Part Six · The Perfected Freedom
The first five parts took this freedom apart into four headings and read them through—name, body, wisdom, function. But these four headings are, after all, one and the same freedom; and when they gather back into one, perfected upon a Buddha, this "perfection" itself has an aspect of its own. This last part reads that aspect of perfection. And it is here that this whole book, together with the two axes behind it, comes to its close.
This part has two chapters.
The first reads two aspects of fruit-level perfection. One is the Tathāgata's ten masteries. Part One laid a thread in waiting: a bodhisattva of the eighth ground has already attained a set of "ten masteries," but the scripture went on to say the buddhas have, besides, a set the eighth-ground bodhisattva "has not yet attained." That set is the cause-ground's; the fruit-ground's is another. This chapter opens that fruit-ground set—it has for its aspect "never using the least skillful effort" (manifesting all buddhas in a single thought, yet not stirring a hair's breadth of skillful effort), the perfection of effortless spontaneity, not the eighth ground's causal set brightened. The other is the four virtues of the great nirvāṇa: permanence, bliss, self, purity. The scripture plainly judges that the world too has permanence-bliss-self-purity and the supramundane too has it, but the world's is inverted (words without meaning), and only the great nirvāṇa's, supramundane, has words with meaning. Of these, the virtue of "self"—the Nirvāṇa says "self is the sense of the tathāgatagarbha," "all beings have the buddha-nature, which is the sense of self"—is the deepest and most delicate point of this whole line; here this book only records the scripture, and leaves the definitive sense of this "self" to the author to adjudicate, pronouncing no judgment in his stead.
The second chapter is the book's last, and reads this freedom's final "terminus." The buddha-fruit's mastery, perfected to the utmost—where is its ultimate return? Is it a cessation, like the two vehicles' ash-body and extinguished-wisdom entering the without-remainder nirvāṇa? This chapter says: no. The terminus of the buddha-fruit's mastery is the ultimate non-abiding nirvāṇa—not abiding in birth-and-death, nor abiding in nirvāṇa, delivering beings unceasingly yet ever-quiescent in substance; taking "non-abiding" for its mastery, not "cessation" for its end. And this book's keynote all along, "unobstructedness," here reaches its name—the unobstructed liberation. It is here, too, that this freedom reaches its seam: the single thought-moment of the vajra-like samādhi, which the axis of realization reads as "arrival" (the path's last step), and the axis of attainment reads as "the mastery after arrival" (the ultimate with no step further)—one and the same thought-moment, one and the same turning, where the two axes meet and end.
In, then, to the first chapter: without the least effort.