Transition ⑦ · From the Lotus Offerings to the Huayan Dharma-Realm

Part Seven has walked up to a fire in which what burned was the "I," and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part Seven done, the offerings of body and Dharma have been pushed to their utmost.

Someone shoulders the Dharma and lives it out, and his very person becomes an offering (the dharma-offering). Sadāparibhūta bowed to everyone he met, giving the affirmation "you are originally a Buddha" to each person he encountered (the offering of reverence). The Medicine King burned his body, pushing the main thread of loosening "mine" to the very end of the flesh—and in that fire, what burned was the "I"; it was losing the "I", driven to its fiercest point (the gift of body and life).

Pushed this high, this fierce, the offering still ends in the same one thing: losing the "I", loosening the clenched heart.

Is it enough?

In fierceness, the Medicine King's scene has reached the top—there is no letting-go more thorough than offering out even the body.

But seen from another direction, it has not yet reached the top.

Because this offering of the Medicine King's, however heroic, is still finite.

Think it through: he made his offering to one Buddha—the Buddha Pure Bright Virtue of Sun and Moon, that one. He used one body—this one body of his own. It happened at one time—that occasion, that once. One Buddha, one body, one time. However thorough the letting-go, this offering still has its edge: the edge is at "one."

Then is there an offering that has no edge even at "one"?

—An offering made not to one Buddha, but to all Buddhas to the ends of space, throughout the dharma-realm. Made not with one body, at one time, but thought after thought continuing, never interrupted, offering on and on until "the realm of space is exhausted, the realm of beings is exhausted, the karma of beings is exhausted, the afflictions of beings are exhausted"—and still this offering of mine is not exhausted.

There is. It is exactly the vast cultivation of offerings of the bodhisattva Samantabhadra, in the Huayan Sūtra.

The word vast is there precisely to burst the Medicine King's edge of one Buddha, one body, one time. Samantabhadra's offering is made to all the Buddhas of the measureless dharma-realm; its time is thought after thought continuing, without beginning or end; its measure is "only when the realm of beings is exhausted will my offering be exhausted—and since the realm of beings cannot be exhausted, this offering of mine likewise has no end." It is not some one earth-shaking great offering; it is a river of offering without end and without border, running through the whole dharma-realm.

And—do you remember? That most famous line, raised more than once along the way: "Among all offerings, the dharma-offering is supreme." Its true home is neither the Diamond Sūtra nor the Lotus Sūtra; it is exactly here, in the passage on Samantabhadra's vast cultivation of offerings in the Huayan Sūtra. The Medicine King's finite fire, within Samantabhadra's infinite offering, is caught, surpassed, and completed—for Samantabhadra says that within all this measureless, boundless offering, the highest is still the dharma-offering, still the heart that practices as the teaching directs, benefits beings, and never leaves the mind of awakening. The Medicine King's fire, burned to its end, turns out to lead exactly here, to this boundless offering heart.

And this is exactly the end this book has pointed to from the very beginning.

The book is titled From Pāli Roots to the Dharmadhātu. We have come this whole way: setting out from the plainest letting-go of the Pāli (Part One), watching that hand open in the human world (Part Two), kept by the Vinaya as a field of merit (Part Three), loosening even "I am giving" in the Mahāyāna (Part Four), loosening in prajñā to "not abiding in marks" and "seeing that the five skandhas are all empty" (Part Five), seeing it again from the reverse side of not-taking (Part Six), and pushing it in the Lotus to the utmost of offering even the body (Part Seven)—this one hand, loosened and loosened again, loosened and loosened again.

Now this hand is to loosen into its last and widest place: loosening "mine" until the whole dharma-realm becomes the object of offering, until losing the "I" and the whole dharma-realm merge into one. The hand that clenched "mine," loosened all the way down this road, here loosens into a river of offering that fills all space and never runs dry. This is the offering of the dharma-realm—the true endpoint of this book, and the widest fulfillment of that word "crossing," which the gate of giving faces among the Six Practice Gates.

In Part Eight we walk into the Huayan Sūtra to see how the bodhisattva Samantabhadra stretches giving open into the offering of the whole dharma-realm. From the Pāli roots to the offering of the dharma-realm—this long road is about to reach its end.

We turn the page.