## 1. Contextualism and Ontological Ambiguity



The meta-level claim about self-recontextualization as self-reversal,
which applies at all levels to all Tiantai doctrines, is itself the
consequence of some considerations concerning contextualism, holism
and conditionality, with which it is thus convenient to begin our
exposition. The heart of the matter, the most fundamental and
far-reaching renovation of Buddhism accomplished by the Tiantai
School, is the move from the *Two Truths* model to a *Three
Truths* one. The Two Truths is an epistemological and pedagogical
heuristic in most Mahayana Buddhism, but in Tiantai the
Three Truths are taken to be a necessary logical entailment of any
proposed determinacy, and thus to apply equally to any possible
ontological, epistemological and ethical entities. They can be
summarized by the claim that no entity can be either the same as or
different from any other entity. This relation of
neither-sameness-nor-difference, a formula used by many
Mahayana Buddhist schools but often interpreted as applying
not to "Conventional Truth" but only to "Ultimate Truth" (on which see
below), and thus understood simply as an instance of
apophasis (i.e., the claim that only negations or silence
are truly appropriate descriptions of ultimate reality, since
no finite or relative predicates can be legitimately applied
to what is infinite or absolute), is in Tiantai instead developed
into what might be described as the "asness" relation,
applying to all putative or real entities without exception, affecting
even what is within the scope of Conventional Truth: each determinate
thing is the totality of all other possible things *as* this
thing. The non-sameness implies that the specific characteristics of
all other things are in some sense discoverable in each thing, that
all their manifold properties and functions will also be
simultaneously operative there.



A simple thought experiment may draw out the implications of this
idea. Imagine that you come upon what looks like a white marble lying
on the ground. You experience it as round, as small, as white, and
immediately you construct a lived attitude toward it--something
that can be picked up, rolled, played with, pocketed. But then you go
to pick it up, and find that it is stuck to the ground. You cannot
lift it. You try to dig it out, and find that it extends downward,
further than you can dig: it is the tip of a larger item. It appears
to be a long rod or cylindrical pipe of some kind. But as you dig
further, you find that after about five inches of narrow thinness it
starts to expand outward; it is a spire on top of a cone. This cone
expands outward as you keep digging down. When you get about twenty
feet down, the cone ends, embedded in a soft, scaly material. Then the
earth rumbles and an enormous two-horned monster emerges from
underground; it is 500 feet tall, and each of its horns is twenty feet
high, with a long sharp tip. You had been digging out one of the
horns. What you had seen as a marble on the ground was in fact the
very tip of one of the horns. Now look again at that tip. You had
experienced it as round. But it turns out it was not round at all: it
is sharp. Yet it has not changed at all: you are still seeing what you
saw. It is not white either: the tip had looked white against the
ground, but now, looking at the monster's horn as whole, you see
it as a pattern of mostly green spots interspersed here and there with
white: looked at as a whole, the horn, including its tip, looks green.
Nor is it movable, pocketable, playwithable--it is rather
dangerous, razor sharp, to be avoided. And yet nothing of what you saw
was taken away: it was just supplemented with further information,
with its larger context.



Tiantai views all things this way. Normally you might make some
qualifications in order to preserve your view that some facts are
unambiguous (indeed, to some extent this process is precisely what
philosophy traditionally *is)*; you might say "the tip,
*considered in isolation*, is indeed round". The usual
procedure is to interpose the distinction between "how it
appears" and "how it really is", some form of
reality-appearance distinction. But the most important consequence of
the transformation of the Two Truths into the Three Truths is the
wholesale dismissal of the appearance-reality distinction. Tiantai
would reject the privileging of either considering in isolation or
considering in any single particular connection; any of these would be
legitimate in some heuristic (*upayic*) contexts, but none
could be non-arbitrarily assigned the role of representing what is the
"really the case", *simpliciter*. To see something
is to see "not-all" of it. We are always seeing a little
fragment of the world, but every bit of the world is changed by the
fact that it is a part of the world, is recontextualized by the rest
of the world, by the rest of space and the rest of time. In fact, if
we ever saw all, we would see nothing. For to see, to take something
as "there", as "real", is to place it within a
context, to contrast it to something outside of itself, something
which is not it. To see all is to see nothing. As in the case of
"fire" and "water" above, if someone were to
say that the entire universe is "round", this would
require changing the meaning of "round". This round would
not be round: for round requires a non-round *outside it* to be
round. It would have to be bordered by something to shape it into
roundness, but the universe would also include that
outside-the-roundness part. If someone were to say the entire universe
were sharp, this would also make no sense. This sharp would not be
sharp; for sharp requires a non-sharp *outside it* to be sharp.
To say the whole universe is sharp, then, means no more and no less
than saying the whole universe is round. We can make no specific
determinations about the whole, about the entire universe, for that
outside of which nothing exists; for all particular specifications
require a contrast to something outside of them. Everything we can say
or think comes from the realm of the finite, and cannot be applied to
the infinite. But the Tiantai point is that we cannot speak of
anything finite without also involving some determination of the
Whole, of the infinite. If we were to say this thing is sharp, we
would have to be assuming that "the whole universe is such that
this thing is sharp". We cannot say that: the whole universe
cannot be "such that this marble is sharp" any more than
the whole universe can be "sharp". But this also means we
cannot say the whole universe is "such that this marble is
not-sharp". Either is equally legitimate, either is equally
illegitimate. What we can say, then, is that this marble appears to be
round, but round is such that it is always turning out also to be more
than round, to be non-round, and vice versa. Roundness is moretoitive.
Round and non-round intersubsume each other.



In short, roundness is present as every non-roundness, and as
moretoitivity; moretoitivity is present as roundness, and as every
non-roundness. This it means to say "roundness and
non-roundness are neither same nor different."



To clarify this, consider the following:



What is the following figure?



O



What is that "same" figure in the diagram below?



[?]2 [?]1 O  1  2



What is it now?




|  |  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
|  |  | M |  |  |
|  |  | N |  |  |
| [?]2 | [?]1 | O |  1 |  2 |
|  |  | P |  |  |
|  |  | Q |  |  |



How about now:




|  |  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
|  |  |  |  | O |
|  |  | M |  |  |
|  |  | N |  |  |
| [?]2 | [?]1 | O |  1 |  2 | O |
|  |  | P |  |  |
|  |  | Q |  |  |



When we looked at that round figure in isolation, it may have
presented itself immediately and unreflectively in accordance with our
habits or proximate mental acts; if we had been thinking about numbers
a moment ago, it might appear simply and unambiguously as
"zero", if about letters as the letter "o", if
about shapes as a "circle". When a single explicit context
was added in the second diagram, it had a clear and definite identity:
it was the number zero. But when we added another context at the same
time, in the third diagram, the figure became ambiguous: it could now
be read as either a zero or the letter O. As we keep adding more
contexts, its identity becomes more and more ambiguous; in the final
diagram above, we can point to the initial circular figure and say,
validly, "*This* is a triangle"--for it is the
vertex of a triangle formed with the two other, non-contiguous and
non-proximate, circles. Who knows what other circles there are out in
the world, and what other figures *this thing right here* is
actually forming? When we consider all things in the universe at the
same time, the initial identities we assigned to them are supplemented
by more and more ambiguity. Looking at just the single series of
letters, is was a zero: this is local coherence. When we see this cup
simply as a cup, we are doing the same thing: ignoring a lot of other
factors, contexts, points of view, ways of viewing, and narrowing down
the relevant factors to allow it to appear as a single unambiguous
something: a cup. If we consider the molecules of which it is made, or
the energy it expresses, or the uses to which it might be put in the
context of various narratives, or its deep past and deep future, its
"cupness" becomes ambiguous: it is simultaneously lots of
other things, part of many different stories. It is a blip on the
screen of energy transformations, or a murder weapon, or an art
object, or a doorstop. The same is true of yourself, and your actions
right now. They are unambiguous only to the extent that we narrow our
vision around them (one way we can narrow our vision, of course, is to
do philosophy; one of the narratives in which we are contextualizing
our experience might be a conceptual system presupposing the sorting
out of essences, attributes, accidents, substantial forms or what have
you, and distinguishing appearances from reality accordingly, so that
it appears to be "essentially" a cup and only
"accidentally" a murder weapon and only "appearing
to be" a revelation from Baal). This is the meaning of Emptiness
in Tiantai: ontological ambiguity. The term "ambiguity"
usually refers only to how we see things. We assume that, in
themselves, everything simply is what it is; but we may have an
unclear view of it; we can't *yet* tell if it's
this or that. We assume that, at least in principle, it must be one or
the other. The idea of Emptiness is the idea that this is true
"ontologically": that is, it pertains to the very being of
things. To say they are empty does not mean they are a blank--for
that would be a definite something, a specific exclusion of all
determinate content, which is, *ipso facto*, itself a
determinate content. Emptiness here means rather that they are, in
themselves, *ambiguous*. Again, this is also to say that
everything is *more* than it seems to be, or rather
constitutively more than it *can* seem to be, no matter what
angles it is seen from, no matter how thoroughly it is known, no
matter how comprehensive a sum of information is gathered about it. It
has the character of being a "something" (a cup, a chair,
an elephant), with a number of specifiable characteristics, but every
"something", just to be there as something, has the
additional characteristic of "moretoitivity"--of
always overflowing whatever is determined about it, of being
*more* than what can be seen from any angle.



This "more" however, does not leave the original
"known" part unchanged. Rather, it recontextualizes it. We
are always seeing the tip of an iceberg. But even the
"tip" is no longer what we thought it was before we knew
it was a tip *of* something more. The key here is that there is
no total decontextualization, that leaving one context is always
simply entering another context; contextual relations do not require
physical contiguity, and the empty space surrounding a given thing
does not cut it off from further recontextualizations but rather is
itself a context, and an illimitable one that opens into infinite
alternate contexts.


## 2. The Three Truths: Emptiness, Provisional Positing and the Center (Kong Jia Zhong  *kong, jia, zhong*)



These analogies, homely and somewhat goofy as they are, may
start to give some sense of the intuitions that
undergird Tiantai's architectonic philosophical system,
which may help orient us as we move into the actual technical
arguments and commitments developed there. This is especially
important in the Tiantai case, as the conclusions to which its
theoretical edifice lead will initialy strike many if not
most readers as wildly outlandish and counterintuitive; some attention
to these everyday experiences--coming upon something in the
world, having some tentative grasp of what it is but with a built-in
incompletion clause pointed toward the future, finding out more about
it, reinterpreting and recalibrating our understanding
accordingly, adjusting our foregroundings and backgroundings, and
so on--may help to spur some reflections on the
concepts normally brought to bear in interpreting
these experiences. It also helps us understand the Tiantai
claim that its most shocking stipuations are nothing special, not
the bizarro-world privileges of some remote ontological plane,
but are rather inescapable entailments of everyday experience of
all sentient beings--for this process of things appearing one way and
turning out another is almost a definition of "experience" as
such. Nevertheless, analogies are never perfect,
always partially mirroring the structure they are intended to
explicate but never doing so completely, and we must not
allow the attractive accessibility of such examples to mislead us
into resting content with only a loose sense of the logical
entailments of this sort of thinking. For a more rigorous grasp
of the reasoning on which so many of
the outrageous epistemological, ontological and
soteriological claims of this school rest, we must approach the
meaning of "neither-same-nor-different" more systemtaically.


### 2.1 Outline of the Three Truths Argument: Getting to "Neither-Same-Nor-Different"



We can reconstruct the argument for this claim as follows:


