Composed commentaries on key Buddhist Sutras and sastras, too numerous to mention. Still, some of his most influential are:
According to the Further Biographies of Eminent Buddhist Monks, the Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar Jizang was spiritually precocious, having achieved some degree of attainment by the age of seven through an immediate understanding of a lecture on Buddhism. As this account tells us, he was installed as a monk at that point, and demonstrated a talent for grasping the essence of any particular problem (Chan, Sourcebook, vol. II, p. 292) His literary output was prodigious, and although it indicates an affinity with and sympathy for virtually the entire spectrum of Chinese Buddhist thought, Jizang is most often identified with the Chinese school of Madhyamika Buddhism, usually called the "Three Treatise School" (Sanlun Zong).
Madhyamika Buddhism as it appears in the Indian tradition is closely identified with the scholar and monk known as Nagarjuna, who most likely lived during the second century AD. His most famous and important work is probably the Mulamadhyamikakarikas, or Verses on the Fundamentals of the Middle Way. If there is a basic premise behind the work and the tradition it represents, it is that all obsessive viewpoints or commitments of any kind, to objects, thoughts, actions, etc., are dysfunctional and are at least in part causes of the basic suffering necessarily associated with the human condition. All claims and propositions, the tradition attempts to demonstrate, are not only logically absurd, but also contribute to duhkha, or sorrow.
Madhyamika studies in China, though, really begin with the work of Kumarajiva (344-413 AD), one of the most outstanding translators and transmitters of Buddhist thought to China. His translations of scores of Buddhist, and particularly Madhyamika, texts have been considered authoritative by many subsequent scholars even up to the present day, and his students and in turn their students became leading figures in the brief though influential evolution of Chinese Madhyamika. One need only remember that the name of the Madhyamika tradition in China, the Sanlun Zong, means "Three Treatise Tradition," and in fact refers to Kumarajiva's translations of three texts purported to be from the Indian Madhyamika tradition. These are the Zhonglun, or Middle Treatise, which is a translation of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamikakarikas; the Shi Er Men Lun or Twelve Gate Treatise, which is also believed to be the work of Nagarjuna; and Aryadeva's Bai Lun or Hundred Treatise (Satasastra).
Jizang lived about a hundred and sixty years after Kumarajiva, in the 6th century. Best known for his innovative formulations, the bulk of Jizang's voluminous writings were commentaries on other texts, including the three sastras by Nagarjuna and Aryadeva from which the Sanlun tradition takes its name as well as Buddhist sutras and other works. He also often critiqued and analyzed other Buddhist traditions such as Abhidharma, Cheng Shi, and certain Chinese Mahayana schools including the Dilun and Shelun schools. It is revealing that most of Jizang's works are commentaries on other texts or traditions. Given the ostensible though fundamental reluctance on the part of traditional Madhyamika to formulate propositional doctrines, however, one might wonder how a writer in the Chinese Madhyamika tradition, such as Jizang, might have seen his own role. Why was he not guilty of engaging in more prapanca, more mere wordplay?
For Jizang, the answer can be found in his general methodology of "po xie xian zheng," which might fruitfully be read as "refuting what is misleading, revealing what is corrective," and its specific application in the form of the "sizhong erdi," or "four levels of the two kinds of discourse". In these formulations we most clearly recognize Jizang's insistence that one must never settle on any particular viewpoint or perspective, but that even the so-called "higher discourse" becomes mundane and misleading if it becomes itself a source or object of attachment and fixation. Therefore one must continually re-examine previously established formulations in order to avoid such sedimentations of thought and behavior.
The question of the meaning of this phrase arises because, Jizang claims, and as the practice of the four levels of the two kinds of discourse will be seen to suggest, it is both meaningless and in fact harmful to speak of "true" or "false" in any kind of final or ultimate sense. If this is the case, then in what sense is Jizang himself justified in using Chinese terms such as zheng and its opposite, xie, which are often translated as "true and false"? Or, as Jizang puts the question: "If there is no assertion and no denial, and no zheng and xie, then why is it that [we] write about refuting what is xie and revealing what is zheng?" (Taisho vol.45 #1852, p.7a, line 5)
For Jizang the term zheng cannot be taken as meaning "true" or "correct," but rather "corrective" or "appropriate," since it largely represents the attempt to overcome obsessive commitment to any of the dichotomous distinctions such as "emptiness and being" or "worldly and authentic discourse," found commonly in Chinese Buddhist formulations. At the same time, it must be kept in mind that Jizang is not suggesting that we should never make these distinctions-under the proper circumstances they can and do have pedagogical and soteriological value. What is apparently being emphasized are the dangers of becoming rigidly committed and attached to any particular set of such distinctions, or the viewpoints which engender them..
