥洹。遂使鹿苑坵墟。鷲山荊蕀。善逝以之流慟。薩埵所以大悲。四依為此而興。
Now, the ways a teaching accommodates itself to circumstance have no fixed pattern, and the means by which it molds and guides beings are not any single thing. Examine the sage's own mind, and its governing concern is bringing suffering to rest; take the teaching's intent as a whole, and its guiding doctrine is making principle pass through without obstruction. And yet the ninety-six schools take the burning house itself for the pure way, and the five hundred divergent sects, tangled in their own net of views, take that tangle for nirvāṇa — so that the Deer Park becomes an overgrown mound and Vulture Peak a thicket of thorns. It is on account of this that the Well-Gone One weeps, and the great being feels great compassion; it is for this that those who rely on the four kinds of reliance arise.
"The burning house" and "the four kinds of reliance" both point outward to texts this site has already translated in full, and Jizang expects his reader to catch the reference instantly rather than have it explained. The burning house is the parable of the Lotus Sūtra, where children absorbed in play fail to notice their house is on fire. "The four kinds of reliance" (四依) are the four grades of teacher — from the ordinary good friend up to the bodhisattva of the tenth ground — who appear in a degenerating age specifically to keep the Dharma from being lost; Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, in the last part of this treatise, will both be identified by name as belonging to this rank.
The rhetorical move here is worth noticing early, because the whole treatise repeats it: Jizang never simply asserts that rival schools are wrong. He describes the ninety-six schools and five hundred sects as themselves in search of nirvāṇa, mistaking a net of views for release — which is a different and more exacting charge than calling them liars or fools. Getting the diagnosis right, on this treatise's own terms, requires stating what the confused party actually thinks it has found.
3. Naming the Four Sects
Here the three treatises are named as one project with two aims, and the sects they attack are enumerated for the first time: one non-Buddhist tradition and three schools that consider themselves Buddhist. A string of rhetorical questions then asks, in effect, "why bother refuting so many opponents at once?" — and Jizang's answer is that the disease has to be traced to its root, or the underlying pattern of wrong view will simply recur in a new guise.
三論由斯而作。但論雖有三。義唯二轍。一曰顯正。二曰破邪。破邪則下拯沈淪。顯正則上弘大法。故振領提綱。理唯斯二也。但邪謬紛綸。難可備序。三論所斥略辨四宗。一摧外道。二折毘曇。三排成實。四呵大執。
The three treatises were composed on this very account. Though the treatises are three in number, their sense runs on only two tracks: the first is called revealing the true, the second is called refuting the false. Refuting the false rescues, downward, those who have sunk and are drowning; revealing the true propagates, upward, the great Dharma. So when one shakes the collar and lifts the net by its cords, the underlying principle is only these two. But wrong views are so tangled and manifold that a full account of them would be difficult to give in every case. What the three treatises refute may be sketched, in brief, as four sects: first, crushing the outsiders; second, breaking the Abhidharma; third, pushing aside Satyasiddhi; fourth, rebuking the mistaken grasp of the Mahāyāna.
問以何義故遍斥眾師。答論主究其原。盡其理也。一源不究。則戲論不滅。毫理不盡。則至道不彰。以無源不究。群異乃息。無理不盡。玄道始通。是以斯文遍排眾計。
Question: For what reason does the treatise refute every master at once, without exception? Answer: The author of the treatise traces each error to its source, and exhausts its underlying principle down to the last strand. If a single source is left untraced, conceptual proliferation is not extinguished; if a single hairsbreadth of principle is left unexhausted, the ultimate way does not become manifest. Only when there is no source left untraced do the massed divergences finally come to rest; only when there is no principle left unexhausted does the profound way begin to pass through unobstructed. This is why this text refutes every position without exception.
問既無法不究。無言不盡應遍排群異。何故但斥四宗耶。答初一為外。後三為內。內外並收。毘曇明有。成實辨空。空有俱攝。斯二為小。
Question: If there is no teaching left untraced and no assertion left unexhausted, then every divergent position without exception ought to be refuted — why, then, does the treatise rebuke only these four sects? Answer: The first of the four is outside the Buddhist fold; the latter three are within it. Between them, inside and outside are both gathered in. The Abhidharma expounds existence; Satyasiddhi discriminates emptiness; between them, emptiness and existence are both taken in. These two together constitute the Hīnayāna.
