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Brook Ziporyn (University of Chicago),“Impermanence and/or/as Eternity: Implications of ‘Coinhabiting a Single Moment’ 同居一念 in Tiantai Meditation”This lecture is part of the Ho Centre for Buddhist Study's 10th anniversary conference.
Abstract
The slogan yiniansanqian (J: yichinensanzen)—meaning something like “Three Thousand worlds inherent in a single instant of mentation”—is commonly presented as the flagship doctrine of Tiantai (J: Tendai) Buddhism, vividly encapsulated the doctrine of the interpenetration of all phenomena that Tiantai shares with Huayan and other Sinitic schools of Buddhism, often represented by the image of Indra’s Net. One of the things that distinguishes the Tiantai approach to this shared doctrinal commitment is the methodology of meditation in which it is embedded, and the indispensable role of temporality in that methodology. This presentation will walk us through the step-by-step presentation of this very concrete and specific methodology, as presented in Zhiyi’s Mohezhiguan, drawing out the role played there by experienced temporal succession and its paradoxes. The insistence on deluded distinction-making, and with it constructive imaginative projection, as the key operators constituting all possible experience, including that of Buddhahood, is central to this method, concretizing the Madhyamaka-inspired refutation of the categories of sameness and difference in the direct experience of the coextensivity of the radically opposed determinations of “arising, dwelling and perishing” that constitutes every moment of sentient existence, and thus the ineradicability of every possible experience from every other possible experience.
Brook Ziporyn is the Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on Tiantai Buddhism, Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy of religion. He is the author of Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism (2016) and Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond (2024), and translator of Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (2020). He received his PhD from the University of Michigan.
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170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, Ontario M5R 2M8
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