On the seventh page of the People's Daily for April 15, 1958, Ma T'e published an article entitled "Discussions of Problems of Logic." In his conclusion he critically evaluates many people and even classifies me as a revisionist who must be criticized. I have studied this article closely and feel that it is shot through with difficulties.

One of the interpretive devices that Ch'eng-kuan (澄 觀) is famous for having employed to distill the essence of the vast Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra (Tafang-kuang fo-hua-yen ching 《大方廣佛華嚴經》 was a series of variations on the contemplative theme (kuan-men 觀門) of the complete interfusion (yüan-jung 圓融) of the scripture's three chief protagonists (san-sheng 三聖) ── the Buddha Vairocana (Pi-lu-che-na 毘盧遮那) and the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī (Wen-shu-shih-li 文殊師利) and Samantabhadra (P'u-hsien 普賢). By aligning these three powerful sacred persons with a number of philosophical (...) categories that he believed to be central to the sūtra ── categories like "cause" (yin 因 ), "fruition" (kuo 果 ), "faith" (hsin 信 ), "understanding" (chieh 解), "insight" (chih 智), "practice" (hsing 行), "principle" (li 理), etc. ── he provided a focal point at which the rich and vivid meditative and liturgical lives of Hua-yen devotees could be made to converge with their philosophical reflections. -/- Although Ch'eng-kuan invoked this device in several of his writings, his most concerted development of it is a short essay entitled San-sheng yüan-jung kuan-men, which appears to have been written relatively late in his long career. Like many important Hua-yen texts, this essay seems to have been lost in China not long after its author's death. However, it was preserved in Korea and Japan and from the latter country was reintroduced to China in the last years of nineteenth century. Neither in China nor in the West has it yet been adequately studied. -/- The core of the present article is a critical edition of the Chinese text of the essay based on a careful comparison of all available versions and presented together with a copiously annotated English translation. The edition translation are preceded by a brief interpretive introduction and followed by an appendix in which are given: a detailed discussion of the work's textual history, detailed accounts of its various editions, and descriptions of its several surviving paraphrases and commentaries. (shrink)

Ths historical legacy inherited by thinkers of the Ch'un-ch'iu period comprised, briefly speaking: a religious world outlook characterized by ancestor worship; the ethical concept of filial piety and brotherliness, which was linked to ancestor worship, or derived therefrom; the concept of a ritual system; the conditions of aristocratic politics and scholar bureaucracy. These were things shaped on the basis of the blood ties in a patriarchal and racial society, and they were passive, from the standpoint of progress, being the obstacle (...) that hindered people from making big strides forward. Next, there were the tendency toward simple materialism and dialectics, which was born from the bowels of religious world outlook; the materialist philosophy of complaint against and hatred and cursing of Heaven; the belief in things and in laws; and Shih Po's doctrine of "Things are produced when matter combines." These were positive things, especially the last three, which emerged at a time when the slave system had begun to collapse, and which formed the premise of their ideological advance. Who among the thinkers of the Ch'un-ch'iu period would inherit and develop these things, what questions would be raised, probed, discussed, or argued on the common basis of their traditional thought, and what specific forms would be used to answer these questions had to be determined by their class stand and by the characteristics of the period in which they lived. (shrink)

The philosophical thought of the Ch'un-ch'iu period was derived and developed from the thought of the Yin dynasty and the Western Chou , there being an inseparable relationship of succession and transformation between them. Thus, in studying the philosophical thought of the Ch'un-ch'iu period, it is necessary to refer back to Yin-Chou thought. The courage and resolve evidenced by an attitude of so-called "cutting off the miscellaneous streams" in order to start with Lao Tzu or Confucius is really a very (...) awkward way of dissecting history. (shrink)