Part Two · The Three Bodies

Part One read the name; this part reads the body.

The name is this freedom's readable aspect—the ten epithets, read off. The body is its visible aspect—the three bodies, seen. Part One set firm that "the Tathāgata's freedom is the ultimate unobstructed freedom"; but that said only what it is. A freedom this ultimate, full to where even the names are complete, must show itself forth—and showing itself forth, in what form?

This part has but one chapter, and that one question is what it answers. At the outset it must screen off a thought all too easy to slip into: to take "ultimate freedom" for a hidden, markless, structureless absolute—as though, being full, it dissolved into a light without distinction, nothing left to see, nothing left to say. Scripture does not so treat the buddha-fruit. The buddha-fruit's freedom has a structure that shows itself, that can be seen—three bodies: dharma-body, enjoyment-body, transformation-body.

But the words "three bodies" raise a second misreading at once: are the three bodies three separate Buddhas? One dharma-body Buddha, one enjoyment-body Buddha, one transformation-body Buddha—three, standing side by side? This chapter says: no. The three bodies are one and the same buddha-fruit freedom, divided by "to whom it appears" into three faces, not three Buddhas.

This chapter's scene is a dialogue. In the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī asks the Buddha, to His face: this "Tathāgata's dharma-body" of which You speak—what, in the end, is its mark? How the Buddha answers—and what He goes on to say of why what the two vehicles attain can be called only a "liberation-body" and not a "dharma-body"—is the gateway of this chapter. Entering by that dialogue, we shall see: how the three bodies appear according to whom they meet, how they are disclosed out of "turning the defiled into the pure," and how they are permanent.

In, then: this freedom shows itself forth as body.