An Eye Given Away

4.2 An Eye Given Away

In the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra there is a story—very famous, and very painful.

Śāriputra—who would later become the great disciple foremost in wisdom under the Buddha—long, long ago set his heart on the bodhisattva path, to practice dāna-pāramitā, and had already practiced it for sixty kalpas. Sixty kalpas is a span of time too long to imagine.

One day a man came begging from him—not for money, not for food, but for one of his eyes.

Śāriputra did not say a second word. He gouged out the eye and gave it to him. The man took the eye, held it up to his nose, sniffed it, found it rank and foul, spat on it, threw it to the ground—and then lifted his foot and stepped on it.

Śāriputra's heart went cold. He thought: "People like this truly cannot be saved! The eye was of no use to him at all, yet he demanded it; having got it, he despised it, threw it down, trampled it. How could anyone save such a person? Better to leave all this, and free myself early from birth and death."

And so he retreated from the bodhisattva path and turned back to work for his own liberation.

Sixty Kalpas—Why Still "Not at the Shore"?

Sixty kalpas of the bodhisattva path, and he could gouge out his own eye to give away—this giving cannot be called small. And yet, at the very moment the man sniffed it, spat, and trampled it, Śāriputra's heart went cold, and he turned back.

The Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra says why. It says that if giving carries the "three obstructions"—"I give, that one receives, the thing given"—then such giving "falls into Māra's realm," not yet free of the many troubles. Conversely, if a bodhisattva gives with the "three purifications," without these three obstacles, that is "reaching the other shore," the dāna-pāramitā praised by the buddhas.

Look at that one thought of Śāriputra's—"I gave you my eye, and you despise it, you trample it"—inside that thought, "I," "you," and "the eye" are all still rigidly there. Precisely because he was gripping "it was I who gave you this eye," the other man's desecration was more than his heart could get past, and he fell back.

So the true pain of this story is not how vile the eye-beggar was. It is this: even a man like Śāriputra, after sixty kalpas of giving, had still not loosened through the "I" in "I am giving." And where it is not loosened through, one stroke of adversity is enough—sixty kalpas of work fall away.

It tells us something very deep: whether you reach the other shore has no necessary connection to the quantity of your giving, its intensity, or even its length in time. A man who gives for sixty kalpas and can part with his own eye may still not be at the shore; while a man who gives only a bowl of rice, with a mind loosened through, may already have arrived. The difference lies entirely in those three wheels—loosened, or not.

"Empty"—How So?

Then these three—"I, the other, the thing"—how is it that they are "empty"? The Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra offers a few very homely comparisons.

Start with "the thing given." Take a piece of cloth. We feel that "cloth" is a solid, real thing. But pull it apart and look: cloth is woven of threads, one by one. And the threads? Finer fibers still. Keep taking it apart, and what we call "a piece of cloth" is only a temporary shape of many conditions coming together—threads gathered, and it is called "cloth"; threads unraveled, and the "cloth" is gone. The thing called "cloth" has no graspable, independent self of its own. It exists—but it exists as "conditions met together," not as "cast in iron, standing there on its own."

Now "the one who gives." We feel that "I" is a solid, real person. But this "I," too, is only earth, water, fire, and wind, gathered around an emptiness into a body; the body moves, walks, speaks, and so is called "a person." Take it apart piece by piece, and that graspable, one-and-only "I" cannot be found either.

And there is one comparison subtler still, which says that a thing's "good" or "bad" lives in the mind, not in the thing. The same beautiful person: one stirred by desire looks and finds them lovely beyond words; one practicing the contemplation of impurity looks and sees only impurity upon impurity. One object, two kinds of seeing, two different things. So "beautiful" and "ugly" are not on that person; they are in the mind of the one who looks.

Put these together: the one who gives, the one who receives, the thing given—not one of the three is cast in iron, not one can be gripped. See this layer clearly, and then go give: the hand gives as before, but the mind no longer clamps down on "I gave a solid real thing to a solid real person." The three wheels have loosened.

"The Other Shore" Is Not "Giving Made Perfect"

One more spot must be seen clearly here, lest "reaching the other shore" be imagined crooked.

Hearing "dāna-pāramitā," "reaching the other shore," we easily suppose it means "giving done to its most flawless, its highest grade"—as if the other shore were a moral high-water mark, within reach only of those who train to the very top.

The Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra takes pains to puncture exactly this. It says: the arhat also "reaches the other shore," and the Buddha "reaches the other shore"—the name is the same, the inside is different. The arhat's other shore is leaving birth and death and entering nirvāṇa—already a magnificent liberation. But in the bodhisattva's dāna-pāramitā, "the other shore" points to something else: it is to give everything, at all times, in all ways—a giving without boundary, without end.

So pāramitā does not mean "brought to perfection"; it means "without end." Nor is "the other shore" some far-off bank you arrive at only after training to the summit. The Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra puts it with great life:

"This shore is stinginess; the river is giving; the other shore is the buddha way."

Look—stinginess is the bank on this side of the river (where a person starts out); giving is the crossing itself (walking in the water); the buddha way is the bank on the far side (where one is going). These three are not three separate, unrelated places. They are three phases of one and the same crossing. "The other shore" is not at the horizon; it stands at the end of this one loosening of your hand, this one crossing. Giving is the boat that ferries you over.

Understand "the other shore" this way, and the whole matter comes down to earth: you need not first train yourself into some perfect person before dāna-pāramitā has anything to do with you. You need only, at the moment of each giving, loosen those three wheels a little—and with that loosening you are already in the river, walking toward the far bank.

Walking On

We have said so much now about "empty"—the three wheels empty, the thing unobtainable, the "I" unobtainable—and a danger appears: listening along, might you begin to feel, "Then isn't giving all for nothing? If there is no real I giving, no real thing, no real person receiving—why give at all?"

That thought is exactly where the road most easily goes astray. The next chapter takes it apart and makes it plain: "empty" has never meant "nothing."