as one of the foremost figures of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Indeed,
he lived at the very pinnacle of Chinese Buddhism among towering
figures like the legendary pilgrim and Yogacara (Faxiang) master
Xuanzang (602-664), the Chan patriarch Shenxiu (d. 706) and the great
chronicler Daoxuan (596-667). According to Song dynasty biographer
Zanning, he was "mysterious and upright, by nature surpassingly clever
and sagacious." For the better part of his life, he worked in close
proximity with the highest echelons of imperial power, deeply engaged
in matters of court and country. For four decades, under a series of
emperors, he served as a lecturer, a translator, a rhetorician, a
propagandist, and a miracleworker. Tirelessly, he lectured on the
Flower Garland Sutra, translated Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit and
Khotanese (a Middle Iranian language once spoken in what is now
China's Xinjiang province) into Chinese, and wrote meticulously
crafted commentaries interpreting Buddhist scripture in a manner that
served to exalt his imperial patron's status. Shortly after his death,
the emperor Ruizong (r. 684-690, 710-712) praised him effusively: "The
late monk Fazang inherited his virtuous karma from the Heavens and his
open intelligence accorded with principle. With his eloquence and
outstanding understanding, he had his mind interfused with penetrating
enlightenment." He would become known as the third patriarch and
systematizer of the Flower Garland (Huayan or Hua-yen) school of
Buddhism.
1. BiographyFazang was a native of Sogdiana (in Chinese, Sute). This
is an Iranian civilization that encompassed territories now
incorporated into the modern states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in
Central Asia. As a youth, he embraced Buddhism with fervent devotion;
at sixteen, he burned off one of his fingers as an offering to the
Buddha before the Aśokan reliquary in the famous Famen Temple in the
Tang dynasty capital of Chang'an. Thereafter, he became a recluse on
nearby Mount Taibai, where he encountered masters of the Flower
Garland (Avatamsaka) Sutra. Returning to Chang'an to attend to his
ailing parents, he encountered Zhiyan (602-668) and became his student
and disciple. Fazang was constantly called upon to explicate the
profound wonders contained in the Flower Garland Sutra, lecturing to
clergy and rulers more than thirty times.
Like many eminent Buddhists, a mystical aura has grown around Fazang
in subsequent hagiography. One must investigate with a careful and
critical eye the many miracles and legends that surround his person.
Some of the purported miracles were closely associated with his
oratory prowess. In 689, when he delivered his lecture on the Flower
Garland Sutra in Luoyang, a piece of auspicious ice was discovered in
which, it is said, an image of "twinned pagodas" appeared. When
Śiksānanda and he were translating the Flower Garland Sutra in
Luoyang, a hundred-petaled lotus flower blossomed in front of the
translation hall. After lectures in 692 and 696, light allegedly
issued from Fazang's mouth, prompting the congregated faithful to
marvel. On other occasions, following his lectures, it is said that
flowers fell from the heavens and five-colored clouds accumulated in
the skies.
Fazang appears to have been a practitioner of esoteric Buddhism, which
many East Asian rulers believed commanded magical powers. In 697, the
throne requested that he use Buddhist scriptural magic to help defeat
the Khitan, a proto-Mongolian ethnic group that once dominated what is
now Manchuria. Fazang performed a ritual cleansing, changed clothes,
set an eleven-faced image of the bodhisattva (an enlightened being who
selflessly seeks to aid others) Guanyin (Kuan-yin) on a ritual
platform, and worked his magic. Heavenly drums echoed, the image of
Guanyin appeared on high, surveying the countless divine troops who
materialized to combat the raiders, inspiring the Zhou forces and
plunging the Khitan into despair. This triumph prompted the empress Wu
Zhao to exclaim, "This is the blessed aegis of Buddha force!" and
change the reign era name to Shengong ("Divine Merit").
He was also renowned as a conjurer, capable of summoning weather. On
multiple occasions, his prayers and rites brought timely rain to
alleviate drought. In 687, at the empress' behest, he prayed for rain,
fasting for seven days, until the skies fortuitously opened and
drenched the parched ground. Again, in 696, his prayers proved
effective in bringing salubrious rain to afflicted Yongzhou. In 702,
Fazang invited another monk to pray at Wuzhen Temple in Lantian, which
had no spring. After three dawns of reciting sutras, a freshet
suddenly jetted forth at Maitreya Pavilion, bringing vernal bounty to
the surrounding lands. Under the emperor Zhongzong, when drought
struck Chang'an, Fazang prayed and performed Buddhist rites for seven
days, finally bringing a downpour. The following year his prayers for
rain were successful once again. Under the emperor Ruizong, he
relieved drought and snowless winter, his sincere prayers brought down
a blizzard.
