Reading Map　How to Read This Book

This book reads one mastery to you—the buddha-fruit's mastery. It reads in six parts. First, let me point the six out—with a map in mind, even a long road reads without alarm.

Six Stretches of Road

Part One · The Land Where the Name Is Full. First, set the frame. A Buddha has ten names—Thus-Come, Worthy-of-Offerings, Rightly-and-Fully-Awakened, on through Buddha and World-Honored One. This part's first chapter says: these ten names are not ten titles affixed from without, but ten faces of one and the same mastery; the name is full precisely because the reality is already full (the name's fullness is the mastery's fullness). The second chapter draws a contrast: a bodhisattva of the eighth ground has already attained a set of "ten masteries," but the scripture says the buddhas have, besides, a fruit-ground set "not yet attained"—two sets, not one set brightened. The book's whole frame (name and reality coincide; the fruit-level is not the causal-level brightened) is in this part.

Part Two · The Three Bodies. Mastery shows a body. The markless dharma-body beings cannot lay hold of; to deliver beings, a Buddha shows a reward-body and a transformation-body. This part reads: the three bodies are not three Buddhas, but one mastery showing three faces according to the beings it faces (manifested according to capacity); and these three bodies are disclosed by the "transformation of the basis"—shown forth of themselves once the defiled is turned into the pure, not three bodies fetched from elsewhere.

Part Three · The Four Wisdoms. Mastery's cognition. A Buddha's four wisdoms—great-perfect-mirror, equality, wondrous-observing, duty-fulfilling—are not four spirit-cognitions acquired apart from severing the defilements, but are "turned" out of the eight consciousnesses (turned, not acquired). This part is wholly a chapter of treatise, like a mirror with its dust ground away: the dust ground off, the bright shining appears of itself, not a new mirror fetched once the dust is gone. Name, body, wisdom—at this point the three are one sentence: all "turned, disclosed," not acquired from without.

Part Four · The Powers, Fearlessnesses, and Distinctive Dharmas. Mastery's function, turned toward beings. The ten powers are "powers of wisdom" (each a kind of "knowing-as-it-is," not spirit-power); the four fearlessnesses are the lion's roar of wisdom-and-severance complete; the eighteen distinctive dharmas are virtues the buddha-ground alone possesses fully (non-lapse, non-diminution, action following wisdom, the three-times knowledge unobstructed); the four analytical knowledges are the unimpeded penetration of teaching. This part reads two faces: the function's "completeness" (the ten powers, the eighteen distinctive dharmas—self-benefit complete), and the function's "opening-out" (the four fearlessnesses, the four analytical knowledges—other-benefit unobstructed). The book's keynote, "unobstructedness," is densest in this part's terms.

Part Five · The Marks, the Great Compassion, the All-Kinds Wisdom. Reading "function" a layer deeper. The first chapter reads the marks and signs: the thirty-two marks and eighty signs are a seal this mastery shows upon its form-body, a seal that can be seen—neither the essence of buddha-virtue nor an irrelevant ornament, set just against Part One's ten epithets, the seal that can be read. The second chapter reads the great compassion and the all-kinds wisdom: the great compassion is the root by which this function cannot but deliver (without great compassion, no Buddha), the all-kinds wisdom the fullness by which it can deliver all (prajñā arrived at fruit-level fullness). Here the function turns, in full breadth, toward beings.

Part Six · The Perfected Freedom. Mastery's perfection, and its final return. The first chapter reads two aspects of fruit-level perfection: the Tathāgata's ten masteries (with "never using the least skillful effort," effortless spontaneity, for their aspect), and the great nirvāṇa's four virtues—permanence, bliss, self, purity (of which the virtue of "self" this book only records from scripture, leaving the telling to the author). The last chapter reads this mastery's final "terminus": the ultimate non-abiding nirvāṇa—not abiding in birth-and-death, nor in nirvāṇa, taking "non-abiding" for its mastery, not "cessation" for its end. The keynote "unobstructedness" here reaches its name (the unobstructed liberation). The whole book, and both axes, close here.

Five Bridges

Between the six parts lie five "transitions." They are short—bridges between road and road, gathering up what came and looking out to what comes, before the next stretch. Do not skip them; each part's question is first asked on the bridge.

