|
The Unfinished Bridge A Dialogue on Hua Yen, Phenomenology, and the
Tyranny of Principle This
dialogue began as an inquiry into the scriptural origins of Chinese Hua Yen
Buddhism
(602–841ad) but rapidly evolved into a
profound philosophical confrontation. The central tension, which remained
unresolved, was between a metaphysical claim of a seamless, interpenetrating
reality (the Hua Yen view) and a phenomenological insistence on the primacy
of the experienced, conventional world (the interlocutor’s, i.e., Bodhangkur’s stance). The conversation circled a
single, critical question: Can a principle, however elegant, truly address
the raw data of human suffering? Hua
Yen philosophy, with its sublime architecture of Li (the
absolute principle) and Shi (phenomena), was presented in
its full grandeur. The doctrine of the Four Dharmadhatus,
culminating in the non-obstruction of all phenomena (Shi Shi Wu Ai), paints a universe of infinite mutual
containment, famously illustrated by the metaphor of Indra's Net. Here, every
jewel reflects all others, and the totality of the cosmos is present in a
single dust mote. The purpose of any phenomenon, including a human being, is to
be a perfect locus for this cosmic interplay—to fully express the universal
through the particular. Yet,
this very grandeur became the source of critique. The interlocutor, Bodhangkur, channelling a perspective attributed to the
modern Druid named Finn, argued that such a principle is not a discoverable
reality but an abstract construct, akin to the logic of a Universal Turing
Machine. It can generate a world experienced as real, but the machine itself
has no ontological substance. This stance is a rigorous form of immanentism:
the only reality that can be verified is the phenomenal one. To claim a
"deeper" reality is to engage in unverifiable metaphysics. This collision
of frameworks became most acute in the discussion of suffering. From the Hua
Yen view, suffering (dukkha) has a pedagogical purpose: it is the
friction that grinds away the illusion of separateness, the very experience
that makes the doctrine of interpenetration existentially necessary. The
"benefit" of awakening to Li is the cessation of
this self-imposed tyranny; the wave realizes it is the ocean and is freed
from the fear of crashing. The
interlocutor’s counter argument was devastating in its simplicity: the
dispelling of a cognitive error does not necessarily stop suffering or change
the phenomenon's obligated function. Knowing one is a character in a play
does not alleviate the obligation to perform the role, and may, in fact,
introduce a paralyzing awareness of its "essential futility." This
is the spectre of cosmic despair (so Jean-Paul Sartre) —not liberation, but a cursed consciousness
forced to act out a meaningless part. The
thought experiment of the middle-aged man in crisis crystallized this
impasse. A Hua Yen master’s purported response—a re-framing of the man’s very
being from a separate self to a manifestation of the cosmos—was critiqued as
practically useless. It failed to engage with the human, conventional need
for volition and effort., i.e. “Try harder!” The interlocutor’s final,
piercing observation—"No wonder Hua Yen died out!"—was not merely a
quip but a serious historical and philosophical claim: a system that cannot
translate its sublime insights into pragmatic, human-scale guidance risks
irrelevance. This
critique found a powerful historical echo in the Bodhangkur’s
final point regarding the development of early Buddhism. The observation that
the Noble Eightfold Path, with its explicit injunction for "Right
Effort," was a later insertion into the Four Noble Truths template is
profound. It suggests that the earliest Buddhist community itself recognized
that a purely descriptive framework was insufficient. The path required
an imperative—a "Try harder!"—to bridge the gap between
understanding the truth and actualizing it. In
conclusion, this dialogue did not arrive at a synthesis but brilliantly
illuminated a fundamental divide. On one shore stands Hua Yen, offering a
glorious vision of a non-dual, interpenetrating cosmos where the particular
and universal are perfectly reconciled. On the other stands a pragmatic
phenomenology, demanding to know how this vision alleviates the concrete
suffering of a being who must still live, strive, and die within the
conventional world. The bridge between these shores remains the unfinished
work of any wisdom tradition: to marry transcendent understanding with the
immanent, often messy, necessity of Right Effort. The Hua Yen
master speaks of the ocean, but the drowning man still needs to know how to
swim. Finn vs. Sartre |