The Chinese Masters, and the Six Kinds of Abhidharma
Jizang closes his treatment of the outsiders by turning to China: are Laozi and Zhuangzi's "three mysteries" really on a level with the nine divisions of the Buddhist canon, and is Laozi himself the Buddha's equal? He answers with Sengzhao's own conversion story and Kumārajīva's verdict, then examines the persons of the two founders directly. The part closes by opening the treatise's second sect, the Abhidharma, with a historical roll call of the six collections that make up the tradition.
1. Sengzhao's Conversion, and Kumārajīva's Verdict
Jizang raises the obvious objection to lumping Laozi and Zhuangzi in with the Indian outsiders: surely Chinese thought, unlike foreign heterodoxy, belongs inside the Buddhist fold. He answers first with a story, not an argument — the conversion of Sengzhao, Kumārajīva's greatest Chinese disciple, from Daoist philosophy to Buddhism.
次排震旦眾師。一研法。二覈人。問曰。天竺四術既是外言。震旦三玄應為內教。答釋僧肇云。每讀老子莊周之書。因而歎曰。美即美矣。然棲神冥累之方猶未盡也。後見淨名經。欣然頂戴謂親友曰。吾知所歸極矣。遂棄俗出家。
Next, in refuting the various masters of China: first, examining the teaching; second, examining the person. Question: Granted that the four schools of India are external teachings, surely the three mysteries of China ought to count as belonging to the inner, Buddhist fold? Answer: The monk Sengzhao said: "Whenever I read the writings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, I would sigh and say, 'Beautiful — beautiful indeed. And yet the method by which they lodge the spirit and put an end to entanglement still falls short of the whole.'" It was only later, on encountering the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, that he joyfully received it with bowed head and said to his close friends, "Now I know where the ultimate destination lies" — and thereupon he cast aside worldly life and went forth from the household.
Sengzhao (僧肇, 384–414) is already a familiar figure on this site: his preface survives as one of the most important witnesses to the transmission of the Hundred Treatise into Chinese, and he became, alongside Kumārajīva, one of the two towering intellects behind the entire Chinese Madhyamaka project this treatise defends. That Jizang opens his defense of Buddhism's superiority to Daoism with Sengzhao's own biography, rather than with an abstract argument, is a deliberate choice: the case is made first by example — one of the sharpest philosophical minds of the age tried Laozi and Zhuangzi, found them beautiful but incomplete, and only found what he was looking for in a Buddhist sūtra.
2. Six Points of Comparison
Jizang next quotes Kumārajīva's own assessment — that ordinary people mistake Laozi and Zhuangzi's obscurity for profundity — and then sets out six specific points on which Chinese and Indian teaching supposedly diverge, before answering two further challenges about whether "emptiness" in Laozi and in the Buddha's teaching might, after all, be naming the same thing.
羅什昔聞三玄與九部同極。伯陽與牟尼抗行。乃喟然歎曰。老莊入玄故。應易惑耳目。凡夫之智。孟浪之言。言之似極。而未始詣也。推之似盡。而未誰至也。
Kumārajīva, on hearing it once claimed that the three mysteries reach the same ultimate as the nine divisions of the canon, and that Laozi stood as an equal rival to Śākyamuni, sighed deeply and said: "It is precisely because Laozi and Zhuangzi enter into the mysterious that they so readily confuse the eyes and ears of ordinary people. The wisdom of the unenlightened, and reckless words besides — their speech seems to reach the ultimate, and yet it has never actually arrived there; pressed to its conclusion, it seems exhaustive, and yet no one has ever actually gotten to the bottom of it."