方等稱大。大小該羅。略洗四迷。則紛累都盡耳。問此之四執優降云何。答外道不達二空。橫存人法。毘曇已得無我。而執法有性。
What is styled the Mahāyāna in the broad canonical sense is called great. With great and small both encompassed, this brief cleansing of four kinds of confusion brings every entanglement to a complete end. Question: Among these four positions taken hold of, what is the ranking of superior and inferior? Answer: The outsiders fail to penetrate the twin emptiness of person and phenomena, and arbitrarily posit both a person and real phenomena. The Abhidharma masters have already attained the emptiness of a self, and yet they still hold that phenomena possess a nature of their own.
跋摩具辨二空。而照猶未盡。大乘乃言究竟。但封執成迷。自淺至深。四宗階級。
Harivarman discriminates the twin emptiness in full, and yet his illumination of it is still not exhaustive. Only the Mahāyāna is said to be ultimate — though even here, sealing oneself up within one's own grasp of it becomes, in turn, a fresh confusion. From shallow to deep, the four sects thus form a graded series.
問外道邪言可得稱破。餘為內教。何得亦破。答總談破顯。凡有四門。一破不收。二收不破。三亦破亦收。四不破不收。言不會道。破而不收。說必契理。收而不破學教起迷。亦破亦收。破其能迷之情。收取所惑之教。諸法實相言忘慮絕。實無可破亦無可收。泯上三門歸乎一相。照斯四句破立皎然(自此以來總明申破。從此已去別斥四宗)。
Question: The outsiders' erroneous claims may fairly be said to warrant refutation — but the remaining three belong to the Buddhist teaching itself. How is it right to refute them as well? Answer: Speaking of refuting and of gathering-in together, there are in all four gates. First, refuted and not gathered in. Second, gathered in and not refuted. Third, both refuted and gathered in. Fourth, neither refuted nor gathered in. Where what is said fails to meet the way, it is refuted and not gathered in. Where what is expounded necessarily accords with principle, but the study of that very teaching gives rise to confusion, it is gathered in but not without refutation — both refuted and gathered in at once: refuting the confused state of mind that is capable of being misled, while gathering in the very teaching that was misunderstood. As for the real character of all dharmas, where speech is forgotten and deliberation cut off, there is truly nothing to refute and nothing to gather in either. When the above three gates are dissolved and returned to a single mark, these four propositions illuminate refutation and establishment with perfect clarity. (Everything from here back has stated the general sense of refuting; everything from here forward takes up the four sects one by one.)
This is the treatise's own table of contents, and it is worth having by heart before reading further, since Jizang rarely re-announces which of the four sects he has moved on to. The order given here — outsiders, then Abhidharma, then Satyasiddhi, then mistaken Mahāyāna — is also a ranking from shallowest to deepest error, laid out explicitly in the passage on relative standing above: the outsiders posit a self and real phenomena outright; the Abhidharma masters (Parts 3–4 of this collection) have at least seen through the self but still cling to phenomena as really existent; Harivarman's Satyasiddhi school (Parts 4–5) sees the emptiness of both self and phenomena but, in this treatise's judgment, does not carry that insight to its full conclusion; and even a mistaken grasp of the Mahāyāna itself (Part 6) can fall into a subtler version of the same trap, sealing itself inside its own formula for what "great" means.
The fourfold scheme of refuting and gathering-in (破而不收 / 收而不破 / 亦破亦收 / 不破不收) recurs at the end of nearly every one of the four refutations that follow, applied afresh each time to what is being refuted. It functions as this treatise's answer to an obvious objection: if the three treatises are Buddhist works, how can they turn around and attack fellow Buddhists? The answer given here is that a teaching and a mistaken grasp of that teaching are not the same target — the treatise means to salvage the Buddha's own teaching even while dismantling the confusion that has attached itself to it. The same four-part logic appears again, applied specifically to the Hundred Treatise's own practice of refuting-while-partly-affirming its outside opponents, later in this collection (Part 12).
4. Crushing the Outsiders: The Four Errors About Cause and Effect
Jizang now opens the first of the four sects. "Outsider" (外道) is defined not as a geographical or ethnic category but a structural one — anyone whose mind wanders outside the way, regardless of nationality, which is why the next part of this treatise will apply the same word to certain Chinese masters. Here, though, the outsiders in question are the ninety-six schools of India, and Jizang reduces their entire spread of positions to four possible stances on cause and effect.