1. For anything to be what it is, it must be mutually exclusive with
whatever it is not. If it has aspects or qualities in common with
anything else, it is nonetheless stipulated to be specifically itself
not insofar as it has these in common, and thus is indistinguishable
from the other things that share them, but insofar as it is different
from them.
2. To be is to be determinate. To be determinate is to be finite,
non-all. To be finite is to be conditional. Anything strictly
unconditional would *ipso facto* be omnipresent (no particular
place rather than another can be the "condition" for its
existence) and always occurring (no particular time rather than
another can be the "condition" for its existence), and
thus indistinguishable from anything else. This would be equivalent to
not being determinate at all, for it would be impossible for an
unconditional entity to be mutually exclusive with anything, since
that exclusion would then have to be a "condition" of its
existence.
3. Any entity must thus be copresent with some otherness; it must
exist in a world that includes something that is not it, i.e., (by
item #1), something that is mutually exclusive with it (even if just
the empty space around it). Some form of copresence-with-otherness is
an *essential* characteristic of the existence of all entities.
All forms of relation, including relations of causality and of
conceptual contrast, are instances of this necessary
copresence-in-the-world.
4. The conditions from which it must be different but related include
not only immediately contiguous causally efficient factors, but also
prior states of affairs. More searchingly, the constitutive copresent
otherness cannot be to non-*X* in general, for this would
merely be a repetition of the determination of *X* itself, in
reverse; to the extent that there is no more in non-*X* than
the negation of *X*, no new content is provided by the
contrast, which therefore presupposes *X*. Rather, the
exclusions that make up the determination of *X* must be
specific other determinations, other exclusions; they must in
principle include anything at all that the entity in question is
different from: to be determinate as *X* is a specific
exclusion of all specific non-*X* things and states. We have
greater knowledge of what the essence of a dog is by learning more
about each and every particular thing that the dog is not, how it
differs specifically from a cat, from a hedgehog, from a table, from a
towel.... (Our knowledge is thus always constitutively partial
and in-process; knowing *X* is always being poised to know more
about *X*. Knowledge *per se* is non-omniscience.)
5. However, all copresence-in-the-world, all conditioning, all
relation, all causality between two entities requires some overlap or
interface between them. There must be some place, thing, time, medium
or concept that simultaneously includes them both, or which they both
include. Any two entities must have something in common to succeed in
being copresent--to have a causal relation or to even be
contrasted.
6. But no genuinely distinct entities, insofar as they are distinct
and thus determinate, have anything in common.
7. Hence two genuinely mutually exclusive entities can have no
relation of conditioning one another.
8. Hence there are no genuinely mutually exclusive entities. Thus the
nature of determination stipulated in item #1 must be supplemented.
This rewrite of the nature of determination is the Three Truths.
9. Whatever appears to be, i.e., to be just what it is and nothing
else, cannot really be mutually exclusive with whatever it is not.
*X* is "non-different" from non-*X*. This
non-difference is called the Emptiness (Kong  *kong*,
*Sunyata*) of *X*. For if *X* is
non-different from non-*X*, it fails to fulfill the condition
of being *X* stipulated in item #1, and thus *X* *is
not* *X*; *X* is "empty".
10. But *X* is also "non-same" with non-*X*.
Empirically, if it were the same, there would be no *X* to be
called non-different: its presence is nothing other than its
non-identity with all other states. Logically, the alternative to the
Tiantai view is the default bivalent assumption that either some
entities exist or that no entities exist; but both existing and
non-existing require non-sameness--i.e., the non-sameness between
existing and non-existing. Anything determinate is non-same with what
is not itself, by item #1. This is why there is something rather than
nothing: even total nothingness would still be determinate and
non-same to what it is not, i.e., non-same to somethingness. Nothing
would therefore still be something, so the question why there is
something rather than nothing is actually moot. Non-sameness to what
it is not is analytically necessary to any proposed entity. Even if no
entity is posited, "no-entity-being-posited" will not
obtain unless the positing of entities is thereby excluded, and
non-sameness is necessary to succeed in excluding the positing of any
entity. This is non-sameness to non-*X* is called the
Provisional Positing or Conventional Truth (Jia  *jia*) of
*X*.
11. The non-sameness of *X* and non-*X* and the
non-difference between *X* and non-*X* are themselves
non-same as one another and non-different from one another. Non-same
in spite of being non-different is Provisional Positing. Non-different
in spite of being non-same is Emptiness. These are just reversed ways
of saying the same thing, but the reversal is itself not negligible.
They are two opposite and mutually exclusive senses given to a single
identical referent. They are synonymous and yet contrasted. This is
called the Center (Zhong  *zhong)*.
12. *X* has to be an aspect or part of more than whatever it
seems to be, and even as a part or aspect it cannot really be just the
single selfsame (i.e., simply and bivalently same or different) part
or aspect it appears to be.
13. But it also does and must seem to be just this and nothing
besides, and can appear only if initially appearing to be mutually
exclusive with what it is not: to appear is to appear as something,
which is to appear as finite. The whole of which any appearance is a
part or aspect can never appear *simpliciter*, even in thought.
It is always appearing as one specific thing (or concept, or thought)
or another.
14. To be present as *X* is to not be *X*, but such that
this not-*X* is showing itself only as *X*. To be
*X* is to exclude non-*X* but only in such a way as to
necessarily involve non-*X*, which can only be done by showing
itself exclusively as *X*.
15. Thus the Three Truths are:
	1. Provisional Positing: Some *X* is always appearing.
	2. Emptiness: *X* is not (only) *X*.
	3. The Center (or Middle, or Mean): The simultaneity, inseparability,
	sameness-as-difference of *X* appearing and *X* not
	being only *X* (this is the Center in its simplest formulation,
	as "the exclusive Center" (Dan Zhong 
	*danzhong*) which is itself neither Emptiness nor Provisional
	Positing, is beyond both and more ultimately real than both, but which
	can appear as either).
16. A further implication of the Center, called the
"Non-exclusive Center" (Bu Dan Zhong  *budan
zhong):* Any two putatively distinct things, *Y* and
*X*, are also not-same-and-not different *from one
another*. For the Center can never appear *simpliciter;* it
always appears as some specific coherence showing itself, to which it
is non-different. Provisional Positing is intrinsic to every instance
of both Emptiness and the Center, and Provisional Positing is always
some specific provisional posit (even the abstract concept
"provisional positing", or the abstract concept
"emptiness" or "the center" is still a
*specific* provisional posit.) Each provisional posit involves
every other provisional posit, specifically. *Y* is an
instantiation of *X*. *X* is an instantiation of
*Y*. All other appearances are thus
"intersubsumptive" with *X*. The Center is thus
ultimately not beyond or more real than Emptiness or Provisional
Positing, but is itself synonymous-as-contrasted with them, such that
just to be Empty or to Provisionally Posited, or to be any provisional
posit, is to be the Center, the subsumer and subsumed of all other
provisional posits--and vice versa.


### 2.2 The Self-Overcoming of Holism into Omnireductionism



From this we can perhaps see in what way Tiantai is able to stipulate
at once the self-preserving and the self-overcoming of both holism and
apophasis. First, atomism of any kind--that is, any doctrine that
stipulates basic indivisible buiding blocks exist whose
identities are independent of the relations and wholes into which they
may enter--is rejected as unintelligible, and a thorough contextualism
asserted: things can only be determinate in relation to a context, and
there can be no non-arbitrary limiting of the extent and multiplicity
of contexts, since each context will itself be intelligible only with
respect to a larger context. This would seem to lead to a holism of
some sort: each apparently isolable thing is really an aspect or
expression of some more inclusive whole, and each of these finite
wholes must be an aspect or expression of a still more inclusive
whole. The part is dependent on the whole, the conditional is
dependent on the unconditional. But the unconditional can have no
specific separate identity, not even as "the unconditional
*per se*". Any determination for the whole turns out to
self-overturn into other determinations, precisely due to its success
in being a determination for the exceptionless whole. For example,
Thales says the world is made of water. This is stipulated after first
isolating other lesser wholes: water, earth, fire, air. Each of these
was already a finite whole, involving an alleged collapse from
appearance to a deeper reality: what appeared to be trees and stones
and pillars turned out to be part of the larger whole
"earth", ways in which earth appears or manifests; what
appeared to be body-heat and flames and sunshine turned out to be part
of the larger whole "fire", ways in which fire appears or
manifests. Now Thales says both of these are really parts of a larger
whole "water", ways in which it appears and manifests. But
each of these generalizing claims involves a *meaning-change*
for the term in question. "Water" initially meant
"what is *not* fire, earth, wind, which excludes them,
what is contrasted to them". After Thales, "water"
means also "what expresses itself sometimes as watery, sometimes
as fiery, sometimes as earthy, sometimes as windy". Along comes
Heraclitus and claims that all is really "fire".
"Fire" now means also "what expresses itself
sometimes as watery, sometimes as fiery, sometimes as earthy,
sometimes as windy". What is intended in claims of this type,
allowing them to appear to be doing explanatory work, is the
maintenance of a distinction between which of these expressions is
primary and which secondary, which direct and indirect; but Tiantai
would deny that this distinction can be meaningfully maintained once
this totalization has been effected. Because each now means the whole,
they lose their original meaning, for that meaning was entirely
dependent on a contrast to what was excluded. If fire is everything,
then fire is not fire. If water is everything, then water is not
water. If fire is everything, then water is really fire. If water is
everything, then fire is really water. If fire is really water, then
water is really fire. Hence by going through the universalization of
*any* determinate entity, we reach the overturning of that
determination into something that expresses itself as all other
determinations, and at the same time undermines its own privileged
status as ultimate foundation, making all other possible
determinations equally unconditional, all-pervasive, universal,
absolute. To see the absoluteness of any one entity is thus to
de-absolutize that entity and also to absolutize every other
entity.


### 2.3 From Two Truths to Three Truths: The Self-Overcoming of Apophasis into Trivialism



The Three Truths position of Tiantai derives from a particular
understanding of the Two Truths doctrine advanced by Indian Buddhist
philosophers of the Madhyamaka school, interpreted as holding
that any specific thing we could say about the world was at best a
"Conventional Truth", which served as a kind of
"raft" to get beyond it to the "Ultimate
Truth" of Emptiness--determinations of any kind were thus
at best an indispensable means to get beyond themselves, to be
discarded when their work is done. The stipulation of Emptiness
(*Sunyata*) was itself a raft to get beyond not
only all other determinate views but also Emptiness itself as a
"view" or theory or concept. Ultimate Truth, true
realization of Emptiness, was thus at best a celebratory term used to
point to an ineffable experience of the liberation from all views, all
definite conceptions of determinate "things". The
motivation for this was soteriological in a specific, pan-Buddhist
sense: the goal of all human endeavor, including philosophy, including
ethics, including epistemology, is assumed to be the reduction or
elimination of suffering. Buddhism claims that this is what
we're always trying to do, but usually in a self-defeating,
ignorant way; it claims to provide a more effective way. Note that
this does not make any claim about what is valuable, but rather
addresses what is assumed to be a necessary entailment of what it
means to consider anything valuable, i.e., what structures desire qua
desire. To desire is to value, and suffering is simply the
non-satisfaction of our desire. Hence all endeavors are endeavors to
eliminate some suffering, i.e., to satisfy a desire. The
characteristic Buddhist contribution is then to note that desiring any
conditional object or state is necessarily self-defeating. This is
because to be conditional is to be brought into being by a
qualitatively distinct, heterogeneous and extrinsic cause. But
examined closely, this cannot be a *single* extrinsic cause,
for if any effect were produced by a single cause, that cause and that
effect would always be copresent--wherever and whenever that
cause occurred, the effect would also occur. But that would mean that
the cause would therefore no longer be extrinsic to the effect; they
would be, rather, necessary and intrinsically conjoined, actually two
aspects of a single irreducible entity, which would mean that no
causal event actually ever occurs. This means that all conditional
things require multiple causes, each of which itself requires multiple
causes.



This introduces an intrinsic instability and inner conflict into
whatever exists conditionally, that is, whatever is finite, whatever
is determinate. The unconditional would have to be omnipresent and
omnitemporal and indeterminate. But the nature of desire is to have
specific conditions of satisfaction: to desire is to require some one
state of affairs *rather than*, *to the exclusion of*,
some other state of affairs--minimally, pleasure *instead of
pain*. This means all desire qua desire is desire for something
conditional; otherwise there would be no need for the desire, since
the desired state would already always and everywhere be present.
Desire desires a single effect to the exclusion of any other effect;
but the denial of effectivity for any single *cause* also
implies that what is produced by any causal process can never be only
a single *effect*. For since what is produced is not dependent
solely on any single cause, or indeed any finite set of causes
considered as a unit, the production of a new event always requires
the conjunction with some hitherto excluded condition. Since by
hypothesis this new condition is not a consistent part of the original
set, it will not always be the same, and thus the effect will not be
one and the same; every conjunction will produce its own effects, and
by hypothesis there is no limit to the set of conjunctions (for that
would make them simply a single cause). Less rigorously, it is held
that the cross-purposes and conflicting tendencies thus built into any
effect make it impossible for it to be a stably homogenous entity
consistently isolable from the opposite conditional states it means to
exclude, such as is required by the exclusive structure of specific
desires. Whatever is desired must be identifiably present at a
particular time and place, and whatever is such is conditional, and
whatever is conditional entails impermanence, and thus suffering.



The pan-Buddhist denial of the existence of a "self" rests
on the same point: the impossibility of single-cause causal events.
For the "self" rejected here is precisely the claimant to
single-causality: the agent of actions which putatively requires no
second condition to produce an effect, e.g., to will something, to do
something, to want something, to experience something. The self never
acts alone, has no independent effects, and thus actually is not a
self-as-efficacious-agent. "Self" here essentially means
"controller". Because there is no single causality, there
is no single controller, and thus no self. For this reason too,
satisfaction of desire is not sustainable. For in doing what the self
desires, other causes besides the activity of the self are always also
involved; the effect is not in the self's control, and thus will
inevitably contravene its desires, its own causal contributions to the
effect. Indeed, the early Buddhist analysis of the human condition
amounts to the claim that all desire is really a proxy-version of this
impossible desire for control, for single-agent causality, for pure
autonomy, for selfhood; thus all desire is doomed.



The same considerations have serious epistemological consequences as
well. The Buddhists viewed theoretical stances and philosophical
positions as themselves objects of desire, of clinging. Since all such
stances are themselves specific, determinate, they are *ipso
facto* conditional. As conditional, they are *ipso facto*
suffering. Hence attachment to views was seen as a form of suffering
and an obstacle to liberation. All determinate metaphysical views
about how or what things are were to be transcended and left
behind.