略陳六義明其優劣。外但辨乎一形。內則朗鑒三世。外則五情未達。內則說六通窮微。外未即萬有而為太虛。內說不壞假名而演實相。外未能即無為而遊萬有。內說不動真際建立諸法。外存得失之門。內冥二際於絕句之理。外未境智兩泯。內則緣觀俱寂。以此詳之。短羽之於鵬翼。坎井之於天池。未足喻其懸矣。秦人疑其極。吾復何言哉。
Let six points be briefly set out to make clear the superiority and inferiority of the two. The outer teaching discerns only a single bodily form; the inner teaching illuminates the three periods of time with full clarity. The outer teaching has not penetrated the five faculties of feeling; the inner teaching expounds the six supernormal powers and fathoms their subtlety to the root. The outer teaching has not managed to take the ten thousand existent things as themselves the great void; the inner teaching, without destroying provisional names, expounds the real character of things. The outer teaching cannot, remaining within the unconditioned, freely roam among the ten thousand existent things; the inner teaching, without stirring from the true limit, establishes all dharmas. The outer teaching still holds fast to a gateway of gain and loss; the inner teaching merges the two limits into the principle where all assertion is cut off. The outer teaching has not brought object and knowing subject both to rest; the inner teaching brings condition and contemplation to quiescence together. Weighing the matter in this detail, a short-winged bird set beside the great peng's wings, or a well at the bottom of a pit set beside the ocean of heaven, would not suffice to liken the distance between them. Since the people of Qin themselves have doubted which reaches the ultimate, what further need have I to speak?
問伯陽之道道曰太虛。牟尼之道道稱無相。理源既一則萬流並同。什肇抑揚乃諂於佛(此王弼舊疏以無為為道體)。答伯陽之道道指虛無。牟尼之道道超四句。淺深既懸。體何由一。蓋是子佞於道。非余諂佛。
Question: Laozi's Way is called the great void; Śākyamuni's way is termed the markless. If the source of the principle is one and the same, then the ten thousand streams flowing from it are likewise the same throughout — so are not Kumārajīva and Sengzhao, in praising one and disparaging the other, simply flattering the Buddha? (This refers to Wang Bi's old commentary, which took non-being as the very essence of the Way.) Answer: Laozi's Way points to empty non-being; Śākyamuni's way transcends the four propositions altogether. Since shallow and deep already stand at so great a remove, how could their essence possibly be one and the same? It is rather you who flatter the Way — not I who flatter the Buddha.
問牟尼之道道為真諦。而體絕百非。伯陽之道道曰杳冥。理超四句。彌驗體一。奚有淺深(此梁武帝新義。用佛經以真空為道體)。答九流統攝。七略該含。唯辨有無。未明絕四。若言老教亦辨雙非。蓋以砂糅金。同盜牛之論(周弘政張機並斥老有雙非之義也)。
Question: Śākyamuni's way is the ultimate truth, its essence cutting off the hundred negations entirely; Laozi's Way is called dark and profound, its principle transcending the four propositions — this confirms all the more that their essence is one and the same. How, then, could there be any difference of shallow and deep? (This refers to the new doctrine of Emperor Wu of Liang, who used Buddhist scriptures to make true emptiness the very essence of the Way.) Answer: The nine schools taken together, and the seven bibliographic categories that comprehend them all, discriminate only being and non-being — they have never made clear the cutting-off of the four propositions. To claim that Laozi's teaching, too, discriminates the double negation is simply to mix sand in with gold — the very same maneuver as the thief who claims the ownership of another man's ox. (Zhou Hongzheng and Zhang Ji both rebuked the claim that Laozi possesses this meaning of the double negation.)
"The four propositions" (四句, catuṣkoṭi) and "the hundred negations" (百非) are the same tetralemma technique this treatise has already used against the outsiders' causal theories in Part 1, and it is central to the entire method of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: being, non-being, both, and neither, each position taken up and dissolved in turn. Jizang's argument here is that Laozi's "great void" only ever discriminates being against non-being — one pair of the tetralemma's four corners — and never actually cuts off all four together, so however dark and mysterious the language sounds, it has not reached the same ground the Buddhist teaching stands on.
The two named emperors and officials are worth having straight: Wang Bi (王弼, 226–249) was the towering commentator on the Laozi and Yijing whose reading of the Way as rooted in non-being (無) shaped Chinese philosophy for centuries; Emperor Wu of Liang (梁武帝, r. 502–549) was the most fervently Buddhist ruler in Chinese history, and Jizang here reports his personal attempt to reconcile Daoist and Buddhist metaphysics by reading Laozi's "dark and profound" through the lens of Buddhist emptiness — an attempt Jizang treats as well-intentioned but mistaken, "mixing sand in with gold." Zhou Hongzheng and Zhang Ji were officials at that same Liang court who argued the point out directly with the emperor.
