Contradiction and ambiguity in Chinese Buddhist Philosophy

Abstract

The following analyzes the linguistic strategy and rhetorical function of contradiction and ambiguity in Chinese Buddhist texts. These are compositional patterns designed to enhance and promote the soteriological intention of Mahayana Buddhism, which essentially aims at our detachment from falseness. Mahayana “emptiness” (sunyatā) implies that attachments are not only obscured but also produced by conventional linguistic habits. Consequently, the verbal realization of this insight must – as the Chinese Buddhist thinker Seng Zhao (384-414) states – defy the conventions of a univocal form of articulation. The implicit ambiguity of Buddhist texts means they should not be understood as a manifestation of apodictic statements, for it rather functions in a practical way to undermine the reader’s potential to become attached. Chinese Mahayana traditions, then, consider linguistic expression in an ambivalent way: on the one hand as a source of unwholesome attachments, on the other as a precondition for detachment. This paper discusses two major issues regarding ambiguity as a compositional feature of Chinese Madhyamaka, Tiantai, and Huayan texts. First, the compositional ambiguity not only corresponds to but enhances the soteriological intention implied by the meanings of liberation and emptiness. Second, it often can be seen to arise from the classical Chinese language itself – more precisely from the indeterminacy of Chinese characters’ word class and their resultant semantic ambiguity. Here I will discuss three selections from texts ascribed to Seng Zhao (374-414), Zhiyi (538-597) and Dushun (557-640) which exemplify ambiguity as a compositional feature. While Seng Zhao’s and Zhiyi’s texts deal with the relationship between the two truths – the conventional and ultimate truth – the passage from the text ascribed to Dushun expounds the relationship between distinctive form and emptiness.