Every Road Is a Kind of Giving

6.2 Every Road Is a Kind of Giving

In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra there is a long stretch of text called the twenty-five gateways of perfect penetration. The Buddha asks the bodhisattvas and great disciples seated before Him: by which road did each of you enter and awaken? And so twenty-five sages stand up one by one and report their own dharma-door—one entered through the ear-root, one through buddha-recollection, others through contemplating fire, contemplating water, contemplating earth… Twenty-five different roads, and every one of them arrives at the same "perfect penetration"—awakening that is complete and all-penetrating.

Down the ages, readers have mostly taken this passage as twenty-five entry methods of practice, scanning for the one that suits them best. But look with a different eye, and a strange thing comes into view: these twenty-five roads, every one of them, at its end, naturally flows out into a kind of giving.

An Organ for Receiving, Reversed into Giving

First, the principle behind this strange thing.

Our six roots—eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind—what do they ordinarily do? They receive. The eye takes in forms, the ear takes in sounds, the nose takes in scents… The six roots are like six openings, gathering the outside world inward, toward "me." And gathering, gathering, this receiving gathers up an "I"—gathers up "my seeing, my hearing, my sensing, my knowing."

But to cultivate perfect penetration is to take this direction and reverse it.

The clearest example is the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara's ear-root perfect penetration. The ear is meant for hearing sounds outside; Avalokiteśvara turned it around—not hearing outward toward sounds, but turning back to hear the very capacity of hearing itself. The sūtra calls this "turning the hearing around to hear the self-nature." With this one reversal, the ear is no longer just an opening that gathers inward; it becomes a channel that gives outward—a conduit for carrying compassion.

So the shared secret of the twenty-five roads is this: take an organ that originally gathers inward, and reverse it into a channel that gives outward. Receiving hoards up an "I"; giving loosens that "I." To cultivate perfect penetration is this very reversal. And precisely because of this, every road of practice becomes, at its end, a form of giving.

Avalokiteśvara: Bestowing Fearlessness on Everyone

Of the twenty-five, Avalokiteśvara's account is the fullest—and the one that most plainly uses the word give.

He says that after he perfected the ear-root penetration, he gained a power called the fourteen fearlessness-bestowals—to "bestow fearlessness" is to give beings the gift of not being afraid. Which fourteen? The sūtra lists them one by one: beings who meet fire, the fire cannot burn them; who meet water, the water cannot drown them; in darkness, on perilous roads, in prison, all can be saved; the heavily greedy can leave greed; the heavily angry can leave anger… From the coarsest fear—of burning, of drowning—down to the subtlest, the fear that one's own afflictions can never be subdued, Avalokiteśvara can give them all a measure of "no need to fear."

And the sūtra closes the list in so many words: "These are called the fourteen powers of fearlessness-bestowal." That word bestow—that word give—is the sūtra's own. The fruit of Avalokiteśvara's practice is exactly this: to give the great gift of fearlessness, in an unbroken stream, to all beings who suffer.

He has one thing more, called the thirty-two responsive bodies—whatever form beings need him to appear in to be saved, that form he appears in: where a Buddha-body is called for, a Buddha-body; where an ordinary person, an ordinary person. This appearing, too, is a kind of giving—what is given is not some external object but "he himself": he turns his own existence into the very form beings most need, and offers it up. Manifesting the body is the gift of the body; teaching the Dharma is the gift of the Dharma—both at once.

Mahāsthāmaprāpta: "Two People, Each Holding the Other in Mind"

Another sage, the bodhisattva Mahāsthāmaprāpta, walked the road of buddha-recollection. On his road, the giving is the most unobtrusive of all.

He offered a thoroughly homely comparison:

"Suppose there are two people: one holds the other in mind with all his heart, while the other has forgotten him—these two, even if they meet, might as well not have met. But if the two hold each other in mind, and the remembering deepens, then life after life they will be like a shadow with its form, never parted again."

He goes on: the Buddha holds beings in mind the way a mother holds her child in mind; but if the child only runs off on his own and never thinks of his mother, that remembering comes to nothing. If the child turns back and holds the mother in mind the way the mother holds him—then mother and child, life after life, will never again be apart.

Look at Mahāsthāmaprāpta's giving—what is given? A remembering. Out of his own practice of buddha-recollection he generates a drawing power of mutual remembrance, leading beings, gently, toward the Buddha. This gift needs no mouth opened to teach, no goods brought out to give—simply that he, this person, exists and remembers, and that has become a force drawing beings toward the light.

It is the most silent of all giving: not "I give you something," but "you and I are together inside this remembering."

Even Contemplating Fire, Contemplating Earth, Is Giving

The remaining roads are all like this.

There is the Earth-Holding Bodhisattva, who in those days was a man who paved roads, filled in pits, and carried heavy loads for others—wherever the road was uneven, he went and made it level. Paving and paving, he awakened: better than leveling the ground outside is leveling the ground of one's own mind; when the mind-ground is level, the ground of the whole world is level too. His road of earth gives beings a road to walk beneath their feet—a road-paving kind of giving.

And there are those who entered through fire, through water, through space… The one who contemplated fire burned affliction into wisdom, and that fire gives light to others. The one who contemplated water, his mind like clear water, moistens all things equally, choosing no favorites. The one who contemplated space, his mind like the open sky, has room for everything and lets go of everything. Each of these, at its end, flows naturally from "I cultivate what is mine" into benefiting all beings.

Of the twenty-five roads, not one ends with the practitioner shutting the door to enjoy the attainment alone. Every road leads to giving.

Practice Itself Is an Act of Giving

Join this chapter to the last, and the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, from the reverse side, lets us see one great thing:

At the opening of Part Six we said that the first five parts spoke of giving as an act—bringing things out, sharing them with people. But here in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, giving is pushed to a more fundamental place: giving is not only an act; it is a state of being.

When a person, by any road at all—keeping precepts, recollecting the Buddha, practicing contemplation—reverses the direction that gathers inward and hoards up an "I" into the direction that gives outward and loosens that "I," then this person himself, his very existence, becomes a gift to beings. No need to wait for him to do anything; what he is, is already giving.

The first chapter said that keeping precepts is giving; this chapter says that cultivating concentration and wisdom is giving too. Precept, concentration, wisdom—the whole road of practice turns out to be giving in its different guises. That loosening hand, loosened far enough, makes even practice itself a gift.

Walking On

And yet whatever is good will be stolen and misused. Even giving, this cleanest of things, can—where practice runs very deep—be hijacked and turned upside down.

There are those who impersonate sages and steal for themselves the offerings of the faithful and the reverence of the faithful; there are those who fly the flag of "practice" and turn giving into extraction. This is no scaremongering—at its close, the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, gravely, points these traps out one by one. The next chapter is the heaviest alarm bell in this part, and the one most worth remembering.