Three Ways to Read, as You Please

One, walk from head to tail. This is best. The book is one ascending argument: Part One sets the frame (name and reality coincide), Parts Two and Three read the mastery's body and wisdom (manifested by capacity; turned, not acquired), Parts Four and Five read the mastery's function turned toward beings (completeness, opening-out, marks, compassion, all-kinds wisdom), Part Six gathers it into perfection and into that "resting-place of non-abiding." With no stretch missing, that line "name and reality coincide, unobstructed is not unending" comes round.

Two, if pressed, read Part One first. The frame is handed over there. With its two chapters read, you hold the book's most essential thing—the pair "the name's fullness is the mastery's fullness" and "the fruit-level is not the causal-level brightened"; whichever later stretch answers your heart, you can go there and still read it.

Three, come with a question, read to the stretch. Doubting whether "becoming a Buddha is a higher rung," go to Parts One and Six; wishing to know how a Buddha delivers beings by the three bodies and by the marks, go to Parts Two and Five; harboring a doubt that a Buddha's wisdom and powers are acquired spirit-powers, Parts Three and Four are written for you; wishing to see how the two axes close and whether the buddha-fruit's terminus is a cessation, go to the last chapter. But wherever you go first, please supply Part One—without the frame in hand, each stretch's words go awry.

A Few Small Conventions

• Of "a Buddha," this book uses the reverential pronoun (rendered here as "He," capitalized); of bodhisattvas and practitioners, "he." The Teacher's holy name is written "Homage to the Fundamental Teacher, Śākyamuni Buddha."
• The scriptures' and treatises' own words are set off in indented quotation—at a glance one can tell which are the scripture's own words and which the explanation given to you.
• The book has one running image: the seal. A Buddha's mastery is itself markless; but once shown in the world, it has a "seal that can be read" (the ten epithets, upon the name) and a "seal that can be seen" (the marks and signs, upon the form-body). This "seal" is the book's structural image, identifying that mastery, not the mastery itself.
• Some of the images in the book are the author's, not the scriptures'—like one person called by four names by four kinds of people (father, teacher, doctor, neighbor), one person showing three countenances to an intimate / a guest / a child, a mirror with its dust ground away. Wherever such an authorial image appears, the book marks it in passing, "this is an image, not the words of the scripture," lest you take it for the scripture's express text. (A few other images are the treatises' own—like the sons in prison, the sea's shallows and depths, the former and latter lamps—and the book marks each in passing, "this is an image the treatise draws.")
• The scriptures' catalogue numbers, Sanskrit romanization, and source particulars are nowhere in the main text; they are all gathered in the appendices at the back: the per-chapter sources in Appendix A (Academic Notes Index); the plain-language and romanization of terms in Appendix C (Glossary).
• The book has one locked line it does not soften: unobstructed is not unending. The buddha-fruit's mastery is ultimate not in "how large it is," but in there being "not one hindrance left standing, not one thing left outside"—a subtraction, not an addition. Wherever it writes of a Buddha's perfection, the book gathers toward "not one hindrance," not toward "infinitely large."
• A few larger questions the book, where it meets them, says plainly "this book does not adjudicate," and does not settle them for you. The weightiest is that "self" among the great nirvāṇa's "permanence-bliss-self-purity"—how it is reconciled with "no-self," where lies the line between nirvāṇa's true self and the ordinary being's false self: the book only records the scripture, leaving the telling to the author. Besides this, judgments like "only the Buddha possesses all four nirvāṇas," the cross-axis positioning of the buddha-fruit against the bodhisattva's causal level and the two vehicles' fruit (heteromorphic, not hierarchically superior), the ultimacy of the two vehicles, how the realization-and-attainment two readings of that single moment are divided—these "vertical" adjudications belong to the author's doctrinal discernment, and the book keeps within its bounds.
• This book and the "realization" axis's The Sublime Awakening are twin volumes: that volume writes the step where the bodhisattva path reaches its very last, becoming a Buddha (the path's last step), this volume the mastery after arrival (the mastery that need take no step further). One and the same moment of the sublime awakening / the buddha-fruit, inked from two sides. And this book is the "attainment" axis's third, and last, volume—following The Arhat's Mastery (the mastery of going out) and The Bodhisattva's Mastery (the mastery of staying), to this volume The Tathāgata's Mastery (the mastery of the unobstructed), where the arc of the attainment axis's three volumes comes round; and the realization and attainment axes, too, close together at the sublime-awakening seam of this volume's last chapter.

Setting Out

The map points this far. The road is read out.

We set out from Part One, setting the frame.