In most of the dominant Indian theories, those ideas are granted
temporary validity as conventional truths: they are to serve as
"rafts", to be clung to temporarily, but only because they
are an effective means of passing beyond themselves. This includes
both specific Buddhist doctrines and also ordinary conventional speech
(necessary for even communicating Buddhist ideas). Whatever ideas do
not lead to their own abandonment in this way (and hence do not lead
to the end of suffering) do not count even as conventional
truths--for example, 1) metaphysical and religious theories about
the Absolute, or unconditional claims about the world as a whole and
2) non-conventional views of things in the world, claims that
contravene ordinary language of the community. There tends to be a
kind of hierarchy in the Indian Two Truths theory: first, plain
falsehood, including all philosophical theories about reality and
unconventional views. Then conventional truth, which includes ordinary
daily life ideas about self and other, cause and effect and so on, and
also Buddhist ideas about suffering, the Four Noble Truths, non-self,
and even "Emptiness" considered as a concept. These ideas
lead beyond themselves, instrumentally, to the experience of
Emptiness, which is liberation from all views. The conventional truths
had an instrumental value, but none were really "true"
about things--Emptiness meant that all of them were, in the most
ultimate sense, false. Also, there are really only one or two kinds of
conventional truth: first, common sense daily speech, the correct
general names for things as used in the daily life of your particular
community, and second, Buddhist ideas. The reason these count as
"truths" is because they are useful in leading us to
liberation from suffering--and in leading us to liberation from
these ideas themselves. "True" propositions are
propositions that have the power to lead beyond themselves.



This led to a somewhat paradoxical situation, on several levels. There
was always a problem in Emptiness theory: Emptiness was supposed to be
not a "view" at all, to predicate nothing about reality.
But if it *does* anything at all, if it *negates or
excludes* any other view, it is, in the Tiantai view, still a kind
of view. For to be something in particular is just to exclude
*something else* in particular. That is all a
"thing" is, that is all a "view" is. To be
something just *is* to exclude something else; nothing more is
required to count as a being. Pre-Tiantai Emptiness theory gets into
an infinite regress, chasing its tail around the problem of the
transcendence of Emptiness: no statement can represent it, even
"all things are Empty". It is purely and totally above and
beyond anything that can be thought or said, all ordinary experience
of identities in the world. It is a negation that is supposed to bear
no relation at all to what it negates, to entirely escape the system
of relations, of conditionality. Emptiness is supposed to be strictly
"inconceivable". In Tiantai, this problem disappears.
Emptiness is still very important, but it is simply a
*conditional* assertion of unconditionality. We do not have all
the conditionality (specifiability, particularity) on one side and all
the unconditionality (transcendence, inconceivability) on the other.
Everything, every experience, every identity, every action, is in the
same boat: they are all *both conditional and unconditional, both
conceivable and inconceivable*. The thought, experience, concept
"Emptiness" is also both conditional and unconditional,
both conceivable and inconceivable, like "water" and
"fire" in our example about. Emptiness is an especially
efficient marker of self-exploded holism, the term that applies most
easily everywhere and thus ultimately nowhere, allowing all other
terms to do the same. It is Provisionally Posited, which means it is
at least locally coherent (conditional, determinate, conceivable), but
it itself is also Empty, which means it is globally incoherent
(unconditional, indeterminate, inconceivable). It appears in
experience as something in particular (locally coherent as precisely
this word and this thought "Emptiness"), but this, like
every other local coherence, is haunted by its own inseparable nimbus
of infinite outsides, infinite contexts, each of which differently
contextualizes it and thus bestows on it alternate identities: there
is more to it than any single concept, including the concept
"Emptiness", can hold. Emptiness is, to use a word coined
for just this Tiantai usage, "moretoitivity" (i.e., the
quality of always constitutively having *more-to-it)*: and
moretoitivity is itself moretoitive. It appears not just as
moretoitivity, but as specific identities, something more, above and
beyond, simple moretoitivity as such. Ambiguity is itself ambiguous:
fire is not just fire, it is ambiguous; but the ambiguity is not just
ambiguity, it is also fire. This applies to everything else as well.
Local coherence and global coherence (Provisional Positing and
Emptiness) are just two ways of saying the same thing.



In the Tiantai "Three Truths" theory, instead of
concluding that every particular view and thing is false, we conclude
that all is, ultimately, true. Every possible view is equally a truth.
There is no longer a hierarchy between the levels, and no category of
plain falsehood. "Conventional Truth" in Tiantai is not
something to be left behind when we reach enlightenment, but rather
what is obtained and mastered and intensified there. Moreover, nothing
is left out of it--all possible statements, viewpoints, ideas,
concepts, positions are conventional truths. The criterion is still
the same: all things can be used as "skillful means" to
lead to Buddhahood. So now we have Three Truths, which are not a
raft-like instrument to get beyond all statements and concepts, and a
final higher truth that allows us to have no biased and particular
view of things, but rather as three true ways of viewing any
particular thing. It is not a raft to get beyond all rafts, but a raft
that leads to the raft factory that makes and houses all rafts, and
allows one to move at will from any raft to any other raft, including
the initial one. However you may be viewing a particular part of the
world or the world as a whole, it is "conventionally"
true. There are not just a few conventional truths, but an infinite
number of them, even when they are directly opposed and contradictory.
So in Two Truths theory, we would say that "this is a cup"
is conventionally true, and "this cup is empty" is a
higher conventional truth, which finally leads us to a direct
inconceivable experience of the emptiness of this cup, freedom from
clinging to any view at all of this cup, which is the liberation from
all suffering. If someone were to point to this "cup" and
say, "This is an elephant", however, that would not even
be a conventional truth, because that is not how most people think of
it, it is neither the ordinary speech of the language community, nor a
Buddhist term designed to lead beyond itself. That would be a plain
error. And if someone said, "This is an expression of the will
of God", that would also be an error, not even a conventional
truth, since it tried to make a claim beyond that of conventional
usage to an ultimate, universally applicable, absolute truth. But in
Tiantai Three Truths theory, it is just as true to say, "This is
an elephant" or "This is the Will of Baal" as to say
"This is a cup". And neither of these is less true than
saying, "This is empty", or indeed any less true than
"experiencing" the emptiness of this cup/elephant. In both
cases, what we have is a *locally coherent* way of viewing this
thing--it just means that it *looks that way* from some
perspective, within some set of parameters, for some length of time.
It doesn't matter anymore whether those parameters are shared by
the common sense of a particular community or speech group; all that
matters is that it is possible to make it look that way, that it looks
that way *from anywhere*, for *even one moment*. In Two
Truths and Emptiness theory, nothing is really true. In Tiantai Three
Truths theory, *everything* is true. We don't need an
extra "Emptiness" outside of this locally coherent way of
seeing things; Emptiness just means that whatever is *locally*
coherent is also, *ipso facto*, *globally*
*in*coherent. That is, when all factors are taken into
consideration, the original way any thing appears is no longer
unambiguously present, but it restored as a raft leading to all other
rafts, including itself, as ineradicable aspects of all reality, of
any reality.


## 3. Transformative Self-Recontextualization (Kai Quan Xian Shi  *kaiquanxianshi*)



This strange "neither-same-nor-different" structure of the
Three Truths is to be understood in accordance with another key
Tiantai concept, "opening the provisional to reveal the
real" (Kai Quan Xian Shi  *kaiquan
xianshi*). This is a way of further specifying the relation
between local coherence and global incoherence, which are not only
synonymous, but also irrevocably opposed, and indeed identical only by
means of their opposition and mutual exclusivity. Provisional truth is
the antecedent, the premise, and indeed in a distinctive sense the
*cause* of ultimate truth, but only because it is the strict
exclusion of ultimate truth.


### 3.1 The Setup-Punchline Structure of Reality



This can be compared to the structure of the relation between the set
up and the punch line of a certain kind of joke. Consider the
following:



(Setup)
Two strangers were chatting on a bus. One told the other he was on
his way to a biology lab downtown to pick up his dog. "The
scientists there are doing some research on him", he said.
"He was born with no nose".
"Really?" said the other. "How does he
smell?"
(Punchline)
"Awful".


Let's talk about that structure. When we hear the question
"How does he smell?" it seems as if it is a serious query,
an expression of serious curiosity about canine anatomy and its
mutations. It has the quality of seriousness, of factuality, of
non-ironic information. There is nothing funny about that statement.
But, when the punch line comes, retrospectively, that set up is funny.
That set up is funny because it has been recontextualized by the pun
on the word "smell", which is made to have more than one
identity when put into a new context.



The interesting thing to note here is that it is precisely by
*not* being funny that the setup was funny. In other words, if
it was already funny, if you didn't take it seriously for a
second, the contrast between the two different meanings of this thing
could never have clashed in the way that is necessary to make the
laughter, to make it actually funny. We have a setup which is serious
and a punch line which is funny, but when you look back at the setup
from the vantage point of having heard the punchline, that setup is
also funny. After all, we don't say that just the punch line is
funny. We say the whole joke is funny. The setup is funny in the mode
of not being funny yet. It is only funny because it wasn't
funny. It is the same thing in the Lotus Sutra and it is the same
thing in life really. You're Enlightened! That is what
Mahayana Buddhism says, everyone is Enlightened! Everybody
is a Buddha! But the way in which you are a Buddha is the way in which
the setup of a joke is funny, i.e., by *not* being a Buddha. By
struggling toward buddhahood, toward something else, but by
revisualizing or recontextualizing or expanding awareness, which has
been the preferred technique in Buddhism all along, those very things
which are the details of daily life, of the struggles to interact, to
deal with conditions and suffering and lack of control are not just a
means to buddhahood. They are themselves buddhahood as the life of a
sentient being.



The "provisional", conventional truth, local coherence, is
the set-up. The "ultimate truth", Emptiness, global
incoherence, ontological ambiguity, is the punch line. What is
important here is to preserve *both* the contrast between the
two *and* their ultimate identity in sharing the quality of
humorousness which belongs to every atom of the joke considered as a
whole, once the punch line has been revealed. The setup is serious,
while the punchline is funny. The funniness of the punchline depends
on the seriousness of the setup, and on the contrast and difference
between the two. However, once the punchline has occurred, it is also
the case that the setup is, retrospectively, funny. This also means
that the original contrast between the two is both preserved and
annulled: neither funniness nor seriousness means the same thing after
the punchline dawns, for their original meanings depended on the
mutually exclusive nature of their defining contrast. Is the setup
serious or funny? It is both: it is funny *as* serious, and
serious *as* funny. Is the punchline serious or funny? It is
both, but in an interestingly different way. It is obviously funny,
but is it also serious? Yes. Why? Because now that the setup has
occurred, both "funny" and "serious" have a
different meaning. Originally, we thought that "funny"
meant "what I laugh at when I hear it" or something like
that, and "serious" meant "what gives me non-funny
information" or something similar. But now we see that
"funny" can also mean: What I take to be serious, what I
am *not* laughing about, what I am earnestly considering, or
crying over, or bewailing even.



But this means also that "serious" means "what can
turn out to be either funny or serious". So both
"funny" and "serious" now both mean
"funny-and-serious, what can appear as both funny and
serious". Each is now a center that subsumes of the other; they
are intersubsumptive. As a consequence, the old pragmatic standard of
truth is applied more liberally here: all claims, statements and
positions are true in the sense that all *can*, if properly
recontextualized, lead to liberation--which is to say, to their
own self-overcoming. Conversely, none will lead to liberation if not
properly contextualized.


### 3.2 Tiantai Teachings about Teachings: "Impermanence" as both *Opposite* and *Synonym* of "Permanence" (In Four Steps)



This contextualism is applied intricately and thoroughgoingly to
Buddhist teachings themselves, including especially its most
foundational teachings about the basic character of existence:
impermanence, suffering, and non-self--and also about the solutions to
those conditions: enlightenment and Buddhahood. Are all things
permament or impermanent? Are there selves or no selves? Can we end
suffering or can't we? For Tiantai the right question to be
asked for understanding and applying doctrine is not "is it
true?"--since all doctrines are "true" in this
sense of "liberating" in some contexts, and not in
others--but rather "in what sense, and in what context, is it
true, i.e., liberating?" It is in this connection that we must
understand the Tiantai "classification of teachings."
Among the many rubrics used for this purpose in traditional Tiantai,
the most philosophically important is the classification of the four
types of *contents* of the Buddha's teaching
(Hua Fa Si Jiao ), called the Four Teachings, namely,
Tripitaka, Shared, Separate, and Perfect
Cang ,Tong ,Bie ,Yuan ).



These four types of content are viewed by Tiantai thinkers not as four
different teachings, but as really increasingly subtle explications of
one and the same content, the basic Buddhist teaching, via more and
more expansive recontextualizations. Tiantai classifies all the
teachings found in the Mahayana Buddhist scriptures into
these four general types, according to the degree to which they have
developed the understanding of the basic Buddhist concepts of
universal conditionality, i.e., of Impermanence, Suffering, and
Non-Self. It should be noted again that all four of these types are
regarded as "true teachings" of the Buddha--true in
the sense of validly propounded as a way of liberating sentient beings
from suffering in some particular context--and that all are
equally also *not* considered *uniquely* true
descriptions of reality. Moreover, in keeping with the general Tiantai
approach to interpretation, they are not really *different*
teachings at all: they are viewed as alternate expositions of the same
idea as it is recontextualized, to varying degrees of thoroughness as
appropriate, even though--as we shall see--they appear
*prima facie* to be in direct contradiction to one another. As
such, this schema provides us with a strong general model of the
Tiantai conception of the self-overcoming of suffering, impermanence
and non-self, wherein they are overcome by remaining exactly as they
were, indeed even more so, and thereby are revealed to also be their
own opposites.



Zhiyi takes an obscure passage from a Chinese translation of the
*Mahayana* *Mahaparinirvana
Sutra* as one of his models for these four expositions.