3. Examining the Persons: Is Laozi the Buddha's Equal?
Having compared the teachings, Jizang turns to the second half of his stated plan — examining the persons themselves. A Daoist objection, drawing on the Numinous Treasure scriptures, presses the point that the Buddha, Laozi, and even Confucius are all sages of equal rank, so that ranking them is itself a kind of violence to a deeper unity.
覈人第二。問佛名大覺。老曰天尊。人同上聖。法俱妙極。苟欲存異。將非杜不二之玄門傷得一之淵府哉(蓋是道士用三洞靈寶等經立義)。
Examining the person, second. Question: The Buddha is named the Great Awakened One; Laozi is called the Heavenly Honored One. The persons are alike supreme sages, and the teachings are both wondrous and ultimate. If one insists on maintaining a difference between them, is this not simply to block off the mysterious gate of non-duality, and to wound the deep source of attaining the One? (This is the position established by Daoist priests, drawing on the Three Caverns, the Numinous Treasure scriptures, and the like.)
答悉達處宮方紹金輪聖帝。能仁出俗遂為三界法王。老為周朝之柱史。清虛是九流之派。子若欲令人一法同。何異堆阜共安明等高。螢燭與日月齊照。
Answer: While Siddhārtha still dwelt in the palace, he was already destined to succeed as the golden-wheel-turning sage king; once the Able and Benevolent One left worldly life, he became the Dharma-king of the three realms. Laozi, by contrast, was only the Keeper of Archives under the Zhou dynasty, and his teaching of clarity and emptiness is merely one current among the nine schools. If you wish to make the person and the teaching in both cases equally the same, how does this differ from setting a mound of earth beside Mount Ming and calling them equal in height, or holding up a firefly's glow beside the sun and moon and calling them equal in brightness?
問同人者之五情。異人者之神明。迹為柱史。本實天尊。據實而談。齊之一貫。答漢書亦顯品類。以伯陽為賢。何晏王弼稱老未及聖。
Question: What Laozi shares with ordinary people is his five faculties of feeling; what sets him apart from ordinary people is his numinous intelligence. His trace was the Keeper of Archives, but his true root was, in fact, the Heavenly Honored One. Speaking according to what is truly the case, the two should be run through as one single continuity. Answer: Even the History of the Han makes plain the distinction of rank, counting Laozi only among the worthies. He Yan and Wang Bi themselves declared that Laozi did not attain the rank of a sage.
設令孔是儒童。老為迦葉。雖同聖迹。聖迹不同。若圓應十方八相成佛。人稱大覺。法名出世。小利即生人天福善。大益即有三乘賢聖。如斯之流為上迹也。至如孔稱素王說有名儒。老居柱史談無曰道。辨益即無人得聖。明利即止在世間。如此之類為次迹矣。
Even granting, for the sake of argument, that Confucius was the bodhisattva Ru-tong and Laozi was the bodhisattva Kāśyapa, though their traces are alike sagely traces, sagely traces are not therefore all the same. Where a being responds perfectly throughout the ten directions and accomplishes buddhahood through the eight aspects, people call him the Great Awakened One, and his teaching is named a teaching that transcends the world; its lesser benefit is birth as a human or a god possessed of blessing and goodness, and its greater benefit is the noble ones of the three vehicles. Traces of this kind constitute the superior trace. But as for Confucius, styled the Uncrowned King, who taught being under the name of the Confucian scholar, and Laozi, who dwelt as Keeper of Archives and discoursed on non-being under the name of the Way — discriminating their benefit, no one thereby attains sagehood; clarifying their advantage, it is confined entirely to this present world. Traces of this kind constitute only the secondary trace.
