Sanlun Sect in Han Buddhism
The Sanlun sect, also known as the "Three Shastras" sect, derives its name from three books, the Mulamadhyamaka-karika, the Sata-shastra, and the Dvadasamukha-shastra. Its founder was Jizang (549-623), an eminent monk who lived during a period that spanned the late Sui (581-618) and the early Tang (618-907) dynasties.
Jizang was a descendent of a man who had fled his native land of Pathia (present-day Iran) as a result of a family feud, and who first arrived at Nanhai (in present-day Guangxi) and then settled in Jinling (present-day Nanjing). Jizang himself was born in Jinling, and his name was given by Paramartha (499-569), the great Indian scholar who was translating Buddhist scriptures there.
During Jizang’s childhood his father often brought him to lectures given by Falang (507-581) at the Xinghuang Monastery. At the age of seven, he was tonsured as a novice under the tutelage of Falang. At 19, he showed unusual talent for reciting Falang’s lectures and he had already come a long way in his study of the Three Shastras. At the time, the country was torn apart by war between the failing Chen Dynasty and the rising Sui Dynasty. As a result many Buddhist temples were abandoned and monks became homeless. During the turmoil, Jizang scavenged missing Buddhist texts from the ruins of monasteries, and learned a great deal from what he found. After the Sui Dynasty restored peace to the Baiyue region (present-day Zhejiang and Fujian provinces), Jizang went to Kuaiji (present-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province), and settled in the Jiaxiang Temple. By that time he had achieved virtuosity in his cultivation of Buddhist theories, and he began teaching Buddhist doctrines in the temple.
In 606, Yang Guang, or Emperor Yangdi, summoned him to Yangzhou and put him up in the Huiri Temple. Later he went to Chang’an (present-day Xi’an), where he was warmly received by the royal family.
In 618, when Li Yuan entered Chang’an as the founding emperor of the Tang Dynasty after conquering the Sui, Jizang was one of the ten eminent monks the emperor invited to run Buddhist affairs for him. During his lifetime Jizang was a prolific writer. Incomplete statistics show that he wrote at least 91 volumes on 21 subjects, most of which were about the doctrines of the Sanlun sect.
Of the three treatises that form the foundation of the Sanlun sect, the Mulamadhyamaka-karika and the Dvadasamukha-sastra were works by Nagarjuna (c. 3rd century), a major scholar of Mahayana Buddhism in India, and the Sata-sastra was the work of his disciple, Aryadeva (3rd century). At the center of the theories of these three treatises is the principle that all things arise from conditional causations without nature. The three classics were translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva (344-413), a celebrated monk from Kuqa. For this reason, Nagarjuna and Aryadeva are regarded as forefathers of the Sanlun sect. Kumarajiva is worshipped as a patriarch of a later time.
After Kumarajiva translated the three classics into Chinese, most of his disciples dedicated themselves to disseminating the doctrines contained in these works, but only one of the disciples, Shengzhao, was able to inherit Kumarajiva’s ideas and to safeguard the purity of the theories of the three books. The books first circulated in the North, and found their way south of the Yangtze River with the arrival of Senglang at Mount Sheshan (present-day Xixia Mountain in the suburbs of Nanjing), where Senglang became the abbot of the Xixia Monastery. In 512 (11th year of the Tianjian reign of the Liang Dynasty), Emperor Wudi dispatched ten monks to the monastery to learn the three classics from Senglang. Zengquan, the top student among the ten, later became the master of a monk named Falang, who eventually rose to fame and acquired a large group of followers on his own. But none of Falang’s followers compared favorably with Jizang, who drew on the quintessence of the three books and founded the Sanlun sect. Jizang’s new interpretations of the three ancient books were later dubbed the “New Three Classics.”
The Sanlun sect’s theories boil down to the belief that the multitude of things in the universe, both material and spiritual, came into being because of hetupratyaya, that is, internal and external causations. Only when all the necessary conditions become available can a thing come into existence. Otherwise nothing can happen. For the same reason, all things owe their existence to the availability of various conditions, and their own identities are empty and unattainable. Such is the Buddhist philosophy: “All things are void.”
The Sanlun sect divides the teachings of Sakyamuni into two pitakas (collections) or three dharma-cakras (wheel of dharma). The two pitakas refer to the Sravaka Canon that belongs to the Hinayana doctrine and the Boddhisattva Canon that belongs to the Mahayana doctrine. In passing, the term “Hinayana” means “small vehicle,” such as a bicycle that is large enough to carry only one passenger; whereas the term “Mahayana” means “large vehicle,” such as a train that can carry many people at the same time. “Hinayana,” which developed before the rise of Mahayana Buddhism in first century BC, is a derogative term used by the followers of Mahayana Buddhism in jeering at Buddhists of the earlier period on the grounds that they were preoccupied with their own emancipation while leaving other people alone in the ocean of misery.
The three theories are the fundamental dharma-cakra, the incidental dharma-cakra, and the from-the-incidental-to-the-fundamental dharma-cakra, which exactly classify the Buddha’s teachings in a chronological manner.
The Sanlun sect had its heyday when it was first created during the Sui Dynasty, but it began to decline after the mid-Tang Dynasty, following the emergence of the Huayan (Avatamsaka), Ci’en, and other sects, at a time when “a hundred flowers were blossoming and a hundred sects of thought were contending.” The reason behind the decline of this sect is perhaps its delineation of the theory of “the void and unattainable,” which was so thorough that human beings either found it unacceptable or were simply scared of it. The lack of successors is another reason for its decline. As a matter of fact, there was no lack of people engaged in the study of the Sanlun sect, but few regarded themselves as followers. This situation remains to this day.
