Yuan Liaofan and Master Kong

Late in life the Ming scholar Yuan Huang (style name Liaofan, 1533–1606) wrote instructions for his son that later circulated as the Four Lessons of Liaofan. The first lesson, “On Establishing One’s Destiny”, tells his own story: as a youth he met a Master Kong, skilled in Shao Yong’s numerological method, who calculated the course of his life.

For years afterwards, “whenever I was examined, my placings never departed from what Master Kong had set down”. Yuan concluded that everything was fixed and stopped striving. The turn came at Qixia Mountain near Nanjing, where he sat facing the Chan master Yungu for three days and nights “without a single stray thought”. The master asked why; Yuan replied that his fate had been calculated, so there was nothing to hope for. The master laughed that he was just an ordinary man after all.

Yuan then vowed to do good and kept a ledger of merits and faults. By his own account Master Kong’s predictions began to fail: “Master Kong had calculated that I would place third, but suddenly I placed first; his words did not come true, and I passed the provincial examination”; he had predicted danger at fifty-three, but “that year passed without harm, and I am now sixty-nine”; he had predicted no son, but Yuan later had a son, Tianqi.

Reading it again in this book’s language

The story can be retold in the framework of the earlier chapters, but its limits need marking first.

First, why were Master Kong’s predictions so accurate in the early years? One possible explanation is that a person’s situation, abilities and patterns of behaviour are fairly stable over a period, so fairly accurate predictions can be made from them; and once the subject believes the prediction and becomes “calm and wanting nothing”, his behaviour becomes even more fixed and the prediction more accurate still. In Chapter 2’s terms, a very precise prior (“my fate is fixed”) is confirmed through action (no more effort, no more trying).

Second, why did the predictions later fail? Because Yuan changed his strategy of behaviour, and the stable pattern on which the predictions were built no longer existed. This fits Chapter 6: determinism does not mean predictability, and when the system itself changes, predictions based on its old state fail.

Seeds and perfuming

Yogācāra Buddhism uses “seeds” and “perfuming” to describe how experience shapes consciousness and how it later becomes manifest.

The first sentence defines a seed: a latent potency in the root consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) that directly produces its own result. The second says that seeds can be formed by the perfuming of experience, “seeds produced by habituation”. Later teachers often summed up the cycle as “seeds give rise to manifest activity, and manifest activity perfumes seeds”: latent tendencies produce present mental activity, and present activity in turn strengthens or alters the latent tendencies. That summary is later teaching language, not the text of the Cheng Weishi Lun.

The structure is close to Chapter 2’s agent: the outcome prior (seed) drives action (manifest activity), and the experience action brings updates the prior (perfuming). Both describe a loop that sustains itself and can also be changed.

“Transforming consciousness into wisdom” is a summary of what fascicle 10 of the Cheng Weishi Lun describes as turning the eight defiled consciousnesses into the four wisdoms (great mirror wisdom, wisdom of equality, wisdom of wondrous observation, wisdom of accomplishing what is to be done). In Yogācāra this is the final fruit of practice, not a cognitive technique reached in a few exercises; to compare it with “reshaping a prior” says only that both involve a change in fundamental cognitive structure, and no more.

“If one can turn things”

The contrast between “being turned by things” and “turning things” can be read as another statement of Chapter 3’s two routes: a mind pulled by external things has its state set by its input; a mind that can “turn things” is no longer set one-way by its input. This is a goal of religious practice; the sutra’s “same as the Tathāgata” lies far beyond anything a model in cognitive science can discuss.

The value and the limits of reading them together

These three texts share a structure with active inference: the state of mind shapes behaviour and experience, and experience in turn shapes the mind; carried along by the loop, the result looks like fate; become aware of one link in the loop and change it, and the result changes. That is the value of reading them together.

But the reading must not go too far. Yuan’s merit ledger, Yogācāra’s transformation of the basis and the Śūraṅgama’s “same as the Tathāgata” are each embedded in a complete moral and religious system with its own aims and standards; active inference is a mathematical framework whose models are used in this book only to show possible mechanisms. Using either side to “prove” the other is unfair to both.