Transition Five · From the Ten Masteries, to the Nirvāṇa of No Fixed Abode

Part Five is walked. Take stock in the corridor.

Part Five brought the book's title down to its most concrete. The "mastery" of The Bodhisattva's Mastery, by the eighth ground, is called out item by item—over life, mind, wealth, karma, birth, vow, resolve, psychic power, knowledge, Dharma; ten doors. Along the line "the ten masteries undo the ten fears," "mastery" came down to the ground: it is that the ten matters which fenced and frightened a person (death, poverty, falling, doubt, quailing before a crowd …) can fence him in no longer. And these ten doors all open toward beings—a mastery "displayed to beings," not enjoyed behind a closed door; displayed without strain, because at the Immovable ground the path won before rouses of itself. But in this part the book held a line: to mark clearly that this is the "bodhisattva's" causal-stage ten masteries, belonging to a place apart from the Buddha's fruit-stage ten—while not weighing which is higher, and not joining how they connect; that is left for what follows.

And at this part's close a strange question was left, fit to hand to the last part.

The eighth-ground bodhisattva is already so free—the ten fears undone, going by himself, unable to slide back—why does he still not stop? Why do the Buddhas still so urgently urge him, "do not rest; rise; go on"? A person already this free might well settle here. Yet he will not. This "will not stop" is the bodhisattva's mastery's last, and deepest, seal.

Where will he not stop? In neither of two places.

One is birth-and-death. He might well weary of this flood and seek a way out into deliverance—yet he chooses to stay soaked in it to deliver beings, "through measureless eons of birth-and-death his heart not sinking" (Part One said it). He is not bound by birth-and-death, yet neither does he flee it—he does not abide in birth-and-death. The other is nirvāṇa. He has plainly reached the door of nirvāṇa, plainly could take the realization and enter the quiescence (that near-cessation stillness of the eighth ground, the last chapter said, so still the Buddhas must urge him not to cling)—yet he does not take that realization, does not stop in that stillness. He does not abide in nirvāṇa.

Birth-and-death—unbound, yet unfleeing; nirvāṇa—reachable, yet untaken. Stopping at neither end—the ground of this "abiding in neither" the canon calls the nirvāṇa of no fixed abode. This is the floor under the Buddhas' "urging him to rise": what they urge is not "do not rest" in general, but that he not stop even at this last resting-place, the stillness of nirvāṇa.

The last part has two chapters. The first speaks of this "abiding in neither," the nirvāṇa of no fixed abode—where the bodhisattva's mastery finally rests. The second returns to the sentence set down on the book's first page and held all along, and brings it round whole: how the two masteries—the bodhisattva's and the arhat's—are finally to be seen side by side. From its first page the book has held to "different in kind, not in height"—one "able to leave, and leaving," one "able to leave, and not leaving," both true, opposite in direction. How that final weighing comes down is the load-bearing close of the whole book, and part of it, too, is left for the author to settle.

Carry this question into the last part: a person who will not stop even at nirvāṇa—where, then, does his mastery rest?