The Rafter is the Whole Building, in Fa-tsang (Cook)

Fa-tsang [Fazang, 643-712] concludes his Treaties on the Five Doctrines (the translation of a shorter title of the above-mentioned Hua-yen i-ch'eng chiao i fen-ch'i chang) with a description of the relationship between a rafter and the whole building of which it is a part. It is an analogy for any whole and its parts. By means of it, Fa-tsang shows the relationship of identity and interdependence (or interpenetration) discussed earlier. He analyzes this relationship by means of six characteristics which are possessed by each part of the whole. The six are totality, particularity, identity, difference, integration, and non-integration. In terms of the rafter, this means that the rafter is the totality, a particular, identical with all other parts and consequently with the whole, different in form and function, integrated into, and thus part of, the whole, and non-integrated in the sense that the rafter remains an observable, removable part with its own nature. The rafter is all six simultaneously.

What do we mean first of all by 'totality'! Fa-tsang answers, "It is the building." But the building is just a number of conditions, such as a rafter. What is the building itself? Again Fa-tsang replies, "The rafter is the building. The reason is that this rafter itself completely creates the building. If you remove the rafter, there is no building. If you have a rafter, you have a building." But how can a rafter all by itself wholly create the building if there are no roof tiles, nails, and other things?

It can not, says Fa-tsang, because if there are no roof tiles, nails, and the like, there is no such thing as a rafter. A real rafter is only a rafter in the context of the whole building, and therefore, when it is a real rafter, it wholly creates the building. A non-rafter cannot do this.

Several points should be noted in this slight paraphrase of the original. First, Fa-tsang clearly says that it is a particular object - the rafter - which is the building. We might insist that the rafter is only part of the building, not the building. but we would be missing the point. It is a particular, with a definite shape, location, and function, but if we remove each particular comprising the whole in order to find the real building, we will never find it. For it is just these particulars in their conjunctive togetherness which we call 'building'. However, we must not overlook the other part of the relationship, which is that the rafter is only a rafter in the context of the building, and it is therefore itself the result of the causal building. In claiming that the rafter-part is the building whole, Fa-tsang is making the point that the two are completely interdependent, for there is no whole apart from parts and no part separate from the whole. Consequently, the parts which conjunctively make up the whole are not independently existing individuals at all; they are empty of independent being. The individual is simply a function of the whole environment and at the same time is the whole. (from Causation in the Chinese Hua-Yen Tradition, by Francis Cook, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 1979)