Having finished this, I can't recommend it enough: Emptiness and Omnipresence I knew nothing about Tiantai / Tendai Buddhism before encountering Ziporyn. I'm not sure it quite 'clicked' in reading Experiments in Mystical Atheism in the way it seems to have done with this book, which really takes you through Tiantai thinking, accessible but in-depth. It's outrageously inclusive. There's an element of infectiousness about it, I guess this is probably there in other schools of Buddhism, and some other traditions, but Tiantai seems to ramp it up, elaborating how the mere noticing of Tiantai ideas, the briefest entertaining of them as a thought-experiment, sets one ineradicably on the road to full realisation of them - indeed, is full realisation of them. It has the air of a kind of 'positive Necronomicon' infection dynamic - with the caveat that for Tiantai, the 'negative Necronomicon' dynamic of conceptual or spiritual infection is ultimately identical with the positive one. Maybe a bit of resonance with the inescapability of Hegel's dialectic, but without Hegelian teleology.
Tiantai is a thoroughgoing contextualism, regarding the ontological status and identity of all entities as deriving entirely from their contexts, their relationships to other entities. It is a thoroughgoing holism, regarding these dispositive relationships as incapable of definitive limitation to any finite subset of what exists. It is a thoroughgoing monism, rejecting any notion of distinct ontological categories that are irreducible to one another. It is a theory of thoroughgoing immanence, rejecting any possibility of any independently existing transcendent realms entirely beyond what is present in immediate experience.
Epistemologically this entails thoroughgoing skepticism about all unconditional claims, and thoroughgoing anti-realism.
Ethically it implies a thoroughgoing renunciation of all finite aims, as well as thoroughgoing repudiation of all determinate moral rules, moral consequences, and moral virtues.
our understanding of each of these points must be thoroughly modified by the most characteristic premise of Tiantai thought of all, which determines the meaning we intend for the term “thoroughgoing” here: the idea of “self-recontextualization”. As we’ll see in detail below, this is a thinking-through of the basic notion of universal contextualization itself and its constitutive role in the construction of all identities, to the point of seeing it to entail the ambiguating of the identity not only of the contextualized but also of the contextualizer.
It will mean that for all finite conditional entities, exceptionless impermanence is seen to be also exceptionless eternalism, exceptionless anti-substantialism is seen to be also exceptionless substantialism, exceptionless anti-realism is seen to be also exceptionless realism, again supplemented by a claim about the interchangeability of these two seemingly opposed claims.
thoroughgoing renunciation of finite aims, moral rules, moral consequences and moral virtues is seen to be also an exceptionless acceptance of all finite aims and the endorsement of all determinate moral rules, consequences and virtues.
These multiple entities are not “simply located” even virtually or conceptually: the “whole” which is the agent performing every experience is not a collection of these various “inherently entailed” entities or qualities arrayed side by side, like coins in a pocket. Rather, they are “intersubsumptive”. That is, any one of them subsumes all the others, and yet, because of the view of what “subsumption” actually is, each is subsumed by each of the others as well: all relation is subsumption, and all subsumption is intersubsumption.
Traditional Buddhism gives a rather commonsensical account of sentient experience: every moment of sentient experience is a sensory apparatus encountering an object, giving rise thereby to a particular moment of contentful awareness. But in the Tiantai view, each of these three—sense organ, object, this moment of consciousness—is itself the Absolute, the entirety of reality, expressed without remainder in the peculiar temporary form of sense organ, of object, of this consciousness. Hence each moment of every being’s experience is redescribed, to paraphrase a canonical early Tiantai work, as follows: The absolute totality encounters the absolute totality, and the result is the arising of the absolute totality. (法界對法界起法界)
The Absolute, the whole of reality, is one and eternal, always the same and omnipresent, but it is also the kind of whole that divides from itself, encounters itself, arises anew each moment, engenders itself as the transient flux of each unique and individual moment of experience of every sentient being.
. The heart of the matter, the most fundamental and far-reaching renovation of Buddhism accomplished by the Tiantai School, is the move from the Two Truths model to a Three Truths one.
They can be summarized by the claim that no entity can be either the same as or different from any other entity.
This relation of neither-sameness-nor-difference, a formula used by many Mahāyāna Buddhist schools but often interpreted as applying not to “Conventional Truth” but only to “Ultimate Truth” (on which see below), and thus understood simply as an instance of apophasis...is in Tiantai instead developed into what might be described as the “asness” relation, applying to all putative or real entities without exception, affecting even what is within the scope of Conventional Truth: each determinate thing is the totality of all other possible things as this thing.
