Hua-Yen Buddhism ( Francis H. Cook)
Cosmotheistic Crapola
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra†by Francis H. Cook.]
Many notable Buddhologists, particularly Zennists, consider Chinese Hua-Yen Buddhism to represent the pinnacle of Buddhist philosophy. I’m not one of the many, and in my opinion, Francis Cook’s one-sided version of the philosophy -- which myopically emphasizes Emptiness (Madhyamika) while virtually ignoring (and even dissing) Mind-Only (Yogacara) -- is a particularly flawed and imbalanced presentation of it. In short, I consider Cook’s book cosmotheistic crapola, and also a gross perversion of what Gautama and Yogacara teach.
My introduction to Hua-Yen Buddhism was some twenty-odd years ago with Garma C.C. Chang’s “Buddhist Teaching of Totality†(see my three-star Amazon review). But Chang’s book was not anything like Cook’s. Whereas Chang considers Hua-Yen in a wider, general context that, to an extent, accounts for Mind, Cook’s explication of the philosophy virtually ignores and grossly distorts Yogacara. His position is pure Madhyamika, which explains why he, in effect, though recommending Chang’s book on the one hand, effectively disses it on the other, as evidenced by his statement, “I have several reservations about some of its interpretations.†In my opinion, Chang’s book is a superior, more balanced presentation of Hua Yen than Cook’s. Whereas Chang opines, “The philosophies of Emptiness, of Totality, and of Mind-Only are equally important in the establishment of the Hua-Yen doctrine,†Cook, who has no real understanding or appreciation of Yogacara’s Mind-Only doctrine, can only perceive and explain Hua-Yen through the jaundiced eyes of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika.
Because I’m writing a book on Buddhism, I wanted to get clear on Hua-Yen, the one major (though obscure) Mahayana school I hadn’t deeply studied. With this in mind, I procured a copy of Cook’s book and Thomas Cleary’s “Entry into the Inconceivable: An Introduction to Hua-Yen Buddhism,†which I will be reviewing within the month.
I took ten pages of notes on Cook’s book, and could easily (if given a large grant) write a text making complete mincemeat of it. I have next to zero respect for Professor Cook’s understanding of Buddhism and consider him a pointy-headed, pipe-smoking (which he admits to) half-scholar. The challenge for me is delimit my review, which could, unless I restrain myself, stretch into multiple pages. Consequently, be advised that my review is just the very tip of the iceberg concerning my criticisms of Hua-Yen Buddhism, as Cook presents it.
The Hua-Yen school is based on the Indian Avatamsaka (or Flower Garland) Sutra and flourished in China during the Tang period. Its five patriarchs were Tu-shun, Chih-yen, Fa-tsang, Ch’eng-kuan, and Tsung-mi. Fa-tsang (643-712), is especially revered, and his writings are generally considered the most important by students of this philosophy.
According to Hua-Yen, the absolute inextricably co-inheres with and is thereby inseparable from phenomenal existence; thus the absolute is ever bound to the space-time continuum, and the end result is a cosmotheistic theosophy which is somewhat similar to the current Christian cosmotheandicism pushed by the likes of Ilio Delio (see my two-star review of “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beingâ€).
Hua-Yen Buddhism derives from The Jewel Net of Indra, the Vedic metaphor that explains the interrelatedness of all existents in the cosmos. The Jewel Net of Indra is an elegant (though hardly unassailable) model for understanding the universe. And it is elegant precisely because it posits Brahman, which is tantamount to the Dharmakaya, or universal Mind, as the warp and woof of existence. But take Brahman out of the equation, which the Mahayanists such as Cook do in their perverse adaptation of the Jewel Net of Indra to Substance-less Madhyamika, and the wheels fall off the metaphor.
From a modern scientific perspective, Hua-Yen is a non-wholistic philosophy. First off, it doesn’t account for a beginning to the universe, the space-time continuum. And because it is non-teleological, it doesn’t account for evolution and the consequent hierarchy it engenders. If one accepts the Big Bang theory, that the universe was created about 14 billion years ago, then Hua-Yen’s cosmotheistic philososophy, which reduces acosmic Reality to cosmic reality (dependent origination or emptiness), becomes untenable. Ultimate Reality, according to renowned physicist Bernard dâ€Espagnat, is Hypercosmic Being, which “exists†outside of space and time. And d’Espagnat’s description of the Absolute mirrors that of the Christian Godhead, the Hindu Sat-Chit-Ananda, and the Buddhist Dharmakaya. But Hua Yen’s ultimate reality is simply dependent origination, and to reduce Ultimate Reality to dependent origination is “spiritual materialism†on the grossest level.
Neither Cook nor Fa-tsang, whom Cook mainly bases his discourse on, groks what Buddhadharma is about. This is exemplified by Cook’s pathetic, uneven, contradictory, and unelaborated-upon definitions of core Buddhist terms.
