Choosing between Huayan and interbeing for a given moment
When two Buddhist ways of seeing dependence both seem right, use a small set of questions to see which one fits the situation in front of you.
なぜ効果があるのか
Huayan’s mutual containment and the modern teaching of interbeing, treated on the engaged-buddhism-interbeing page, both describe how things depend on one another. They differ in emphasis: Huayan is a metaphysics of interpenetration built on a cosmic image, and interbeing is a practical ethic of seeing one’s own life inside others’. Dependent origination and Madhyamaka emptiness, on their own pages, supply further lenses. Choosing between them is a matter of asking which lens the situation calls for: is the question about how things are, or about what to do?
やり方
- Name the situation in one sentence and state what you want to understand or decide.
- Ask whether the question is about how things are structured (lean toward the Huayan image) or about what to do in a relationship (lean toward interbeing).
- If the question is about why things seem solid, consider the emptiness and dependent-origination pages before choosing.
- Test the chosen lens by applying it to the situation for a few minutes and noticing what it shows that the other lens would not.
- Note which lens you chose, and what it changed, so you can see the pattern over time.
エビデンス
The comparison draws on the school’s texts as described in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Fazang and on the corpus pages for interbeing, dependent origination and Madhyamaka emptiness. The choosing procedure is my own design and has not been tested. (anecdotal)
The distinction between Huayan and interbeing is one of emphasis, not a sharp doctrinal line, and reasonable teachers would draw it differently. The procedure is a reflective tool, not a claim about which lens is correct.
出典
よくある間違い
Treating the teachings as competing answers that must be ranked. They are different lenses on overlapping ground, and choosing one for a moment does not deny the others.
IX Coach でこれを実践する
Huayan Buddhism and Indra’s Net: Mutual Containment in the Flower Ornament School の実践法をもっと見る
- Indra’s net reflection: one object containing its conditions
Take one ordinary object or event and trace how it holds the reflections of its causes, its makers and the people it touches, until the boundary you started with looks porous.
- 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.
- The four dharmadhatus as a reflective sequence
Move through four ways of seeing the same world, from phenomena, to principle, to the two ways they do not obstruct each other, as a sequence of attention rather than a ranking.
- Samantabhadra’s ten vows as an aspiration practice
Read the Avataṃsaka’s closing vows of the bodhisattva Samantabhadra as ten aspirations to act, and use them to shape what you intend to do with your practice.
- Seeing mutual containment in work and home
In an ordinary relationship or task, notice the parts of other people’s lives that are present in what you do, and what your choices contain of them.
関連する概念
- 縁起:苦しみはどのように生じ、消えるのか
苦しみがどのように自らを維持するかの地図としての十二支の連鎖——そしてそこから降りる場所
- Engaged Buddhism: Interbeing, the Mindfulness Trainings and Practice in the World
How Thích Nhất Hạnh and Buddhist movements across Asia joined meditation and social action — and how it is practised
- Śūnyatā: Emptiness and the Two Truths in Madhyamaka
Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: why nothing has a fixed essence, and why that is not the same as nothing
- Buddha-Nature (Tathāgatagarbha): A Buddha Hidden in Every Being
The Mahāyāna teaching that a buddha is already present in every being, and how practitioners work with it