Part One · Mastery Begins in the Vow

This part has two chapters, but before them it must do something larger than either: set up how the whole book sees.

"The bodhisattva's mastery"—four words easily misread as a sum. As if the arhat first won a measure of mastery, and the bodhisattva, on top of it, accrued a little more, walked a little farther, and gained "a greater mastery of the same kind." So "arhat first, bodhisattva after" gets taken not only as the order of practice but as the order of mastery: one ruler, the arhat marked to one notch, the bodhisattva to a higher one. The first thing this book does is put that ruler away. In the canon the bodhisattva's mastery rests on no prior fruit—it rests on a single thought of aspiration; and it is not measured by "how cleanly one has severed"—it is measured by "how much one has amassed, and for whom, and amassed without setting any limit of 'enough.'" Once the vow arises, this mastery has its ground; the three incalculable eons of accumulation that follow fill out the very mastery that vow opened—not some other mastery set on top of the four fruits. So this part is called "Mastery Begins in the Vow": mastery arises from the vow, not as a sequel to the fruit.

This book has a twin volume that comes before it—The Arhat's Mastery. That volume writes the view from inside the gate: the arhat's mastery is the seal that the exhaustion of the taints makes legible, the freedom of "no cord can bind him any longer"; reaching that exhaustion, he takes the realization, takes up no further becoming, and goes out of birth-and-death. This volume follows that one, and at once turns around: standing at the very same door through which one may walk out, the bodhisattva does not walk out. Not that he cannot—he has long been fit to leave and chooses not to. That volume's mastery is signed in "able to leave, and leaving"; this volume's is signed in "able to leave, and not leaving." Two masteries, opposite in direction, both true mastery. From first page to last this book holds one sentence and will not loosen its grip: the bodhisattva's mastery and the arhat's are different in kind, not in height. One measures "how cleanly one departs," the other "how fully one can stay"; you cannot measure a person who has chosen to stay by "how cleanly he departed," any more than you can measure a steelyard with a ruler.

Into the first chapter, then: within that one thought of aspiration, where the mastery begins; and at that door standing open, why he does not walk through.