The Niànfó Sūtra Before the Word: The Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections

2.1 The Niànfó Sūtra Before the Word: The Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections

How this sūtra came to be, the earliest account is in a preface whose author is now unknown—one that Sengyou, the Liang-dynasty cataloguer of scriptures, gathered into his Collection of Records on the Tripiṭaka. The preface says: of old, Emperor Ming of the Han "dreamed one night of a divine man, his body the color of gold, a halo of sunlight at his nape, flying before the palace hall." Waking glad at heart, the next day he asked his ministers: what god is this? The learned Fu Yi answered:

I have heard that in India there is one who has attained the path, named "Buddha," who can rise weightless and fly. Surely this was his spirit.

So Emperor Ming sent a party of twelve envoys westward to the land of the Greater Yuezhi, where they "copied out the Buddha's scriptures, forty-two sections," and brought them back to Luoyang. Later the Lives of Eminent Monks records that Kāśyapa Mātaṅga, the translator who came east with the scriptures, lodged outside the Yong Gate west of Luoyang—the place, tradition says, that would later become the White Horse Monastery.

How much of this origin is history and how much legend has been weighed and re-weighed for centuries. But one thing even the most exacting cataloguer grants: Sengyou, having collated the scriptures and traced their sources, set down his verdict—"of ancient scriptures now extant, none is earlier than the Forty-Two Sections." The Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections is the first time the Chinese read the Buddha's words in their own script.

And inside this first scripture lies a fact easily overlooked, yet very weighty.

A Sūtra Without the Word Niànfó

Search all forty-two chapters of the sūtra, and the two characters niànfó—"recollect the Buddha"—do not appear even once.

It is not that the text was too short to fit them—the whole sūtra runs to a bare two thousand words and more. Across the full forty-two chapters, the word niànfó occurs zero times.

Yet the act of niàn—recollection—is everywhere. The sūtra speaks of "recollecting the path," of "recollecting impermanence," of "recollecting the four great elements within the body," of "mentally recollecting my precepts"—and there is that famous phrase, "the space of a single breath." Of the six recollection objects Part One walked through—Buddha, Dharma, Saṅgha, virtue, generosity, deities—several already cast their shadows here. One item alone is absent: recollection of the Buddha.

What is going on?

It is not that the Chinese of that age set no store by buddha-recollection. It is that the word niànfó had not yet been coined in the Luoyang of that day. But the work it would one day do—recollection—was already running in this sūtra, only under a different name. That name was niàndào: recollecting the path.

What Niàn Recollected First Was the Path

There is a chapter in which the Buddha speaks a line that cuts straight to the bone:

What do I recollect? I recollect the path. What do I practice? I practice the path. What do I speak? I speak the path. I recollect the true path, not neglecting it for even a moment.

What do I recollect? The path. What do I practice? The path. What do I speak? The path. "I recollect the true path"—settling the mind on the path that is real. "Not neglecting it for even a moment"—not letting it slip from the mind for so much as an instant. Look: this is exactly the track Part One described. The lifeline of recollection lies not in recollecting hard, but in recollecting without break. When the Buddha taught Mahānāma, what He wanted was precisely this unbroken continuity. Now that same "not neglecting it for a moment" was written down in Chinese characters for the first time—only, the object written was "the path."

And what is more striking, the text immediately after this line pours out, almost in one breath, the whole stock of "recollection." The very next chapter says:

Seeing heaven and earth, recollect impermanence; seeing mountains and rivers, recollect impermanence; seeing the ten thousand things in their forms and abundant flourishing, recollect impermanence. Hold the mind thus, and the path is swiftly attained.

The chapter after that: "Practicing for a single day, constantly recollecting the path and practicing the path, one thereby attains the faculty of faith, and one's merit is immeasurable." That one word, "constantly," is still the same unbrokenness. The chapter after that, again: "intently recollect the four great elements within the body." Four chapters in a row, every one a chapter of recollection. And at the sūtra's close, one more line: "An upright mind recollecting the path can be freed from all sufferings"—an "upright mind," a mind neither crooked nor leaning, neither scattered nor disordered.

These few passages of niàndào raise up the earliest skeleton of buddha-recollection on Chinese soil.

Then why niàndào, and not niànfó?

The reason is plain. The character dào—the path—the Chinese had long known: the Confucians spoke of the dào, the Daoists spoke of the dào, it was on the lips of every street and lane. But fó—"Buddha"—was a raw new word, freshly carried over the sea: even when Emperor Ming asked about his dream, Fu Yi had to gloss it—"in India there is one who has attained the path, named Buddha." See that—even to introduce "Buddha," he had to borrow the three words "one who has attained the path." The translators took the path of least resistance: take a word you already understand, and let it catch a practice you do not yet understand. So when recollection first set foot on Chinese soil, what it recollected was the path.

The step looks like a detour, but it left a door open. Once the word fó had settled in and grown familiar in China, niàn-fó could simply step into the place niàn-dào had held—the whole architecture of recollection had already been laid out for it by niàndào.

