Abstract
Sengzhao (c.374–414) was a Chinese Neo-Daoist who converted to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and few people doubt his influence on Chinese Buddhist philosophy. In this article, provided his Neo-Daoism (xuanxue) and Madhyamaka Buddhism, I will present how Sengzhao featured a symbolic meaning of ‘void’ (śūnya) as rooted originally in Daoism. The Daoist contradictions, in particular between ‘being’ (you) and ‘nothing [non-being]’ (wu), are essential to the development of his doctrine of ‘no ultimate void’ (不真空論, Buzhenkonglun). To understand what Sengzhao meant by ‘void’, which is in denial about the ultimate reality, I broach a notion of nihil (‘nothing’ but also ‘no value’) that bears on his discursive practice. In this light, I formulate a Daoist argument for contradictions and ECN (ex contradictione nihil—nothing follows from contradictions) from Laozi’s Daodejing. Furthermore, I elaborate on Sengzhao’s defence of ECN in his Buzhenkonglun. Reconstructing his negative approach to contradictions within the scope of the four-valued expressions (catuṣkoṭi) in the Madhyamaka tradition from Nāgārjuna, I consider a likely objection that a fifth value such as the ineffable may be inferred as void. Instead of subsuming the ineffable value under his discourse, I finally endorse Sengzhao’s purpose of linguistic and conventional approximation to the ultimate reality as silence. As such, I conclude the significance of void in Sengzhao’s denials via contradictions (ECN), i.e. an early philosophical peak of Chinese Buddhism from Daoism.
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Notes
On (Neo-)Daoist meditation techniques in historical texts, see [2, 9], etc. On Buddhist ethics as a pragmatic cure for suffering, see [26]. I thank James Sellmann and Chris Rahlwes for their highly helpful feedback, respectively, including comparative thoughts between Daoism and Buddhism as well as logical and semantic conundrums to solve.
The essay was written for the course ‘Eastern Philosophy [tōyō tetsugaku]’ (1892, when Sōseki was 25 years old). See [25, pp. 30–32].
The quotations in English are my translation of Sōseki’s Chinese and Japanese text, whereas I follow [36] for the Daodejing translation in the main part.
Sõseki does not provide the original Chinese quotations for the second argument. Here I translate his Japanese into (traditional) Chinese and English alike.
Two kinds of opposition, i.e. contrariety and contradiction, should be demarcated from one another. The former observes the law of excluded middle, according to which two contrary sentences are judged either true or false, whereas they can be both true or false (for example, it is true that an average girl is not beautiful, and it is also true that she is not ugly). On the contrary, not only does the latter observe the first law but also the law of (non-)contradiction, according to which two contradictory sentences cannot be both true or both false. Therefore, in the parenthesised example, if it is true that she is not beautiful, then it is false that she is not ugly. In this article, I will consider the latter kind of opposition in my regimentation of the Laozi argument, so that we can see a logically rigorous consequence from contradictories. See also [37, p. 148].
The interlocking ying-yang (陰陽) opposites, such as non-being/being and occult/manifest, are one and the same ultimate reality that embraces all. In the Daodejing, these opposites can be understood in ‘correlative’ logic and thinking (both/and), which are neither monist nor dualist (either/or). See [38, pp. 18–19]. More specifically, I formulate correlative opposites into sentences about contradictions.
Yongtong Tang ([1962] [40, p. 235]) describes that Sengzhao’s philosophy represented a highest peak of the Neo-Daoist system such as ‘being and nothing [有無]’ and ‘noumenon (thing itself) and function [體用]’. The Chinese ‘middle-way’ (madhyamaka) school, to which Sengzhao was affiliated, was labelled Sanlun (‘three treatises’) because it hinges on two texts by Nāgārjuna, the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā (MMK; ‘Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way’) and Dvādasá-dvāra-śāstra (‘The Twelve Gates Treatise’), and one called the Śata-śāstra (‘One Hundred Verses Treatise’) by Nāgārjuna’s disciple Āryadava. See also [46, p. 504], [28, pp. 96–97].
