Sudhana's Long Road

8.4 Sudhana's Long Road

The last great stretch of the Avataṃsaka is called the chapter on Entering the Dharma-Realm. It tells how a young man—the youth Sudhana—walks into the dharma-realm.

And the way he walks is unusual: he does not sit down to ponder out a doctrine; he takes to the road, to visit teachers, one by one. The bodhisattva Mañjuśrī awakens the bodhicitta in him, yet does not explain everything through on his behalf—he simply tells him to go south and seek out spiritual friends (kalyāṇamitra) everywhere. So Sudhana travels south, calling on fifty-three teachers in turn—the famous story of Sudhana and the fifty-three teachers.

Not a Staircase, but a Road That Walks into the Dharma-Realm

The number fifty-three makes it easy to suppose: this is a staircase of fifty-three steps; Sudhana starts on the lowest, climbs one step with each teacher, the later teachers ever more accomplished, until at last he tops out at Samantabhadra.

But that reading is a misunderstanding.

The most direct counter-evidence is who these fifty-three teachers are. They are everyone: kings, elders, merchants, physicians, ship-captains; monks and nuns gone forth; laymen and laywomen; children and the old; even non-Buddhist practitioners, even night-goddesses. They are scattered through every corner and every stratum of society, with no ordering from low to high. A few of them, what is more, behave strangely—even disturbingly—and it is exactly this that keeps the road from being a ladder of ranks. Were it a ladder, those few "strange" teachers could not have been placed evenly, deliberately, along every stretch of the way.

So Sudhana's road is not a climbing-up but a walking-through—through fifty-three different lives, fifty-three different shapes of giving. Each teacher demonstrates one kind: some give material things, some give dharma, some give peace of mind (the gift of fearlessness), some give a way of seeing the world, some "do" nothing at all and demonstrate simply by their existence…Fifty-three of them, like fifty-three voices sounding at once, joining in one great piece of music. They are not fifty-three rungs ranked high and low; they are fifty-three parts played together.

Sudhana's Own Giving: Setting Judgment Down First

There is one more thing on this road that is easy to miss: Sudhana himself is also giving.

When Mañjuśrī sends Sudhana off, he gives him a rule. The gist: in drawing near to spiritual friends, give rise to no weariness; give rise to no satiety; accord with all of a teacher's instruction; do not pick at a teacher's skillful means; do not let the mind that "looks for his faults" arise.

Mark that last clause—"see no fault in the teacher." This is something Sudhana gives away before a single lesson has been heard: he sets his own judgment down first, offers it up first. It is a soundless giving—loosening, in advance, the mind that loves to pick and to pass verdicts.

It is exactly because he first managed "seeing no fault" that those strangely behaving teachers could teach him at all. Put in his place someone who, at the first sight of conduct beyond the ordinary, instantly raises the thought "this person is wrong," and the whole journey of learning breaks off on the spot. Because Sudhana is willing to set judgment down first, the teacher can give the dharma, and the dharma can enter his heart. You see, this too is a giving that flows both ways: the teacher gives Sudhana dharma, and Sudhana gives the teacher a trust that does not pick, does not pass verdicts.

At the Road's End, He Finds He Was inside Samantabhadra All Along

Sudhana walks on and on, to the fifty-second—the bodhisattva Maitreya. Then, going further, Mañjuśrī comes back: the sūtra says that Mañjuśrī, from far away, extended his right hand across one hundred and ten yojanas—league upon league—and laid it upon Sudhana's crown, then guided him on toward Samantabhadra.

This return matters greatly. Mañjuśrī is the beginning of Sudhana's road (the first to receive him), and now he reappears near the end—which bends the whole road from a straight line into a ring: the end folds back to the beginning. All the more proof that this is no staircase with a top (a staircase does not send you back to the start just below the summit), but a circle whose head and tail join. The patriarchs say that Mañjuśrī (the beginning, who governs wisdom) and Samantabhadra (the fulfillment, who governs practice and vow) are from the first "the two sages in mutual inclusion"—two faces of one body, each containing the other.

At last, Sudhana enters Samantabhadra's realm. And what does he see? The sūtra says he "saw his own body within Samantabhadra's body"—he finds that this whole hard road he has walked has lain, from beginning to end, inside Samantabhadra's body.

It is the most moving close the long road could have. Sudhana does not "walk up to" a place in front of Samantabhadra; he discovers that he has been inside Samantabhadra "all along." The road he walked was held, the whole while, by the road itself (by Samantabhadra). The sūtra says further: everything Sudhana gained across the fifty-three visits, set against what he now enters in a single thought, within a single pore of Samantabhadra, "does not amount to a hundredth part"—the whole dharma-realm he traversed is gathered entire into one thought, one pore, of Samantabhadra.

The Road Is the Walking That Enters the Dharma-Realm

To gather this chapter in: Sudhana and the fifty-three teachers tell us one thing about giving and the dharma-realm.

Entering the dharma-realm is not thought out, and not scaled in a single leap. It is walked out—taking that loosened hand and, with one concrete person after another, in one concrete situation after another, reaching it out and opening it, again and again: walking in, step by step. Every visit is a giving (giving dharma, giving peace of mind, giving trust, giving the setting-down of judgment); strung together, the fifty-three visits are the complete unfolding of giving as the road that walks into the dharma-realm.

And at the road's end you find this: the road has not carried you off to some "other place." It lets you discover that you were there all along—inside Samantabhadra, within the dharma-realm.

Walking On

Sudhana has walked to the road's end and entered Samantabhadra's body. Then this "end"—this dharma-realm, this Samantabhadra—what, finally, is it?

Is it a place where giving has been left behind and only lofty metaphysics remains? Or is this end precisely giving itself, stretched into its final form?

The next chapter is the true end of this road, and of this book. Samantabhadra will say it with his own mouth, setting "dharma" and "giving" equal.