#tiantai

If the veils obstructed the nature of reality, the nature of reality would break down; if the nature of reality obstructed veils, the veils would not arise. So we know that the veils are none other than the nature of reality; when the veils arise, the nature of reality arises, and when the veils cease, the nature of reality ceases. The Scripture on Absence of Conformations says, “Desire is the Path, and so are anger and folly. All Buddhist teachings are in these three things. If people seek enlightenment apart from desire, they are as far from it as the sky is from the earth. Desire is none other than enlightenment.” The Pure Name Scripture says, “While traveling on false paths one realizes the Path of Buddhas. All beings are the appearance of enlightenment, and it cannot be further attained; all beings are the appearance of nirvana, and it cannot be further extinguished.”

Chan-jan [i.e. Zhanran, the sixth patriarch of the T’ien-t’ai school] says, “In (empty) space there is no light or dark, for light and dark are dependent on form (ripa) to obstruct each other. (In the same way), there is in the ‘space’ of the Dharma-nature fundamentally neither good nor evil. It is only in the passions of the ordinary person that good and evil obstruct each other … for they are the same in both substance and essence. One who comes to such an understanding is assuredly manifesting enlightenment. Hence he can bring (himself) to practice calming-and-contemplation (even) amid evil. Having realized that there is no (ultimate) evil in evil, he has seen its substance and its essence. Thus he knows that ultimately (‘in substance and in essence’) neither good nor evil exists at all.”

The religious faith of a Tiantai Buddhist is that there is some being in the universe who has lived the specific self-made nightmare that is my own plight, and has made good on it, has found the contextualization that allows its inherent Buddhahood to shine forth, and that this being has vowed to connect to other sentient beings in the universe suffering from a similar set of values, i.e., set of delusions, and to respond to their special needs by helping them contextualize this in a way that will again open up its eternal Buddhahood, will show that this folly has itself always already been Buddhahood. My good faith is ultimate and unimpeachable: I am being what I am being. Even though that inevitably goes wrong and hurts everybody, including me, that does not mean it has to be abandoned and replaced with someone else’s values, i.e., someone else’s folly, someone else’s obsessions and one-sidedness—whether that someone else is a Buddha, or the Lord God, or a wise man, or an ethicist, or a jurist representing society. The divine has no values! That is atheism! But that means all values are equally divine—if we can find the way to divinize them—and that is the challenge, the sole religious task!

To seek the character of reality outside of ordinary things is like running from the space in one place to look for space elsewhere. The ordinary is the true; there is no need to abandon the ordinary and strive for the holy.