In spite of his impressive monastic, scholastic, and thaumaturgical
credentials, Fazang was no detached ascetic who speculated on matters
recondite and metaphysical. Under Wu Zhao (a.k.a. Empress Wu or Wu
Zetian, 624-705, r. 690-705), the only female emperor in Chinese
history, the Buddhist clergy was politicized as never before.
Contending against a Confucian tradition that stridently opposed her
assumption of power, Wu Zhao naturally sought validation for her
sovereignty in Buddhism. She styled herself in Buddhist terms as a
cakravartin (a universal wheel-turning monarch) and a living
bodhisattva. A brilliant orator, lecturer, ideologue, rhetorician and
translator, Fazang was one of many Buddhist ideologues who helped
sanction her sovereignty. He differed from the vast majority of her
other Buddhist supporters in that he was an independent-minded and
profound thinker who lectured to Wu Zhao, rather than mustering
rhetoric for her. The remarkable duration and depth of their mutual
commitment also stands out. For better than three decades, beginning
when he preached the Flower Garland Sutra on behalf of her recently
deceased mother, he applied his abundant talents toward enhancing Wu
Zhao's reputation as a Buddhist ruler.
At a pivotal juncture of Wu Zhao's political ascent, as part of a
grand ceremony early in 689 that anticipated the inauguration of her
Zhou dynasty by a single year, she ordered Fazang to convene a dharma
assembly and, from an elevated seat, expound upon the Flower Garland
Sutra to thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns congregated for the
event. When Fazang delivered a lecture at Buddha's Prophecy Temple in
Luoyang in 700 (shortly after the completion of his new translation of
the Flower Garland Sutra), the ground of the lecture hall and temple
purportedly shook. Rather than interpreting this earthquake in
Confucian fashion, as an inauspicious disharmony of the elements, Wu
Zhao understood it as a wondrous event, praising Fazang:
Because he has extended the knowledge of the subtle and profound;
disseminated wisdom on the mysterious and abstruse, on the first day
of translation, I dreamed that sweet dew descended as an auspicious
sign. On the morning of the lecture I felt the earth tremor, a
miraculous sign. This, then, was the footfall of the Future Buddha,
Maitreya, using the mandala as a lucky icon.
This marriage of ideology and power did not end happily. In Wu Zhao's
turn toward Daoist expiatory rites and longevity potions during her
final years, Fazang felt a shift in his patron's imperial favor. In
early 705, Fazang transported the sacred finger-bone of the Buddha
from Famen Temple to Luoyang, where Wu Zhao placed him in charge of
the relic veneration ceremony, which she believed might ameliorate her
declining health. In this official capacity, which provided him access
to her person and to the Forbidden City, Fazang worked in tandem with
conspirators from the court and betrayed his longstanding patron Wu
Zhao, supporting the coup that removed her in 705. A political
opportunist, he continued to promote Flower Garland Buddhism serving
under emperors Zhongzong (r. 684, 705-710), Ruizong, and Xuanzong (r.
712-756). Curiously, his treachery, to no small extent, saved Buddhism
from being identified as a rogue ideology used to validate one whom
the Confucian establishment styled an illegitimate female usurper.
Fazang's successful promotion and propagation of Flower Garland
Buddhism under successive rulers played an important role in the
subsequent spread, development and Sinification of the school. Over a
period of three decades, Fazang played a leading role in these
cooperative efforts among the corps of Indian, Khotanese, Sogdian,
Korean and Chinese writing translations and commentaries on Buddhist
sutras. In Fazang's epistolary correspondence with Korean Flower
Garland monk Ŭisang, another disciple of his master Zhiyan, it is
apparent that he attempted to propagate a worldwide state without
barriers, an infinite realm linked by the Mahayana Buddhist faith.
