Trusting It Through

4.1 Trusting It Through

The corridor asked: on what strength can the bodhisattva not take the realization, return into birth-and-death without sinking, get into the water without drowning? This chapter answers—on a "seeing," on a reality he settles into at the moment of entering the grounds. The canon calls it the forbearance of non-arising.

First take the name apart. "Non-arising" is the reality trusted: all dharmas are, from the first, unarisen (and so beyond ceasing too). "Forbearance" (kṣānti) is the mind's stance toward that reality—trusting it, resting in it. Together, the forbearance of non-arising is "settled trust in, and rest upon, the reality that all dharmas are unarisen."

The first thing is to clear away a very common misreading: taking this "forbearance" for "endurance," and so taking the forbearance of non-arising for an advanced edition of the "patience" among the six perfections—as if it were a deeper bearing-up. That is wholly twisted. Patience (kṣānti as the second part called it) is "conduct"—bearing others' abuse, cold and heat and hunger, without a vengeful mind; what it faces is adversity. The "forbearance" of non-arising is "cognition"—what it faces is reality, and what it does is "trust and rest in." The two are one root in Sanskrit, but one falls on "able to bear a wrong," the other on "able to trust a truth." This chapter speaks of the latter.

What it sees: all dharmas, like empty space

What does the forbearance of non-arising see? The Avataṃsaka's Ten Grounds says it plainly, at the eighth, Immovable ground:

Apart from all discriminating thought of mind, will, and consciousness, grasping nothing, like empty space, entering all dharmas as having the nature of empty space—this is called gaining the forbearance of non-arising. Sons of the Buddha! A bodhisattva who accomplishes this forbearance at once enters the eighth, Immovable ground.

(This "eighth, Immovable ground" is just the eighth of the ten grounds named in Part Two—Joy, Stainless, Radiant, Blazing, Hard-to-Conquer, Present, Far-Reaching, Immovable, Good-Insight, Dharma-Cloud; what this part and the next describe—the forbearance of non-arising, the ten masteries, the nirvāṇa of no fixed abode—all falls on this eighth rung, the Immovable ground.)

"Apart from all discriminating thought of mind, will, and consciousness"—setting down the mind habituated to discriminate and grasp; "entering all dharmas as having the nature of empty space"—directly seeing all dharmas as, like empty space, arisen from nowhere, grasping nowhere. The Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra gives its contemplation:

If a bodhisattva can contemplate all dharmas as neither arising nor ceasing, neither not-arising nor not-ceasing … single-mindedly accepting and bearing the wisdom of true reality used by all the buddhas of the ten directions, which nothing can break and nothing can move—this is called the dharma of the forbearance of non-arising.

Mark the care in that line. It does not only say "contemplate all dharmas as neither arising nor ceasing"; it adds "neither not-arising nor not-ceasing." Saying "neither arising nor ceasing" first strikes down the grasping at "dharmas as really arising and ceasing"; adding "neither not-arising nor not-ceasing" then strikes down grasping at "neither arising nor ceasing" as itself a real thing—falling into the other pit, "all is annihilated, nothing at all." Neither end may be grasped—this is the middle way, not a seeing of the world as voided, as gone. "Like empty space" says it is unobstructed, ungraspable, unarisen and unceasing; it does not say it is blankly empty, a nothing.

Not figured out, but seen

Here is a distinction that is the key to the whole chapter: the forbearance of non-arising is not "having figured out a doctrine," but "having seen a reality with one's own eyes." The two are far apart. A person can have the doctrine "all dharmas neither arise nor cease" by heart, expound it fluently—that is "knowing it as a concept," using the very mind habituated to discriminate to think, to infer, to assent to a proposition. The forbearance of non-arising is not this. It is the direct seeing that comes once "all discriminating thought of mind, will, and consciousness" is set down: the mind habituated to discriminate—to cut the world into "me" and "things" and then grasp at them—is set down whole; and as it is set down, the "solid, real things" it had grasped dissolve along with it, showing their original "empty-space" nature. The crucial point: the discriminating mind that sees and the solid appearance that is seen are set down together, dissolve together—it is not that "I" stand on this side and "look" at a thing called "reality" over there (that would still be discriminating, still grasping), but that grasper and grasped fall away at once, and reality is present then and there. This is what "direct seeing" means—seen on the spot, not inferred at the remove of a concept.

A comparison makes it plain. To have the doctrine "water has buoyancy; a person is lighter than water and so floats" by heart (knowing it as a concept), and actually to lie down into the water and be held up by it, floating (witnessing it in the body), are two different things. The first is "knowing about floating"; the second is "the body's having truly trusted the water"—and only with the second does one dare, in the water, to relax and not thrash. The forbearance of non-arising is the latter: not the head knowing the saying "dharmas do not arise," but the mind's having itself witnessed the fact that "all dharmas are like empty space."

