Ziporyn, Brook. "Whitehead and Tiantai: Eternal Objects and the "Twofold Three Thousand." In Whitehead and China: Relevance and Relationship:  113-136.

Abstract

The similarities between Whitehead's process philosophy and the Chinese Buddhist schools of Tiantai and Huayan have often been noted.  In a recent study, for example, Li Rizhang calls Whitehead's philosophy a "western version of the doctrine of dependent co-arising and Emptiness." These two Buddhist schools and Whitehead agree, he says, on the following points: the denial of simple location, the denial of the independence of objects, and the denial of the absolute division of subject and object.  More essentially, both assert that every object is "in a sense everwhere at once." But then he points out what he considered the two greatest differences, for there are two points found in Whitehead which, he feels, have no corresponding notion in the Chinese Buddhist schools: Whitehead's notion of God and his idea of "eternal objects." The latter is regarded by Li as a holdover from the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, a connection Whitehead himself makes as well.  The implication is that the Buddhist versions, having no such antecedent in their tradition, find no reason for recourse to this notion.  I will argue in the paper that, while this may be true of Huauan thought, which would seem to see no use for the eternal objects, the Tiantai philosophy of Siming Zhili (960-1028) has its own doctrine corresponding to that of Whitehead's eternal objects, which forms an integral and central part of his metaphysics and philosophy of praxis.  From a Huayan perspective, or one primarily focused on it, the eternal objects are indeed a usless holdover from Plato, perhaps representing a regrettable obsession peculiar to the occidental mind.  From Zhili's perspective, however, Whitehead's problem is not that he posits the eternal objects, but that he does not pursue this idea far enough.  For the difference between Whitehead's eternal objects and Zhili's "Three Thousand as Inherent Principle" (liju sanqian) is that while the former form a realm of their own distinct from the actual occasion into which they may ingress, the latter are simply an alternate way of referring to the "Three Thousand as transforming and created" - they are the totality of actual occasion themselves.