Chapter Notes: Part III, Chapter 4

Primary Source Extracts & Notes to Self

NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.

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Here are extended versions of the quotations used in Chapter 4 of Part III, providing a fuller picture of the thoughts of those who influenced my thinking on these subjects.

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From Cessation and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of the Hua-yen — Dushun (7th century):

Knowledge accords with things, being in one and the same realm, made by conditions, tacitly conjoining, without rejecting anything, suddenly appearing, yet not without before and after. Therefore scripture says, “The sphere of the universal eye, the pure body, I now will expound; let people listen carefully.” By way of explanation, the “universal eye” is the union of knowledge and reality, all at once revealing many things. This makes it clear that reality is known to the knowledge of the universal eye only and is not the sphere of any other knowledge. The “sphere” means things. This illustrates how the many things interpenetrate like the realm of Indra’s net of jewels-multiplied and remultiplied ad infinitum. The pure body illustrates how all things, as mentioned before, simultaneously enter each other. Ends and beginnings, being collectively formed by conditional origination, are impossible to trace to a basis-the seeing mind has nothing to rest on.