The Daoist claim that Confucius was really the bodhisattva Rutong (儒童菩薩) and Laozi really the bodhisattva Kāśyapa in disguise, sent ahead to prepare China for the Buddha's later arrival, was a real and influential syncretist position in the centuries before Jizang — sometimes folded into the wider "conversion of the barbarians" (化胡) legend that claimed Laozi himself had traveled west and become the Buddha. Jizang's answer is characteristically generous in form and uncompromising in substance: he grants the premise entirely, for the sake of argument, and shows that even so, the ranking still holds. A bodhisattva's trace as a buddha and the same bodhisattva's trace as a minor sage-official are not interchangeable achievements merely because the same being lies behind both.
The distinction drawn in the final lines — teachings whose benefit reaches to the three vehicles of noble ones and liberation, against teachings whose benefit is "confined entirely to this present world" — is the same standard the coming parts of this treatise will apply to internal Buddhist schools as well, not only to outsiders. Even a school that teaches something true about how to live well within the present life will, by this treatise's own measure, fall short if it stops there.
4. Opening the Second Sect: The Sarvāstivādin's Own Claim
With the outsiders fully dealt with, Jizang turns to the second of the four sects: the Abhidharma tradition, associated above all with the Sarvāstivāda (薩婆多部, "the school that holds all dharmas exist"). As with every sect in this treatise, its own strongest self-description is given first, in its own voice.
折毘曇第二。一立宗。二破斥。有薩衛門人。序其宗曰。阿毘曇者名無比法。無漏慧根會理隔凡。其功冠絕。故云無比。超四執之外。越三界之表。群聖之所讚歎。六道之所歸崇。敢有抗言。當屈之以理。
Breaking the Abhidharma, second. First, establishing the position; second, refuting it. There are followers of the Sarvāstivāda school who set out their own position, saying: "The Abhidharma is named the Dharma Without Compare. The faculty of undefiled wisdom meets with principle and sets itself apart from the ordinary — its accomplishment towers above all comparison, and this is why it is called without compare. It rises beyond the four wrong positions of the outsiders, and passes clean beyond the bounds of the three realms; the whole company of sages praises it, and all six destinies turn to revere it. Should anyone dare to speak against it, he ought to be brought to submission by reason alone."
Jizang's method across all four sects is consistent, and worth naming explicitly here since it governs the next several parts of this collection: state the opposing position first, in its strongest and most confident form, in effectively its own voice — here, a Sarvāstivādin follower's own boast that his tradition rises "beyond the four wrong positions" refuted in Part 1 — and only then subject it to refutation. The same "state it fully, then break it" structure organizes the entire Hundred Treatise, where it is built into the very form of the text as alternating Outsider and Insider voices.
5. The Six Historical Collections of Abhidharma
Before any refutation can begin, Jizang insists on establishing exactly what "Abhidharma" refers to — a demand for precision that runs through the whole treatise. What follows is a compact history of six distinct textual layers, from a work attributed to the Buddha himself down to a digest compiled roughly a thousand years after his parinirvāṇa.
問夫欲立理。先須序宗源。未知毘曇凡有幾種。答部類甚多。略明其六。一者如來自說法相毘曇。盛行天竺不傳震旦。二者隣極亞聖名舍利弗。解佛語故造阿毘曇。凡二十卷。傳來此土。三者佛滅度後三百餘年。有三明六通大阿羅漢。姓迦旃延。造八犍度。凡二十卷。傳來此土。所言八者。一雜。二使。三智。四業。五大。六根。七定。八見。言犍度者。翻之為聚。以其八義各有部類。因之為聚也。
Question: If one wishes to establish a position, one must first set out the source of that tradition. It is not yet clear how many kinds of Abhidharma there are in all. Answer: The divisions and categories are very numerous; let six be briefly set out. First, the Abhidharma spoken by the Tathāgata himself, expounding the characteristics of dharmas — this flourished widely in India but was never transmitted to China. Second, the one who bordered on the ultimate and stood second only to the sage, named Śāriputra, who, in order to explain the Buddha's own words, composed an Abhidharma in twenty fascicles — this was transmitted to this land. Third, more than three hundred years after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, there was a great arhat possessed of the three insights and the six supernormal powers, surnamed Kātyāyana, who composed the Eight Aggregations in twenty fascicles — this too was transmitted to this land. As for what is meant by "eight": first, miscellaneous topics; second, the underlying tendencies; third, knowledge; fourth, karma; fifth, the great elements; sixth, the faculties; seventh, concentration; eighth, views. As for the term "aggregation" (犍度, skandha), it is translated as "gathering" — since each of these eight topics has its own division and category, they are, on that account, called gatherings.
