all names are abstractions. That's the whole Emptiness argument. No name refers to a single, unambiguous, decisively determinate entitity. p44

The attempt to define anything, to find out what anything is once and for all, is itself based on a kind of “self ” idea: the fact itself must be so-and-so, a certain way and no other, unconditionally. For it to be simply true that, say, the apple is red, would require the “one cause–one effect” principle that is denied by the nonself doctrine of Buddhism: the idea that everything arises through a combination of causes and conditions.. The redness of the apple would have to be brought about by a single cause: the existence of the apple. The apple, acting alone, would have to have the power to make its redness appear. It would have to be a “self,” a sole cause....We cannot say that it is simply a “fact” that “the apple is red.” On the contrary, the redness of the apple is a result of a combination of factors—notably, the conjunction of the apple and a certain kind of visual apparatus, a nervous system, a habit of organizing impressions so as to divide the apple from what is not-apple, a system of names and associations and desires that condition this, and so on. Even if we fold all the conditions of the material object into one and call that the “apple,” any and every attribute of the apple will require additional conditions in order for the apple to come into being. (p47)

So every nameable entity is in the same boat as “the French Revolution.” It is an abstract, sometimes useful convention, taking account of some but not all of what is relevant, but that is always in danger of coming apart at the seams, being renamed in another way that seems more accurate, seems to account for more realities. (p49)

There is only the totality of interrelations, but these cannot be interrelations “between” predesignated “things.” That means even “interrelations” cannot really stand, since that presupposes “things” between which the relations exist. “Relations” means “relations between things.” If there are only relations, there are no things. But if there are no things, there are no relations either.

The problem with simply stating, “All things are inseparable; the universe is one inseparable whole,” is that we tend to then form a picture in our mind of “the whole universe.” But this picture is always misleading. Whatever way we may try to picture the whole, the whole of wholes, is also self-contradictory...The universe as a whole can have no particular characteristics. It can only be indeterminate. When we picture it, we are implicitly placing it within a frame, to which it is contrasted. So if we imagine infinite blackness, we are actually also putting some implicit non-blackness around it...Emptiness is this self-undermining of any claim about the whole.

The one thing we know is that nothing is what we think it is. (p49)

The Lotus Sūtra is something of a riddle among Mahāyāna scriptures. ..What’s all this about being the “King of Sūtras”? This is just a bunch of muddled parables and tall tales! It doesn’t seem to include any actual—how shall we say?—teachings! There’s the declaration that the Buddhas appear in the world for one purpose only, but, then, what is that purpose? ... It has been called, with some justice and considerable wit, a long prologue without a book: talking again and again about a teaching called “The Lotus Sūtra” and how amazing it is, and then—we never get the teaching, so it seems. It is a book about a book called itself, and rather than have an amazing content, its content is just to tell us how amazing the content of this book is and all the things it does. (p70)

Actually, it turns out, the Lotus Sūtra does have a teaching. It can be stated in one sentence, from chapter 2: “The Buddha said: Buddhas teach only bodhisattvas.”

what appears to be our selfish care for ourselves, for our own future, accoding to Buddhist nonself theory, is actually already a kind of compassion for someone "else". (p75)

We can see already that the dichotomy between selfishness and compassion cannot be absolute in a Buddhist context. Compassion is unavoidable; it is a necessary condition of all living beings, of all action, of all life. It’s just a question of the range and criteria of its application. (p77)

This is the meaning of "skillful means." You are doing much more than you realized, and you need not change your ways. (p91)

The Buddha sums up the situation in a phrase that is the heart of the whole Lotus Sūtra, and the key to all of Tiantai thought: “Without seeking it, we nonetheless effortlessly attained it.”

Enlightenment is not the renunciation of skillful means; rather is the mastery of all skillful means. (p97)

Second, note how this story illustrates the key idea of the Lotus Sūtra: “Without seeking it, we nonetheless effortlessly attained it.” The son did not seek to inherit the estate. He made no effort toward that end at all. He had no desire for it. But that does not mean he made no effort at all. Quite the contrary; he was working diligently the whole time. It wasn’t that he had no desire at all, just no desire for the goal he eventually attained. In fact, he needed his desire to get there—his desire for something else. He needed to want to make his meager minimum wage and not get fired. In fact, he was completely devoted to pursuing his own desire, which was the sole means to get beyond that desire, to get something he had never dreamed of. There is **a fundamental misrecognition and misdirection involved in the means/ends process here, in the structure of desire**, just as we saw in the story of the burning house. (p97 emph added)

We are not to discard our desires. On the other hand, we are not to take our desires seriously, as if they could actually be fulfilled. No, desire whatever you desire and pursue it wholeheartedly. But ...what you will end up attaining through this pursuit will definitely not—or at least will not only be, or not ultimately be—whatever it is you think you’re going to attain, what you want to attain, what is motivating you to work so hard at attaining it.

