PhD candidate, UChicago Divinity School

Exactly 1000 years ago, in what is now the present-day city of Ningbo, China, a dramatic break-up unfolded between the great Song Dynasty Tiantai Buddhist thinker, Siming Zhili 四明知禮, and his brilliant disciple and de-facto Dharma-heir, Jingjue Renyue 淨覺仁岳. As legend tells it, sometime in the year 1025, Renyue became violently ill in the middle of a supplication ritual. From this point on, he “renounces all his prior convictions,” and begins to openly advocate for a doppelgänger position closely resembling that of the heretical Shanwai faction both of them had spent a good part of the last decade, and spilled a great deal of ink, refuting. In a series of four exchanged polemical texts, Renyue stages a remonstrative intervention with Zhili over the status of a strange body, unique to Tiantai Buddhist Pure Land theory, called “zunte” 尊特. This peculiar, errant body leaves an ambiguous, self-contradictory trace in the Classical Tiantai corpus. On the one hand, the de-facto founder of the tradition, Zhiyi (aka 智者大師) sometimes speaks of the zunte body as if it were its own discrete entity, to be placed within or alongside the traditional three bodies of a Buddha (i.e. the response (or born) body, the recompense (or enjoyment) body, and the dharma-body). And yet, on the other, he seems to ascribe prima facie mutually contradictory predicates to it, identifying it sometimes as a ‘response’ body (nirmāṇakāya, Ch. yingshen 應身) and sometimes as a ‘recompense’ body (saṃbhogakāya, Ch. 報身). The problem of this strange body and its contested status forms the fault line along which the doctrinal stakes of Zhili and Renyue’s split come into relief. Renyue and Zhili put flesh to two mutually incompatible envisionings of the zunte body of Amitābha Buddha; and concomitantly with each of these respective envisionings, each of Renyue and Zhili gives a wildly divergent reading of the same Tiantai tradition. Along the way, we walk an ever bifurcating path (liangxing 兩行) through a series of contested terrains, surrounding problems of triplicity, paradox, and the “Middle” (zhong 中)—as well as the “relation” between finitude and infinity, and between Nagarjuna’s Two Truths. This is a story about, among other things, two birds, a beetle, and a body “like all of space.”