四者六百年間有五百羅漢。是旃延弟子。於北天竺共造毘婆沙釋八犍度。毘婆沙者。此云廣解。於西涼州譯出。凡有百卷。值兵火燒之。唯六十卷現在。止解三犍度也。五者七百餘年有法勝羅漢。嫌婆沙太博。略撰要義作二百五十偈。名阿毘曇心。凡有四卷。亦傳此土。六者千年之間有達磨多羅。以婆沙太博四卷極略。更撰三百五十偈。足四卷合六百偈。名為雜心也。
Fourth, within the sixth century after the Buddha, there were five hundred arhats, disciples of Kātyāyana, who together composed, in northern India, the Mahāvibhāṣā, a commentary on the Eight Aggregations. "Vibhāṣā" is translated here as "the broad explanation." It was translated at Xiliangzhou, and ran to a full hundred fascicles, but it met with the fires of war and was burned, so that only sixty fascicles survive at present, covering the explanation of only three of the eight aggregations. Fifth, more than seven hundred years after the Buddha, there was the arhat Dharmaśrī, who, finding the Mahāvibhāṣā excessively broad, composed a brief digest of its essential meaning in two hundred and fifty verses, named the Abhidharmahṛdaya, in four fascicles in all — this too was transmitted to this land. Sixth, within the thousandth year, there was Dharmatrāta, who, finding the Abhidharmahṛdaya's four fascicles still excessively condensed relative to the Mahāvibhāṣā's breadth, composed a further three hundred and fifty verses, bringing the total, across four fascicles, to six hundred verses — this is named the Saṃyuktābhidharmahṛdaya.
其間復有六分毘曇。釋論云。目連和須密及餘論師共造。並不傳此土。唯眾事分毘曇是六內之一。此土有之。復有甘露味毘曇二卷。未詳作者。並傳此土。毘曇雖部類不同。大宗明見有得道也。
Within this same span there was, further, the Ṣaṭpādābhidharma, the "Abhidharma of Six Divisions." The Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom says it was composed jointly by Maudgalyāyana, Vasumitra, and other treatise-masters; none of it, however, was transmitted to this land, save that the Prakaraṇapāda, one of the six divisions, alone reached this land and exists here. There is, further, a two-fascicle Amṛtarasa Abhidharma, whose author is not known in detail; this too was transmitted to this land. Though the Abhidharma's divisions and categories differ this widely among themselves, its overarching doctrine is, throughout, that one attains the path by seeing existence.
This roll call matters for what comes next: Part 3 will refute the Abhidharma school's central claim across ten distinct points, and Jizang's insistence here on first fixing exactly which texts count as "the Abhidharma" — six historically distinct layers, from a lost buddha-word original down to a thousand-year-old digest of a digest — makes clear that his target is not a single book but an entire school's cumulative tradition of exposition. The closing line names that tradition's single unifying claim in five characters: 明見有得道, "one attains the path by seeing existence" — holding that liberation comes through correctly analyzing really existent phenomena (dharmas) rather than through seeing all phenomena as empty. That is exactly the claim Part 3's ten-point refutation will take apart.
Part Two Complete
This closes Part Two: Sengzhao's conversion and Kumārajīva's verdict on Laozi and Zhuangzi; the six-point comparison of inner and outer teaching; the examination of persons, weighing the Buddha against Laozi and Confucius even under the most generous Daoist reading of who they really were; and the historical roll call of the six collections that make up the Abhidharma, closing on that school's own central claim — that one attains the path by seeing existence.
Part Three takes up the refutation of that claim directly, working through ten distinct faults Jizang finds in the Abhidharma position, before turning to the third sect, Harivarman's Satyasiddhi school, and its own opening statement of what it believes it has achieved that the Abhidharma could not.