Practice · BookGivingTransition 6

Transition ⑥ · From the Śūraṅgama's Reverse Side to the Offerings of the Lotus

Part Six has walked up to the words "the highest giving is the gift of the Dharma," and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

Part Six circled around to the reverse side of giving and looked at three layers. From the precepts: not stealing is also a kind of giving—to bar the hand that wants to take is likewise to loosen that "I." From concentration and wisdom: the twenty-five roads of practice all flow toward giving—even quiet sitting and meditation are giving. And from the affairs of the māras: giving can be hijacked into deviant giving, and what invites deviant giving is the small stain of greed in one's own heart for offerings and for renown. At the last, the Śūraṅgama Sūtra names this very discernment a most precious gift of the Dharma—telling us: the highest form of giving is not giving things (the gift of wealth) but giving the Dharma (the gift of the Dharma).

By this point, the hand of giving has been seen quite whole: giving outward, barring inward, flowing forth in practice, and keeping watch that it not be stolen away.

Is it enough?

By the kinds of giving, it seems complete: the gift of wealth, the gift of fearlessness, the gift of the Dharma—all present.

But where does each of these kinds of giving reach its limit?

The limit of the gift of wealth was pointed out long ago—a brahmin's eighty-four thousand great gifts still could not match the work of a single instant of mind; the seven treasures filling all of space still could not match handing on one line of the Dharma. However much wealth is given, there is a ceiling.

And the gift of the body? So far we have only glimpsed it from a distance—the Śūraṅgama Sūtra says "body, flesh, bones, and blood, shared with all beings"; Avalokiteśvara "manifests a body" to teach the Dharma. But those were only touches in passing. Pushed all the way to its end, what would the offering of the body look like?

And the gift of the Dharma? The Śūraṅgama Sūtra calls it the highest, the most excellent. But how high is highest? To what splendor can a dharma-offering rise?

There is a sūtra that pushes both of these—the offering of the body and the offering of the Dharma—to the utmost place. It is the Lotus Sūtra.

In the Lotus Sūtra there is a bodhisattva, Bhaiṣajyarāja, the Medicine King. To make offering to the Buddha and to the Dharma, he did something that shook heaven and earth: he set his own body alight, making the burning of his body an offering to the Buddha.

Reading this, your heart most likely seizes—this is too much! Is it telling people to go and burn their own bodies?

That seizing is exactly where the Lotus Sūtra wants you to stop and look deeply. It pushes the body-offering to so extreme, so heroic, so unsettling a picture not so that you will copy it and burn your body—the next part will make this layer clear. It uses this most extreme of images to force one question: when a person is willing to loosen even this most tightly clenched thing of all, the body—willing to offer even this out—what, in the end, is being loosened? What is loosened is the last line of the "I"'s defenses. When the Medicine King burned his body, what burned was nothing other than the "I" itself. This is losing the "I", pushed to the very end of flesh and bone.

And what the Lotus Sūtra says next matters even more. Such an offering by burning the body, it says, is indeed a great offering; and yet—"Among all offerings, the dharma-offering is supreme." Among every kind of offering, the offering of the Dharma stands highest. Even a body-offering as heroic as burning the body, the Lotus Sūtra still pushes one step further, toward the dharma-offering.

So in the Lotus Sūtra these two offerings—of body and of Dharma—weave into the highest and most moving stretch of road this book has walked. Part Six said the gift of the Dharma is highest; the Lotus Sūtra performs that "highest," scene by scene—the Medicine King burning his body, the bodhisattva Sadāparibhūta bowing in reverence to everyone he met, and at last the plain instruction that the dharma-offering is supreme.

In Part Seven we walk into the Lotus Sūtra to see what it looks like when the offerings of body and Dharma are pushed to their utmost—and to see clearly what, in that fire, was truly burned.

We turn the page.