For example, Cook writes, “That is, [Dharmakaya], the the realm of beings, the highest truth, and Tathagatagarbha are the same.†No they aren’t. The Dharmakaya, as timeless, spaceless, Being, or Mind, is forever unimplicated by the realm of created beings. Elsewhere, Cook writes, “Being is just that, a unity of existence in which numerically separate entities are all interrelated in a profound manner.†Again, this is nonsense; Being is Cit-Ananda, the Dharmakaya-Sambhogakaya, Uncreated Conscious Light-Energy, and has nothing to do with either the perceived interrelation or non-interrelation of created beings.
Cook writes: “The cosmos is in short a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism. Hua-Yen calls such a universe the Dharma-dhatu, which we may translate as “cosmosâ€or universe†if we wish, with the proviso that it is not the universe as commonly imagined, but rather the universe of identity and interdependence.â€
This is a perversion of the term “Dharmadhatu,†which is the Dharmakaya, timeless Awareness, as the spaceless Context, or uncreated Space,†in which all phenomena arise. Identity and interdependence do not pertain to the Dharmadhatu, even though they arise within it. As Jesus put it, “My Kingdom [meaning God, or Being, or the Dharmakaya/Dharmadhatu] is not of this world.â€
As I earlier stated, Cook has virtually no understanding of Yogacara. He writes: “The doctrine of emptiness is the very cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy and practice, and despite the occurrence of “Seed of Buddhahood†(Tathagatagarbha) “Store Consciousness†(Alaya-vijnana), and other doctrines similar to theses, Buddhist have always insisted (rightly I believe), that these should not be mistaken for metaphysical substances, spirits, and the like.â€
First off, emptiness is not the cornerstone of Buddhism; Mind, or awakened Awareness, which means “Buddha,†is.†Secondly, the Yogacara terms that Cook identifies as in-Substantial all pertain to a single metaphysical Substance—Mind – which has become everything, but which is unimplicated by anything. But the uber-circumscribed Cook, in concert with his fellow contemporary Buddhist academics, has no understanding of Yogacara metaphysics, reducing it to Madhyamika ontology and phenomenology.
Because I can’t spend days and endless pages on this review, I herein won’t deconstruct the somewhat complex Hua-yen principles of intercausality and interpenetration (Though I will do so to an extent in my review of Cleary’s book). But I will say that I do not find them tenable, especially when Brahman, or Mind, is discounted in the Hua-Yen equation.
Below is an excerpt from the Indian “Avatamsaka Sutra,†from which Chinese Hua-Yen Buddhism stems. Notice that the Indian Buddhists, unlike their Chinese misinterpretors, acknowledge a cunning Creator behind the Net of Indra – Indra! who can be considered a Divine personification of Brahman.
“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.â€
Interestingly enough, Tu-Shun, the first patriarch of Chinese Hua-Yen, in a quote provided by Cook, also identifies a Divine Being, Vairocana, as the Dharmadhatu, the universal, or all pervading, Dharma Body. But because Cook is intent on reducing the trans (or hyper)-cosmic Dharmadhatu to cosmic proportion, so as to fit it within his atheistic model
, he redefines Dharmadhatu, the body of Vairocana, as “dharma-dhatu,†as the mere identity and interdependence of phenomenal existents.
To make sure that no hypercosmic idea of Mind or Brahman can soil his cosmotheistic thesis, Cook lets us know that it would be a grievous error to imagine that there is such a Divine Being. He writes:
“This is a serious error, for then we imagine that there was some primordial deity, similar to Brahaman of the Upanishads, who, for some inscrutable reason, manifested himself as the present phenomenal universe which we see about us and which we are a part.â€
If you are interested in a reductive, cosmotheistic philosophy based on Nagarjuna’s illogical Madhayamika (see my five-star review of “Buddhist Illogic,†by Avi Sion, for more on this), then you may find this pseudo-wholistic text by Francis Cook an amenable read. But if you’re like me and have little interest in or use for Nagarjuna’s nonsense as the basis for a cosmotheistic paradigm, then you likely won’t.
According to Cook, “the Hua-Yen masters were not mystics.†And the implication of this, which Cook ignores, is that they weren’t clear about Ultimate Reality, which Hua-Yen, in accordance with Madhyamika, reduces to emptiness, but not the Great Emptiness or Void that is Mind, the Dharmakaya, but the reductive, non-Spirit-full emptiness of Nagarjuna, which is a synonym for dependent origination. Thus, because the absolute, according to Hua-Yen, inextricably co-inheres with and is thereby inseparable from phenomenal existence, the absolute is ever bound to the space-time continuum, and the end result is a cosmotheistic theosophy which is somewhat similar to the current Christian cosmotheandicism pushed by the likes of Ilio Delio (see my two-star review of “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beingâ€).
