Part Eight · The Huayan Dharma-Realm · Where the Whole Road Arrives

This book carries the name From Pāli Roots to the Dharmadhātu. Setting out from that plainest word of the Pāli in Part One—letting-go—we have loosened and walked, loosened and walked, and with this part we arrive at last at that far end: the offering of the dharma-realm (dharmadhātu).

The Avataṃsaka Sūtra is the terminus of this road. It stretches the act of giving open across the entire dharma-realm—stretched until there is no edge, no bottom, no end.

Five chapters, five stretches of scenery.

Chapter one: watch how a bodhisattva enters the Way. It turns out that the door into the whole bodhisattva path is nothing else—it is giving: grounded in great compassion, stepping in through the vast giving that begrudges nothing at all. Giving is the door into the Way.

Chapter two: Samantabhadra's vast cultivation of offerings—offering stretched until there is no edge: offering to all Buddhas through all space and across the whole dharma-realm, thought after thought unbroken, continuing even until the realm of beings is exhausted, until the realm of space is exhausted—and still not stopping.

Chapter three: the most famous line of all lives here—"Among all offerings, the dharma-offering is supreme." But this "supreme" does not tread material offering down and lift the dharma-offering high; it says that every offering which accords with the Dharma is gathered home into this one dharma-offering.

Chapter four: follow the youth Sudhana down his long road of visits to fifty-three teachers—a road that is not a staircase climbed rung by rung, but a walking-through that enters the dharma-realm. At its end, he discovers that he has been inside Samantabhadra's body all along.

Chapter five is the end of this road, and the end of this book. Samantabhadra speaks one sentence that sets "dharma" and "giving" equal: "In this ocean of dharma of mine, there is not one letter, not one phrase, that was not acquired by relinquishing and giving." So the Dharma itself is giving. Giving, walked to its end, is not surpassed by the dharma-realm, not left behind; it has itself become the dharma-realm.

That hand which has been loosening all the way—loosened to here, it has loosened into the whole dharma-realm. We look first at why giving is the door into the Way.