Part Five · The Ten Masteries

Part Four ended by saying: the "Immovable ground" is no stagnant pool; reaching it, the bodhisattva instead gains power in full, which the canon counts as ten items, each called a "mastery." This part lays those ten out, one by one.

This is where the book's title comes down to the ground. The whole book is called The Bodhisattva's Mastery, and "mastery" is its very bone; and in the canon, the place where the bodhisattva's mastery is set out most concretely, item by named item, is just the eighth ground's "ten masteries"—over life, mind, wealth, karma, birth, vow, resolve, psychic power, knowledge, and the Dharma; mastery in each of these ten. Each earlier chapter's mastery was the seal of some single face (the seal of not-taking, of amassing, of altruism, of immovability, of effortless non-regress); at these ten masteries, mastery is enumerated—called out one by one. So this part is the book's most concrete chapter on that one word, "mastery."

This chapter has a fine way in: the canon says these ten masteries serve "to counter ten fears." That is, the opposite of mastery is fear—a person fears death, fears poverty, fears how he himself will turn out … ; and the bodhisattva's gaining the ten masteries is just these ten fears, one by one, no longer able to fence him in. Read along the line "the ten masteries undo the ten fears," and "mastery," that slightly abstract word, comes down to the ground: mastery is, in these ten matters, no longer being fenced in by fear, moving freely through. And the mastery of these ten gates is, in each, "displayed toward beings"—not enjoyed behind a closed door, but shown, gate by gate, to beings, used to deliver beings (this takes up Part Three's "altruism is mastery").

But this part also has a most crucial line, most easily stepped over, to set up straight here first. These "ten masteries" exist at the fruit stage too (the Buddha has his own "ten masteries of the buddhas"). Carelessly, one takes the eighth-ground bodhisattva's ten masteries for the Buddha's full mastery. The canon's wording here is most careful: it says "this bodhisattva gains these bodhisattva's ten masteries"—repeating "bodhisattva" pointedly, marking these as the ten masteries of the causal stage, not the fruit. And the Buddhas say to the eighth-ground bodhisattva's face: the buddha's ten powers, fearlessnesses, eighteen distinctive qualities, "you have not yet attained." So at this part the book holds to one thing: to mark clearly the "causal-stage" standing of these ten masteries—however concrete and complete, they are still the bodhisattva's causal-stage mastery, belonging to a place apart from the Tathāgata's fruit-stage mastery. As to which of the two masteries is higher, and how they connect, this part does not weigh and does not join—that is the edge the last part touches, and a matter left to the author to adjudicate.

Into the first chapter: these ten doors of mastery, one by one, what each is; how they undo ten fears; and why they are still not the Buddha's.