Kuei-Chieh Liu
Department of Social Studies Education National Hsinchu Teachers College
This paper tries to describe the traditional Chinese Buddhist concepts of “man” in relation to four aspects: the origin, essence, cognition and final resort of “man”. At first, the fifth patriarch of the Hua-yen school, Tsung-mi, is cited, who in his “Treatise on the Origin of Humanity” explained in five steps the origin of “man”. Next, the essence of “man” is explained according to the ideas of the patriarchs Tsung-mi, Chu Tao-sheng, Bodhidharma, Hui-k’o, Seng-ts’an, Tao-hsin, Hung-jen and Hui-neng, who defined it as “Tathagatagarbha, Buddha-nature”, “one’s own mind, the original mind”. The Buddha-nature is in the sentient beings themselves, it is the original nature of the sentient beings, and they only have to take refuge in their own self-nature, not in anything different from themselves. Subsequently, Seng-chao’s treatise “Prajna is without Knowledge” is quoted, in which Seng-chao explained that the sensory organs of man are incapable of knowing the abstract, absolute Buddha-nature or Tathagatagarbha. Seng-chao held that the profane knowledge acquired through the sensory organs “knows something, and therefore knows not everyhing (i.e. truth)”, if one wants to know anything, one has to give up the common knowledge of ordinary people by means of melting away from cognition and casting off its limitation, whereby one directly attains to the unlimited sphere of absolute truth. Finally, it is explained that according to Chinese Mahayana Buddhist thought the final resort of man is Nirvāņa, the pure sphere free from passions and ignorance. Additionally, it is discussed how eminent monks like Kumarajiva, Seng-chao and Tao-sheng described the Nirvāņa and the method to acquire it. In the concluding remarks it is emphasized that the Buddha was a man himself, and that he like any other ordinary man was bound to the cycle of birth and death. Man should be confident and aware of his own original Buddhahood, get rid of his inferiority complex, arouse his subjective consciousness. Especially the later Southern Ch’an school, which emphasized “freedom” and “easeness”, the position of self-awareness and the value of actualizing oneself, expressed even more vividly the existence of an independent self and manifested a position and personality equal to the Buddha.
Keywords: Tathagatagarbha, Buddha-nature, Icchantika, Prajna, Ultimate Truth, Five Skandhas, Nirvāņa, Emptiness