Part One · The Ground Where Naming Is Full

The twin volume, Equal and Sublime Awakening, laid down its pen before a door.

It wrote out, to the full, "how one walks there"—how the four fruits sever the fetters, how the fifty stations amass the provisions, how equal-awakening is off by one, how the adamantine concentration severs that one in a single instant—and writing up to sublime-awakening, it read one word: arrived. The view inside the door, it said—what manner of freedom that "no further step to walk" finally is—belongs to another volume. The road hands on its baton at the door.

This volume sets out from inside that door.

The same sublime-awakening: that volume reads "arrived," this volume reads "the freedom of no longer needing to walk, once one has arrived." As with a traveler come home—one ledger records that he walked up to the door, the other his ease once inside: every movement unhindered. The first ledger the twin volume has closed; this one opens here. Hence the title of this part: the ground where naming is full. The ground where walking ends is the ground where naming is full—walk there, and the road is exhausted; be there, and the being is full; and full to such a degree that even the names are complete.

This part has two chapters, but first it must do something larger than either: set up the reading of the whole book.

The first thing is to be clear about this matter of "names." Scripture certifies the buddha-fruit not by drawing up a checklist of "what He can do," but by a set of epithets—Thus-Come, Worthy-of-Offerings, Rightly-and-Fully-Awakened, Perfect-in-Knowledge-and-Conduct, Well-Gone, Knower-of-the-World, Unsurpassed-One, Tamer-of-Persons, Teacher-of-Gods-and-Humans, Buddha-World-Honored-One. Ten names. That a Buddha is a Buddha is signed by these ten. Which forces a strange question: why is the highest of all arrivals certified by names? This volume's answer: because at the buddha-fruit the freedom has grown so full that it can be "named to the full"—name and being, here, become one thing. The ten epithets are not ten certificates He goes off to earn beyond severance; they are the readable signature of that full freedom—see the signature complete, and you know the being is full. Chapter one is about this.

The second thing is to guard against a most natural confusion. At the eighth ground the bodhisattva, too, scripture plainly says, "attains ten masteries"—over life, mind, wealth, karma, birth, vow, resolve, will, knowledge, dharma: ten exactly, each called a mastery. Same number, same word. The handiest picture follows at once: the Tathāgata's ten masteries are simply the bodhisattva's "turned up a notch, magnified a round"—one set of masteries, dimmer at the bodhisattva's station, brighter at the Buddha's, and pushed to the end of a brightening spectrum, that is the Buddha. This book says: no. Those are two distinct sets, a qualitative break between fruit and cause, not the dim and bright of one mastery. Chapter two points out that break—and points to it exactly where the Buddhas, face to face with the eighth-ground bodhisattva, say the words "you have not yet attained."

With these two set up, the foundation of the whole volume is laid: the Tathāgata's freedom is the ultimate unobstructed freedom, signed by the ten epithets; naming-full is being-full. The three bodies, four wisdoms, ten powers, marks, great compassion, ten masteries, and four qualities that the later five parts unfold are all only the contents this one signature signs, read out one face at a time.

In, then, to chapter one: inside that door, the first thing seen is one person's ten names.