Literally, the passage reads as follows:



 
(Reality) cannot be described in terms of the arising of what
arises.
 
It cannot be described in terms of the non-arising of what
arises.
 
It cannot be described in terms of the arising of
non-arising.
 
It cannot be described in terms of the non-arising of
non-arising.
 
It cannot be described in terms of arising or non-arising [in any
of these ways].
 
Yet under the right circumstances it can be validly described in
terms of any of these.


The passage can be somewhat more venturesomely translated as
follows:



 
The generated generates: that cannot be said.
 
The generated is ungenerated: that cannot be said.
 
The ungenerated generates: that cannot be said.
 
The ungenerated ungenerates: that cannot be said.
 
It cannot be said that there is either generation or the
ungenerated in any of these ways.
 
Although all four of these cannot be said, yet any of them
*can* be said under the right circumstances [i.e., none is
literally or absolutely valid, but all are conventionally
valid--i.e., pragmatically effective in leading to
liberation--in certain situations].


 
Sheng Sheng 
Bu Ke Shuo ,Sheng Bu Sheng Yi Bu Ke Shuo ,Bu Sheng Sheng Yi Bu Ke Shuo ,Bu Sheng Bu Sheng Yi Bu Ke Shuo ,Sheng Yi Bu Ke Shuo ,Bu Sheng Yi Bu Ke Shuo ,Yi You Yin Yuan Gu Ke De Shuo 


For Zhiyi this passage gives more than a standard Buddhist negation of
the tetralemma followed by its provisional affirmation. Instead, he
links these four positions to the following four general categories,
each with its own distinct way of understanding the Four Noble Truths,
and therefore its own way of understanding the nature of all things,
the nature of all conditional events, of both the arising and
perishing of suffering (i.e., of all ordinary experience), of both
suffering and liberation from suffering, and of how they are
related:



1. Tripitaka Teaching Cang Jiao : "The Generated
Generates" Sheng Sheng , or literally, "The arising of
what arises."



The things described by the Four Noble Truths - i.e., all
conditional experience of suffering as well as the experience of the
Unconditioned which is liberation from suffering--actually arise and
perish. (*shengmie* *sidi*
Sheng Mie Si Di )



All things are empty in that they are impermanent, and vanish without
remainder when analyzed and dissolved into their parts
("analytic emptiness"
*xikong*Xi Kong ).



2. Shared Teaching Tong Jiao :: The [Apparently]
Generated [Actually] is Ungenerated Sheng Bu Sheng , or
literally, "the non-arising of what arises."



The things described by the Four Noble Truths--i,e., all conditional
experiences of suffering as well as the experience of the
Unconditioned which is liberation from suffering--do not arise [or
perish]. (*wusheng* *sidi*
Wu Sheng Si Di )



All things are empty in their very nature from the beginning (whether
literally impermanent and dissolved into parts or not)
("emptiness embodied right in the thing," *tikong*
Ti Kong ).



3. Separate Teaching Bie Jiao : The [Previously Established]
Ungenerated Generates [Infinitely] Bu Sheng Sheng , or
literally, "the arisings of what does not arise"



The things described by the Four Noble Truths - i.e., all
conditional experiences of suffering as well as the experience of the
Unconditioned which is liberation from suffering--can be validly
described not only as "really" empty of any determinations
of their own and thus neither arising nor perishing, but also, because
they are also aspects of the compassionate liberative work of a
bodhisattva, in an infinity of alternate ways. (*wuliang*
*sidi* Wu Liang Si Di )



The previous characterizations of things as empty or as non-empty were
both one-sided, as things are in reality neither empty nor non-empty.
Rather, both Emptiness and all non-empty things are manifestations
"the Center," a *tertium* *quid which* is
beyond but also includes both the ungenerated aspect and the generated
aspect, at once both form and formless, the constant infinite
productions of forms by the formless, formlessness present only as the
infinity of forms. It is the collapsing of emptiness and non-emptiness
into something that is immediately both: their unity, which is the
real source of both: this is the Buddha-nature as "Exclusive
Center" *danzhong* *foxing*
Dan Zhong Fo Xing , hidden beneath the two extremes, the
inner kernel of all phenomena, as their source and ultimate
reality.



4. Perfect Teaching Yuan Jiao : The (infinite things generated
by the) Ungenerated (are also) Ungenerated
Bu Sheng Bu Sheng , or literally, "the
non-arisings of the non-arising."



The things described by the Four Noble Truths - i.e., all
conditional experiences of suffering as well as the experience of
liberation from suffering--in all those infinite alternate forms, are
[actually, in their very infinite production,] unmade and unbegun (and
unfinishable). (*wuzuo* *sidi*
Wu Zuo Si Di )



Each thing is empty, non-empty, and the Center. Each thing is neither
empty, non-empty, nor the Center. Each thing is entirely and only
empty. Each thing is entirely and only non-empty. Each thing is
entirely and only the Center. Each thing subsumes all the others. Each
thing is subsumed by all the others. Each of the previous sentences in
this paragraph are synonyms. Not only each thing: the aspect of
emptiness itself is empty, non-empty, and Center, and considered
purely on its own terms is not only the negation of all things but
also, when fully thought through, the positing of all things
(non-empty) and the identity of positing and negation (Center). The
same is true for the aspect of non-emptiness, and Center: each one
alone is all three. This is the "Non-Exclusive Center."
*budanzhong* Bu Dan Zhong Fo Xing  Because
it is what a Buddha lives and realizes, it is also called "the
Buddha-nature". Each thing is the center of the universe, the
substance of which all other things are attributes. Each is the source
generating all things, but also inherently contains all things within
itself so that it generates nothing, and likewise being generated by,
and contained by, any other thing. Each thing is readable equally as
any other thing. Each thing is also the end toward which all other
things tend, the *telos* of all things. A more detailed
exposition of these four positions, and their relation to each other,
is given in the following supplementary document:



> 
> Four Teachings
> 


### 3.3 Time and Facts



The Three Truths, then, are actually three different but mutually
implicative ways of looking at any object or state. Each implies the
other two, and each is one way to describe the *whole* of that
object, including its other two aspects. To be established is to be
negated. To be begun is to be constitutively incomplete; to be
determinate is to be ambiguous, to be anything is to be more than that
thing. If it were not more--other--than *X*, it would
not even be *X*. We may think about this in terms of the status
of a "fact". Emerson says in his essay,
"History" (1841):



> 
> 
> Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No
> anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.
> 
> 
> 



He meant that every historical fact registers "at a
distance", in other times and places, taking on the role of an
ever-ramifying metaphor that applies to more and more individual
cases, with more and more diverse and rich implications. With a few
small modifications, this brings us close to the Tiantai view: all we
need to do is specify that "time" and "fact"
are not really two different things, with the former acting to
ambiguate the solidity of the latter, but are in reality two sides of
the same thing, two aspects of a single process, in fact are
ultimately synonyms. Time is just the addition of other facts. New
facts are just the presence of additional time. In the Tiantai view
these new facts are not imposed on the initial fact from without, but
are posited as the context which alone made it a fact in the first
place, made it determinate as just this fact. "Time" just
means the self-positing of both itself and other facts by any fact.
Time makes facts facts, and unmakes facts by making more facts, all of
which are intrinsic to the first fact: history is the positing and
transcending, the self-establishment and self-recontextualization of
any given fact.



Put another way, let us stipulate that a fact--any determination
about what is so--is something that is in principle knowable, and
that knowability implies a subject-object relation, and therefore a
"distance" or separation, some space away from the
fact-to-be-known. That means that a fact is only a fact if there is
something outside of it, another fact, another time, a place to view
it from; it doesn't count as a fact unless it can impact on some
other site, unless it relates to some otherness. But that means that
its journey out beyond itself to otherness is intrinsic to its very
facticity, and it is this journey out beyond itself that Emerson
denotes with the word "time". To be thus and so, a fact
must be viewable from elsewhere, and elsewhere, whether in physical or
in conceptual space, implies the illimitable positing of still other
alternate perspectives from which to be seen, facts to impact,
viewpoints to interpret and metaphorically internalize the initial
fact. Determinacy implies limit, limit implies space, space implies
infinity of other spaces, of other perspectives, of other contexts.
For something to be a fact is for it to intrinsically posit distances
from itself, and thus to be viewable otherwise.



Most simply, we can say that for Tiantai time itself simply
*is* the continual "opening of the provisional to reveal
the real": an unceasing process of self-recontexualization where
the past on the one hand remains unchangeable and on the other is
constantly changing with each recontextualization. A moment of time is
a recontextualization of the all the past. This also implies that the
Tiantai notion of interpervasion of past, present and future, and of
the "inherent inclusion" of all entities in each, is very
far from resulting in a static picture of the universe devoid of any
genuine creativity. For in Tiantai, each moment of time brings with it
not only a new set of actual occasions, but a new set of
"eternal principles"--categorical obligations,
eternal objects, laws, universals. Each moment is effectively the
creation of a new God who determines anew the character of the rest of
the universe and of all the past and future.



A moment, to be a moment, must be surrounded by other moments, from
which it differs. "Now" must be different from
"then". But that means "now" must
*relate* to "then". The "then" is part
of the world of the "now", against which it defines
itself, to which it stands in necessary contrast. This contrast cannot
be either internal or external to the "now" and to the
"then". "Now" is really
"now-then", and "then" is really
"then-now". This is easy to understand if we consider the
state of the entire totality of being at moment *M* and at
moment *M*+1. The state of things at *M* is thought to
have the power to cause the arising of the state of things at
*M*+1. But if *M* is gone when *M*+1 arrives, it
cannot "reach" *M*+1 to do anything to it; it is
already gone, non-existent, and thus can do nothing. If the state of
things at *M* continues to exist when *M*+1 arrives,
however, time has failed to move ahead, or we must admit the
coexistence of two alternate total states of being at the same time.
If the appearance of *M*+1 does not necessitate the
disappearance of *M* (which by our hypothesis possesses the
power to bring about *M*+1), *M* would then continue to
generate precisely *M*+1 repeatedly forever. In either case,
time would not be possible, and no real entities could arise. Moments
of time are neither same nor different; they are present as one
another, the past as present as future, the future as past and
present, the present as past and future. The past is not yet
over--every moment of the present and future reveals more about
the past and its infinite changes, for they are non-different from it,
though allowing it to appear *as* these new moments. The
present never begins--however far back you look, you will always
be able to find all the characteristics of the present there,
unchanged though appearing *as* some former moment. The present
never ends--all future moments are further disclosures about this
present moment of experience happening right now.


### 3.4 Self-Overcoming of the Whole into Any Upayic Part



We can say all things are impermanent, as in early Buddhism--but
now we know this is just a situationally attachment-undermining way of
saying "impermanent-permanent". We can say all things are
permanent--meaning "permanent-impermanent". We can
say some things are permanent and others are impermanent--meaning
"some-all are permanent-impermanent" and "all-some
are impermanent-permanent". But note too that this does not mean
"permanent-impermanent" is the real truth, while
"permanent" and "impermanent" are both
one-sided distortions. That would be what Tiantai critiques as the
"exclusive Center". Rather, just as
"permanent" really means
"impermanent-permanent",
"impermanent-permanent" *really* means
"permanent", or *really* means
"impermanent". For impermanent-permanent appears
*as* permanence and *as* impermanence, and each of these
is the entirety, not a mere part, of the whole. To be permanent is
already to also be impermanent--there is no other permanence. To
be impermanent is already to also be permanent--there is no other
impermanence. All is funny, all is serious, all is funny-serious. Each
is a perfectly equal synonym for all three. Each is an equally
adequate-inadequate description of the truth.



The same applies in all other cases. We can say all is
suffering--meaning "suffering-bliss". We can say all
is bliss--meaning "bliss-suffering". We can say all
is mind--meaning "mind-matter". We can say all is
matter--meaning "matter-mind". We can say there is a
God--meaning "God-Godless". We can say there is no
God--meaning "Godless-God". We can say all is
illusion--meaning "illusion-reality". We can say all
is reality--meaning "reality-illusion". We can say
some things are true and some things are false--meaning
"some-all is true-false and all-some is false-true". We
can say there is historical progress--meaning
"progress-stagnation". We can say there is historical
stagnation--meaning "stagnation-progress". We can say
society is evil--meaning "evil-good". We can say
society is good--meaning "good-evil". We can say we
are sometimes happy and sometimes sad--meaning "we-everyone
are sometimes-always happy-sad and sometimes-always sad-happy".
And so on. How should we choose which will we say at any time? If all
things are sayable in some sense, what should we say right now? We
should say whatever is most conducive to liberation from suffering,
from one-sided attachments, in this particular situation and
context.


## 4. The Ultimate Reality of All Appearances (Zhu Fa Shi Xiang  *zhufashixiang*)



The same method underlies all of Tiantai's shocking slogans,
such as the claim that "all moments are permanent", as we
have seen, or "all appearances are the ultimate reality",
or "evil is ineradicable from the highest good,
Buddhahood". They mean what they say, of course: no moment ever
ends, and however anything appears to anyone for however long is the
ultimate reality that all things emerge from, all things return to,
that explains and supports and sustains all things. True enough. The
opposite would also be true. But these particular claims are
emphasized in classical Tiantai writings to offset the more common
one-sided prejudices that tend the other way. Because the impermanence
of things and the illusoriness of appearances is stressed in the rest
of Buddhism, it is assumed that anyone getting to Tiantai will already
be aware of this side of reality, and indeed may be in danger of
clinging to it. So Tiantai asserts the opposite, which is equally
true.



