Transition Three · From the Four Embraces, to the Patience of the Unborn

Part Three is walked. Take stock in the corridor.

Part Three gave one thing, but said it deep. The four embraces—giving, kind speech, beneficial conduct, shared work—are the purely other-benefiting shape of the bodhisattva's mastery, a complete work for "leading a person from a distance up onto the path." And "shared work" among them uncovered a weighty sentence: the bodhisattva's mastery is not capital stored in the heart, but something seen, verified, and made effective only within the relationship of "being in the same water with beings." Add that the four embraces grow with the grounds, and that their realm the śrāvaka cannot see—and this is how this book reads it: altruism is mastery. Mastery is not apart from altruism; it shows itself within the relationship of embracing beings.

By now four faces of the bodhisattva's mastery have been read: how the vow arises (Part One), how the two provisions are amassed (Part One), how the six and ten perfections take shape (Part Two), how the four embraces gather that shape into pure altruism (Part Three). But looking back, all four read the same outer aspect—what the bodhisattva does. The vow is arousing the mind to act; the provisions are amassed; the perfections and embraces are practiced, one deed at a time. All of it is "doing."

But a question underneath has been passed by every time: on what strength can he do these things?

On what strength does he not take the realization at the door of nirvāṇa? On what strength does he return into the flood of birth-and-death, soaked for measureless eons, his heart neither weary nor drowned? On what strength does he get into the same water as beings and not himself go under? A person who has seen nothing, settled on nothing, could not sustain such a road—"plainly able to leave, yet not leaving; plainly able to sink in the very water, yet staying afloat." What sustains all this lies not in "what he does," but in "what he has seen"—in a seeing, a settledness, won at the moment of entering the grounds.

This seeing the canon calls the patience of the unborn—the settled acceptance of the view that "things are, from the first, unarisen." It is the cognitive seal of entering the grounds: not one more deed to be done, but the floor that lets every prior deed stand. The first three parts spoke of hands and feet; this part speaks of the steadiness behind the eyes—what he has seen, that he dares to not-take so, to return so, to get into the water so.

Carry this question in: what kind of view has the bodhisattva settled into, grown patient with, such that it can bear up a whole mastery of "able to leave and not leaving, into the water and not sinking"?