Tiandao in short Dao (道, ‘way’), is cosmologically non-anthropocentric in Daoism. See [23, p. 100].
On my view, we should not be encouraged to use the term ‘comparative’ in philosophizing Chinese and non-western thoughts from a Western perspective, for such comparative philosophy is geopolitically derogatory. Instead, philosophy should be explored on one’s own terms, although an interpretative ladder of translation is needed up to a level playing field of philosophizing.
On a modern analysis of logics in Chinese scholarship, specifically the ancient schools of Mo (墨家), Names (名家), and Daoism (道家), see [5, 6, pp. 299–305], [7, pp. 325–326]. My logical analysis does not necessarily follow Chung-yin Cheng’s ‘ontology without language’ interpretation of Dao On Mohist logic, see e.g. [12, ch. 2].
On the one hand, it can be the case that Laozi was historically a collective name of the authors of Daodejing See [31, pp. 58–59]. Similarly, the Zhuangzi (莊子) is a compilation of Daoist texts. On the other hand, Daoism does not necessarily centre on the practices of self-cultivation as associated with the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi. There are various Daoist texts, such as the politically-oriented Four Canons of the Yellow Emperor (黃帝四經, Huangdi sijing) that precede the Laozi. See e.g. [35, p. 11].
For another logical analysis of Sengzhao’s writings as formulated into a number of arguments, see e.g. [34, ch. 6].
For example, establishing a practical yet meditational method in his Essay on Nourishing Life (養生論, Yangshenglun), Ji Kang (嵇康, 224–263 ce) formed the tradition of ‘Neo-Daoism’ (玄學), along with Ruan Ji (阮籍, 210–263), et al. They were called the ‘Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’ (竹林七賢人, zhulin qixian)—as resilient as bamboos flourished—against Confucian regimes in the periods of Six Dynasties (魏晉南北朝, 220–589). See [2, 8, 4, pp. 1–2]. In this tradition, along which Chinese Buddhism developed, one can see Sengzhao’s argument against the substantiation of ‘matter-as-such’ (色即, seji) in his Buddhist precursor Zhi Dun (支遁, 314–366 ce), who loaned the Daoist notions of ziran (自然, ‘self-so’) and xiaoyao (逍遙, ‘free wandering’) in the Zhuangzi to explicate the Buddhist notion of ‘śūnya [void]’ [46, pp. 506–508].
I primarily employ Rafal Felbur’s English translation for Sengzhao’s text in classical Chinese, Buzhenkonglun [10], whereas I modify the essay title and content to my end in consultation with a Chinese edition [45], a Japanese edition [41, 42], and Chinese-speaking scholars round me, especially Han Qiu and Jieyou Zheng. I am grateful for their support.
The other three famous disciples are: Dao Sheng (道生, 355–443), Dao Rong (道融), and Seng Rui (僧叡).
The reputation originates from Sengzhao’s master, Kumārajīva’s compliment to him. In passing, on my rendering in English, I prefer ‘void[ness]’ to ‘emptiness’ in translating the Sanskrit ‘śūnyatā’, for the former implies no ontological limit whereas the latter does.
Nāgārjuna lived round the time of the second century ce. For the English translation, I follow [14].
When it comes down to the Sanskrit original satya (諦), it should be noted that we distinguish the semantic (and logical) ‘truth’ and the ontological ‘reality’ in translating the ultimate (真諦) and the conventional (俗諦) into English. See also [28, p. 68].
I am immensely obliged for Bo Mou’s comments (‘Comparative Philosophy Forum—Beijing’, August 2023), in particular, for learning his theory of double-reference that distinguishes the sentential and referential levels. The latter level does not invalidate the law of non-contradiction. See also [24].