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra†by Francis H. Cook.]
Many notable Buddhologists, particularly Zennists, consider Chinese Hua-Yen Buddhism to represent the pinnacle of Buddhist philosophy. I’m not one of the many, and in my opinion, Francis Cook’s one-sided version of the philosophy -- which myopically emphasizes Emptiness (Madhyamika) while virtually ignoring (and even dissing) Mind-Only (Yogacara) -- is a particularly flawed and imbalanced presentation of it. In short, I consider Cook’s book cosmotheistic crapola, and also a gross perversion of what Gautama and Yogacara teach.
My introduction to Hua-Yen Buddhism was some twenty-odd years ago with Garma C.C. Chang’s “Buddhist Teaching of Totality†(see my three-star Amazon review). But Chang’s book was not anything like Cook’s. Whereas Chang considers Hua-Yen in a wider, general context that, to an extent, accounts for Mind, Cook’s explication of the philosophy virtually ignores and grossly distorts Yogacara. His position is pure Madhyamika, which explains why he, in effect, though recommending Chang’s book on the one hand, effectively disses it on the other, as evidenced by his statement, “I have several reservations about some of its interpretations.†In my opinion, Chang’s book is a superior, more balanced presentation of Hua Yen than Cook’s. Whereas Chang opines, “The philosophies of Emptiness, of Totality, and of Mind-Only are equally important in the establishment of the Hua-Yen doctrine,†Cook, who has no real understanding or appreciation of Yogacara’s Mind-Only doctrine, can only perceive and explain Hua-Yen through the jaundiced eyes of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika.
Because I’m writing a book on Buddhism, I wanted to get clear on Hua-Yen, the one major (though obscure) Mahayana school I hadn’t deeply studied. With this in mind, I procured a copy of Cook’s book and Thomas Cleary’s “Entry into the Inconceivable: An Introduction to Hua-Yen Buddhism,†which I will be reviewing within the month.
I took ten pages of notes on Cook’s book, and could easily (if given a large grant) write a text making complete mincemeat of it. I have next to zero respect for Professor Cook’s understanding of Buddhism and consider him a pointy-headed, pipe-smoking (which he admits to) half-scholar. The challenge for me is delimit my review, which could, unless I restrain myself, stretch into multiple pages. Consequently, be advised that my review is just the very tip of the iceberg concerning my criticisms of Hua-Yen Buddhism, as Cook presents it.
The Hua-Yen school is based on the Indian Avatamsaka (or Flower Garland) Sutra and flourished in China during the Tang period. Its five patriarchs were Tu-shun, Chih-yen, Fa-tsang, Ch’eng-kuan, and Tsung-mi. Fa-tsang (643-712), is especially revered, and his writings are generally considered the most important by students of this philosophy.
According to Hua-Yen, the absolute inextricably co-inheres with and is thereby inseparable from phenomenal existence; thus the absolute is ever bound to the space-time continuum, and the end result is a cosmotheistic theosophy which is somewhat similar to the current Christian cosmotheandicism pushed by the likes of Ilio Delio (see my two-star review of “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beingâ€).
Hua-Yen Buddhism derives from The Jewel Net of Indra, the Vedic metaphor that explains the interrelatedness of all existents in the cosmos. The Jewel Net of Indra is an elegant (though hardly unassailable) model for understanding the universe. And it is elegant precisely because it posits Brahman, which is tantamount to the Dharmakaya, or universal Mind, as the warp and woof of existence. But take Brahman out of the equation, which the Mahayanists such as Cook do in their perverse adaptation of the Jewel Net of Indra to Substance-less Madhyamika, and the wheels fall off the metaphor.
From a modern scientific perspective, Hua-Yen is a non-wholistic philosophy. First off, it doesn’t account for a beginning to the universe, the space-time continuum. And because it is non-teleological, it doesn’t account for evolution and the consequent hierarchy it engenders. If one accepts the Big Bang theory, that the universe was created about 14 billion years ago, then Hua-Yen’s cosmotheistic philososophy, which reduces acosmic Reality to cosmic reality (dependent origination or emptiness), becomes untenable. Ultimate Reality, according to renowned physicist Bernard dâ€Espagnat, is Hypercosmic Being, which “exists†outside of space and time. And d’Espagnat’s description of the Absolute mirrors that of the Christian Godhead, the Hindu Sat-Chit-Ananda, and the Buddhist Dharmakaya. But Hua Yen’s ultimate reality is simply dependent origination, and to reduce Ultimate Reality to dependent origination is “spiritual materialism†on the grossest level.
Neither Cook nor Fa-tsang, whom Cook mainly bases his discourse on, groks what Buddhadharma is about. This is exemplified by Cook’s pathetic, uneven, contradictory, and unelaborated-upon definitions of core Buddhist terms.
