Transition Four · From the Forbearance of Non-Arising, to the Ten Masteries

Part Four is walked. Take stock in the corridor.

Part Four turned the direction around. The first three parts read what the bodhisattva does; this part read what he sees and settles into—the cognitive floor that holds up all that doing. That floor is the forbearance of non-arising: the mind directly sees "all dharmas, from the first unarisen, like empty space," and trusts it, rests in it—not endurance, but settled trust; not knowing a doctrine, but the whole mind turning over to rest on reality. And once this "trusting it through" is accomplished, the mastery shows two shapes: it goes by itself (no strain, flowing of itself), and it cannot slide back (rooted in reality, nothing able to break or move it). One positive, one negative, both that single "the mind does not move."

But the name "Immovable ground" is most easily heard as a dead stillness—as if here a person just sits, and is nothing further. The last chapter already let slip a contrary word: the Buddhas must urge him "do not stop; rise, go on delivering beings." Which shows that "immovable" is not "nothing left at all"; within the "immovable," precisely, there is power in full.

This power in full the canon counts out as ten items—each called a "mastery."

Mastery over his own lifespan (to abide long in the world to deliver beings, he abides long); mastery over his own mind (entering measureless samādhis without disturbance); mastery over what he enjoys, over deeds, over birth, over vows, over conviction, over miraculous transformation, over wisdom, over the Dharma … reaching this step, the bodhisattva gains mastery in each of these ten. The "Immovable ground," it turns out, is no stagnant pool; it is a realm of unobstructed mastery in ten matters—its "immovability" the kind that "moves however it will, yet nothing can move it."

But here the most crucial line, and the most easily blurred, must be set up first in the corridor. These "ten masteries" are the bodhisattva's ten masteries—masteries of the causal stage. The Buddha too has "ten masteries" (or the ten powers, the eighteen distinctive qualities, those fruit-stage masteries), and those are of the fruit stage, full and complete. The "you have not yet attained" the Buddha said to the eighth-ground bodhisattva in the last chapter draws just this line: however high the bodhisattva's ten masteries, they are still parted from the Tathāgata's by a stretch of road not yet completed. Carelessly, one takes the eighth-ground bodhisattva's ten masteries for the Buddha's full mastery—and that one blurring flattens the whole road from the eighth ground to buddhahood.

So the next part looks at these "bodhisattva's ten masteries" on their own: which ten they are, in what way each is a mastery, and—where, exactly, the line is drawn between them and the Tathāgata's ten.

Carry this question in: the ten masteries the bodhisattva gains within the "immovable"—where is their freedom; and why are they still not the Buddha's?