On a non-referential conception of time in Daoism (that is, impossibility of referring to distinct temporal aspects of Dao), this article cannot cover the full scope. But I can construe sentences about time from Daoist texts, such as the Zhuangzi. For one thing, an A-series (i.e. non-reducible past, present, and future in temporal order) and a B-series (i.e. prior/posterior relations in temporal order) of time may not be agreeable to the perennial cosmogonical Dao, which contains constant change of the myriad things ([1, p. 361], [18, pp. 586–587], citing Zhuangzi, ‘Autumn Flood’). By contrast, in addition to affirming sentences of temporal change, I observe J.M.E. McTaggart’s own inclination to his C-series of time [22, p. 462], i.e. direction-less non-temporal order that is unchanging, in the Daodejing. Consider the following chapters in particular:
14: Winding and twisting: she [Dao] cannot be named; she reverts back to when there was beingless. She is called ‘the shape without a shape’; ‘the image of what is not a thing’. She is obscure light! [繩繩不可名, 復歸於無物; 是謂無狀之狀, 無物之象, 是謂惚恍] (clarification added to the female pronoun of Dao on the translator Ryden’s rendering, Ryden [36, pp. xi–xii])
16: Attaining vacuity is perennial; keeping to emptiness is everlasting. [致虛極, 守靜篤]
42: The Way generates the Unique; the Unique generates the Double; the Double generates the Triplet; the Triplet generates the myriad things. The myriad things recline on yin [the negative] and embrace yang [the positive] while vacuous qi holds them in harmony. [道生一, 一生二, 二生三, 三生萬物. 萬物負陰而抱陽, 沖氣以為和] (clarification added)
Each of the above highlights a temporary process between being and non-being (beingless). Put differently, one can formulate the sentences of temporality (‘generating the myriad things’) and of non-temporality (i.e. ‘attaining vacuity’ or void) in direct yin-yang contradiction, which is taken to be in harmony. In fact, one of the xuanxue commentators, Wang Bi (王弼, 226–249 ce), is said to interpret ch. 42 above that ‘the Unique’ is non-being and ‘the Double’ is being, whence ‘the Triplet’ is both together [36, p. 88]. Mutatis mutandis, on my view without existential claims, the Unique is a sentence about no time and the Double is a denial of the first sentence, whence the Triplet affirms the contradiction thereof.
This ‘perennial way’, for the Daoist sages, can be regarded as immanently the ‘one’ between the realms of nothing and being. For more discussion, see [17, p. 487]. The one is either sententially or referentially expressed in my formulaic diagram of Dao.
The translator Ryden interprets 斯 as ‘therefore’ (or ‘then’), but I think assuming implication or entailment from that is mistaken. On my view, there is no material implication, viz. the consequence from ‘what is beautiful’ to ‘what is not beautiful’. This is materially equivalent to either ‘what is not beautiful’ or ‘what is beautiful’ \((\beta \supset \lnot \beta \equiv \lnot \beta \vee \beta )\). Instead of this disjunction, when the preceding 皆知 (‘all know’) is replaced with 斯 (‘and [then also know]’), we realise a conjunction that the good and the non-good co-exist \((\beta \wedge \lnot \beta )\), whence contradictory.
By ‘proposition’ I mean the meaning of sentences, whereby judging its truth-value (either true, false, or limit, even if we may assume Peirce’s triadic logic). The object called ‘nothing [nihil or wu]’ is propositionally expressed and judged about its logical value (e.g. false about sentences of being) in view of semantics, not primarily of ontology (entity in reality). As will be revealed, the distinction between semantics and ontology is key to the understanding of satya (semantic ‘truth’ or ontological ‘reality’) in Sengzhao. In particular, I construe that the nihil does not necessarily imply its existence per se, but a logical consequence through contradictions. On the wu or nothing(ness) as of paramount importance in Daoism, especially Zhuangzi’s non-metaphysical wu different to Laozi’s transcendental one, see [3, p. 4].
For the highest excellence like water, see also Daodejing chs. 8, 78.
