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Willams: Seeing through Images 59
of dharmakāya is used to inform his discussion of the meditation on the
major and minor marks. 97 Quoting and commenting on a passage from the
Guan Wuliang shou fo jing on why one should imagine the buddhas (xiangfo,
), i.e., visualize them, 98 Tanluan explains: 99
When the mind imagines the Buddha, this mind is just the thirtytwo
major marks and eighty minor marks of form. Just when the
minds of sentient beings imagine the Buddha, the major and minor
marks of the Buddha’s body appear and manifest in the minds of
sentient beings. It is as when the water is clear, the form of the image
is manifest; the water and the image are neither the same nor
different. Therefore it is said that the body of the Buddha with its
major and minor marks is just this mind imagining [them].
“This mind makes buddhas” means that the mind is able to
make buddhas. This mind is the Buddha. Outside of the mind there
is no Buddha. It is like fire that comes out from the wood but the
fire cannot be separated from the wood. Since it cannot be separated
from the wood, it is able to burn the wood. Wood becomes
fire which burns the wood which just becomes fire.
The mind of the meditator, the bodily form of the Buddha with his major
and minor marks (the dharmakāya of expediency), and the ultimate nature
of the Buddha (the dharmakāya of the dharma-nature) are inseparable
but not the same. The key is for the practitioner is to see that—following
the Prajñāpāramitā texts—the marks, as all dharmas, are empty and at the
same time—according to the Yogācāra—a natural and intrinsic expression
of the Buddha’s ultimate nature, which are meditatively efficacious.
A similar formulation, but with quite different roots, emerged in the
doctrinal, ritual, and meditative syntheses of Zhiyi in the late sixth century
in southeastern China around Jiankang (), modern Nanjing. First,
Southern Chinese debates since the early fifth century were concerned,
initially, with buddha-nature (fo xing, ) and whether all beings could
attain liberation, and later, with paradigms that explored the relationship
of buddha-nature to sentient, especially human, beings. This was, in effect,
the Chinese Buddhist version of the perennial Chinese debate over human
nature (ren xing, ) whose parameters had been laid out initially by
Mengzi (, late fourth century BCE) and Xunzi (, third century
BCE). Second were a series of triadic structurings of Buddhist formulations