The golden lion: form and its substance

Take a figure that has a clear shape, and contemplate how it is made of one substance that does not change when the shape is broken or remade.

なぜ効果があるのか

In his Treatise on the Golden Lion, Fazang uses a gold statue of a lion to show how form and substance relate. The lion is real as a lion, its parts are the phenomena, and the gold is the emptiness or underlying substance that the form is made of. Fazang argues that the lion can be understood as gold, and that the gold is always the lion’s real nature. Kim’s study of the treatise (2018) summarizes it as the making of gold into a golden lion and its transformation back into gold. The contemplation teaches that form and substance are not two separate things, which is also the Huayan answer to how phenomena can contain one another.

やり方

1. Choose a simple figure or object with a clear shape, such as a small statue, a coin or a stone you can hold.
2. Notice its shape and name it. Then notice the material it is made of, and ask whether the shape is anything apart from that material.
3. Imagine the shape melted down and recast into another figure. Ask what stayed the same through the change.
4. Consider that the same substance can be the whole figure and each part of it, and that each part holds the whole in the same way.
5. End by returning to the figure you started with, and notice how the shape and the substance feel in the same moment.

エビデンス

The golden lion analogy is Fazang’s, from the Treatise on the Golden Lion. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy records that Fazang used a lion statue at the imperial palace to explain the teaching to Empress Wu Zhao around 700, and that sources differ on the date. Kim (2018) describes the treatise’s transformation of gold into lion and back. No controlled study has tested the contemplation. (mechanistic)

Xiong (2024) is a further-reading article on the treatise. I have verified its Crossref record but could not read its text, so I cite it only as a pointer. I could not find a freely fetchable full English translation of the treatise; the standard anthology translations are behind paywalls.

出典

• Fazang (Fa-tsang, 643–712 C.E.). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (entry on Fazang; read 2026-10-14).
• Kim, C.-M. (2018). M. C. Escher and Huayan: Focusing on the Huayan Treatise on the Golden Lion of Fazang. Sookmyung Research Institute of Humanities, 2, 115–138.
• Xiong, Y. (2024). Treatise of the Golden Lion: An Exploration of the Doctrine of the Infinite Dependent Arising of Dharmadhātu. Religions, 15(4), 482.

よくある間違い

Reducing the lion to a metaphor for gold and stopping there. The teaching is that the shape is real, and the gold is what the shape is made of, both at once.