The Ti-Yong 體用 Model and Its Discontents

This chapter provides compelling perspective on Zhu Xi’s repurposing of Buddhist ideas to develop his own philosophical thought. The focus is the ti-yong (inherent reality-function) conceptual polarity—one of the core concepts in Chinese philosophy. The author shows that although Tiantai Buddhists, Huayan Buddhists, and Zhu Xi all deploy the ti-yong model as a crucial component of their metaphysics, in certain key places they deploy it for different ends, leading to subtle structural differences that amounted to large philosophical consequences for these different groups. The author first develops a detailed comparison of these models in the Huayan and Tiantai schools, and then shows how analogous structures to each of these are adapted to form parts of Zhu Xi’s metaphysics. In doing so, he presents an entirely new way to understand Zhu Xi’s philosophical inventiveness and its profound debt to Buddhist thought.