Empty, Not Empty, and the One Truth Beneath the Four

Jizang's key resolution: "empty" describes the afflictions doing the concealing, never the tathāgatagarbha itself — the afflictions are like flowers conjured in empty space, unreal, and it is precisely their unreality that earns the name "empty": "this is false, not a really-existing dharma… hence the dharma that does the concealing is what is called empty" (此是虛妄、非實有法…故說能覆之法名之為空). He resolves a related ambiguity about "wisdom of emptiness" itself: it is not that the object known is bare of marks, but that the cognizing wisdom is without marks because it knows the store's two aspects as one: "knowing the two kinds of store is called wisdom; the substance of that wisdom is without marks, hence it is called the wisdom of emptiness" (知二種藏名智，智體無相故名空智). Having settled that, he glosses the two terms plainly: the empty tathāgatagarbha is the store viewed as utterly separate from all affliction; the not-empty tathāgatagarbha is the identical store viewed as endowed with every buddha-quality beyond the sands of the Ganges — hence "not empty," citing the Nirvāṇa Sūtra's parallel: "the wise see both emptiness and non-emptiness — emptiness is the twenty-five states of existence, non-emptiness is great parinirvāṇa itself."

This is where Jizang's own Sanlun training becomes explicit rather than implicit: he folds the sūtra's empty/not-empty pair directly into his school's non-being/non-nonbeing middle way. Since the empty aspect rules out real existence — the afflictions are utterly empty — and the not-empty aspect rules out real nonexistence — the buddha-qualities are truly and fully present — "neither existent nor nonexistent: that is the middle way," citing the Nirvāṇa Sūtra's own line that "buddha-nature is the seed of the middle way within the three kinds of bodhi" and that "the dharma of the middle way is itself called the Buddha." To attain both wisdoms at once, on this reading, just is to attain the middle way itself.

He then takes on two named rival readings. Teachers "south of the Yangtze" read "empty tathāgatagarbha" as the dharmakāya once it has already manifested, and "not-empty tathāgatagarbha" as the tathāgatagarbha still hidden and mixed together with affliction. Jizang rejects this on two grounds: the passage is explicitly about wisdom cognizing the tathāgatagarbha, not about a dharmakāya/tathāgatagarbha split; and grammatically, "every store of affliction" belongs to what the empty store is separated from, not to what "not-empty" is somehow made of — "not-empty" names buddha-qualities, never a residue of affliction. A separate reading, attributed to a "Master Lin," takes the whole passage as meaning that the very notion of emptiness itself is what conceals the real teaching, since the two lesser vehicles mistake emptiness for the ultimate truth. Jizang records this reading without adopting it.

Jizang's own summary is blunt: "of these four truths, three are impermanent and one is permanent" (此四諦三是無常一是常) — suffering and origin arise and cease, "already existing where there once was nothing, and returning to nothing once again," and are therefore merely provisionally real; cessation alone stands apart from conditioned marks, permanent and not false, and so alone can serve as a true refuge. But he immediately adds a qualifier that keeps this from becoming a naive metaphysical claim: from the standpoint of ultimate principle, all four truths equally "enter suchness," and strictly speaking none of them can even be predicated as "permanent" or "impermanent" at all — citing the Middle Treatise's chapter on the Tathāgata directly: "within the mark of quiescence there is no permanence, no impermanence, and so on for every pair." He backs this with the sūtra's own later warning against over-literalizing the doctrine — fixing on nirvāṇa as permanent and saṃsāra as impermanent is itself "falling into the two views" of eternalism and nihilism.

He resolves the apparent tension with a fourfold breakdown: suffering and origin are impermanent only; cessation is permanent only; the path is permanent or impermanent depending on whether one considers its causal stage or its resultant stage; and beyond all three distinctions lies a silence that predicates neither term of anything. The doctrine that "only cessation is ultimate" is, on Jizang's reading, a teaching pitched at a specific corrective purpose — showing why the cessation-truth alone can ground the other three — not a final metaphysical inventory of which things really exist forever and which do not.

On the newborn-and-sun simile, Jizang draws a precise distinction: ordinary beings are like one born blind, with no perception whatsoever of the cessation-truth's own "colors"; arhats and pratyekabuddhas are like the seven-day-old infant, whose eyes function but are simply overwhelmed by the sun's own brightness — "the eyes are weak and the sun's disk too strong, hence there is no clear seeing" (眼弱、日輪強，故不明了). The two vehicles, on this reading, attain only the cessation of the phenomenal event of suffering, without ever realizing the dharmakāya's own inherent, fundamental quiescence — eradicating affliction is one achievement, recognizing intrinsic quiescence a different one entirely, and the two do not automatically come together.

Jizang records, and ultimately declines, an alternative chapter division here: an unnamed source argued the material on the "two views" and the infant simile actually belongs with the previous chapter on inversion and reality rather than starting a new one, since it already concerns the errors of both ordinary beings and the two vehicles. He allows this fits the text and the doctrine well — "this account, in both text and meaning, is quite good" (此釋於今文及義並好) — but declines to adopt it anyway, purely so as not to conflict with the sūtra's own received fourteen-chapter title sequence, an unusually candid moment of weighing doctrinal fit against inherited structure and choosing structure.

On eternalism and nihilism, he is precise about what each actually consists in: nihilism arises from seeing conditioned formations as impermanent and totally perishing with no continuation at all; eternalism arises from seeing nirvāṇa as permanent — but Jizang stresses that even this can be an extreme view, if nirvāṇa is grasped as a fixed, self-natured permanence rather than "a permanence arising from conditions, not a permanence of fixed nature" (因緣常，非定性常). He supports this with the Ratnagotravibhāga's own formula — "not annihilating conditioned formations, so as to be free of the extreme of nihilism; not grasping at unconditioned nirvāṇa, so as to be free of the extreme of eternalism" — glossed with the Madhyamaka identity of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa already familiar from the Middle Treatise: "the true limit of birth-and-death and the limit of nirvāṇa — these two limits are not different from each other by so much as a hair's breadth," and Sengzhao's own line, "is the path really so far away? Touch any matter, and there is the real."

Jizang closes this stretch of the sūtra by defending its claim that beginning practitioners of the three vehicles are "not utterly ignorant of the Dharma" against what looks like a flat contradiction with the Lotus Sūtra, which elsewhere treats śrāvakas as needing to be drawn out of real ignorance by expedient means. Jiangnan Satyasiddhi masters had tried to resolve this by saying Śrīmālā speaks from principle while the Lotus speaks from expedient teaching; Jizang rejects that move outright, since it would wrongly demote the Lotus to something less than a fully definitive teaching. His own resolution distinguishes non-ignorance at an initial stage of practice from non-ignorance at a later stage — the two texts are describing different points along the same path, not disagreeing about the path itself.

He backs this discussion with an anecdote about his own broader tradition: Zhizang of Kaishan Monastery (開善智藏法師) originally taught that real śrāvaka-vehicle attainment exists as such, until the eccentric monk Baozhi (志公) cryptically rebuked him in verse — after which Zhizang reversed his own position and denied any truly separate śrāvaka vehicle at all. Jizang also rejects two further readings that identify the mere feeling of "wearying of suffering and seeking joy" with buddha-nature's own "correct cause" directly; his own view is that a being can feel this weariness only because buddha-nature is already present within, not that the feeling itself constitutes that nature — keeping cause and its felt symptom carefully distinct.