As Long as a Single Breath

There is one more passage in the sūtra—very short, yet it has been handed down for nearly two thousand years.

The Buddha asked the śramaṇas: "In what span does human life reside?" The reply: "In a span of several days." The Buddha said: "You are not yet capable of the path." He asked another śramaṇa: "In what span does human life reside?" The reply: "In the span of a single meal." The Buddha said: "You are not yet capable of the path." He asked another śramaṇa: "In what span does human life reside?" The reply: "In the space of a single breath." The Buddha said: "Excellent! You may indeed be called one who cultivates the path."

How long does a person live? The first answered: a few days. The Buddha said: you do not yet understand the path. The next: the span of a meal. Still not understood. The last: the space of a single breath. The Buddha praised him—excellent; you may indeed be called one who understands the path. One breath goes out and does not come back in, and this life is over.

This brief exchange of three questions and three answers lights up, at one stroke, two things Part One spoke of: mindfulness of breath, and recollection of death. To watch this breath going out and coming in is to watch the nakedest truth of a life—that it is thin, no thicker than one breath. And that chapter just quoted, "seeing heaven and earth, recollect impermanence"—gazing at heaven and earth, at mountains and rivers, at the flourishing of all things, recollect through all of it that it is impermanent—says the very same thing.

Part One said that the tail of the six recollections is recollection of the deities, and that recollection of the deities is in truth an insurance laid up for the moment of death. This earliest scripture of China never uses the words "recollect the deities," yet with these few strokes—"the space of a single breath," "recollect impermanence"—it planted the very same thing: at all times remember death, remember impermanence. The urgency in later Chinese buddha-recollection—every thought aware of impermanence, pressing on to work the path—has its root right here.

It Is Not in Concentration. It Is in Plain, Steady Practice.

This sūtra holds one more silent fact: from beginning to end, not a single word of meditative absorption appears in it. No "meditative absorption," no "samādhi," no vitakka or vicāra, no "joy," no "ease," no "one-pointedness." It simply does not live inside the topic of concentration at all.

Yet it is not shallow for that. It has its own close weave and its own measure—only it does not speak through the technical terms of meditative absorption. It speaks in another tone of voice: a plain, grounded one.

The sūtra records this scene. A śramaṇa, reciting scripture by night, recited in so sorrowful a voice that regret and doubt rose in him, and he thought of giving up the robe and going home. The Buddha called him and asked:

When you were at home, what did you do for pastime?

The answer: I loved to play the lute. The Buddha said: "And when the strings were slack?" "No sound." "When the strings were too tight?" "The sound breaks off." "And tuned just between tight and slack?" "Then all the notes resound together." The Buddha told the śramaṇa:

Learning the path is just so: hold the mind tuned and even, and the path can be attained.

Notice the scene: the Buddha is not teaching the middle way to some vigorous striver—He is teaching it to a man so sorrowful he wants to go home. This is the sūtra's tone of voice: it does not press you toward deep concentration; it asks only that you tune the mind even and steady, and recollect on, plainly, day after day. It says practice is like forging iron, the dross beaten out pass after pass, until "the vessel made is sure to be fine"; it says pulling up the root of craving is like plucking a hanging string of beads, one bead at a time—there comes a time when they are all plucked away. Slow, but unbroken.

The phrases later Chinese buddha-recollection would say most often—"honest niànfó," "plain and honest," "unbroken and dense"—have their roots in this earliest little scripture.

One thing in passing: at about the same time, another translator, An Shigao, was also translating scriptures in Luoyang. What he brought was a different kind of text altogether—about the breath from beginning to end: one in, one out, how to count it, how to follow it, how to fix it. So from the very start, niàn in China walked in two tones of voice side by side: one like the Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections—plain, close-woven, about how to live and how to act; one like An Shigao—fine-grained, technical, about the work of one sitting after another. These two tones will tangle with each other all the way to the end of this book—but that is a later story.

The Buddha Has Not Yet Stepped to the Front

Come back to this sūtra. There is in fact a line in it that puts the matter of "whether the Buddha is before your eyes" as clearly as it can be put:

A disciple may go from me, leaving me thousands of li behind, and if his mind recollects my precepts he will surely attain the path. At my very side, if his mind inclines to the wrong, in the end he will not attain the path.

A disciple departs, thousands of li away, and if his mind recollects my precepts, he will surely attain the path; one who stays at my side, but whose mind is bent on the wrong, in the end attains nothing. Even toward His own disciples, what this sūtra stresses is not "being at the Buddha's side," but recollection itself—recollecting what? The precepts; the path.

Niàn had arrived in China; but what it recollected was the path. The Buddha Himself had not yet been set up as the object to be recollected.

So when did the Buddha step from backstage to the front—to become the one whom people would recollect with their own lips, and even long to see with their own eyes?

When did people stop being content with "thousands of li away, his mind recollecting my precepts," and want instead to meet the Buddha face to face—to stand in His presence?

That step had to wait for a new wind to enter China—the early Mahāyāna, and the strange sūtra it carried: stand for seven days, until the Buddhas of the ten directions appear before your eyes.

That is the next part's story.