Fazang also taught another Korean monk, Shimsang, who helped transmit
Chinese Flower Garland Buddhism to Japan. Ultimately, these contacts
helped propagate Flower Garland Buddhism, linking it to a wider
pan-Asian network
2. Thought
a. Shunyata
At the very heart of Flower Garland Buddhism is the idea of what is
known in Sanskrit as shunyata ("emptiness"): universal
interconnectedness, all-inclusiveness, intercausality and
interpenetration. Fazang did a great deal to elevate Flower Garland
Buddhism over rival schools, acknowledging other Buddhist schools and
sutras, but championing the Flower Garland Sutra as the central
teaching of the Buddha. As the Buddha's first sermon upon attaining
enlightenment, the nearly incomprehensible Flower Garland Sutra was
invested with a profundity and wisdom unequalled in the Buddha's
subsequent works. In this effort, Fazang gathered and classified the
rather unsystematic and wide-ranging Buddhist teachings into five
categories in order of ascending profundity and power. In ascending
order: Hinayana, Initial Mahayana, Final Mahayana, Sudden Teaching of
the One Vehicle (proto-Zen), and, at the pinnacle, the Comprehensive
Teaching of the One Vehicle—in essence, the Flower Garland Sutra. The
sense of universality allowed the Flower Garland School to be
compatible with other sects, effectively encompassing their doctrine,
while maintaining the overarching primacy of the Flower Garland
teachings.
b. Bodhicitta
This doctrine of interdependence is also reflected in Fazang's
thoughts on bodhicitta (mental dedication to helping all sentient
beings and attaining enlightenment). Following the logic that each
element pervades all that exists and itself contains all other
elements in the phenomenal world, "In practicing the virtues, when one
is perfected, all are perfected," he writes, "and when one first
arouses the thought of enlightenment one also becomes perfectly
enlightened" (trans. Wright). Fazang's emphasis on the omniversal
generative power of the tathagatagarbha, the "womb of Buddhahood,"
while not unique, subsequently developed into an important concept in
the East Asian Mahayana Buddhist tradition.
So that others might better comprehend the profound doctrine of the
Flower Garland Sutra, Fazang used the metaphor of the Ten Mysteries
(Ten Mysterious Gates) to explicate the interconnectedness and
inter-causality in the Flower Garland universe. These Ten Mysteries
illustrate how seemingly contradictory pairs—the hidden and the
manifest, truth and falsehood, the infinite and the infinitesimal, the
general and the specific–mutually complement each other and coexist
without obstruction. Indra's net (see below) is one of the Ten
Mysteries.
Fazang's ideas of an interconnected omniverse extended easily and
effectively from the metaphysical realm to the political arena.
Indeed, it allowed Wu Zhao to serve as the alpha link in a cosmic
concatenation. Stanley Weinstein has commented "Seeing herself as a
universal monarch, she must have been attracted by the Flower Garland
school with its well-ordered universe presided over by Vairocana
Buddha, whose every act was reflected in countless worlds." This
integrated and totalistic vision of the cosmos was "analogous to the
highly centralized imperial state that she ruled." This ideology
allowed Wu Zhao to portray herself as an absolute sovereign,
all-pervasive and omnipresent. This central idea of the boundless
reach of the Buddha's power and compassion, nicely paralleled and
supported the idea of the infinite compass of the ruler's authority
and benevolence. Fazang's creative presentation and flair for theater
(see below), both enhanced the great aesthetic, intellectual and
philosophical appeal of his ideas and made them more comprehensible.
In Wu Zhao, he found a potential cakravartin to propagate the Buddhist
faith; in Fazang's profound thought, she, in turn, discovered powerful
ideological justification for her authority.
c. Indra's Net
When Fazang first lectured on the Flower Garland Sutra, the principles
he expounded upon were so abstruse that the listeners were utterly
dumbstruck. Therefore, to render the sutra comprehensible to his
imperial patrons and to the masses of Buddhist faithful, he used
metaphors such as Indra's Net of Jewels and the Golden Lion. In the
former, "In each of the jewels, the images of all the other jewels are
reflected…the images multiply infinitely, and all these multiple
images are bright and clear within a single jewel." This
concatenation, this mutual linking and inter-penetration, illustrates
harmonious interconnectedness of everything. Here, causal sky net
objects can not be conceived of independently: the nature of each
object is defined by its place with relation to all other objects. He
also devised a Hall of Mirrors to illustrate the workings of Indra's
Net and the power of the Buddha by arranging ten mirrors
(corresponding with the Ten Mysterious Gates), eight in an octagon,
one above and one below, with a statue of the Buddha set in the
middle, the focal point of origin and return. When he lit a torch to
illumine the centerpiece, an endless web of reflected light
crisscrossed, creating an infinite series of images within images,
each containing the entire Buddha. This demonstration made manifest
the meaning of the inexhaustible interconnectedness of the universe,
hence the infinite power of the Buddha.