All appearances are the ultimate reality: how is that true? Normally,
we believe that in some kind of appearance versus reality contrast:
"I thought that was a snake, but upon closer inspection it
turned out to be a rope". This is what most of Buddhism also
says: "I thought there was a self, but it turned out to be a
bunch of impermanent aggregates". Or, "I thought there was
a world, but it turned out to be all mind, or Buddha-nature, or
illusion". Common sense assumes this too: the rim of my glass
looks oval, but in fact we know that, "really", it is
round--it's just that we're seeing it from an angle
that foreshortens it. The rainbow is a mere appearance--when we
go to touch it, we find nothing there. But the clouds and sunlight are
real, they are what it really is, what it turns out to really be.
Tiantai, however, makes the preposterous claim that the oval and the
circle are both true--in fact, both are the ultimate reality, are
findable in all things and at all times and places, are the Absolute.
The rainbow and the cloudy sunlight--both true, both absolutely
true, both the Absolute. The "self" and the impermanent
aggregates--both true, both absolutely true, both the Absolute.
The snake and the rope--both true, both absolutely true, both the
Absolute. All is illusion. All is reality. Time is not an illusion.
Time is the illusoriness of every possible thing. Time is a word that
means "whatever you think is so is already not so". What
is real? What you can go back to, look at again, check up on, verify,
re-examine. But there is literally *no* experience that you can
go back to, so there is none that is real. What is illusion? Something
that turns out to be otherwise than it appears. There is no thing of
which this is not the case. The horn "appeared" to be
round, but "turned out" to be "sharp". But
both roundness and sharpness are equally unreal, equally real. Each is
determined by the context in which it is seen. Taking the unnameable
whole into account, they too are unnameable, neither sharp nor round.
Roundness and sharpness are two names for the same thing, which is
round, sharp, and neither round nor sharp, and both round and
sharp.


### 4.1 Inherent Evil Ineradicable In Buddhahood and the Buddha-nature of Insentient Beings



The same goes for the famous Tiantai claim that "evil is
inherently included in Buddhahod". Future Buddhahood lives in
past delusion, so delusion is "Buddhahood-delusion". Past
delusion lives in future Buddhahood, so Buddhahood is
"delusion-Buddhahood". The same goes also for the famous
Tiantai claim that "insentient beings have the
Buddha-nature"--i.e., that rocks and stones and all other
things with no awareness have the all-pervasive unconditional nature
of awareness: awareness is always nonawareness-awareness (all
awareness exists-with nonawareness, e.g., the objects of awareness,
which are not themselves aware), nonawareness is always
awareness-nonawareness (i.e., nonawareness is determinately
nonawareness only as contrasted by awareness to awareness itself, and
is intrinsically inseparable from whatever awareness might exist in
the universe, simply by virtue of the inseparability of all
existence).



The controversial idea of "the Buddha-nature of insentient
beings" is developed by Zhanran in his *Jingangpi* using
a slightly different approach to the Three Truths, focusing on the
trope of *space* as advanced as a metaphor for Buddha-nature in
the Mahayana *Nirvana Sutra*, in its character of
all-pervasiveness, ineradicability, and indivisibility, and the
non-different/non-identical relation of all regions of space to each
other and of each region of space to whatever possible object can
occupy it. But here too the central argument is the inseparable
intersubsumption of the two opposite terms: sentience is always
insentience-sentience, insentience is always
sentience-insentience.



One way to think about this is to consider a magnet. It has a north
and a south "pole" to it. If we wanted to separate the
north from the south pole, we might try cutting it in half. But when
we do so, we find that each half *still* has both a north and a
south pole. No matter how many times we slice it, the total set of
different characteristics pertaining to the whole are also found in
that separate part: northness and southness are, in their entirety,
found in what was formerly, in the context of the whole magnet, purely
the north part, and also in the former south part. This is how it is
in the Tiantai universe: the universe is one big magnet, but instead
of just a north and a south, it has 3000 different characteristic
aspects: meness, youness, trains, oceans, dogs, soups, historical
incidents, smiles, tears, delusion, enlightenment. If we try to
isolate any of these, however, what we end up with is another entire
"magnet", which also has all 3000 aspects to it: this
meness, it turns out, also has its youness part, its train part, its
ocean part, its dog part, and so on. When I face you, it is you-and-me
facing you-and-me. It is me-and-all-worlds facing all-worlds-and-me.
It is the entire universe facing the entire universe. We are always
different, because wherever we go, there is a you and a me, two
different aspects, never merging into a blank indifferent mush of a
single quality. But since me-and-you is contrasted to me-and-you,
there is really no contrast at all: the same thing is found on both
sides of the contrast. We are neither the same nor different. We are
divided from ourselves, impossible to unify into a simple unity, but
*for that very reason* we are impossible to separate from one
another. Each of us, at each moment, are, in a word, absolute, the
Center as which all appears, and which is appearing in and as all
things. All things are our transformation bodies, we are the
transformation body of all things.


### 4.2 Buddhahood as Full Realization of Dung Beetlehood *et alia*



This also means that, the more fully one realizes that one is any
particular being, the more one realizes that he or she is also all
other, contrasted, things as well. This is how traditional Buddhist
"non-self" doctrine comes to play out in Tiantai. I think
I am already this self, Brook, but in reality, Buddhism tells me, I am
not yet really any such self--for to be a self is to be
unconditional, and that is impossible for "me", a
conditional determinate being. Also, I am not yet
enlightened--for enlightenment is unconditionality, the only
freedom from suffering. To become unconditioned, as I'd thought
I was when I thought I was a self, is to become enlightened. This
non-self is the only thing that really fulfills my previous lust to be
a self, to actually *be* me. I cannot become this by being me
as a determinate being to the exclusion of all other beings, nor other
beings to the exclusion of me. Rather, by the Three Truths, I can only
become more and more me by becoming more and more everything else, and
that is what it means to become more and more enlightened, and to
become more me, more unconditionally this specific me. To
"become what I am", to be a more fully realized version of
myself, is to see myself, Brook specifically, as unconditional, which
means as omnipresent and eternal, which means as expressing itself in
and as all things, which also means, conversely, intersubsumed, i.e.,
as an expression of all other things, as something *as which*
all other things are appearing. I cannot be myself until I am a
Buddha, but I cannot be a Buddha until I can be more fully (i.e., more
unconditionally, more all-pervasively) myself, and that means being
more fully a devil, a fool, a table, a spaceship, or, in Siming
Zhili's example, a dung beetle. Buddhist practice is the
progressively fuller manifestation of my latent Buddhahood--which
means also the progressively fuller manifestation of my latent
Dung-Beetlehood, and indeed, my allegedly long ago already actual but
really hitherto merely latent Brookhood.


## 5. Practice and Doctrinal Diversity



Tiantai is encyclopedic in its approach to Buddhist practice; as one
might expect in light of its view of "exclusion" in
general, it excludes nothing. Hence in Tiantai works we find
extensive, detailed cataloging of a huge diversity of traditional
Buddhist practices, from rituals and devotions to meditations and
contemplations of all kinds, derived from all strata of previous
Buddhist culture. This accords not only with the philosophical
objection to the possibility of any final mutual exclusion of entities
rehearsed above, but also to the *Lotus Sutra* notion of
*upaya*, and the expansion of the range of Conventional
Truth in the Three Truths: the diversity of sentient beings is
limitless, their specific delusions and attachments and sufferings are
of limitless specific types, and thus the appropriate remedial
practices and doctrines for them are limitless. This is also the
justification for the "trivialist" position that all
possible claims are true, for "true" in the Tiantai
context meansonly a remedial *upaya* serving as a raft to
overcome itself, but doing so by totalization of itself, thereby
undermining itself, expressing itself in and as all other things,
intersubsuming all other truth-claims, thereby become all the more
present as all the more absent.


### 5.1 Self-Overcoming of Doctrinal Hierarchy into Omniultimacy



Tiantai takes the non-dualistic ideas suggested by the *Lotus
Sutra* in fables and unexplained narrative hints, and adapts the
resources of Emptiness and the Two Truths to give them a full
philosophical explanation and practical application for Buddhist
practice. The *Lotus Sutra* had made *upaya* the
centerpiece of Buddhism, and asserted a unity of all practices in the
One Vehicle, all leading toward Buddhahood. Tiantai follows this lead
and constructs a vast and complex system for accounting for and
integrating all known forms of Buddhist and even non-Buddhist
practice, all of which are acceptable skillful means appropriate and
wholesome for different persons and times. It rejects nothing, but it
organizes all known teachings and practices into an interconnected
system. The system has an interesting double structure: the first time
through, it appears to be hierarchical, putting the Mahayana
above the Hinayana and the *Lotus* above the rest of the
Mahayana. But the idea of redefinition of identity through
recontextualization is applied here, and when the hierarchical crown
of the *Lotus* has done its work, it has the retroactive effect
of making all the other parts equal as aspects of the One Vehicle.
That is, no teaching, practice or behavior has only a single meaning:
its meaning is determined by the context in which it is viewed. So any
given doctrine or practice can be seen as both the ultimate truth and
as a more partial and only locally relevant, or lesser, truth. The
Tiantai system of integrating all the various teachings and ideas and
perspectives in the world provides a system for seeing everything
twice, three times, infinite times, reassessing and developing the
meanings of each item as it comes into broader and broader relations.
The Hinayana teaching is, in the narrower context, a
"lesser" truth. But in the context of the One Vehicle, it
is itself an instantiation of the One Vehicle, and even gives unique
expression to it: hence the claim (based on a clever strong misreading
of a line from Kumarajiva's translation of the
*Lotus*: Jue Liao Sheng Wen Fa 
Wei Zhu Jing Zhi Wang ) that the Hinayana doctrine
(rather than the *Lotus* itself) is itself the Highest of All
Teachings. The same goes for all other particular ideas, beliefs,
practices. Since nothing has only one meaning, everything *can*
mean anything. The interesting question about any proposition is not
*whether* it is true (it always is), but *how*. The
Tiantai "classification of teachings" is an intricate and
complex way of spelling out in what context and in what way each
doctrine means each of the many things it means.


### 5.2 The Contemplation of Mind as the Three Thousand (Guan Xin  *guanxin*, Yi Nian San Qian  *yiniansanqian*)



The way in which each and any of these alternate methods or doctrines
is recontextualized to promote the desired Tiantai implication is
through the supplementation of the Three Truths view of any and every
possible content. Tiantai meditation most centrally applies a method
called "the contemplation of mind", (Guan Xin 
*guanxin*) given its most famous formulation in Zhiyi's
unfolding of Yi Nian San Qian  *yiniansanqian
(Japanese: ichinensanzen)*, which means something like: "One
Moment of Experience as Three Thousand Worlds". The "three
thousand" is of course a way of saying "everything",
but it is really something a bit more than that. For of course, as
Zhiyi himself points out, any number would be an equally accurate
possible way to talk about the totality of all things, from none to
infinity. This number, "three thousand", is concocted
specifically with meditational practice in mind. Here's how
it's derived:




|  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Ten Realms** x | **Ten Realms** x | **Ten Suchnesses** x | **Three Worlds=3000** |
| Buddhahood | Buddhahood | Appearance | Five Aggregates |
| Bodhisattva | Bodhisattva | Nature |  |
| Pratyekabuddha[1] | Pratyekabuddha | Components |  |
| Sravaka[2] | Sravaka | Capability |  |
| Gods | Gods | Action | Sentient Beings |
| Humans | Humans | Causes |  |
| Asuras[3] | Asuras | Conditions |  |
| Animals | Animals | Effects |  |
| Hungry Ghosts | Hungry Ghosts | Consequences | Environment |  |
| Purgatories | Purgatories | Ultimate Equality and Equal Ultimacy |  |



Please note a few peculiarities of this way of listing "what
exists". First, special care is taken here to include both
"purgatories" (i.e., the demonic thoughts,
practices and consequences of extreme subjective delusion and
suffering) on the one hand, and "Buddhas", (the
enlightened thoughts, practices and consequences of the greatest
wisdom and liberation) on the other hand. This is important, because
it cautions us against viewing these subjective states, good or evil,
as mere epiphenenomena that are somehow outside the ultimate reality.
They are themselves included in the ultimate reality. By including
these terms, Tiantai guards against a vague notion of
"everything" which might lend itself to thinking that only
a pure or neutral substance--mind, matter, energy--is what
is real, or that the values and perspectives, good and bad, painful
and pleasant, that living beings experience are not part of the
"everything". The "everything" that is
included in each moment of experience, and which is eternally
ineradicable, includes all those good and bad subjective states as
well.



