This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Religion and Rutgers Global. This talk will also be available for Zoom streaming. Click here to register.

Abstract:

Buddha-nature, according to the Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism, is something that is not limited to any finite location or determination.  It is said to be all-pervasive, present both inside and outside every possible entity, and thus is not limited only to sentient beings, but also extends to insentient beings.   All these beings not only “possess” the Buddha-nature, like a soul in a body or the Kingdom of Heaven within you or the Atman of the Upanishads or the Tathataga-garbha as preached by some Buddhist schools, something that is to be discovered concealed inside something else (Maya, flesh, matter, sin, delusion) but which is not itself those things that conceal it.  Buddha-nature is neither inside nor outside all these things, or equally both inside and outside them all. But it is not just something that is neither inside nor outside all things; it itself is also said to have “no inside or outside, like space,” which itself has no contents (“no inside”) and yet also has no limits (“no outside”).     So what is it?   Buddha-nature actually is everyone and everything’s entire existence, identical to every iota of their mental and physical being, of every possible entity no matter how concrete or abstract.   In that case, what need is there to teach it, and anyway, how could one possibly do so?   Jingxi Zhanran 荊溪湛然in his Diamond Scalpel 金剛錍,  argues that the Buddha-nature is both fully present and, he claims, fully operative, even as the delusion sentient beings might have about Buddha-nature—for example, their belief that there is no Buddha-nature, or that it is possessed only by sentient beings, or that it only resides “inside” them, rather than being them.   This talk will explore this basis and implications of this claim as well as Zhanran’s treatment of the concomitant problem of whether, how and why such a doctrine is then to be taught to others.

Bio:

Brook Ziporyn is a scholar of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy. Professor Ziporyn received his BA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the Divinity School faculty, he has taught Chinese philosophy and religion at the University of Michigan (Department of East Asian Literature and Cultures), Northwestern University (Department of Religion and Department of Philosophy), Harvard University (Department of East Asian Literature and Civilization) and the National University of Singapore (Department of Philosophy).

Ziporyn is the author of Evil And/Or/As the Good: Omnicentric Holism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Harvard, 2000), The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (SUNY Press, 2003), Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments With Tiantai Buddhism (Open Court, 2004); Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries(Hackett, 2009); Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (SUNY Press, 2012); and Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and its Antecedents (SUNY Press, 2013).  His seventh book, Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism, was published by Indiana University Press in 2016.  His translation of Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings was published by Hackett in 2020, and his translation of the Daodejing was published by Liveright Books and the Norton Library in 2022.  His latest work, entitled Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond, was published by the University of Chicago Press in October of 2024.

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