Essence-Function - Interpenetration and Nonduality

Interpenetration and Nonduality

'Interpenetration' or 'coalescence' (Wylie: zung 'jug; Sanskrit: yuganaddha; Chinese: 通達) and Essence-Function are mutually informing and fundamentally related doctrinally.

Sung-bae Park (1983: p. 147) identifies essence-function as an East Asian Buddhist strategy to convey nonduality:

Since the t'i-yung or "essence-function" construction is originally used by East Asian Buddhists to show a non-dualistic and non-discriminate nature in their enlightenment experience, it should not exclude any other frameworks such as neng-so or "subject-object" constructions. Nevertheless the essence-function construction must be distinguished from the subject-object construction from a scholastic perspective because the two are completely different from each other in terms of their way of thinking.