Second, we have two important reduplications. The ten realms are all
the states in which a sentient being might find him or herself in the
Buddhist universe, from the lowest ignorance and suffering to the
highest bliss and enlightenment. They are often interpreted
symbolically: Buddhahood representing a moment of enlightened
experience, Bodhisattvahood a moment of compassion, Sravakahood a
moment of quiescence or renunciation of the worldly, Godhood a moment
of great worldly bliss and power, Asurahood a moment of egoistic rage
and combativeness, animals ignorance, purgatories suffering. One
reason to read these as states that any being might undergo is that
each of the ten realms is listed twice. This is because each realm
"includes" or "instantiates" all the other ten
realms. That is, each can appear "as" any of the others,
and in fact nothing appears which is not always "as"
something else. A human-bodhisattva, an animal-god, a Buddha-demon, an
Asura-Sravaka, etc. A bodhisattva appears as a human, or an animal, or
a Buddha, or an Asura. But as we've seen, this also means a
human appears as a bodhisattva, or a demon as an animal, or a Sravaka
as a hungry ghost, etc. Of course this goes on *ad infinitum*:
each of these included realms further includes all ten realms, and so
on. The 10 times 10 is just to point to this factor of mutual
inclusion, and make sure it is accounted for in our meditative
contemplation of "what exists".



The other duplication comes in the "Three Worlds". We have
"the five aggregates" but also "sentient
beings". Actually, these are two ways of looking at the same
thing. Early Buddhism taught that what we call a sentient
being--you, me, Bill, Dave--is actually a set of five
aggregates, momentarily arising and perishing impersonal processes of
form, sensation, perception, volition and consciousness. One (the
aggregates) was real, the other (the alleged "self") was a
pernicious illusion. The Three Thousand includes both. In other words,
it does not exclude the illusions about things among the totality of
"what exists"--as we've seen, all things are
equally illusions and equally true. The view of you as Bill is one
item in the list; the view of you as five impersonal aggregate
processes is another item on the list. Here too we have a shorthand
way of pointing to a larger principle, and a goad to keep it in mind
in our contemplation of "all that exists". We are not to
think of a set of real entities lined up side by side, mutually
exclusive, of which there may be some additional erroneous views.
Rather, the erroneous view are part of all that exists, indeed all
that exists is some erroneous (i.e., one-sided, locally coherent)
view. There is no "thing" as such: a thing is just a way
of appearing, and comes with a viewpoint upon it. Tiantai insists
further that to have a single viewpoint requires at least one
additional viewpoint, and so *ad infinitum*. Normally we drain
off the ambiguity and call it "subjectivity" or
"free will" or "the unknown future" to one
side and leave the "reality" on the other side, calling it
"objectivity" or "determinate fact" or
"the settled past". In Tiantai, these are inseparable,
merely aspects artificially separated off from the whole, which is
always both fixed and open, locally coherent and globally
incoherent.



The *locus classicus* of the above enumeration is Zhiyi's
definitive work on meditation, *Mohezhiguan*
(Mo He Zhi Guan ), where it is presented as a
description of "the realm of what is conceivable." The
text walks us through all possible objects of experience this way, one
by one, almost in the manner of a list out of Walt Whitman's
*Leaves of Grass*, while also adducing these multiperspectival
reduplications that result from their mutual subsumptions, a
consequence of the ontological ambiguity attributed to all entities on
the theoretical level by Zhiyi's doctrine of the Three Truths.
His reason for presenting the exposition in this manner, he tells us,
is because the real topic of interest here, which he calls "the
realm of the Inconceivable," the proposed object of the central
Tiantai contemplation, is difficult to present directly in theoretical
terms: it can be disclosed only through first describing the
contrasting realm of the "conceivable" as a foil. Once
this enumeration of what is conceivable is completed, the actual
referent of the term "the realm of the Inconceivable" is
at last presented. It turns out to be any single instant of
experience, fleetingly arising through the conditional conjunction of
cognitive organ and cognitive object--that is, what every
sentient being is experiencing at every moment. Why does Zhiyi
suddenly direct us to consider a momentary mental event, an instant of
experience that arises and perishes in the blink of an eye, at this
particular juncture? The neither-same-nor-different ontological
ambiguity of the Three Truths applies to this entity as well, but now
the task is to realize this in meditational practice rather than only
in theory. To describe what this involves, Zhiyi then asserts, rather
abruptly, that if there is the arising of the slightest wisp of any
experience at all, all the above enumerated Three Thousand are at once
both inherently entailed in it Ju  and also, as he goes on to
explain, strictly identical to it Ji --a way of saying
"are neither the same nor different from it"
(Ruo Wu Xin Er Ji ,*Jie Er You Xin *,Ji Ju San Qian ).
For an English translation of the passage in question, see Swanson
2018, Volume 2, pp. 795--836, especially pp. 815-6.



To see what this means and how it is to be actually experienced
requires careful unpacking. Tiantai meditation practice represents a
surprising and innovative repurposing of certain earlier Buddhist
motifs, just as the Tiantai doctrinal positions do. In this case, the
key motif to be repurposed is the pan-Buddhist emphasis on the
impermanence of mental states. Here this view is pushed to the
extreme, also found in many earlier schools, of regarding apparent all
mental continuity as a misperception of what is really a succession of
radically distinct and extremely brief moments of mental activity. The
traditional Buddhist emphasis on the sole reality of the present
instant of experience is also radicalized in this move and, in a
typical Tiantai manner that by now should seem familiar, both of these
familiar Buddhist claims are thereby repurposed and even reversed, as
we shall see.



The procedure boils down to fomenting a direct phenomenological
experience of the meaning of "neither same nor different"
with respect to any fleeting moment of experience. The great Song
dynasty Tiantai thinker Siming Zhili puts it well, summarizing the
mechanism of the Tiantai "contemplation of mind" procedure
while also dispelling the idealist misunderstanding that takes it to
imply a special ontological status for mind as opposed to matter:
"We must understand that it is because all [the many elements of
experience] share the same nature that they can together dwell in one
single instant of experience. Their dwelling together as one single
instant of experience is used to reveal this shared nature. This does
not mean we are pointing to the moment of experience [i.e., mental
activity, as opposed to material things] itself as their true
nature."
(Xu Zhi Tong Yi Xing Gu . Fang Neng Tong Ju Yi Nian Gu . 
Yi Tong Ju Yi Nian Yong Xian Tong Yi Zhen Xing . Fei Wei Bian Jiang Yi Nian Ming Wei Zhen Xing .
-- Zhi Li ,[Shi Bu Er Men Zhi Yao Chao ] ,Juan Yi ) The
"shared nature" of all phenomena referred to here,
revealed by their dwelling together in a single instant, is not the
nature of mind, or impermanence, or momentariness: it is the Three
Truths, Emptiness qua Provisional Positing qua Centrality, local
coherence qua global incoherence qua intersubsumption, which amounts
to the apprehension of all elements of experience as "neither
same nor different." Here we are to directly observe what
"neither same nor different," which is the nature of all
phenomena, means as manifest in every single moment of experience, for
it is their ability to "dwell together" in (or as) a
single moment that reveals this nature.



To accomplish this, according to the account given in Tiantai texts,
we must first apprehend the instant of experience itself *as a
single whole*. That means to see all the elements of this
moment's experience *as* mental experience, but
specifically as a *single* mental experience, in which all
these elements are simultaneously present, related to one another in a
specific instantaneous structure. This requires some training in
attentiveness to all elements of a single moment equally; the normally
neglected aspects of a single moment's experience, its
peripheral or indistinct elements, are laid out in the above
enumeration of every possible state one can think of, as a way of
trying to reach into every nook and cranny of what one means by
"everything that I can think of right now." This includes
both the knower and the known, as well as whatever way the division
between them presents itself. For although the knower is not present
in the same way other objects of experience are, its presence is felt
in some form; whatever is apprehensible as the presence of the agent
of this mentation, the activity that separates itself off from the
objective contents, the knower as opposed to the known, as well as the
act of opposition itself, is also to be included as an aspect or part
of the world as I know it and imagine it. Also to be included is the
imagined as well as the perceived, the possible as well as the actual.
Also included must be the moment's sense of its own
transitoriness, the sense of being situated between a gone past and
yet to come future, however these may manifest in the experience. All
elements perceived or conceived are to be taken in and noted. The next
step will be to apprehend these all as felt aspects of a single mental
event, a single entity with all these many characteristics in their
specific relations of this moment appearing at once, and all
disappearing at once, such that not one can be changed or replaced. It
must be experienced as a specific total structure of just these
elements, in just these relations, and none other.



This endeavor to see the total manifold of contents as a single mental
event is meant as a direct way of dispelling the premises of ordinary
"deluded" experience. For our ordinary experience is, we
may say, premised on a mistaken application of categories derived from
a conception of durational mental and physical objects to fleeting
experienced moments themselves, the latter being on this view the real
contents of all experience. To be more precise, it must be noted that
categories such as "same" and "different," and
"whole" and "part," and
"necessary" and "contingent," and
"actual" and "possible," and "essential
properties" and "accidental properties," actually
apply only to durational objects, whether physical or mental. All of
these categories require the comparison of one entity with another,
which cannot be done in the span of an instantaneous upsurge of
undivided experience.



How so? Let us start with the most comprehensive of these categories,
as applied to these single whole moments: are these moments "the
same as" or "different from" one another? Considered
purely as moments, the answer is "neither." For it must be
noted that the conception of a series of moments laid out in a neutral
timeline, seen as a set of derivative entities called moments which
are somehow laid out in a more basic element ("time,"
perhaps, or "nature") which is not itself a moment, is no
longer possible here. If there is no other substratum in which
anything can exist besides moments of experience, this applies to the
apprehension of "other" moments as well: these
apprehensions of other moments can only exist in some moment. So we
now must slightly amend the above claim about the basic constituents,
and say instead that the most basic elements are not moments, plural,
as if these were an array of genuinely distinct entities that could
somehow be viewed from outside, but simply speak of "this one
moment." Their plurality exists only from within some specific
single moment. This is why moments cannot be said to simply
"different" from one another. Yet this impermanent moment
is not the same as anything else either; it is of the essence of being
a present moment qua moment to be non-identical to other moments,
i.e., to not-be the past and future moments, and it is the essence of
experiencable contents to require contrast to what they are not.
Indeed, for me to experience the moment as presently occurring at all,
I *must* also be experiencing the difference between present
and not-present *in the present;* the pastness and futureness
to which it has to be contrasted to have the quality of being present
must in some manner also be present to me. So because we have no
durational things, we are radicalizing impermanence, the absolute
transitoriness of moments, which points to an absolute difference
between them; but because moments are not like mutually exclusive
objects laid side by side in a neutral medium, we have no plurality of
moments; their alleged difference is really only each moment
reappearing in a new form as a component in all other moments, which
might be described as each moment's unceasing transforming
continuance, its radical permanence. Moments are neither the same nor
different from one another, and thus neither impermanent nor
permanent, or if we prefer, both impermanent and permanent. It is this
paradoxical nature of every possible moment of experience that is the
"the inconceivable" to be directly realized in Tiantai
contemplation.



What about the multifarious contents *within* any one of these
neither-same-nor-different moments then, the long list of very diverse
experienced components of any given moment? These too are
neither-same-nor-different from one another, within that very moment.
We have seen that these single moments of experience are to be viewed
as indivisible wholes, and that they have no external limits dividing
them from other moments that can be observed in a neutral substratum,
from outside the moments themselves. It should be noted that neither
can such limits between moments be observed from within any moment,
for whatever is observed in a moment is ipso facto within its limits.
But what is more surprising is that there are no definite limits even
between the various contents that constitute these moments. They have
what might initially be described as diverse manifold
contents--first, the multiple objects of sensory observation that
are included (chairs and tables, sky and earth, cups and plates,
people and trees), but, observing more closely, also
"subject" and "object," "actual"
and "possible," as well as "center and periphery,
(possible) hope and (actual) fear, (possible) pleasure and (actual)
pain, water and mountain" and so on. But properly speaking,
these elements are only genuinely "diverse" if they are
viewed through the categorial obligations that apply to durational
objects, whether physical or mental. These durational things, however,
are now to be understood as abstract derivatives of moments of
experience, rather than the ultimate constituents of reality of which
moments of experience are partial apprehensions, as we usually tend to
believe. When viewed on their own terms as moments, the manifold
contents are indivisibly present as the moment they constitute, not
losing their specific experiential qualities, but not separable into
distinct elements that are merely limited "parts" or even
"aspects" of the momentary experience. For we are able to
identify distinct "parts" or "aspects" in an
experienced object only if those parts or aspects can be experienced
as "the same" object apart from the whole in which they
appear, either as isolated entities or as parts or aspects of other
wholes. This cannot happen with any putative part or aspect of a given
moment, for any subsequent appearance of the part or aspect in
question would have to be compared with the part or aspect as it
appeared in the original moment; but this can only happen in yet
another moment, of which both of these instances would in fact be
parts or aspects. Both moment 1 and moment 2 are now experienced only
as parts or aspects of moment 3, and the constituent parts or aspects
of moments 1 and 2 are thus actually component parts or aspects of
moment 3. If "part A" of 1 appears unchanged as
"part A" also in moment 2, this tells us only about two
aspects of the indivisible totality of moment 3, nothing about the
relation of part A to other parts of moments 1 and 2. For again, there
is no neutral medium of comparison between two moments.