The fulfillment of the desire will not bring the expected satisfaction. It will turn out to be a stepping-stone to attaining something completely unexpected, something you presently cannot even dream of right now, which actually subsumes and nullifies in the process the thing you thought you were striving for. So go ahead and desire, strive with all your might to attain your desires, and at the same time know that your desires are futile, are deceptions, are systematic misdirections. This is neither desirelessness nor desire: the new Middle Way.

When we get to chapter 10 of the Lotus Sūtra, “Teachers of the Dharma,” this expansion of assurances takes a new turn; it now is directed at the reader of the text—at you. You, as a reader of the text, are also given the assurance of future Buddhahood. That is, “anyone who hears this Lotus Sūtra and experiences even one moment of pleasure in it,” will become a Buddha—in fact, the text seems to say in Chinese that they have already become a Buddha at this moment. (p100)

In other words, anyone who understands what it would mean if it were true (rather than having to actually accept it as true), who understands the wondrous implications of the idea set forth here, has activated those effects. This is a strange self-verifying structure that is characteristic of the Lotus Sūtra.

By delighting in the Lotus Sūtra right now, you make it the case that in the past you were a great bodhisattva who made a vow to be born here and now as this particular ordinary person. The past is a function of the present; it is the past of this present, never definitive, always changing. The same goes for the future: by delighting in the Lotus Sūtra teaching, the teaching that anything you are doing is bodhisattvahood, you live in a present with a future Buddhahood and a past bodhisattvahood. That isthe structure of the present; it is a present with bodhisattvahood behind it and Buddhahood in front of it. (p102)

The ideal of the Lotus Sūtra, Buddhahood, is the point of convergence and intersubsumption of all particular values, beliefs, and practices, including those of separation and transcendence and otherness itself. What appear to be conflicting values reveal themselves to be further attributes of one another—to intersubsume—when each particular value is pushed to its extreme, made to hold thoroughly and universally to its own convictions, thought through to the end. They intersubsume one another when they are subjected to universalizing puns. p140

Tiantai views all things this way. To see something is to see “not-all” of it. We are always seeing a little fragment of the world, but every bit of the world is changed by the fact that it is a part of the world, is recontextualized by the rest of the world, by the rest of space and the rest of time. In fact, if we ever saw all, we would see nothing. (p150)

... “this marble appears to be round, but round is such that it is always turning out also to be more than round, to be non-round, and vice versa. Roundness is more-to-it-ive. Round and non-round intersubsume each other.”...We may better understand the Tiantai position by retranslating the terms “conventional truth” and “ultimate truth” as “local coherence” and “global incoherence,” respectively. Conventional truth is the apprehension of some entity X as having a certain discernible, coherent identity. (p152)

The fact that conventional and ultimate truths are synonymous is what is meant by the Center. This is also taken to mean that this coherence, X, is the center of all other coherences in the distinctively Chinese sense of being their source, value, meaning, end, ground, around which they all converge, into which they are all subsumed. “Center” (zhong) indicates the midpoint between extremes, the point of indifference that is neither of the two opposites but also equally participates in each of the two, the point of non-duality between opposites. (p153)

The expanded Emptiness notion embodied in the Tiantai Three Truths is after something much more extreme [than the standard form-is-emptiness formulation?]. We sometimes find it expressed in another formula from the Prajñāpāramitā literature, but applied with a more jarring kind of specificity, as, for example, in an early meditation text where Zhiyi casually asserts that for the bodhisattva contemplating his own breathing, “there is no single breath apart from emptiness, and no emptiness exists apart from this particular breath.” For Zhiyi’s statement is not about “all matter” or “all phenomena,” but about one very specific phenomenon: the breath, this specific inhalation and exhalation going on right here and now. This would be like saying there is no Emptiness apart from this cup in front of me.

