The Dharma Itself Is Giving

8.5 The Dharma Itself Is Giving

Sudhana has walked to the road's end and entered Samantabhadra's body. This dharma-realm, this layered and endless Flower Ornament, is the very "end" this book has been walking toward all along.

We tend to assume that the end is the place where giving gets left behind—as though giving were the low, beginner's work, dropped once one has climbed to a height like "the dharma-realm." Giving for the road; metaphysics for the summit.

But the close of the Avataṃsaka, through Samantabhadra's own mouth, turns this whole picture over.

Samantabhadra's Own Account: Everything I Am Came by Relinquishing

Sudhana has entered Samantabhadra's body, and Samantabhadra opens his mouth and tells his own story—his original course through measureless kalpas, world-ages past counting. The account is long and dense, all in the first person, "I." And its content, overwhelmingly, is giving:

"Across past kalpas as numerous as the dust-motes of inexpressibly inexpressible buddha-fields, I practiced the bodhisattva-practice in pursuit of all-wisdom…giving up all that was inner and outer…all I relinquished, with not a single grudge."

Wealth relinquished; cities relinquished; kingship relinquished; wife and children relinquished; even head, eyes, bone, and marrow relinquished. More than thirty lines of self-account, and the list is nothing but relinquishing.

What matters is not how long the list is. What matters is its position: after Sudhana enters Samantabhadra's body, the sūtra lets Samantabhadra recount his bodhisattva conduct, and what he tells is a history of relinquishing. This book reads Samantabhadra as a concentrated disclosure of conduct in the dharma-realm. That is an interpretation; the sūtra does not directly equate Samantabhadra with the whole dharma-realm.

Giving is not a part of Samantabhadra's "past" long left behind. In this self-account, relinquishing remains the causal conduct through which his ocean of dharma was attained.

One Sentence That Traces the "Ocean of Dharma" to Giving

The whole account gathers upon one sentence. Of everything this book has walked past, this is the highest sentence, and the most thorough:

"In my ocean of dharma, there is not a single letter or phrase that was not acquired by relinquishing the station of a wheel-turning king, that was not acquired by relinquishing all that I possessed."

It means: in this whole "ocean of dharma" of mine—there is not one letter, not one phrase, that was not gained by relinquishing and giving: giving away the position of universal monarch, giving away all that I possessed.

First keep hold of the sūtra's own verb: "acquired." This is not a polite flourish of praise, but neither does it directly state the equation "dharma is giving." It says that every letter and phrase in Samantabhadra's ocean of dharma was acquired through relinquishing and giving.

"The ocean of dharma"—all the dharma Samantabhadra has realized and spoken. Every letter, every phrase, came by relinquishing. The quantifier is universal: there is no exception anywhere. This is the force of the passage: relinquishing is presented not as one causal practice among many, but as a condition through which every part of this ocean of dharma was acquired.

The book therefore reaches a crucial point: the dharma-realm does not leave giving behind. Giving has not dissolved or been replaced by something higher; Samantabhadra traces the attainment of his ocean of dharma, letter by letter, back to relinquishing. To compress that relation into "the Dharma itself is giving," however, is this book's Huayan reading, made below by bringing the passage together with Fazang's teaching on mutual inclusion. It is not a literal equation stated by the sūtra.

"One Act of Giving Gathers All Practices"

The sūtra gives a causal relation between relinquishing and the ocean of dharma. In the Treatise on the Five Teachings, Fazang writes that "one practice is all practices" and uses giving to explain the mutual inclusion of the pure and the mixed. In the Song, Chengqian's notes on the Treatise on the Golden Lion give that key a clean and brisk form:

"As one act of giving gathers all practices…by analogy, giving is the nine perfections. Many practices are one practice."

These two sentences are Chengqian's glosses, not Fazang's base text. "As one act of giving gathers all practices"—Chengqian uses giving as an example of how one practice includes the many. The source explicitly says "by analogy" before "giving is the nine perfections." That marker must remain: giving and the other nine perfections illustrate mutual inclusion here; their distinctions are not erased.