See also Fig. 1 earlier on, for how LNC fits in the viewpoints of Daoism that I structured.
See Daodejing ch. 16; also ch. 28, on the similar denotation, ‘ultimate nothing’ (無極, wuji).
Hewitt [16, p. 279].
Specifically, in view of Sengzhao’s Buddhist purpose for negatively inferring the ultimate reality through contradictions of named ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, or ‘conventional designations’ (152c–153a; [10, p. 76]), it is compelling that he refers to ‘the master from Yuanlin Grove’, putatively Zhuangzi (late 4th century bc). As Sengzhao intended there, near the end of Buzhenkonglun, his Buddhist end is in consonant with the Daoist metaphors of the finger and the horse in the Zhuangzi (ch. 2; [21, p. 30]):
I say that nothing is better than to let them cast light on each other. To use my finger as basis to determine that another’s finger is not a finger is inferior to using what is not my finger as basis to determine that my finger is not a finger; to use a given horse as basis to determine that another horse is not a horse is inferior to using what is not a given horse as basis to determine that a given horse is not a horse. Heaven and Earth are one finger; the myriad things are one horse.
As the translator Felbur rightly notes [10, pp. 123–135], one can see Sengzhao’s frequent allusions to the Laozi (e.g. chs. 1, 35, 78) and the Zhuangzi (e.g. chs. 1, 2, 3), but also to Confucius’s Lunyu (論語, Analects) and the Book of Changes (易經, Yijing) several times, throughout his Zhaolun (‘Essays of Sengzhao’). The Zhaolun consists of four main essays: ‘Things Not Shifting’ (物不遷), ‘No Ultimate Void’ (不真空, Buzhenkong-lun), ‘Prajñā [Wisdom] of No Knowing’ (般若無知), and ‘Nirvāṇa Unnamed’ (涅槃無名).
On the list of Buddhist scriptures that Sengzhao quoted, including those translated by his master Kumārajīva, see [10, pp. 183–184].
Fukunaga [13, p. 253] suggests that Sengzhao’s seeking after truth (求道) was not restrictive to choose either Daoism or Buddhism, but his Buddhism was a new development of the Lao-Zhuang thought in the Wei-Jin Dynasties as the sinicised speculation towards liberation.
According to Graham [15, p. 102], ‘Chinese Buddhism at first confused the Void (śūnyatā) with the wu of Taoism [Daoism], but later learned to deny that it is either yu [有] or wu [無]’ (clarification added). On my view, Sengzhao’s time is precisely the case in the early phase of Chinese Buddhism, where wu and kong were indistinctly nebulous in meaning the Sanskrit śūnyatā, owing to his earlier learning of Daoism and Neo-Daoism (xuanxue).
Daodejing ch. 3 in full: ‘不尚賢, 使民不爭; 不貴難得之貨, 使民不為盜; 不見可欲, 使心不亂. 是以聖人之治, 虛其心, 實其腹, 弱其志, 強其骨. 常使民無知無欲. 使夫知者不敢為也. 為無為, 則無不治.’
Fraser [11, p. 125].
The second dao (道) in this sentence is conventionally taken to be a verb that predicates of the first dao.
The second wu: (物) in the first sentence is conventionally taken to be a verb that predicates of the first wu:
If you conceptualise [conceive or name] a thing ‘a thing’, what you thus conceptualise can indeed be a thing [夫以物物於物, 則所物而可物]. But if you conceptualise a non-thing ‘a thing’, though you conceptualise it as a thing it is not a thing [雖物而非物]. For things do not derive their reality from names [是以物不即名而就實], and names are not brought about simply by virtue of there being things. Thus ultimate truth dwells in sovereign stillness beyond the domain of ordinary naming [emphasis added]; how could mere words and letters articulate it? Yet I cannot remain silent and will try to fashion for it an approximation in words. (Buzhenkonglun, 152a; [10, p. 72], modification/clarification added)
The last sentence above, on my reading, can be 7.1 for Sengzhao, if it were after the ending of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 7 [43]: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
Although Frege required only two primitives, i.e. assertion and negation, I concur with Timothy Smiley on his non-Fregean distinction between assertion, negation, and rejection [39, p. 3]. According to Smiley [39, p. 4], ‘[t]he equivalence between rejecting P and asserting \({\sim }P\) does not make rejection redundant; on the contrary, [...] rules of rejection are needed to ensure that \({\sim }P\) is the negation of P.’ Similarly, I consider that Sengzhao took rejection very seriously in his Buzhenkonglun. I thank Chris Rahlwes for the Smiley reference and reinforcement.