Why "forbearance": trusting a truth that runs against the grain

So why the word "forbearance," and not "knowing," not "realizing"? Because the truth that "all dharmas are from the first unarisen" runs against the grain of how we know. This mind of ours, lifelong, is habituated to see things arise and cease, solid and real; to say now "all dharmas are unarisen, like empty space" runs counter to the mind's habit, and so the first time it hears, the first time it contemplates, the mind "cannot settle"—it instinctively resists, dares not trust. To be able, before this counter-intuitive truth, to settle and to trust without alarm and without retreat—that is "forbearance": able to bear it, to trust it, to rest in it. The Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra describes that state in a few words: "the mind penetrating without obstruction, immovable and irreversible"—the mind has penetrated reality, no longer snags, no longer resists, and so it does not move, does not regress. And it gives a weighty appraisal: this is "the first gate that aids the buddha-path."

A comparison. A person afraid of heights steps onto the clear glass walkway at the outer edge of a tall tower. He "knows," rationally, that the glass is thick, will not break, that he cannot fall—yet with the chasm under his feet his whole body still trembles, he dares not move. Why? Because the appearance of "an abyss underfoot" runs against his instinct, and his mind "cannot settle" on the truth that he is in fact safe. Until a moment comes when his whole being truly "trusts it through"—not the head knowing, but the whole person settling, no longer trembling—then he can walk across with "the mind penetrating without obstruction, immovable." The forbearance of non-arising is just such an accomplishment of "trusting it through": not the head knowing the doctrine "dharmas are unarisen," but the whole mind settling onto that reality, no longer resisting or wavering. That settling done, the mastery is truly immovable.

Just because it is "the mind's settled trust in a truth," it is the cognitive seal of the bodhisattva's mastery, not one more good deed to be done. It marks not "the bodhisattva did something more," but "this mind of the bodhisattva, in how it sees reality, has settled in a way it can never go back from."

So this is what held it all up

By now, looking back, one thing can be seen: the powers the first three parts described all rested, underneath, on this one "seeing."

Part One said the bodhisattva, at the door of nirvāṇa, can "not take the realization" and not fall into the śrāvaka ground. On what strength does he not take it, not fall? At the time it was put only as: on the eye of "the wisdom of the unattainable emptiness." That eye, seen to the bottom, is just this chapter's "contemplating all dharmas as neither arising nor ceasing, as having the nature of empty space." Part Two said prajñā is the "eye" for the six perfections' hands, guiding the five to "not abide," to cross to the far shore. What that eye guides them to see is likewise just this reality—prajñā, as prajñā, has the unarisen for its deepest seeing. Part Three said the bodhisattva can get into the very same water of birth-and-death as beings and not himself drown. On what strength does he stay afloat in the water that drowns others? On just this: he has seen that this water "has the nature of empty space"—the water is still water, he still delivers beings in it, but he knows in his heart it has no real self-nature with which to drown him, and so it does not.

So what the first three parts spoke of was all hands and feet—the hand that vows, the hands that give and keep precepts, the hand that gathers beings in; what this chapter has touched is the eye that holds up all those hands and feet. The hands can move because the eye has seen the road; the bodhisattva's various deeds can be "non-abiding, not-taking, not-sinking" because beneath this mind there is laid the trusted-through seeing that "all dharmas are from the first unarisen." Without this seeing, however magnificent the vows and deeds, the root still floats—seeing dharmas as real and grasping at them, a person regresses all the same when great adversity comes. With this seeing, the root goes down into reality, and only then are all the prior deeds truly "immovable." This is why it is only here, in this fourth part, at the forbearance of non-arising, that the root of the bodhisattva's mastery is at last touched to the bottom.

Onward

Gather the chapter into a sentence: the forbearance of non-arising is the cognitive seal of the bodhisattva's mastery—the mind directly sees "all dharmas like empty space, from the first unarisen," trusts it, rests in it, and so the mastery does not move. It is not endurance, but settled trust; not figuring out a doctrine, but the whole person turning over and coming to rest on reality—and the vows and deeds of the first three parts all rest, underneath, on it.

As for which ground this turn falls at—the seventh, the eighth, or whether it is partly realized the moment one enters the grounds at the path of seeing—the masters judge differently, and this book takes no side; we hold to the turn itself, and do not contend over which slot it hangs in.

But the words have reached only "the mind no longer moves." That sounds like stillness, like ceasing to stir. Yet the canon says just the opposite: once this mind settles into reality, its acting instead "goes by itself," and can never "slide back." The next chapter looks at the two shapes the mastery takes after this "trusting it through."