Part Four · The Forbearance of Non-Arising

The first three parts all read the bodhisattva by "what he does"—how the vow arises, how the two provisions are amassed, how the six perfections and four embraces are practiced, one deed at a time. All of it work of the hands and feet. This part turns around and reads "what he has seen."

For underneath the hands and feet, something must hold them up. On what strength can a person not take the realization at the door of nirvāṇa, stay soaked in measureless eons of birth-and-death without his heart sinking, get into the same water as beings and not himself drown? If he has seen nothing in his heart, settled into nothing, he could not bear up such a road—"able to leave and yet not leaving, able to sink in the very water and yet staying afloat." What sustains all this lies not in how much he does, but in "what he has seen and settled into"—in a seeing, a patient acceptance, won at the moment of entering the grounds. The canon calls it the forbearance of non-arising.

Two chapters. The first says what that "seeing" is: the forbearance of non-arising—not "forbearance" in the sense of endurance, but the mind's settled trust in, and rest upon, the reality that "all dharmas are, from the first, unarisen"; the bodhisattva's one irreversible turn on the side of cognition. The second says what that seeing looks like once it is settled: at that step (the canon calls it the "Immovable ground"), acting is no longer effortful—it goes by itself (effortless flow); and the position can no longer slide back (irreversibility). An "it goes by itself" and a "it cannot slide back," both that one "settling into reality so the mind does not move," come down into the shape of mastery.

Two cautions first, against misreading. One: this "forbearance" is not endurance—take it for "enduring harder" and it is wholly twisted; it is "trusting it through," the mind's utter reliance on a truth. Two: at which ground this turn falls (the seventh, the eighth, or earlier) the masters judge differently, and this book takes no side—we hold only to the turn itself: once the mind truly settles into reality, the mastery becomes immovable. And one plain word to set down here first: however high this ground's mastery, it is still a matter of the causal stage; even at the eighth ground, the Buddhas remind the bodhisattva to his face, "you have not yet attained" buddhahood.

Into the first chapter: that seeing which holds everything up—what, exactly, does it see, and why is it called "forbearance"?