Huayan Buddhism is regarded as one of the most philosophical schools of Chinese Buddhism, representing the elite-scholar Buddhism under the Tang Dynasty. Its vision of truth is based on the Avatamsaka sutra, the scripture that Huayan masters studied, explained, and commented intensively throughout their lives. This was the common vocation of these monks, which gradually created a lineage of the Huayan tradition, a succession of exegetes who believed that the Avatamsaka sutra was the consummate teaching of Buddha preached directly after his enlightenment under the bodhi tree. Although the base text of Huayan Buddhism was the Avatamsaka sutra, classifed as the round or perfect teaching in the classi?cation of doctrines (panjiao ), other teachings, such as Madhyamaka, Yogacara, and Tathagatagarbha had exerted a great influence on the way Huayan scholars apprehended and interpreted this Mahayana scripture. In this article, we are going to discuss how Yogacara philosophy was evaluated in the context of Huayan Buddhism, how the Huayan masters classifed the consciousness-only teachings, and finally how they applied this philosophy in revealing the purport of the Avatamsaka sutra, formulating its own distinctive school, the round teaching of one vehicle.
