Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 23. (Budapest, 2004)

Imre HAMAR: Hermeneutical Methods in Chengguan's Commentary to the Avatamsakasütra

apogee under the Tang. In studying Chinese Buddhist commentaries, all the three meanings of Hermeneutics can be taken into consideration: to express, to translate and to interpret. First of all, Buddha expressed his teaching in the sütras, relying on his experience of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. In terms of communication, this experience is the verbum interius* which is to be progressed ad extra as the word of Buddha, Buddhavacana, in order to convey this crucial experience to the audience, Buddha's disciples. However, verbum interius cannot be completely expressed, as enlightenment is beyond the limits of spoken words and concepts which inevitably make difference of the world. According to Chinese Buddhist tradition, the first sermon that Buddha delivered after his enlightenment was the Avatamsakasütra which is a direct revelation of the truth that Buddha had realised in his samâdhi, when he obtained an insight into the dharma-dhätu, the realm of truth, or tathatâ, the way how the things really are. Even if there must have been a distance between words and experience, his first teaching seemed to be too abstruse to his poor followers who sat there like deaf and dumb. Buddha had to accommodate his tenets to the capacities of his disciples by applying upäya, skilful method, which was even further away from verbum interius, but eventually paved the way for final truth. Second, all the scriptures had to be translated into Chinese by the Inner Asian and Indian missionaries who had to face several difficulties in their work.

9 As translation, in fact, is a kind of interpretation, the translators had to be qualified not only as translators, but also as Buddhist practitioners in order to be able to decode Buddha's word correctly, to reach the realm of verbum interius, and then to transmit it by using a foreign language. They had to deconstruct and reconstruct the teaching. Reconstruction, of course, was of great difficulty. Chinese language and thinking differed so much from the Indian, that it took centuries to accomplish the Buddhist "church-language".

10 Third, the scriptures had to be interpreted and explained, as hermeneutical circles rendered difficult the comprehension of Buddha's teaching, taught several hundred years earlier in a different country with different cultural tradition. The first commentators were the translators themselves who tried to provide an oral explanation of the Dharma to drum up Chinese followers. As the foreign religion had taken root in Chinese society and culture, the first Chinese commentators appeared, and made their hermeneutical effort to understand the Buddhavacana. It happened to be the time when Xuanxue iv^-, Dark learning gained wide currency in Chinese philosophy. Exchange of ideas between Xuanxue thinkers and Buddhist scholar monks made up the mainstream of philosophical discussion of those days." Though both Daoan 11$ (312-385) and Daosheng (ca. 360-434) criticised the geyi fêH method,

12 which substituted Buddhist terms by Chinese philosophical vocabulary, the impact of Dark Learning is quite evident in their works.

13 Thus it seems to be reasonable to conclude that they, along with other Buddhist commentators, looked for hermeneutical methods in the current trend of thinking. At the end of the Han dynasty, commentators of Classics, Zhuang Zun WM (59 BCE- 24 BCE) and Huan Tan WM (43 BCE- 28 CE) refused the zhangju üjtfej commentaries prevalent in Han, which produced long glosses to words of Classics.

14 They searched instead for the meaning and the structure of the text. Wang Bi nL$} (226-249), the creator of Xuanxue philosophy followed their path, by claiming that the meaning of Laozi can be summarised in one phrase: "Emulating the root [by way] of bringing to rest the stem and branches [growing from it] that is all!"

15 He believed in the homogeneity and coherence of the text, and he showed it by clarifying the obscure parts with the clear ones.

16 It is interesting to note that in the Christian tradition Augustinus (354^30) was the first who applied the same commentarial strategy in explaining the Bible instead of using allegories advocated by Origen (185-254).'

7 Chinese Buddhist scriptures are at variance with the Chinese Classics in that the language into which they were translated was not as