But the most important consequence of the transformation of the Two Truths into the Three Truths is the wholesale dismissal of the appearance-reality distinction. Tiantai would reject the privileging of either considering in isolation or considering in any single particular connection; any of these would be legitimate in some heuristic (upayic) contexts, but none could be non-arbitrarily assigned the role of representing what is the “really the case”,
atomism of any kind—that is, any doctrine that stipulates basic indivisible buiding blocks exist whose identities are independent of the relations and wholes into which they may enter—is rejected as unintelligible, and a thorough contextualism asserted:
...This would seem to lead to a holism of some sort: each apparently isolable thing is really an aspect or expression of some more inclusive whole...But the unconditional can have no specific separate identity, not even as “the unconditional per se”.... [if everything is "water" (eg) water loses its meaning]...Hence by going through the universalization of any determinate entity, we reach the overturning of that determination into something that expresses itself as all other determinations, and at the same time undermines its own privileged status as ultimate foundation...To see the absoluteness of any one entity is thus to de-absolutize that entity and also to absolutize every other entity.
The pan-Buddhist denial of the existence of a “self” rests on the same point: the impossibility of single-cause causal events. For the “self” rejected here is precisely the claimant to single-causality: the agent of actions which putatively requires no second condition to produce an effect, e.g., to will something, to do something, to want something, to experience something. The self never acts alone, has no independent effects, and thus actually is not a self-as-efficacious-agent.
Indeed, the early Buddhist analysis of the human condition amounts to the claim that all desire is really a proxy-version of this impossible desire for control, for single-agent causality, for pure autonomy, for selfhood; thus all desire is doomed.
Emptiness is supposed to be strictly “inconceivable”. In Tiantai, this problem disappears. Emptiness is still very important, but it is simply a conditional assertion of unconditionality. We do not have all the conditionality (specifiability, particularity) on one side and all the unconditionality (transcendence, inconceivability) on the other. Everything, every experience, every identity, every action, is in the same boat: they are all both conditional and unconditional, both conceivable and inconceivable
In the Tiantai “Three Truths” theory, instead of concluding that every particular view and thing is false, we conclude that all is, ultimately, true. Every possible view is equally a truth. There is no longer a hierarchy between the levels, and no category of plain falsehood.
This strange “neither-same-nor-different” structure of the Three Truths is to be understood in accordance with another key Tiantai concept, “opening the provisional to reveal the real” (開權顯實 kaiquan xianshi). This is a way of further specifying the relation between local coherence and global incoherence, which are not only synonymous, but also irrevocably opposed, and indeed identical only by means of their opposition and mutual exclusivity.
The “provisional”, conventional truth, local coherence, is the set-up. The “ultimate truth”, Emptiness, global incoherence, ontological ambiguity, is the punch line. What is important here is to preserve both the contrast between the two and their ultimate identity in sharing the quality of humorousness which belongs to every atom of the joke considered as a whole, once the punch line has been revealed.
To be permanent is already to also be impermanent—there is no other permanence. To be impermanent is already to also be permanent—there is no other impermanence. All is funny, all is serious, all is funny-serious. Each is a perfectly equal synonym for all three. Each is an equally adequate-inadequate description of the truth.
The “provisional”, conventional truth, local coherence, is the set-up. The “ultimate truth”, Emptiness, global incoherence, ontological ambiguity, is the punch line.
So both “funny” and “serious” now both mean “funny-and-serious, what can appear as both funny and serious”. Each is now a center that subsumes of the other; they are intersubsumptive.
This contextualism is applied intricately and thoroughgoingly to Buddhist teachings themselves, including especially its most foundational teachings about the basic character of existence: impermanence, suffering, and non-self—and also about the solutions to those conditions: enlightenment and Buddhahood. Are all things permament or impermanent? Are there selves or no selves? Can we end suffering or can’t we? For Tiantai the right question to be asked for understanding and applying doctrine is not “is it true?”—since all doctrines are “true” in this sense of “liberating” in some contexts, and not in others—but rather “in what sense, and in what context, is it true, i.e., liberating?”
This also means that, the more fully one realizes that one is any particular being, the more one realizes that he or she is also all other, contrasted, things as well. This is how traditional Buddhist “non-self” doctrine comes to play out in Tiantai. I think I am already this self, Brook, but in reality, Buddhism tells me, I am not yet really any such self—for to be a self is to be unconditional, and that is impossible for “me”, a conditional determinate being. Also, I am not yet enlightened—for enlightenment is unconditionality, the only freedom from suffering. To become unconditioned, as I’d thought I was when I thought I was a self, is to become enlightened. This non-self is the only thing that really fulfills my previous lust to be a self, to actually be me. I cannot become this by being me as a determinate being to the exclusion of all other beings, nor other beings to the exclusion of me. Rather, by the Three Truths, I can only become more and more me by becoming more and more everything else, and that is what it means to become more and more enlightened, and to become more me, more unconditionally this specific me. (emph added)