To see what is at stake here, we must further consider the derivation
and entailments of our notion of "different parts or aspects of
a thing" in ordinary consciousness. As I lift my coffee mug to
take a sip, my normal consciousness will be tracking certain
continuities, shaped usually by my practical intentions and more
occasionally by more abstract theoretical considerations. I may see
this mug as one in a series of drinking vessels experienced in the
past; I may think of it as an instance of the general category
"drinking vessel." I may evaluate its effectiveness in
containing the amount of coffee I want to have in one sitting and how
smoothly it facilitates delivery of that coffee to my mouth, linking
it to past and prospective actions and experiences. I may simply think
of it as a single physical object, an individual substance unifying a
manifold of properties such as solidity, color, smoothness, shape. In
each of these cases, I am making sense of this experienced perception
of the mug by forefronting its connection with certain other
perceptions and conceptions, together with which it seems to belong:
other mugs, the universal concept of drinking vessel, the intention to
drink coffee in a few minutes, the properties of solidity and the like
that also instantiate in other objects. I will want to distinguish
between which of these connections are necessary and which merely
contingent, and my sense-making will be largely dependent on how and
how well I do this. If I shift into Tiantai meditation mode, however,
I am to direct my attention instead to the connection of this
perception of the mug with *everything else going on within this
moment of experience.* This may include any or all of the above,
but viewed *as* aspects of this moment, alongside everything
else in its perceived spatial and temporal surroundings. Viewing that
moment as a single indivisible event, I will no longer be able to make
a distinction between necessary and contingent: the moment as a whole
and every one of its elements are exactly what they are, and cannot be
any different--for any difference would by definition simply be
another moment of experience. To imagine it with any part removed,
added or repositioned is simply to be having another moment of
experience, not this one. It cannot be compared to another moment to
see which parts are permanent and which transitory, which are
necessary and essential to its being what it is and which are merely
adventitious or contingent, for any such comparison would again be the
occurrence of a different moment. All of it is transitory and every
connection equally contingent, but all of it is equally necessarily
just as it is, none of it can be otherwise than it is. It will
definitely be internally articulated, with what would normally be
described as portions that are qualitatively distinct from one
another, since experienced contrast is necessary to any and all
perception of qualities, or of any moment occurring at all. But none
of these elements can be regarded as actually divided into genuinely
"different portions" of the moment, since none can be
experienced without at the same instant experiencing all the
others--any act of zeroing in on and "visiting" one
will simply be an additional moment of experience, one that appears as
an entirely different moment (though of course in the end it too is to
be seen as neither-same-nor-different, as already noted); to be
visiting one portion is to visit them all.



This has interesting consequences that pertain also to the devotional
and ritual aspects of Tiantai practice. Let's imagine that I am
thinking about, say, a Buddha; my one instant of experience includes
an apprehension of both the poor suffering being I am now, along with
whatever objects-- the tables and chairs and ceiling and floor,
possible and actuals, pasts and futures--are within my present
purview, and also a beatific Buddha somewhere else whom I am not, or
the *possible* existence of such a Buddha, or the Buddha I will
be in the future, or even one I *might* be in the future. As in
the case of past, present and future, even to experience myself
specifically as *not* a Buddha is also to be apprehending
Buddhahood in some mode or form. To see myself as deluded and
suffering is to also be experiencing the absence of some contrasting
state; in our example, if part of what I think about is how very
*not* a Buddha I presently am (perhaps in the context of a
repentance ritual, but also in simply noting the magnitude of my own
greed, anger and delusion), then my apprehension also includes this
Buddhahood in the mode of its not-presence, internal to this present
moment just as the sense of contrasting pastness and futureness in
general always are. But the copresence of both my delusion and
suffering and the imagined bliss and wisdom of an imagined Buddha whom
I am not, both present in this single instant of experience, is not to
be imaged like the case of a durational object with two distinct and
opposed qualities to it, like, for example, a piece of pastry with
both a sweet portion and a bitter portion (due to a baking mishap,
perhaps!). If I bite into this pastry and happen to take in both the
sweet and the bitter at once, I can conceive of these as genuinely
separate because I can compare to other pieces of pastry which are
either completely sweet or completely bitter, or the sweetness and
bitterness separated out from all pastry and present in other foods,
and I can resolve to henceforth, in my next bite, take only the sweet
and not the bitter, for the pastry will persist through time, waits
for me to relate to it in another moment in a potentially different
way. Alternate ways of experiencing the pastry, or of zeroing in on
one portion rather than another, or comparisons to other experiences,
are available due to the fact that a durational object is something
other than the moments of its existence; the different moments of its
existence exist in a neutral shared medium, either space and time for
a physical object or, even in the case of a purely mental object, at
least time. As we have seen, this is not true for the instant of
experience, which shares no neutral medium with other moments; again,
precisely because they are themselves nothing but time, two moments of
time cannot be compared except in a third moment which differs from
both (although this difference is immanent to all three moments, and
therefore the two differing terms is immanent to all three
moments--and in that sense they do not differ, as we shall see in more
detail below). I cannot revisit this moment, and I cannot compare it,
and I cannot abstract from it. There is never even the possibility of
an instance of encountering one of these without also encountering the
other. If I experience both the sweet and the bitter once, however
fleetingly, though they are both instantly gone in the next moment, in
another sense they are eternally together, indeed they are aspects of
a single thing, always and exceptionless encountered together. For in
general, when we judge two things to be "the same" we mean
that they it is impossible to encounter or even consider one without
considering the other; they are inalienably and always together. When
I say "water is the same as H2O," I mean that
these are two names for the same thing: whenever anyone encounters
water they are encountering H2O, whenever anyone encounters
H2O they are encountering water. They would be distinct
entities only if it is at least conceivable that they can in fact be
separated, that one might occur without the other. This also applies
to different "aspects" of a single fact which are always
encountered together--for example, the pitch and the volume of a
musical note. We might think that, although every pitch has a volume
and every volume has a pitch, so they are always encountered together,
they are still meaningfully said to be different aspects because I can
distinguish between them, enumerating different parameters and
characteristics of each. But again, this distinguishing of aspects
happens only *after* the initial apprehension of them
together--in a subsequent moment--and depends entirely on the
possibility that the pitch and the volume can change in different
ways, i.e., that the pitch might remain constant while the volume
changes or vice versa. This is not possible when the two are
apprehended only as existing together in a single moment: there is no
possibility of any change in either of them. The distinguishing of
different "aspects" requires hypostasizing the note as an
entity with some kind of existence independent of its momentary
appearance, a durational object of contemplation. The thought about
the different aspects of the note belongs to another moment, and is a
new object in its own right which belongs inalienably to its moment,
just as the initial apprehension of the total note, with its exact
pitch and volume and none other, belonged to the first moment. They
can only be considered different if they are in principle separable in
some way, and that is not the case for the elements of the moment.
They are therefore not different from one another.



Yet, though I must experience both the Buddhahood and the
non-Buddhahood as indivisible components of a single moment, never to
be repeated in isolation, it is also true that both are non-different
from every other instance of both Buddhahood and non-Buddahood in all
other moments. Each is constantly extending itself in an infinity of
forms, including in the forms of each other. For, as touched on
briefly above, to be experienced as "occurring" at all, a
present moment must also include within it some sense of the contrast
to a gone past and a coming future, which thus must also be
apprehended within it somehow. "Other" moments are present
even in this moment itself "as" the sense of surpassed
pastness and to-come futurity that are the necessary contrasts that
constitute its own sense of presentness. The experienced pastness and
futureness are thus necessary components of the present qua present,
but like any other components, they are not genuinely distinct parts
or aspects that can be detached from the total moment. This means not
only that the present sense of pastness and futureness, like all the
other components of the present moment, can only be experienced at the
same time as all the other components of this single moment, and thus
are absolutely non-same with anything in any past or future moment.
But this also means, conversely, that they are non-different from the
contents of every other moment, for the same reasons that the moments
as wholes are non-different: there is no neutral medium in which to
compare them. The distinctness of my present vague intimation of
tomorrow and the actual events that come to take place tomorrow is as
immanent to tomorrow as it is to the present: tomorrow's
experience of disconfirmation of today's expectation is immanent
to that moment tomorrow, and experience of this disparity necessarily
includes both of the two disparate terms: yesterday's
expectation of the future is thus also an inalienable component of
tomorrow's single whole moment in which it is disconfirmed.
Future moments when they do occur are neither the same nor different
from the vague representation of the future in the previous moment;
they might be seen as absolutely distinct (as in commonsensical views
of an "imagined" as opposed to a "real"
future), or conversely as further articulations of the previous vague
intimation; but in fact the "vague intimation of future"
in question has no fixed nature to be same as or different from,
precisely because this element of the present moment, like all the
other elements, is not really a distinct part or aspect existing
beyond the moment in which it occurs, is not a durational entity at
all, but merely an unrepeatable and indivisible component of a
particular moment, neither same nor different from the other
components of that moment. So we must say the future is neither
completely different from the imagined future contributing to the
composition of a past moment, nor completely identical to that
imagined future--or if we prefer, both. Thus do we speak of the
permanence-impermanence, the impermanence-permanence, not only of
every moment, but of every component of every moment.



A moment is intrinsically fleeting, gone as soon as it arises. I
cannot prolong it or remain in it. But note also that, if this moment
is not characterizable as "different" from any other
moment, I also can never actually *leave* this moment: whatever
subsequent moments may appear, they are non-different from this one.
This non-difference is apprehended in the single upsurge of the
unchangeable moment as its own internal sense of its difference from
past and future moments: they are present there, in some form or
other, precisely however vaguely or distinctly they are within that
one experience, as inalienable aspects of that moment itself. The next
moment, when new contents appear, will be experienced as *more
of* or *other expressions* of the same moment. That moment,
though radically impermanent, is thus also experienced as permanent
and necessary, just like a "substance" in Spinoza's
sense: it can be conceived only as existing, since it just is its
being conceived; and it can only be conceived as existing exactly as
it does exist; it is infinite and indivisible, since whatever appears
as its limit or divider is ipso facto internal to it, one more
component of it, and the conception of only a "part" of it
will simply be by definition a different moment; and by the same
token, it cannot be acted upon by anything external to it, it is
infinitely productive, and everything it produces is more of itself.
The moment is both radically impermanent and radically eternal. More
to the point, its impermanence is its permanence, its permanence is
its impermanence--exactly the claims of Tiantai's
theoretical conclusions. I experience the eternity-temporality of this
moment continuing to show itself in and as the
neither-same-nor-different array of all other possible experiences,
beings, ideas, moments. This is mode in which we find the direct
experience of Buddhahood-as-all-sentient-beings, and
all-sentient-beings-as-Buddahood.



So it is that after gaining some facility in this sort of reduction of
all time to the present moment and of all concrete and abstract
objects as well as subjective states to the single instant of
experience, we are to notice how this instantiates, in an immediate
experiential way, the "inconceivable" character of all
phenomenon, which was independently asserted on theoretical grounds in
doctrinal writings: we are to notice that neither sameness nor
difference applies to the relation between any of the contents of this
experience as apprehended above. This applies to the relation of one
moment to another, to the relation of the knowing activity and the
known objects, and also to the relations among all the many component
objects themselves: none are the same as each other, none are
different from one another. As such, this is a direct experience of
the Ultimate Reality of all Phenomena, precisely in the experience of
the phenomena themselves in all their distinctness. And in as much as
this is simply what is in fact going on in all actual temporal
experience, all experience is discovered to be the Ultimate Reality of
all Phenomena.



The above gives us a roadmap of the agenda for Tiantai meditation: to
experience the Three Thousand as a single moment of experience and
thus as neither-same-nor-difference both with each other and with that
moment as a whole. But how is all of the above actually to be
*realized,* not just conceptually or theoretically, but
experientially? Zhiyi does, in that same work, lay out ritual
procedures for inducing a direct experience of a single moment as the
totality of existence, brilliantly expounding the salvifically
paradoxical effects this would have, in terms quite resonant to
what we've explored above--for example in the section on the
first of the Four Samadhis, the "One-Practice
Samadhi." (See Ziporyn, 2016, pp. 273-275 for an English
translation of this passage; for an alternate translation, see Swanson
2018, Volume 1, pp. 252-261). Another procedure for isolating
the moment, through introspection and analysis, freeze-framing
it so that one sees "no motion or turning, no source or
destination, nowhere it comes from and nowhere it goes to"
(Xing Zhe Xin Shu Qi Shi ,Fan Zhao Guan Cha ,Bu Jian Dong Zhuan , Gen Yuan Zhong Mo , Lai Chu Qu Chu ), and
then discovering through analysis that no coherent boundaries can be
found between this frozen moment and its excluded past and
future, is offered in the "Samadhi of Awareness of One's Own
Thoughts," described in the fourth of the Four Samadhis (see Swanson
2018, pp. 323-386). But in the practice under discussion here,
singled out by later tradition as the most central and distinctive
form of specifically Tiantai meditation, crucially, we are instead not
instructed to try to get this done by directly thinking about it or
willing it, by attempting to expand our conception of mentation to
include all these contents, to overstep the habitual subject-object
divide by fiat, or by the application of the by-now-familiar
dialectical refutation of the categories of sameness and difference as
found in the doctrine of the Three Truths. All of these are here
regarded as futile; they would still land us in the merely theoretical
territory of the "conceivable," where the habitual
categories would automatically reimpose themselves. The attempt to
unravel these categories deliberately ends up further entangling us in
them, for it means trying to attain a new kind of experience or
conceptualization that is simply "different" from the
ordinary ones--as we found to be unavoidable in the description of
these desiderata given in theoretical terms above. These categories of
same and different are as deeply embedded in the attempt to dispel
them as in that which it attempts to dispel. Rather, the practical
application of these ideas is done in precisely the opposite way from
what one might expect: it is done not by deciding to expand our
apprehension of the mind or moment to include all, to view all
encountered contents as constituents of a single moment of experience,
and then succeeding in doing so. Rather, it is done precisely by
trying to *exclude* all other experiences from this moment of
experience, to dispel them, *and then failing* to do so. It is
done by tracing out and thinking about what the moment includes, but
merely by settling our attention on the moment qua moment, on the
momentariness of the moment as an instantaneous and unchangeable
and unrepeatable single flash of experience: on the
infinitesimal smallness of its duration, how little is within its
expanse, its utter failure to occupy almost all of time and all of
reality. For it is only thus that one directly experiences all
external time and reality making themselves impossible to exclude,
experiencing first-hand the necessity of their inclusion. How so?



