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date: 26 June 2022

Abstract and Keywords

Saichō (767–822) was a Japanese Buddhist monk who transmitted the Chinese Tiantai tradition as well as other aspects of Mahāyāna Buddhism to found the Japanese Tendai school. His endorsement of universal Buddhahood (Buddha-nature) on the basis of the one-vehicle teaching of the Lotus Sutra and the establishment of Mahāyāna precepts based on an altruistic bodhisattva spirit, to replace the detailed precepts of the traditional Vinaya, had a lasting influence on the basic assumptions of Japanese Buddhism. His legacy includes later developments in the radically nondual interpretation of “original enlightenment” to mean that all living things are enlightened just as they are. The second part of this chapter explores some of the crucial ambiguities and implications of this idea in its original Chinese and Japanese Buddhist contexts and in general philosophical perspective as they pertain to perennial issues of Buddhist practice as well as to general ethical and epistemological concerns.

Keywords: Saichō, Tendai, Buddha-nature, threefold truth, emptiness, Middle Way, bodhisattva precepts, original enlightenment, hongaku

Paul L. Swanson

Paul L. Swanson is a Permanent Research Fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan, where he is editor of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. He has a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His major fields of research include Shugendō, a Japanese mountain religion, and the textual and philosophical study of the Buddhist Tiantai/Tendai tradition. Publications include Foundations of T’ien-t’ai Philosophy (Asian Humanities Press, 1989), Pruning the Bodhi Tree (co-edited with Jamie Hubbard, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (co-edited with Clark Chilson, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), and an annotated translation of the complete Mohe zhiguan (Jpn. Makashikan), one of the most important texts of the Tiantai tradition (forthcoming in the Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture).

Brook Ziporyn

Brook Ziporyn is Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Religion and Comparative Thought at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. His research interests focus on Chinese Buddhism, especially the Tiantai tradition, as well as philosophical traditions within Classical Confucian and Daoist thought. His publications include Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Harvard University Press, 2000), The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (State University of New York Press, 2003), Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism (Open Court Press, 2004), Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Hackett Publishing, 2009), Ironies of Oneness and Difference (State University of New York Press, 2011), and Beyond Oneness and Difference (State University of New York Press, 2013).

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