Transition ④ · From the Pāramitā of Giving to the Three Wheels Empty

Part Four has walked up to a line you can probably recite by heart already, and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part Four done, this book, keeping company with giving, has stepped over a great threshold.

From the letting-go of the Pāli, to the teaching on giving in the Āgamas, to the field of merit in the Vinaya—the first three parts loosened "mine" again and again. But standing in the middle there was still an "I who is giving." In Part Four the Mahāyāna went to work, and what it worked on was precisely this "I." It showed us that a gift, joined to that small wisdom which sees through, loosens the three wheels—I give, he receives, this is the gift—and crosses the river, becoming the pāramitā of giving that can carry people across. Through an eye given away, it woke us, painfully: even one who has given for sixty kalpas, if that "I" is not loosened through, will turn back at one small grievance. It pressed on us that empty does not mean nothing—the harder we work at the deed, the less the heart must clench. And at the last it drew a bottom line: however great the gift, it must never be conscripted to harm beings.

This whole part loosened the "I who is giving" down to a very deep place. As far as reasoning goes, the case by now is very thorough.

But Part Four spoke of the three wheels empty mostly by way of treatises—the works of patriarchs like Nāgārjuna and Asaṅga. The strength of a treatise is to open the reasoning out, take it all the way through, set it in good order: what the three wheels are, why they are empty, how one can still give once they are empty, what the ten marks of pure giving are…item by item, laid out clean and clear. When you finish reading, your head understands.

But there is one thing a treatise cannot do.

It can make you understand the three wheels empty, yet it can hardly make that phrase strike into your heart like a bolt of lightning, never to be forgotten. The finer the reasoning is split, the farther it sometimes drifts from the heart—you have memorized a formulation, without ever truly being shaken by it.

And there is a sūtra that did what the treatises could not.

It does not much explain the three wheels empty—it all but performs them, right before your face. Its sentences are short, sharp, carrying a music that cannot be named; for over a thousand years they have stayed nailed fast to the heart of this land. Even someone who has never read a Buddhist scripture has probably heard a line or two of it—

"Give rise to a mind that abides nowhere."

"Abiding nowhere, practice giving."

"Giving without abiding in marks."

This sūtra is the Diamond Sūtra.

Look at that phrase, giving without abiding in marks. It does not analyze for you, at length, how the three wheels are empty this way and that; it says only, lightly: when you give, do not let the mind stop on any mark. Not on the mark "I am giving," not on the mark "he is receiving," not on the mark "this is what was given." Not abiding—not stopping, not sticking, not clenching. The whole part's worth of treatises on the three wheels empty is condensed, in the Diamond Sūtra, into one word: non-abiding.

Non-abiding lies closer to the heart than empty. Empty still feels like a truth to be thought through; non-abiding feels like a motion that can be made this very instant—at the moment the mind is about to stick, loosen, and do not stick. The hand gives; the mind does not stop. That is all.

And this strikes most directly against the word the gate of giving faces: crossing. "Give rise to a mind that abides nowhere"—that mind which abides nowhere can only arise once the hand clenched around "mine," clenched around "I am giving," has been loosened completely. Loosened until there is nowhere left to abide—that is losing the "I"; and losing the "I" is the sharpest edge of the "crossing" in "crossing over all suffering and distress."

In Part Five we step from the treatises that explain into the sūtra that performed the three wheels empty as non-abiding—the Diamond Sūtra. We go to see what kind of "abiding nowhere, practice giving" it is, when giving meets prajñā and is honed to its sharpest.

We turn the page.