d. The Golden Lion
Fazang's most famous device of performative metaphor was a lion made
of gold. The lion represents the cosmos, parts of the lion the various
phenomena of the universe, while the gold represented emptiness. The
lion had a mane, teeth, claws and eyes: parts that seemed distinct and
unrelated. And yet the essential substance of the entire lion was the
same–gold. Within each hair, paradoxically, there are infinite lions.
The differences are all superficial. Such is the nature of the
integrated, interconnected Flower Garland universe. After
demonstrating this principle to Wu Zhao using the sculpture of a lion
at the imperial palace gate around 700 (sources differ), Fazang wrote
a one-chapter Essay on the Golden Lion.
In his Treatise on the Five Teachings, a house is used as a metaphor
for the universe. The complex interplay between joists, uprights,
roof, tenons and mortises—the sum total of structural relationships
between all parts–is contained in a single rafter. The nature of the
infinite can be seen in the infinitesimal. The role of the rafter–or
any other component–helps one understand the interdependence of all
sentient beings. Certainly, Fazang's flair for the theatrical and his
ability to convey the message to his patrons through such brilliant
demonstrations, helped successfully propagate Flower Garland Buddhism.
3. Works
Much of Fazang's energy was devoted to exegetical work on and
demonstrations of the Flower Garland Sutra. He produced more than
sixty original works, commentaries on a wide variety of Buddhist
texts, and meditation manuals, and participated in many Buddhist
translation projects. Collectively, Fazang's works and translations
must be looked at not only in terms of their metaphysical and
ideological merit, but as political rhetoric consciously geared toward
promoting the Flower Garland school and exalting the sovereignty of
his imperial sponsors. Fazang's Treatise on the Five Teachings
detailed a hierarchy of Buddhist sects, placing, of course, Flower
Garland at the apex and clarifying common ideological ground.
Fazang was a propagandist. His Huayanjing zhuanji, a commentary he
wrote between 690 and 693, helped provide legitimacy for Wu Zhao's
claim to be a cakravartin. Making reference to her titles as "Sage
Mother" and "Divine Sovereign," Fazang remarked, "Both sage and
divine, she makes the Six Supernatural Penetrations act without
stopping; infinitely good and infinitely beautiful, she displays the
Ten Goodnesses beyond all limits."
For Wu Zhao, retranslating and reinterpreting the Flower Garland Sutra
was an ongoing, high-priority political activity. Fazang played a
pivotal role in this effort. The Flower Garland Sutra was at the heart
of a deep-rooted and longstanding Khotanese tradition of Buddhist
kingship, with a Chinese lineage going from ruler Shi Hu of the
Eastern Jin in the 4th century to Liang Wudi to Sui Wendi and finally
to Wu Zhao. She sent emissaries to Khotan to seek the Sanskrit version
of the Flower Garland Sutra. In 679, the Indian monk Divākara
presented newly recovered Sanskrit sutras at Gaozong's court. In 684,
with Divākara, Fazang worked on a translation of the Flower Garland
Sutra at Western Taiyuan Temple. As preparatory work for the
compilation of the new Flower Garland Sutra, Fazang compared these new
texts to extant translations, noting disparities and incorporating
omissions. Between 695 and 699, she recruited Khotanese monks such as
Śiksānanda and Devaprajña to work in tandem with Fazang, completing a
new, improved Flower Garland Sutra that was eighty chapters instead of
sixty. This new Flower Garland Sutra superseded the version completed
in the 680s and helped confirm Wu Zhao's identification as a
cakravartin and a bodhisattva.
4. References and Further Reading
a. Secondary Sources
Chan, Wing-tsit, ed. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton
University Press, 1963. Pages 406–424 include a brief survey of Flower
Garland school thought and a full translation of the "Golden Lion
Essay."
Chen, Jinhua. Monks and Monarchs, Kinship and Kingship: Tanqian in Sui
Buddhism and Politics. Italian School of East Asian Studies Essays
Series, vol. 3. Kyoto: Scuola Italiana di Studi sull'Asia Orientale,
2002.
