Transition Five · From Compassion to the Perfected Freedom

Part Five read the heading "function" to its bottom.

The marks and signs are the visible form-body seal this function shows; the great compassion is the root by which this function cannot but deliver—without great compassion, no Buddha; the all-kinds wisdom is the fullness by which it can deliver all—prajñā's fruit-level fullness, arrived at the far shore. And this great compassion and wisdom, traced to the last, rest still upon that "light of unobstructed wisdom." Here this freedom's four headings stand wholly complete: name (the seal that can be read), body (the visible structure and the marks and signs), wisdom (the four wisdoms turned out of the eight consciousnesses), function (the completeness, opening-out, body, substance, and guide turned toward beings).

The four headings complete—yet one last thing remains unread: this freedom's "perfection" itself.

The four preceding parts took this freedom apart into four headings, reading them one by one. But these four headings are, after all, one and the same freedom; and when they gather back into one, perfected upon a Buddha, does this "perfection" itself have an aspect of its own? It does. Part One laid a thread in waiting: a bodhisattva of the eighth ground has already attained a set of "ten masteries," but those are the cause-ground's ten masteries; the scripture said the buddhas have, besides, a fruit-ground set of ten masteries, which the eighth-ground bodhisattva "has not yet attained." That fruit-ground set of ten masteries only at this last part is opened in full—it is the aspect of this freedom "perfected, accomplished at the buddha level."

And one thing deeper than the ten masteries: where, at last, does this perfected freedom come to rest? The verse at the close of Part Five already showed the edge of it—"were the Buddha to enter final nirvāṇa, He would not be called permanent." A Buddha does not take up that nirvāṇa from which there is no return, ashes-and-cessation; His great compassion delivers beings unceasingly, His prajñā knows all unceasingly. This abiding that "abides neither in birth-and-death nor in nirvāṇa" is called the ultimate non-abiding nirvāṇa. It is the last resting-place of this freedom's perfection, and the place where this whole book—and these two axes, the axis of Realization and the axis of Attainment—come, at last, to close together.

So the last part reads two things: the Tathāgata's ten masteries (the aspect of this freedom perfected at the fruit level), and the ultimate non-abiding nirvāṇa (the place where this perfection comes at last to rest, the end of the two axes).

In, then, to the last part: the perfected freedom.