For example, Cook writes, “That is, [Dharmakaya], the the realm of beings, the highest truth, and Tathagatagarbha are the same.†No they aren’t. The Dharmakaya, as timeless, spaceless, Being, or Mind, is forever unimplicated by the realm of created beings. Elsewhere, Cook writes, “Being is just that, a unity of existence in which numerically separate entities are all interrelated in a profound manner.†Again, this is nonsense; Being is Cit-Ananda, the Dharmakaya-Sambhogakaya, Uncreated Conscious Light-Energy, and has nothing to do with either the perceived interrelation or non-interrelation of created beings.
Cook writes: “The cosmos is in short a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism. Hua-Yen calls such a universe the Dharma-dhatu, which we may translate as “cosmosâ€or universe†if we wish, with the proviso that it is not the universe as commonly imagined, but rather the universe of identity and interdependence.â€
This is a perversion of the term “Dharmadhatu,†which is the Dharmakaya, timeless Awareness, as the spaceless Context, or uncreated Space,†in which all phenomena arise. Identity and interdependence do not pertain to the Dharmadhatu, even though they arise within it. As Jesus put it, “My Kingdom [meaning God, or Being, or the Dharmakaya/Dharmadhatu] is not of this world.â€
As I earlier stated, Cook has virtually no understanding of Yogacara. He writes: “The doctrine of emptiness is the very cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy and practice, and despite the occurrence of “Seed of Buddhahood†(Tathagatagarbha) “Store Consciousness†(Alaya-vijnana), and other doctrines similar to theses, Buddhist have always insisted (rightly I believe), that these should not be mistaken for metaphysical substances, spirits, and the like.â€
First off, emptiness is not the cornerstone of Buddhism; Mind, or awakened Awareness, which means “Buddha,†is.†Secondly, the Yogacara terms that Cook identifies as in-Substantial all pertain to a single metaphysical Substance—Mind – which has become everything, but which is unimplicated by anything. But the uber-circumscribed Cook, in concert with his fellow contemporary Buddhist academics, has no understanding of Yogacara metaphysics, reducing it to Madhyamika ontology and phenomenology.
Because I can’t spend days and endless pages on this review, I herein won’t deconstruct the somewhat complex Hua-yen principles of intercausality and interpenetration (Though I will do so to an extent in my review of Cleary’s book). But I will say that I do not find them tenable, especially when Brahman, or Mind, is discounted in the Hua-Yen equation.
Below is an excerpt from the Indian “Avatamsaka Sutra,†from which Chinese Hua-Yen Buddhism stems. Notice that the Indian Buddhists, unlike their Chinese misinterpretors, acknowledge a cunning Creator behind the Net of Indra – Indra! who can be considered a Divine personification of Brahman.
“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.â€
Interestingly enough, Tu-Shun, the first patriarch of Chinese Hua-Yen, in a quote provided by Cook, also identifies a Divine Being, Vairocana, as the Dharmadhatu, the universal, or all pervading, Dharma Body. But because Cook is intent on reducing the trans (or hyper)-cosmic Dharmadhatu to cosmic proportion, so as to fit it within his atheistic model
, he redefines Dharmadhatu, the body of Vairocana, as “dharma-dhatu,†as the mere identity and interdependence of phenomenal existents.
To make sure that no hypercosmic idea of Mind or Brahman can soil his cosmotheistic thesis, Cook lets us know that it would be a grievous error to imagine that there is such a Divine Being. He writes:
“This is a serious error, for then we imagine that there was some primordial deity, similar to Brahaman of the Upanishads, who, for some inscrutable reason, manifested himself as the present phenomenal universe which we see about us and which we are a part.â€
If you are interested in a reductive, cosmotheistic philosophy based on Nagarjuna’s illogical Madhayamika (see my five-star review of “Buddhist Illogic,†by Avi Sion, for more on this), then you may find this pseudo-wholistic text by Francis Cook an amenable read. But if you’re like me and have little interest in or use for Nagarjuna’s nonsense as the basis for a cosmotheistic paradigm, then you likely won’t.
According to Cook, “the Hua-Yen masters were not mystics.†And the implication of this, which Cook ignores, is that they weren’t clear about Ultimate Reality, which Hua-Yen, in accordance with Madhyamika, reduces to emptiness, but not the Great Emptiness or Void that is Mind, the Dharmakaya, but the reductive, non-Spirit-full emptiness of Nagarjuna, which is a synonym for dependent origination. Thus, because the absolute, according to Hua-Yen, inextricably co-inheres with and is thereby inseparable from phenomenal existence, the absolute is ever bound to the space-time continuum, and the end result is a cosmotheistic theosophy which is somewhat similar to the current Christian cosmotheandicism pushed by the likes of Ilio Delio (see my two-star review of “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beingâ€).