This is the "one is all" we met earlier, brought down onto practice: Fazang uses giving to explain the mutual inclusion of pure and mixed practice, and Chengqian's gloss says that giving gathers all practices. This does not cancel the distinct cultivation of discipline, patience, vigor, meditation, and wisdom. It says that one real act of giving in accord with the Dharma is not sealed off from the other perfections: within it can be seen discipline's not taking what is not given, patience's freedom from vexation at the recipient, and dimensions of vigor, meditation, and wisdom (the three wheels empty).

When Fazang set out to teach "one is all"—the most recondite of principles—he did use giving to explain pure and mixed practice; Chengqian later placed giving within the Golden Lion analogy of mutual inclusion. To the Huayan school, giving is the best of all examples for showing how one small, concrete act can contain the whole dharma-realm.

One Stick of Incense Carries the Whole Road

Putting Samantabhadra's causal account together with Fazang's teaching on mutual inclusion, this book proposes a Huayan synthesis: the whole dharma-realm can be disclosed through the gate of giving. That is why the book condenses the relation into "the Dharma itself is giving." The short sentence is the author's interpretive compression, not an equation spoken verbatim by the sūtra.

The dharma-realm, that great building of layer upon endless layer, is not a metaphysical pavilion for admiring from a distance and quietly speculating upon. It is a building held up by practice—and giving is the foundation-stone this tradition picked out with its own hands to show how one act is the whole.

Within this reading, it carries a very real, very warm meaning for ordinary people like us:

The small, concrete act of giving you do at this moment is not a "low" step waiting to be surpassed. It is not the first rung of a staircase to the dharma-realm—because that staircase never existed. Within the building of the dharma-realm, so long as your mind accords with the Dharma, so long as the "I" in it has been loosened, then the stick of incense you pass over, the bowl of rice, the word of comfort—each, then and there, already carries the form of the whole road. You do not have to climb from "giving" up to "dharma-realm"; this one opening of your hand is, in itself, already inside the dharma-realm.

Samantabhadra's autobiography of relinquishing is the model given to us: a being of the dharma-realm is, in the end, in his very content, a history of letting go. Every time we open the hand, we are adding one more line to our own history of letting go.

Part Eight, to This Point—and the End of the Long Road

With these five chapters, Part Eight has walked the Huayan through.

Giving is the door into the Way (the Ground of Joy). Offering, stretched until there is no edge (the vast cultivation of offerings). Every offering that accords with the Dharma, gathered into the highest, the dharma-offering (among all offerings, the dharma-offering is supreme). The dharma-realm, entered step by step, by walking (Sudhana and the fifty-three teachers). And at the road's end, Samantabhadra traces every letter and phrase of his ocean of dharma to giving; this book then reads that passage together with Fazang's mutual inclusion and condenses the result as "the Dharma itself is giving" (the Entering the Dharma-Realm chapter, the Treatise on the Five Teachings, and Chengqian's notes on the Treatise on the Golden Lion read together).

From that plainest word of the Pāli in Part One—letting-go—to this "dharma is giving" reading formed by bringing Huayan sūtra and treatise together: the long road this book's name points to, from Pāli roots to the dharmadhātu, has here come to its end.

That hand clenched around "mine" loosened, in Part One, only a little—softly, inside the heart of one busy householder. Then it loosened and loosened—loosened into the human world, loosened into the Vinaya's field of merit, loosened away the "I who am giving," loosened to "not abiding in marks," loosened until even the body was offered, loosened until offering filled the dharma-realm. Loosened to the last, the hand has loosened beyond all trace—loosened into the whole dharma-realm. And that is the word this gate of giving answers to—"crossing over"—made good on its widest, most thorough scale.

Walking On

In principle, the road has reached its height. But this resplendent dharma-realm must, in the end, come back down to our world—back down to the ordinary days you and I are living right now.

And our age, in so many places, has quietly turned "giving" back into a deal—merit-making, bargaining for blessings, trading charity for a name. This is exactly the knot this book has been loosening for us since its first page.

So, having walked this long road from the Pāli to the dharma-realm, the final part will invite giving out of the scrolls and back into the world before our eyes—to look at us as we are today: what, exactly, is this hand clenching, and how is it to loosen? The next part is this book's coda.