Title

Remaining Emotions Linger Around: Contextual Reconstruction and Philosophical Interpretation of the Tiantai School’s Idea of “Mutual Understanding of Essence and Ritual”

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Genre

Pages

529-569

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Language

Chinese

Key words

Zhiyi 智顗, Yuanjiao 圓教, Book of Rites, Confucius, confluence of Confucianism and Buddhism

Abstract

This paper adopts the relationship between emotion (qing 情) and ritual (li 禮) as its analytical lens, distinguishing among the formal, substantive, and ultimate meanings of li, and explores the convergence between Tiantai 天台 Buddhism and ritual philosophy from the perspective of the ultimate meaning of li. Tang Junyi 唐君 毅 (1909-1978) interprets “ritual without essence” as the transcendent non-dualistic emotion that forms the ultimate origin of rituals and music—residual emotion (yuqing 餘情). This study, however, uses Yinshun’s 印順 (1906-2005) notion of humanity’s shared emotional inclination, or “religious desire,” as a mediating concept to connect and mutually illuminate Zhiyi’s 智顗 (538-597) concept of residual Buddhahood (yufo 餘佛) —“when ignorance is not yet eradicated, but the perfect principle is deeply understood”—with the ritual philosophical concept of residual emotion.

Through an analysis of the twenty-five skillful means in the practice of śamatha- vipaśyanā (tranquility and insight), this paper points out that residual Buddhahood— the fundamental ignorance that is subdued but not yet eradicated—possesses ontological continuity across the mundane and the sacred in terms of realization, and ambivalence toward good and evil in terms of value. Therefore, beneath the meditative realization of residual Buddhahood lies a religious affectivity that transcends objective forms, namely the residual emotion in ritual theory. The Tiantai doctrine that upholds “non-cessation cessation”—the idea that afflictions are none other than bodhi (awakening)—is thereby further elucidated through its reflection in the “ritual without essence” and its residual emotion.