Chen, Jinhua. "More Than a Philosopher: Fazang (643-712) as a
Politician and Miracle-worker." History of Religions 42.4 (May 2003):
320-358.
Cook, Francis. Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Penn State
University Press, 1977.
DeBary, Wm. Th., et al, eds. Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol I., 2nd
ed. Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. 471-476 includes sections
from the Flower Garland Sutra such as "The Tower of Vairocana" and
"Indra's Net."
Fang, Litian. Huayan jin shizi zhang jiaoshi, Zhongguo Fojiao dianji
xuankan. Zhonghua, 1996. Forte, Antonino. A Jewel in Indra's Net: The
Letter Sent by Fazang in China to Ŭisang in Korea. Italian School of
East Asian Studies Occasional Papers 8. Kyoto, 2000.
Forte, Antonino. Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias in the History of the
Astronomical Clock: The Tower, the Statue and the Armillary Sphere
Constructed by Empress Wu. Rome, 1988. See pp. 121-122.
Forte, Antonino. Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End
of the Seventh Century. Naples, 1977.
Fox, Alan. "Fazang." Great Thinkers of the Eastern World, ed. Ian P.
McGreal (HarperCollins, 1995), 99-103.
Gu, Zhengmei. "Wu Zetian de Huayan jing: Fowang chuantong yu fowang
xingxiang." Guoxue yanjiu 7 (2000): 279-321.
Liu, Ming-Wood. "The Harmonious Universe of Fa-tsang and Leibniz."
Philosophy East and West 32 (1982): 61-76.
Rothschild, Norman H. Sub-chapter "Fazang" in "Rhetoric, Ritual and
Support Constituencies in the Political Authority of Wu Zhao, Woman
Emperor of China." Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 2003.
Weinstein, Stanley. "Imperial Patronage in T'ang Buddhism."
Perspectives on the T'ang, eds. Arthur F. Wright and Denis C.
Pritchett (Yale University Press, 1973), 265-306.
Weinstein, Stanley. Buddhism in T'ang China. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Wright, Dale. "The 'Thought of Enlightenment' In Fa-tsang's Hua-yen
Buddhism." The Eastern Buddhist (Fall 2001): 97-106.
b. Primary Sources
Ch'oe Ch'iwŏn (Cui Zhiyuan), Da Tang Jianfusi gu shu fanjing dade
Fazang heshang zhuan, (Taisho Tripitika, vol. 50, no. 2054).
Biography.
Daoxuan, Xu Gaoseng zhuan (Biographies of Eminent Monks), Taisho
Triptika, vol. 50, no. 2060. Biography.
Fazang, Dasheng qixinlun yiji, Taisho Tripitika vol. 44, no. 1846.
Fazang, Fanwang jing pusa jieben shu, Taisho Tripitika vol. 40, no.
1813. Commentary on Brahmajala sutra.
Fazang, Huayanjing tanxuan ji (Taisho Tripitika, vol. 35, no. 1733).
Commentary on the profundities of the Flower Garland Sutra.
Fazang, Huayan jing wenyi gangmu, Taisho Tripitika, vol 35, no. 1734.
Explicates the ten mysterious gates (Ten Mysteries) from the Flower
Garland Sutra.
Fazang, Huayanjing zhigui (Taisho Tripitika, vol. 45, no. 1871).
Commentary on the Flower Garland Sutra.
Fazang, Huayanjing zhuanji (Taisho Tripitika, vol. 51, no. 2073).
Propaganda supporting Wu Zhao's sovereignty written between 690 and
693.
Fazang, Huayan Wujiao zhang (Treatise of the Five Teachings), Taisho
Tripitika, vol. 45, no, 1866. Central work that classifies Buddhist
teachings and situates the Flower Garland Sutra at the apex.
Fazang, Jin shizi zhang, (Essay on the Golden Lion), Taisho Tripitika
vol. 45, no. 1881.
Yan Chaoyin, "Da Tang Jianfusi gu dade Kangzang fashi zhi bei," Taisho
Tripitika, vol. 50, no. 2054. Funerary epitaph.
Zanning, Song Gaoseng zhuan, Taisho Tripitika, vol. 50, no. 2061.
Zhipan, Fozu tongji, Taisho Tripitika vol. 49, no. 2035. Biography is
fascicle 29 of this Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) work.
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