The Philosophical Aspects of Chinese Buddhism

Abstract

Chinese Buddhism, as a comprehensive systematic thought, consists of cosmology, epistemology, and value orientation or life philosophy of its own character. Its own specialty vindicates the key note of value orientation in a reciprocal resonance to its cosmology and epistemology. In the context of its Dependent Origination(yuanqi), its cosmology immensely transcends the cycle of birth, growth, and death though originated in it, its epistemology targets at transcending all empirical knowledge by intuitional analysis, and its value orientation glorifies itself at achieving prajnā bodhisattva via enlightened nirvana. Its enlightened subjectivity in value orientation integrates the Buddhist cosmology based on dependent origination elaborately that no nirvana could be independently illustrated without referring to prajnā, i.e., no ethics could be ever attained without being elucidated by way of epistemology in western philosophy.