所言摧外道者。夫至妙虛通目之為道。心遊道外故名外道。外道多端。略陳其二。一天竺異執。二震旦眾師。總論西域九十六術。別序宗要則四執盛行。一計邪因邪果。二執無因有果。三立有因無果。四辨無因無果。
As for what is meant by "crushing the outsiders": that which is utterly subtle, empty, and unobstructed is called the way; a mind that wanders outside the way is therefore called an outsider. Outsiders take many forms; here, in brief, we set out two: first, the divergent positions held in India; second, the various masters of China. Speaking of the Western Region as a whole, there are ninety-six schools; but stating the essentials of each lineage individually, four positions are the ones in wide currency: first, positing a false cause and a false effect; second, holding that there is no cause but there is an effect; third, establishing that there is a cause but no effect; fourth, arguing that there is neither cause nor effect.
問云何名為邪因邪果。答有外道云。大自在天能生萬物。萬物若滅。還歸本天。故云自在。天若瞋。四生皆苦。自在若喜。則六道咸樂。然天非物因。物非天果。蓋是邪心所畫。故名邪因邪果(自在既爾。七計例然)。
Question: What is meant by "a false cause and a false effect"? Answer: There are outsiders who say that Maheśvara, the Great Sovereign God, is able to generate the ten thousand things, and that when the ten thousand things perish they return once more to that original god — hence he is called sovereign. When the god is angry, all four kinds of birth suffer; when the god is pleased, all six destinies alike rejoice. But in truth the god is not the cause of things, nor are things the effect of the god — this is simply a picture painted by a mistaken mind. Hence it is named a false cause and a false effect. (Maheśvara being of this kind, the other seven such positions follow the same pattern.)
難曰。夫善招樂報。惡感苦果。蓋是交謝之宅報應之場。以不達義理故生斯謬。又夫人類生人。物類生物。人類生人則人還似人。物類生物物還似物。蓋是相生之道也。而謂一天之因產萬類之報。豈不謬哉。
Objection: Good conduct summons a pleasant reward, and evil conduct draws a bitter result — this is simply the dwelling-place where cause and effect exchange places, the very field where deeds and their recompense operate. It is only for failing to penetrate this principle that such a mistaken view arises. Further, beings of the human kind give birth to human beings, and beings of the animal kind give birth to animals: when the human kind gives birth to humans, the offspring in turn resembles a human; when the animal kind gives birth to animals, the offspring in turn resembles an animal. This is simply the way things generate their own kind. Yet to claim that a single god, as sole cause, produces the recompense of ten thousand different kinds of being — is this not simply mistaken?
Jizang's definition of "outsider" as a mind that wanders outside the way, rather than a nationality, is doing real work: it licenses the next part of this collection, where Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Confucius — indisputably Chinese — are examined under the very same heading as Maheśvara and the Sāṃkhya teachers. The category is philosophical, not ethnographic.
The four-way grid of cause and effect set out here — false cause and false effect, no cause but an effect, a cause but no effect, neither cause nor effect — is a tetralemma applied to causal theory itself, and readers of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā on this site will recognize the family resemblance immediately: Chapter One of that text opens with its own fourfold rejection of causal accounts of arising. Jizang is not simply borrowing a rhetorical shape; he is placing the entire spread of Indian causal theory onto a grid his own school's root text will spend its first chapter dismantling.
5. No Cause but an Effect: Self-Origination and Its Rebuttal
The second of the four positions denies any cause at all while still admitting that effects plainly occur. Jizang illustrates it with a genuinely startling image — Zhuangzi's penumbra questioning the shadow about what causes it to move — and then presses the position on the difference between "uncaused" and "spontaneous," a distinction its own defenders cannot make good on.
問云何名為無因有果。答復有外道窮推萬物。無所由籍。故謂無因。而現覩諸法。當知有果。例如莊周魍魎問影。影由形有。形因造化。造化則無所由。本既自有。即末不因他。是故無因而有果也。
Question: What is meant by "no cause but an effect"? Answer: There are, further, outsiders who, pressing their investigation of the ten thousand things to its limit, find nothing that things depend upon or derive from, and therefore hold that there is no cause; yet since the various phenomena are plainly to be observed before one's eyes, they hold that one must recognize there is an effect. Take, for example, Zhuangzi's story of the penumbra questioning the shadow: the shadow exists in dependence on a form, and the form comes about through the transformations of nature — but the transformations of nature themselves derive from nothing further. Since the root is, from the outset, simply self-existent, the branch that follows from it does not depend on anything else. This is why they say there is no cause, and yet there is an effect.
