The Highest Offering

8.3 The Highest Offering

"Among all offerings, the dharma-offering is supreme."

This line of eight characters flows out of the passage on Samantabhadra's vast cultivation of offerings in the Avataṃsaka, and became the most famous teaching on offering in the Chinese world. We have touched on it several times before; now, at last, we have walked to its home.

But this line is extremely easy to read askew. Read it askew, and the whole account of giving falls back into the old pit of dividing things into high and low.

"Supreme" Does Not Tread Down the Material and Lift Up the Dharma

The most common reading goes: "Offering things is low; offering the dharma is high; so to offer the Dharma ranks a grade above offering material wealth." As though material offering and dharma-offering were set on one staircase and sorted high and low.

The patriarchs—above all Master Chengguan, who helped settle the final text of this very passage—block this reading from the start. Glossing the line, Chengguan's first sentence says: the Dharma is "what the Buddhas take as their teacher"; it is the father and mother of the Buddhas. So the "supreme" in "the dharma-offering is supreme" does not mean "first place" in a ranking; it means "root" in the order of value—the Dharma is the root into which all offerings together converge.

Put more bluntly: this line is not setting "offering the Dharma" against "offering wealth" to compare rank and contend for place. It is telling you: what allows any offering to become a true offering is the thing in it that accords with the Dharma.

Seven "Dharma-Offerings" That Are Really One Thing

Then what, concretely, does "dharma-offering" mean? The sūtra goes on to list seven:

"Namely: the offering of cultivation in accordance with what is taught, the offering of benefiting sentient beings, the offering of embracing sentient beings, the offering of taking on the suffering of sentient beings in their place, the offering of the diligent cultivation of wholesome roots, the offering of not forsaking bodhisattva activity, the offering of not departing from bodhicitta."

To practice as the Buddha taught; to benefit beings; to embrace beings; to take on suffering in beings' place; to cultivate wholesome roots diligently; not to abandon the work a bodhisattva is meant to do; not to depart from the bodhicitta—the mind set forth for awakening—these seven are the dharma-offering.

Look: not one of the seven is "taking a thing and offering it." They are all ways of living the Dharma out: taking the Buddha's teaching and landing it in your own practice, landing it in the benefit of beings. So the dharma-offering is not the offering of a "dharma"—like setting a scripture scroll on an altar—but taking your whole life and putting the Dharma into practice—and this practice itself is the highest offering to the Buddha.

And the patriarchs saw right through it: these seven are seven faces of one and the same thing. Chengguan says that among the seven, the one that truly matters is the first—cultivation in accordance with what is taught: doing as one has been taught; the other six are all that first one, unfolded in different directions. And the point that gathers the seven faces together is the last—not departing from bodhicitta.

Why that one? The Avataṃsaka gives its own answer. It says: "If there were no sentient beings, no bodhisattva would attain perfect awakening." The bodhisattva seeks awakening in the first place for the sake of benefiting beings; the moment one departs from this bodhicitta—this awakening-for-beings—the six before it (benefiting beings, taking on their suffering…) all come to nothing. So bodhicitta is not an eighth item set beside the seven; it is the pivot—the moment the other six depart from it, none of them counts as "dharma-offering" any longer.

Giving Material Things Can Also Be "Dharma-Offering"

Then does "the dharma-offering is supreme" mean that when we ordinarily give material things, make material offerings, we stand a grade lower—worth little?

Exactly the opposite. The most important turn in this chapter is right here.

Master Chengguan says something crucial, and the gist is this: so long as the giving of material things accords with the Dharma, it is itself dharma-offering. The bodhisattva Gladly-Seen's burning of his body is a dharma-offering; but an elder quietly, decently giving material wealth—so long as he gives "equally, all at once, with nothing before and nothing after," in keeping with the sense of the Dharma—that is equally a dharma-offering.

You see, this redraws the dividing line. The line does not run between "did you offer things, or dharma"—not through the material of the offering; it runs through "does this offering of yours accord with the Dharma"—through the mind, and whether it answers to the Dharma.

So the true sense of "the dharma-offering is supreme" is not to tread material offering underfoot, but to gather every offering that accords with the Dharma home into this one great category of dharma-offering. You bring one stick of incense to offer to the Buddha—if you offer it with the awareness that the three wheels are empty, with the bodhicitta that would benefit beings—then that stick of incense, then and there, is dharma-offering. The dharma-offering is not another kind of thing standing opposite material offering; it is what all offerings together accomplish once they have come to accord with the Dharma.

And this folds everything before it into one whole: Part Five's "not abiding in marks," Part Seven's offering of body and Dharma, this part's vast cultivation of offerings—all gathered here into one sentence: every offering that has loosened the "I" and accords with the Dharma—whether what is offered is a stick of incense, a scroll of scripture, or a life—is dharma-offering. What is high is not the thing called "dharma"; what is high is the mind that has come to accord with it.

Walking On

Offering has been stretched until there is no edge (the vast cultivation of offerings), and gathered back to a single root (the dharma-offering supreme; not departing from bodhicitta).

But this road into the dharma-realm—how, exactly, is it walked? Is it a staircase climbed rung by rung? The close of the Avataṃsaka answers with a young man's long journey of visits.

In the next chapter, we follow the youth Sudhana down his long road to fifty-three teachers.