However, Buddhism has traditionally recognized a difference between drzti or "ontological commitment" and siddhanta or "positional commitment." Because the tradition does adopt an outlook, as critical as it may be, even the Madhyamika is necessarily positionally situated within a traditional perspective. Commentary, since it always remarks on what has been said before, always therefore represents a commitment to a tradition. What is being challenged, then, is the kind of obsession which turns a point of view or perspective into a dogmatic ontological fixation. To the extent, therefore, that one becomes ontologically committed to one's point of view, regardless of its pedagogical efficacy, it becomes necessary to engage in what might be described as a "deconstructive" analysis. It seems justified to describe this analysis as deconstructive because Jacques Derrida, the ostensible father of modern deconstructive philosophy, deals with a similar concern in his critique of what he calls "logocentrism."
The textual basis for Jizang's emphasis on the necessity for the further deconstruction of deconstructive language can be found in Kumarajiva's translation of the Zhonglun, Chapter XIII, verse 8:
The Great Sage [Buddha] taught the Dharma of emptiness
in order to overcome all views.
If one persists in viewing emptiness as an existent [thing],
Such a one cannot be saved by all the Buddhas.
This passage suggests at least one aspect of Nagarjuna's understanding of the basic thrust of Buddhist thought and practice, which is the overcoming of attachment or ontological commitment in order to solve the problem of duhkha or "suffering." This pragmatic attitude towards truth can be seen in the early Buddhist parable of the raft which is abandoned once it serves its purpose: even Buddhism is to be abandoned when its purpose has been achieved.
The problem is that, as Nagarjuna had anticipated in the previously quoted verse 8 from Chapter XIII of the Zhonglun, there is a tendency to become attached to the effort to become unattached. If one begins to take deconstructive and pedagogically useful notions such as sunyata or "emptiness" as ultimately or fundamentally "true," then one is not only thwarting the cure, one is actually intensifying the illness. This idea also is expressed in another early Buddhist parable, the one concerning the king shot by a poisoned arrow, who wanted to know all kinds of useless information regarding his attacker before allowing the doctor to cure him. As Jizang says:
It is like water, which is capable of extinguishing fire; if the water itself were to catch on fire, what would one use to extinguish it? Nihilism and eternalism [the two extreme positions] are like the fire, and emptiness is capable of extinguishing them. [But] if one persists in becoming attached to emptiness, there is no medicine which can extinguish this. (Taisho vol.45 #1852, p7a, line 14)
The mechanism by which water can be said to "catch on fire" seems to be "persistent attachment." This suggests that even emptiness, which is a cure and not a thing, can itself become poisonous and unhealthy if one allows it to become the object of one's commitment and clinging. This would be equivalent to taking morphine for a back injury, but then continuing its use after the injury has healed. The medicine has become a toxin through the mechanism of addiction. This kind of attachment to the cure is not overcome by additional exposure to the original illness, but rather by revealing the merely provisional or pedagogical nature of the medicine through argument and refutation. Thus, if one develops a fixation on the language of deconstruction, this language must be further deconstructed. This necessity is described in Buddhist terms as "sunyata sunyata," or the "emptying of emptiness."
The objection is often raised that the progressive deconstructive refutation of all positions is itself a form of nihilism or negativism. But Jizang disagrees, and instead argues that:
One speaks of non-being only because there is initially the illness of [attachment to] being. If the illness of [attachment to] being subsides, then the medicine of emptiness is discarded, and one finally realizes that the holy path has nothing to do with being and non-being.…Originally nothing is asserted; subsequently nothing is denied. (Taisho vol.45 #1852, p.6c, line 27)
Jizang thus seems to reject the charge of nihilism by insisting that no negation would be necessary or even possible without a prior assertion, and that the Madhyamika deconstruction thus remains a dialectical response to a prior misconception. Although it takes the form of negation or refutation, this is only because the propositions of its opponent are formulated as assertions and affirmations-that is to say, it is meaningful only because it responds to a previous affirmation, proposition, or position. A process by which this progressive deconstruction takes place, enabling the "emptying of emptiness," is described by Jizang as "the four levels of the two kinds of discourse."
A central notion which the Chinese Madhyamika tradition inherits from its Indian predecessors is the idea of the two levels of discourse, sometimes translated as the "two truths." It implies that meaningful discourse can take place on (at least) two levels, which are the conventional or mundane (Ch. shisu di or shih ssu ti, Skt. samvrtisatya) and the authentic or higher (Ch. zhendi or chen ti, Skt. paramarthasatya). That is, language has an everyday reference which is called into question once one analyzes the metaphysical assumptions on which these references are based, and that this kind of analysis is liberating in certain ways. In terms of the current discussion, these two levels of discourse could also be described as "tacit acceptance" on the one hand and "deconstruction" on the other.
Jizang says that there are four different ways of understanding this distinction regarding the use of language. That is, the distinction between conventional and liberating forms of discourse can be meaningful in four different ways:
The apparent intent of this kind of analysis is to emphasize that the way to overcome clinging to a deconstructive strategy is to further deconstruct it. Even though only four levels are described here, there doesn't seem to be a point at which one can stop and rest. Jizang's description of the fourth level suggests that even the analytic of the four levels of the two kinds of discourse, like all other Buddhist teaching devices (and in fact all teaching devices whatsoever) is strictly provisional, useful only for a given purpose, and does not express any essentially true or ultimately valid claims about reality..
- Alan Fox