Part Six · The Refused Rest
By now the faces of the bodhisattva's mastery have all been read: how the vow arises, how the two provisions are amassed, how the six and ten perfections take shape, how the four embraces gather that shape into pure altruism, how the forbearance of non-arising makes its cognitive floor, how effortless non-regress is that floor come down into mastery, how the ten masteries call it out item by item. This last part asks the question that has lain buried all along, never answered head-on: a person this free—where, in the end, does he rest?
The earlier parts kept letting the question's edge show. Part One said the bodhisattva, at the door of nirvāṇa, "can not take it"—so if he neither takes nirvāṇa nor is bound by birth-and-death, where does he stop? Parts Four and Five said the eighth-ground bodhisattva, already effortless and unable to regress, the ten fears undone, is still urged by the buddhas to "not rest; rise; go on"—he will not let himself rest even there. This part answers head-on: the bodhisattva's mastery rests in a resting-place that "rests nowhere"—not resting in birth-and-death (unbound by it), nor resting in the quiescence of nirvāṇa (not taking the cessation that was his to take). The canon gives this "stopping at neither" a name: the nirvāṇa of no fixed abode. So this part is called "The Refused Rest": he has refused the final rest that was his to take.
Two chapters. The first speaks of this "mooring at neither bank," the nirvāṇa of no fixed abode—where, in the end, the bodhisattva's mastery rests. The second returns to the sentence set down on the book's first page and held all along, and brings it round whole: what, finally, is the relation between the bodhisattva's mastery and the arhat's. From the start the book has held to one line—"different in kind, not in height": one "able to leave, and leaving" (taking that final rest), one "able to leave, and not leaving" (refusing that final rest), both true, opposite in direction. How that last judgment comes down is the load-bearing close of the whole book.
One line must be set up at the door first, and this part especially must keep it. Below, several very large questions come up—whether the two-vehicle's nirvāṇa is ultimate, whether the śrāvaka must turn from the lesser toward the great, how the buddha's perfected fruit-stage mastery joins the bodhisattva's causal-stage mastery. These "vertical" adjudications—who is ultimate, who must turn back, how the fruit is perfected—are not what this book sets out to settle for you; they are for the author to weigh in person, and an edge to be touched in the tathāgata part to come. In this part the book does only one "horizontal" thing: to set the two masteries side by side, to see clearly where they differ in kind, and why they should not be set on one ruler and ranked. To judge their difference, not their height—that is this part's measure.
Into the first chapter: a person who will not stop even at nirvāṇa—where, then, does his mastery rest?