問無因自然此有何異。答無因據其因無。自然明乎果有。約義不同。猶是一執。難曰。夫因果相生猶長短相形。既其有果。何得無因。如其無因。何獨有果。若必無因而有果者。則善招地獄。惡感天堂。
Question: How does "uncaused" differ from "spontaneous"? Answer: "Uncaused" speaks with reference to the cause's being absent; "spontaneous" makes clear that the effect is present. The wording differs in emphasis, but it remains a single position. Objection: Cause and effect generate one another exactly as long and short give each other their shape. Given that there is an effect, how could there fail to be a cause? And if there is truly no cause, how could there be an effect at all, of all things? If it must be maintained that there is no cause and yet there is an effect, then good conduct might just as well summon hell, and evil conduct might just as well draw one to heaven.
問曰。有人言。自然有因。自然無因。萬化不同。皆自然有。故無同前過。答曰。蓋未審察之。故生斯謬。如其精究。理必不然。夫論自者。謂非他為義。必是因。他則非自矣。故自則不因。因則不自。遂言因而復自。則義成鉾楯。
Question: There are those who say: there is spontaneously a cause, and spontaneously no cause; the ten thousand transformations differ, and all of them are spontaneously so — hence this position does not fall into the fault just described. Answer: This is simply a failure to examine the matter closely, and so this further mistaken view arises. Were the matter investigated with precision, the principle could not possibly stand. Now, to speak of "self" (自) is, by definition, to mean what is not other. If a thing is truly caused, then it derives from another, and what derives from another is precisely not self. Hence what is self is not caused, and what is caused is not self. To go on and say that a thing is both caused and yet also self is for the very meaning of the terms to turn spear against shield.
The story of the penumbra (罔兩, sometimes rendered "shadow of a shadow") questioning the shadow about why it moves is Zhuangzi's own, from the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, the "Discourse on Making All Things Equal." Jizang borrows a Daoist parable to illustrate an Indian philosophical position — a small early sign of a method this treatise's next part makes explicit and sustained: Chinese and Indian "outsider" thought are treated as structurally comparable, and images from one are used freely to explain the other.
The closing argument — "what is self is not caused, and what is caused is not self... to say a thing is both caused and yet also self is for the very meaning of the terms to turn spear against shield" — is a purely logical move about what the word "self" (自, here meaning something closer to "spontaneous" or "self-so") can coherently mean, independent of any empirical claim. This kind of argument from the meaning of terms themselves, rather than from evidence, is characteristic of the whole Sanlun approach and recurs constantly across the three treatises this text defends.
6. A Cause but No Effect, and Neither Cause nor Effect
The third position is the eternalist-denying nihilism of those who hold that death is annihilation — answered here with Huiyuan of Mount Lu's celebrated image of fire passing from one piece of firewood to the next. The fourth and worst position denies both cause and effect outright, the view Jizang identifies with the six heterodox teachers contemporary with the Buddha.
問云何名為有因無果。答斷見之流唯有現在更無後世。類如草木盡在一期。難曰。夫神道幽玄。惑人多昧。義經丘而未曉。理涉旦而猶昏。唯有佛宗乃盡其致。經云如雀在瓶中。羅縠覆其口。縠穿雀飛去。形壞而神走。
Question: What is meant by "a cause but no effect"? Answer: Those of the annihilationist persuasion hold that there is only the present life and nothing further beyond it — like grasses and trees, whose whole span is exhausted within a single season. Objection: The way of the spirit is dark and profound, and deludes the multitude of people through and through; its meaning has passed through the ages without being understood, and its principle, though encountered every morning, remains obscure still. Only the Buddhist lineage exhausts it to the very end. A sūtra says: it is like a sparrow shut inside a jar, with fine gauze covering its mouth — when the gauze is torn through, the sparrow flies free; when the body decays, the spirit likewise departs.