Emptiness is just literally dependent co-arising. Constitutive fragility. Constitutive impermanence. Constitutive conditionality. Lack of independent identity. Constitutive context-dependence. Constituent interaction, constitutive relationship: to be is to be interacting. This means, in sum, constitutive openness to alterity. (p157)

We can never really be quite sure about what other people think of us; the subjectivity of the “other” is an eternal mystery, and however many professions of love and esteem may succeed in securing, there is always, necessarily and structurally, an element of doubt, of anxiety: Are those people lying? Will they still think so a minute from now? How can I be sure? It is perhaps to escape the terrible anxiety of this predicament, the treadmill, the quicksand, the hall of horrific funhouse mirrors that is our striving to attain some stable being by imprinting it on others who can reflect it back upon us, that we wish to conclude that we have a “true self ” above and beyond what anyone may think (p162)

To be real is to be seeable from many alternate vantage points. (Only what is imaginary can be seen in just a single way or a single finite set of ways.) To be is to be infinite and infinitely various. This is the Center, the Third Truth. (p163)...Illusion/infinigy is the necessary mode of existence of all things.

For in Tiantai, each moment of time is the bringing forth of not only a new set of changing events but also a new set of “eternal principles”—omnipresent conditions, rules, requirements, regularities, coherences, laws, universals. Each moment is effectively the creation of a new space-time that determines anew the character of the everything in the universe and of all the past and future.

Many schools of Buddhism would say that the baby is right and the adult is wrong about this! The whole idea of object-permanence, in this view, is a misconception—the primal misconception. When something goes somewhere else, it is in fact something else, so it is impossible for something to go elsewhere.

But according to Tiantai, neither the infant nor the adult is correct....To be impermanent is already to also be permanent; there is no other permaance... 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.

It is Buddhahood as pre- sented in the Lotus Sūtra—not a realm that is additional to the nine other realms, but rather a certain way of seeing and experiencing those other nine realms. It is, to be specific, a realm that beholds all the other realms of experience, and beholds them as aspects of itself, and therefore also as aspects of one another. It is the seeing of all the other realms as inte- grated into oneself as upāyas, “skillful means,” ways of expressing and eliciting Buddhahood. Buddhahood, in the Lotus Sūtra, is not the tran- scending of all conditional states, but the intersubsumptive availability of all possible conditional states as skillful means. (p188)

Tiantai meditation, unlike some other Buddhist meditation tech- niques, does not put any special premium on “emptying” or “stilling” the mind. It does not try to form a wordless, featureless, direct appre- hension of the moment, excluding all conceptualizations, all imagina- tions, all ideas, all thoughts. Indeed, in the Tiantai view, even if one were to remain entirely without views or thoughts, in complete stillness, this would itself be no more than one more mental state, one more con- structed and delusory vision of the world. It is an important one! But it is not the truth. So do not linger on this vision of the featureless world as if it were truth (p192)

Do you want to change the world, or something in the world, or something in yourself, or in other people? Then don’t “change” it at all; rather, recontextualize it. Changing it, in the sense of eradicating this state or situation, is impos- sible, and the futile attempt to do so is counterproductive. Addressing any problem in its own terms, in the terms in which it presents itself to you as a problem, is a form of attachment to the reality of that situation as a non-ambiguous fact, which works for the reinforcement of the rigid unseen contextualizers that define the situation in precisely that way; it turns out, rather, to be a way of further entrenching future repetitions of exactly the state or situation you are trying to eliminate. The situation is paradoxical: the attempt to change a situation is what entrenches it, while a radical acceptance is the first step toward transforming it. (p235)

Zhili had stipulated that “outside of the devil there is no Buddha, out- side of the Buddha there is no devil” (mowaiwufo fowaiwumo 魔外無佛, 佛外無魔).4 Hitler becomes a Tiantai bodhisattva by “succeeding” in “murdering the Jews” in the Tiantai sense: he succeeds if and only if this comes to mean for him, “To be a Jew is to be the Buddha: there is no Buddhahood outside Jewishness, no Jewishness outside Buddha- hood.” The “evil” Jewry, seen in its fully nonself-natured, Three Truths intersubsumptive form, is precisely inclusive of, productive of, and ulti- mately identical to the highest good, Buddhahood, and vice versa. The point is that this does not require eliminating the original baseless as- sociation of the word “Jew” with “devilishness,” but rather its Tiantai expansion into universal deviltry. Indeed, the ridiculous anti-Semitic claims of near-universal Jewish devilish power can be put to good use here in overcoming themselves; a small further tweaking from fatuous universality to true universality succeeds in completely reversing their meaning, revealing that precisely in this universal devilishness Jewish- ness is real Buddhahood. For universal deviltry, precisely through its universality, its unconditionality, is also Buddhahood. (p260)