They are three of the so-called ‘Six Schools and Seven Sects’ (六家七宗) in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420). Stemming from the teaching of prajñā (‘wisdom’), such as śūnyatā (‘void’) and niḥsvabhāva (‘lack of own-being’), in the sutras of Prajñāpāramitā (‘perfection of wisdom’), those schools were representative of the geyi (格義, ‘categorised concepts’) method of sinicising foreign Buddhist notions into the Neo-Daoist and Confucian context. In passing, the other four sects were labelled ‘variant school of original nothingness’ (benwuyi 本無異宗), ‘school of stored consciousness’ (shihan 識含宗), ‘school of illusory transformation’ (huanhua 幻化宗), and ‘school of causal combinations’ (yuanhui 緣會宗). See also [46, pp. 503–504].
The four characters in Chinese originally stem from Daodejing ch. 40. See also [15, p. 100].
In this quotation, I render the English translation of ‘existing’ and ‘having being’ (or ‘non-existing’ and ‘having nothing’) to be interchangeable or philosophically equivalent.
On a taxonomy of Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi, see also [33, p. 320].
On a similar rendition of four-fold true/false propositions from a Daoist example, the butterfly dream in the Zhuangzi see [20, pp. 166–167, fn. 14].
諸法 (‘dharmas’ in the plural or even universal sense) is in the prior sentence 不動真際為諸法立處 (‘the unmoved reality [truth] is the foundation [place] for establishing dharmas’). This part is a paraphrase from the Fangguang-banruo-jing (放光經, ‘Radiance Sūtra’), one of the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras (般若經, ‘Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras’) in Mahāyāna Buddhism translated from Sanskrit. See [45, pp. 58–60]. After all, Sengzhao is a Buddhist.
Priest’s sources include the Avataṃsaka-sūtra (華嚴經, Huayan-jing, ‘Flower Garland Sūtra’) of Chinese origin, the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (‘The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Sūtra’), and the MMK dedicatory verses. Amongst them, MMK 13:8 [14] clarifies tersely what Priest means by a fifth value, the ineffable that refers to ‘void’ [28, pp. 64–66, clarification added]:
The victorious ones have said that emptiness [void] is the elimination of all views.
For whomever emptiness [void] is a view that one will accomplish nothing.
See Buzhenkonglun: e.g. ‘at the root things and I are one, affirmation and negation are the singular pneuma [物我同根, 是非一氣]’ (152a; [10, p. 71]); ‘The reality is one, even though the concepts [names] are dualistic [此事一稱二]’ (152c; [10, p. 75], clarification added). In Zhang’s commentary [45, p. 38], the ‘singular pneuma’ (一氣) means ‘consistency’ (一致), which I relate to the ultimate truth in Sengzhao’s semantics (i.e. ECN from the contradiction between an affirmation and its negation), not primarily his anti-realist ontology.
In his commentary, Zhang [45, p. 52] clarifies that ‘although the names are different, their purpose is the same [稱呼雖不同, 其目的却是一致的]’. Similarly, I read Sengzhao’s linguistic (and also logical) purpose in his methodology of semantic negations.
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Oda, T. The Buddhist Sengzhao’s Roots in Daoism: Ex Contradictione Nihil. Log. Univers. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-024-00349-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-024-00349-z