Li Kang

“Everything is interconnected” is a central theme of Chinese Buddhism. This article examines how four prominent Chinese Buddhist schools—Tiantai 天台, Sanlun 三論, Huayan 華嚴, and Chan 禪—engaged with interconnectedness during the Sui and Tang Dynasties (581–907 CE), the golden age of Chinese Buddhism. While Tiantai, Sanlun, and Huayan developed distinctive theses of interconnectedness by advancing beyond the Indian Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (Sanskrit: śūnyatā), which denies that objects have intrinsic nature (Sanskrit: svabhāva), their insights were echoed and integrated in practice-oriented Chan Buddhism. This article analyzes this historical development through two lenses: first, by tracing the evolution of interconnectedness in Chinese Buddhism, it reveals how Chinese Buddhists developed distinctive views that further the Indian doctrine of emptiness; second, by showing how contemporary concepts of identity and dependence can elucidate historical Chinese Buddhist theses while revealing alternative perspectives to contemporary views, it demonstrates how Chinese Buddhism and contemporary metaphysics can be mutually enriching.

Spreading Structures defends and develops structuralism, a currently underappreciated framework in metaphysics. Structuralism treats entities like intersections of spider webs: an entity doesn’t exist in itself, and its existence depends on how it relates to other entities. While integrating insights from the philosophy of science and Buddhist philosophy, this dissertation challenges familiar positions and concepts in analytic metaphysics, including foundationalism, Humeanism, dependence, and grounding.

How should we understand de re modal features of objects, if there are such features? Any answer to the question is connected to how we should think about coincident objects, objects which occupy the same spatio-temporal region and share the same underlying matter. This thesis is mainly about the connections between de re modality and coincidence. My interest in the connections is twofold: First, how do theories of de re modality interact with theories about coincidence? Details of interactions are discussed from chapter 2 to chapter 5. Second, do the considerations about de re modality offer reasons to favour a particular position about coincidence? And how does this answer contribute to current meta-ontological debate? These are raised in chapter 1 and are answered in conclusion.

According to Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597), the founder of the Chinese Buddhist Tiantai school 天台宗, “one object is all objects;” hence, all objects are profoundly interconnected. In this paper, I critically examine Zhiyi’s metaphysics of objects as presented in the historical Tiantai texts and subsequently develop a contemporary and accessible thesis of interconnectedness by integrating Zhiyi’s views with resources from contemporary analytic philosophy, particularly relative identity. By drawing on Zhiyi’s insights and incorporating contemporary philosophical ideas, I also illustrate how historical Chinese Buddhism and contemporary analytic metaphysics can be mutually informing.

Few would deny that something ontologically depends on something else. Given that something depends on something, what depends on what? Huayan Buddhism 華嚴宗, a prominent Chinese Buddhist school, is known for its extensive thesis of interdependence, according to which everything depends on everything else. This intriguing thesis is entangled with seemingly paradoxical claims that everything is not only identified with everything else but also contained within it. Moreover, the radical thesis of interdependence entails that dependence is pervasive and symmetric. In this paper, I first develop a contemporary interpretation of Huayan interdependence by employing the definitional account of essence and the essence-based account of dependence. Through these contemporary resources, I elucidate and unify the theses of interdependence, mutual identity, and mutual containment within Huayan Buddhism. I then propose a unique framework of ontological dependence that suggests varying degrees of ontological dependence, aimed at accommodating and explaining away our intuitions against pervasive and symmetric dependence. By contemporizing Huayan Buddhism, I explore its potential and facilitate engagement between contemporary metaphysics and Huayan Buddhism.