Sengzhao 僧肇
c. 384–414 CE · East Asian Buddhism · Known
Sengzhao was the foremost Chinese student of the translator Kumarajiva, and in the four essays of the Zhaolun he gave Buddhism in China its first rigorous statement of emptiness. He wrote in the vocabulary of Laozi and Zhuangzi while turning it to new work. Things are neither being nor non-being, he held, and things do not shift. Wisdom is a knowing that does not know, and nirvana has no name and is found here in the world rather than beyond it.
Signature
The position Sengzhao is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence
- Time
- Block Universe
Positions on the 3 axes the sources answer
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable (75 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Identity
- leans Changing (86 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (25 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
17 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Sengzhao refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- End of Things
- Final Liberation
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Non-Dual Awareness
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Non-Self
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Block Universe
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Conventional
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Apophatic Pointer
What is the status of paradox? - Human Nature
- No-Self
What is human nature?