We may find all sorts of strange monsters swimming around in the soup of our habits and prejudices, which are as much a part of our “selves” as the prettier creatures there. Most forms of Buddhism prescribe means for gradually starving or discarding these monsters, but Tiantai is unique among Buddhist schools in asserting that, as a consequence of its expansion of the Emptiness doctrine into the Three Truths and what this implies about any form of ultimate control, these monsters cannot be annihilated even for a Buddha. They can only be redirected, reinterpreted, recontextualized, made into servants and ex- emplars of the good, which is made possible precisely by their Emptiness as a supplement to the Emptiness of the selves that contain them, the ambiguity of their putative identities and the susceptibility to rereading that this entails. (p263)

It may be disheartening to know that Hitler, rabid racism, genocidal rage, and the Holocaust are eternally with us and can never be extirpated from the nature of reality. But this discouragement derives, I think, from a misunderstanding of what “eternally present” means in a Tiantai context. To say of the Holocaust “Never Again,” vigi- lantly and unceasingly, is itself a form of this eternal presence, and in the best-case scenario, this would be the mode in which such evils are forever with us.(p272, concludes chapter)

In one sense this “One-Practice Samadhi” is really just a deliber- ate continuous reassertion of its one simple article of faith: “trust that all experiences without exception are aspects of Buddhahood” (liter- ally, “believe that all dharmas are Buddha-dharmas” [xin yiqiefa shi fofa 信一切法是佛法]). At first hearing this may seem like a familiar pan- theistic idea, a claim of omnipresence of the highest being similar to that asserted in some forms of Hinduism (Brahman is everything), Daoism (Dao is everything), and even, in a sense, in monotheism (God’s pres- ence is everywhere). But it is important to see that what is being pre- sented here is something quite different from the belief that “all things are in some sense divine,” or “all things are God’s will,” or even, say, a more thorough pantheist belief that “all things are themselves inalien- able aspects of the divine Absolute.” The main difference lies in the role of delusional human desire and will (in Tiantai they are also included in the Absolute), the role of illusion (it is also included in the Absolute), and the definition of what is highest (it is not a matter of teleology or substance). For in doctrines that claim, “All things are divine,” “divine” generally means arranged by the highest intelligence, while “all things” generally means merely everything that is real rather than an illusion, and not including disobedient human will or inaccurate human cognitions. In contrast, “All dharmas are Buddha-dharmas” means that all as- pects of experience without exception—including all volitions, feelings, and cognitions, and without any escape clause via an appearance/real- ity dichotomy—are aspects of the experience of the full enlightenment of a Buddha. (p276)

This “faith” thus means simply to do the thought-experiment of imagining what the world would look like to one for whom even a thought-experiment assuming himself to be an unrealizable ideal or fiction, or at best to temporarily entertain the idea of his realness, is itself a full expression of the Total Field of All Phenomena to which he himself is also identical. It is a thought-experiment about how the world would look to someone who makes no distinction between thought- experiments and verified realities... It is to think of the indivisible whole of all experience with each thought or simply as an act of faith, to think of—to bring to mind—what it would mean to be a Buddha who sees one’s own present activity of tentatively imagin- ing the possibility of such a being as a Buddha as itself the activity of a Buddha, which as such is omnipresent and eternal (p279)

We can now see how Tiantai gives a theoretical basis for generalizing this principle: whatever you see or think or feel, whatever you experience in any way, is what you are. It does not matter in the slightest whether this seen other is “real” or “merely imagined,” whether it’s a historical figure or a fictional creation, whether it’s a memory or just a daydream. In the present context these distinctions have no ultimate validity. Whatever you can think of as other than yourself, whatever you are not, whatever is excluded contrastively to you as part of the determination of you being what you are, whatever is in this minimal phenomenal sense “out there in your world,” is “you.” But it is you precisely in its contrast to you, as “outside,” like the setup/punch-line structure of the joke. (p284)

And you, in your uninspired workaday life, flailing and straining to get even a small taste of something more, are that imagined other person, that unboundably intersubsuming Buddha, that indivisibly ecstatic mystical freak. You are that one who is constantly turning inside out and outside in as the incessant blossoming and re-blossoming of himself known and forgotten and known, that one who keeps becoming agonized bliss after blissed-out agony as universe after universe, that one who can’t help imploding into totality after totality as self after other after self. You are that one and every other one. But you are them youly. (p286)