匡山慧遠釋曰。火之傳於薪。猶神之傳於形。火之傳異薪。猶神之傳異形。前薪非後薪。則知指窮之術妙。前形非後形。則悟情數之感深。不得見形朽於一生。便謂識神俱喪。火窮於一木。乃曰終期都盡矣。後學稱黃帝之言曰。形雖糜而神不化。乘化至變無窮。雖未彰言三世。意已明未來不斷。
Huiyuan of Mount Lu explains it thus: fire's passing from one piece of firewood to the next is like the spirit's passing from one bodily form to the next; fire's passing to a different piece of firewood is like the spirit's passing to a different bodily form. That the earlier piece of firewood is not the later piece of firewood is what lets one understand the marvel of the technique by which "the finger's pointing is exhausted, yet the fire is not"; that the earlier bodily form is not the later bodily form is what lets one awaken to the depth of feeling's own working. One must not see the body decay within a single lifetime and thereupon claim that consciousness and spirit have perished along with it — nor see the fire exhausted in a single piece of wood and thereupon declare that its final term is altogether at an end. A later scholar cited the Yellow Emperor's own saying: "Though the form crumbles away, the spirit does not perish along with it; riding upon transformation, it arrives at ceaseless change without end." Though this does not openly speak of the three time-periods, its meaning already makes plain that the future is not cut off.
問曰。云何名為無因無果。答既撥無後世受果。亦無現在之因故。六師云。無有黑業。無有黑業報。無有白業。無有白業報。四邪之問最為尤弊。現在斷善。後生惡趣。
Question: What is meant by "neither cause nor effect"? Answer: This position sweeps away entirely both the receiving of effects in a future life and any cause existing in the present life. Hence the six heterodox teachers said: there is no dark deed and no ripening of a dark deed; there is no bright deed and no ripening of a bright deed. Of the four erroneous positions, this final question is the very worst: it cuts off the good in the present life, and delivers one, in the life to come, into the evil destinies.
問斯之紛謬起自何時。答釋迦未興盛行天竺。能仁既出殄斯謬計。佛滅度後柯條更繁。龍樹後興重加剪伐。
Question: From what time do these tangled errors first arise? Answer: Before Śākyamuni arose, they flourished widely throughout India. Once the Able and Benevolent One appeared, he wiped out these mistaken schemes; but after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, their branches and twigs grew thick once more, until Nāgārjuna arose in turn and pruned them back a second time.
Huiyuan of Mount Lu (慧遠, 334–416) is a distinct figure from the Huayan patriarch Fazang cited elsewhere on this site — this Huiyuan was a senior contemporary of Kumārajīva, and the fire-and-firewood image quoted here comes from his essay "The Spirit Does Not Perish" (神不滅論), written to defend rebirth against exactly the annihilationism this passage refutes. The phrase "the finger's pointing is exhausted, yet the fire is not" (指窮於為薪，火傳也，不知其盡也) is itself a direct quotation from the Zhuangzi's third chapter — so within the space of a few lines Jizang has now used Zhuangzi twice, once through Huiyuan's mediation, to illuminate rebirth, precisely the doctrine the historical Zhuangzi's own philosophy of natural transformation might seem to sit uneasily beside. Jizang does not pause over the tension; the image is simply put to work.
Notice the shape of the whole opening argument now that all four positions are in view: false-cause theism, causeless self-origination, cause-without-future-effect (annihilationism), and no-cause-no-effect nihilism outright. These are not four unrelated errors picked at random — they are the four cells of a single tetralemma on cause and effect, and Nāgārjuna's own Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is presented here as the definitive "second pruning" of precisely this same tangle. Part 2 of this collection turns from India to China, and asks whether Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Confucius — for all that Jizang has just borrowed their own images to refute these errors — themselves escape being classed among the outsiders.
Part One Complete
This closes Part One: the treatise's own map of its two gates and four sects, the argument for why a Buddhist treatise refutes fellow Buddhists as well as outsiders, and the first sect in full — the four erroneous Indian accounts of cause and effect, each stated in the voice of its own defenders and then broken on its own terms.
Part Two turns from India to China, and asks the question Jizang's own borrowings from Zhuangzi have already made unavoidable: are Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Confucius themselves outsiders, for all that "three mysteries" of Chinese thought were sometimes claimed to run level with the nine divisions of the Buddhist canon? Kumārajīva's own verdict on the question is quoted in full, and the treatise then turns to its second sect, the six schools of Abhidharma.