Post date: Dec 31, 2016 3:23:02 AM
Fazang is my favorite philosopher. I've been immersed with his metaphysical thought for just about a decade now. My early efforts are, well, not terrible. But I think I've got a good angle now. My first publication on Fazang that I'd consider good scholarship is forthcoming with Philosophy East and West. It's an attempt to explicate Fazang's coin counting analogy--not as famous as his golden lion or rafter analogies, but still provocative. (I'm working on similar explications for the more famous analogies.) Here's the abstract:
This paper explicates the counting ten coins metaphor as it appears in Fazang’s Treatise on the Five Teachings of Huayan. The goal is to transform Fazang’s inexact and obscure mentions of the metaphor into something that is clearer and more precise. The method for achieving this goal is threefold: first, presenting Fazang’s version of the metaphor as improving upon prior efforts by Zhiyan and Ŭisang to interpret a brief stanza in the Avataṁsaka sutra; second, providing textual evidence to support this interpretation; third, contrasting this interpretation with alternatives from Francis Cook as well as YasuoDeguchi and Katsuhiko Sano.
The article is due to be published in a year (December 2017), and it should appear in their Early Release section before too long. A penultimate version is now also available through academia.edu at this link [PDF]. This work might be timely, too, given recent mentions of Fazang's metaphysics in the context of diversifying philosophical educations. Ambition for the coming (2017) year: continue practicing Chinese translation, with efforts to making the final chapter of Fazang's major work (Treatise on Five Teachings of Huayan) available in English outside the context of Francis Cook's dissertation.