All the various characteristics and relations of things are here to be
apprehended, as we've said, as "dwelling together in (or
as) a single moment of mentation"
(Tong Ju Yi Nian ). So far this resembles a perhaps
familiar "phenomenological reduction" of all experience to
their manner of appearing to the subject. But it is not "the
subject" as such that is at issue in this Buddhist context.
Rather, the traditional Buddhist stress on momentariness is to be
remembered: it is a reduction of all objects to subjective experience,
but subjective experience itself is understood as a temporal series of
putatively discrete instantaneous mental events. So we are aiming at a
phenomenological reduction of all moments of experience to a single
present moment. On the theoretical level, however, Mahayana
philosophy had already long exploded the viability of taking this
pre-Mahayana Buddhist concept of momentary experience
literally as ultimate truth, as if these moments were actual entities
that were simply "different" from one another, showing
instead that these moments stipulated by earlier Buddhist philosophers
are "empty" of self-nature: no consistent metaphysical
unpacking of this idea of discrete moments is possible. This
refutation certainly was always understood to mean that in ultimate
truth there could be no such entities as moments with predicates of
"same" or "different" legitimately applied to
them. For not being actual entities at all, and thus certainly not
different, they also could not be said to be the same, nor could any
other predicates be validly attached to them; what does not exist
cannot have any predicates. But where does that leave us? It might be
taken simply as a call to free ourselves from all conceptualization,
all metaphysical views, and to deal instead with reality just as it is
appears to us in our practical everyday experience. But in practical
terms, this "just as it is appears" too often reverts to
seeing experienced time in the same old way, or even in the
pre-Buddhist way: not as instantaneous moments which are simply and
absolutely different from one another, to be sure, but reified as
discrete *clumps* of experienced time which are simply and
absolutely different from one another, a past experience that is an
entirely different entity from the present experience, a present that
is different from the future. Unfortunately, this is precisely the
presupposition that underwrites all of our delusive desires and
attachments: the idea that past experience and the future experience
are mutually exclusive, structured just like metaphysically
constituted "things" in that they have consistent
self-identities, such that one can move from suffering experience to
non-suffering experience in a non-ambiguous way--another view
demolished by the very same Mahayana philosophy of
Emptiness. This preservation of the conventional is of course
essential to Buddhist practice, and for some Buddhist schools the
impossibility of giving any consistent metaphysical explanation of
this conventional experience of progressive time is therefore a
feature rather than a bug. It safeguards the necessary conventional
apprehension of progressive time and the possible achievement of truly
continent and disparate states at different times that must be assumed
for the practice of the Buddhist path, and blocks any temptation for
an alternative model of temporality, which on this view would be just
be one more metaphysical distraction and distortion of the practical
soteriological realities involved. The Tiantai position is also
strenuously committed to preserving the viability of this conventional
model of progressive time for purposes of Buddhist practice, but only
in closest tandem with the most robust possible understanding of the
contrary side of the Mahayana theoretical apparatus: the
non-difference of samsara and nirvana, of affliction and
wisdom, of suffering and the end of suffering. The practice focusing
on "all dwelling together as a single moment" is designed
to bring these two sides of Buddhist philosophy together in practice,
as they are brought together in theory in the doctrine of the Three
Truths. Phenomenologically as well as theoretically, this means seeing
that both the early Buddhist view of "momentariness" (the
idea that all experience takes place only in the instantaneous
"now") and the alleged alternatives to this, for example
the perhaps more commonsensical "specious present" of
Jamesian psychology (i.e., that there are no experiences that can take
place in an instantaneous moment, because mental reality always comes
with an experienced fringe of past and future, a short span of
discernible and certainly finite duration to be strummed through), are
seen equally as one-sided distortions, because both are equally true.
Both momentariness and duration are incoherent explanations of
experience, although both are unavoidable: they are locally coherent
but globally incoherent. The first is impossible because experience
requires contrast, and contrast requires a simultaneously present
multiplicity of moments to strum through. The latter merely pushes the
problem back one step, positing a new slightly larger oneness, and
stipulating that its boundaries are vague without trying to work out
how a boundary that is vague can still function as a real boundary,
thus setting up an infinite regress, abandoning the possibility of
determining precisely where a single experience begins or ends but
continuing to treat it practically as finite, i.e., as mutually
exclusive with other experiences (as is the premise of all ordinary
sense of identity and motivated action); the component parts of the
specious present, in spite of their constituent bleed-over into one
another, remain trackable as qualitatively distinct parts, and the
specious present as a whole continues to function as an
unproblematically distinct though extended unit, a particular specious
present that is different from all the other specious presents
experienced by oneself and others at other times and places. The
former stresses the "one," the latter stresses the
"many," but in reality experience is neither one nor many,
both one and many; neither same nor different, both same and
different. All experience is instantaneous, *and yet* all
experience extends beyond itself into past and future--and this
now applies as much to a specious present as to an instantaneous
present. Rather than seeing one of these views as true and the other
as a pernicious distortion (for example, because the surreptitious
application of objective or spatial categories is distorting what is
actually observed phenomenologically), both are admitted as precise
and unavoidable aspects of what it is for an experience to be an
experience. The alternative between them is thus viewed as a case of
aspect-change, as in the Wittgensteinian duck-rabbit; we can switch
from seeing the moment of experience as instantaneous or as extended
and enduring to make sense of its manifold content, but normally
cannot see both, or grasp the necessary connection between these
mutually exclusive ways of apprehending it. Tiantai meditation is
aimed at experiencing both of these aspects at once, a flat picture
that is also three-dimensional, a flash of an instant which is also
extended without any definite limits, for their necessary though
paradoxical relationship reveals the true nature of all the contents
of experience as neither-same-nor-different.



The method amounts to a deliberate experience of the
*necessary* failure of the phenomenological reduction to either
one of the two aspects, but generally focusing on the necessity and
failure of the aspect of momentariness: one tries to shrink the
experience of time down to a single point, to isolate the moment, and
thereby discovers that even when maximally compressed in this way, the
entire expanse of contents, of places and times outside this point,
resurges in full irreducible splendor, but now *as* the
inalienable and indivisible halo of this instant. The necessary
failure of the reduction is the reverse revelation of the Inherent
Entailment of all the Three Thousand, all of which, however peripheral
or modal, are now seen to be just as much as inalienable components of
its present manifestation as more central and distinct ones; the same
goes for the unequal focus that makes some central and some
peripheral--it too is to be equally included as an inalienable
component of the manifestation just as it is. As if by squeezing a
spring down to its minimal extent, one discovers the irrepressibility
and immensity of its expansive power. By attempting in all good faith
to isolate the moment as sharply as possible, one discovers that even
when sliced away from all the rest of existence, all the rest of
existence ineluctably springs back, now as an undetachable and
unchangeable nimbus which is experienced at once as internal and
external to that moment, and in which all contents are necessarily
present exactly as they are, such that none can be removed or
repositioned, and yet all are equally extending infinitely into past
and future in an infinity of transformations. Having enumerated all
that exists, all that one is not, all that is future and past, all
that is merely possible rather than actual, all that is imagined
rather than real, one tries with all one's might to exclude it
from the bare reality of this moment, staring fixedly only at the here
and now. One fails: the totality of the Three Thousand floods back
right here in and as this moment, albeit now bracingly transformed
into a single boundaryless cloud of surrounding contents
simultaneously flashing forth, in as it were a glorified form--a
single flash of a specifically structured instantaneous unit wherein
each of the variegated components is neither same as nor different
from each of the others, indeed where none is same as or different
from the moment as a whole. By concentrating only on the rabbit in an
attempt to make the duck completely disappear from consciousness, one
discovers that the duck comes back with a vengeance, and with a new
adamantine vividness concomitant to the power revealed by its
unexcludability. That Mobius strip of separation as inclusion and
inclusion as separation is the Three Truths in their constantly
available lived form, the phenomenological revelation of their nature
as neither-same-nor-different going on in every moment of every
sentient being's experience.



So to summarize: we start by mulling over all that we can think of as
possible states of experience, enumerating all these Three Thousand
states of conceivable entities and all their interrelations, pausing
to visualize whatever is possible or actual, in part and in whole,
what I am and what I am not. But this mulling over requires some time
to go through. When we have finished thinking of all we can think of,
we are asked to pause and consider the present moment of
consciousness, which is now in a position to recall all that thinking
as having happened in the very recent past--i.e., at
"another" time. We try to isolate this single moment of
looking back at the long process of mulling, squeezing it down to a
single flash to which all the previously recalled contents are
external--"the slightest wisp of mental activity"
(Jie Er You Xin ), as Zhiyi calls it in that key
passage, arising in the instant when the organ of cognition first
takes notice of its object of cognition. In focusing on the
instantaneousness of the flash of cognition engaged in recalling the
process of mulling through the list of all that could exist,
considering that mulling as past, one is attempting to locate and
focus on a moment that excludes those moments when the mulling was
going on. But in the very act of excluding them, we find all these
contents present to us, precisely as contents to be excluded. At once
consciousness is squeezed down to the tiniest possible flash and
simultaneously experiences the upsurge of all its excluded contents
extending to infinity. The rabbitness of the duck and the duckness of
the rabbit surge forth at once. Are the previous moments spent mulling
over all conceivable being the same as or different from the present
one looking back on them? Neither. All those other moments are present
here *as* this moment of excluding them--neither same nor
different. Are the Three Thousandfold contents within this moment the
same as or different from each other, from the moment as a whole, or
from the contents of putatively other moments also included among its
contents? Neither, as we've explored at length above. But this
is now present to us directly in the singularity of the temporal
moment and its indistinguishability from its multiple contents.



When this consciousness next turns toward the external world, moving
on from recollecting the past to encountering the future, reinitiating
contact with unpredictable circumstances, it finds all of these new
experiences to be in the same relation to that single moment of
meditative recollection as the contents of the recollection had been.
Every content encountered has already been present,
"non-differently," in that moment of recollection
contemplated in the meditation, though of course its new details and
surprising contents ensure that it is also, as expected,
"non-same." All other experiences present themselves
*as* this moment of experience, in its very isolation from
them. On the one hand, nothing about this moment can ever be changed;
on the other hand, none of its elements has a definite self-nature
that could remain the same. Endless versions of its (non-different)
self extend into infinite (non-same) other moments. They are
inalienable components and not merely parts of those other moments,
and they exist nowhere other than in those non-same moments, and as
nothing but inalienable non-repeatable components of those non-same
moments, neither same nor different from each new moment as a whole
and from all its other components. All subsequent moments are in this
way experienced as versions of this moment, endless (non-same)
transformations and extensions of its (non-different) self for all
eternity, but by the same token, this moment itself is experienced as
a version of all other moments, existing only as the (non-same)
transformation and extension of the very (non-different) self of every
other moment past and future. As Zhiyi is quoted as saying, "As
each mental act, itself ultimae reality, connects to each content,
itself ultimate reality, conditional states, each being ultimate
reality, arise one after another. Ultimate reality and ultimate
reality pour into each other one after another: such is the effortless
entrance into the principle of ultimate reality"
(Shi Xin Xi Shi Jing ,Shi Yuan Ci Di Sheng ,Shi Shi Die Xiang Zhu ,Zi Ran Ru Shi Li ).
Zhanran explains, "As each mental act connects to its contents,
the contents also necessarily connect to the mental act.
This interconnection of mental act and contents is what is meant by a
conditional state that is itself ultimate reality. Subsequent mental
acts arise one after another, here described as 'pouring into
each other': mental act pours into contents, contents pour into
contents, contents pour into mental act. Every mental act and every
content pour into each other with each moment of experience,
continuing with never a gap or pause in every instant, naturally and
effortlessly bringing about every stage of realization."
(Xin Ruo Xi Jing ,Jing Bi Xi Xin . Xin Jing Xiang Xi ,Ming Wei Shi Yuan . Fu You Hou Xin ,Xin Xin Xiang Xu ,Ming Die Xiang Zhu . Ji Shi Xin Zhu Yu Jing ,Jing Zhu Yu Xin ,Jing Zhu Yu Jing ,Jing Zhu Yu Xin ,Xin Xin Jing Jing ,Nian Nian Xiang Zhu ,Ru Shi Ci Di ,Cha Na Wu Jian ,Zi Ran Cong Yu Guan Xing , Xiang Si Yi Ru Fen Zheng ,Gu Yun Ru Shi 
.  (Zhan Ran ,[Zhi Guan Yi Li ] ,Juan Yi ))
Such is the vista to be realized in Tiantai meditational practice, and
the manner in which it then extends into all the diverse experiences
one may go on to encounter as one arises from meditation and enters
the world--the permanence-impermanence of Buddhahood-delusion
that arises and perishes in an instant and goes on forever.