Holding the Name: One Buddha-Name That Gathers In Ten Thousand Things

4.3 Holding the Name: One Buddha-Name That Gathers In Ten Thousand Things

The third of the Three Pure Land Sūtras is the Amitābha Sūtra—the shortest of the three, translated by Kumārajīva, its whole text under two thousand characters.

It has no blueprint like the forty-eight vows, no ladder like the sixteen contemplations, no sorting of streams like the nine grades. It does not even wait to be asked. The sūtra opens at the Jeta Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika's Park in Śrāvastī, with twelve hundred and fifty monks, the great bodhisattvas, and a host of gods assembled—and then, with no one petitioning, "at that time the Buddha said to the elder Śāriputra," the Buddha looks at the disciple foremost in wisdom and simply begins:

Westward from here, past ten trillion buddha-lands, there is a world named Utmost Bliss. In that land is a Buddha named Amitābha, teaching the Dharma at this very moment.

In other sūtras a disciple first asks, and only then does the Buddha speak; in this one, the Buddha speaks unasked. Master Ouyi marked the weight of this stroke: this gate is "profound and hard to believe, and so He called out by name to the one of great wisdom and spoke to him"—too hard to believe to wait for a question, so the Buddha, out of utter compassion, "spoke unasked."

And its core is a single passage:

If there be a good man or good woman who, hearing the discourse on Amitābha Buddha, holds the name—for one day, or two days, three days, four days, five days, six days, or seven days, one mind, undistracted—then, at the end of that person's life, Amitābha Buddha together with the host of holy ones will appear before him. At the time of his death, his mind not falling into confusion, he will at once attain rebirth in Amitābha Buddha's Land of Utmost Bliss.

You hear of Amitābha Buddha, and you take this name and hold it fast—one day, up to seven days, one mind, undistracted. When life ends, Amitābha Buddha brings the holy assembly, appears there before you; the mind not confused, you attain rebirth at once.

It is that simple.

"Simple" Does Not Mean "Shallow"

Precisely because it is this simple, people find it easy to look down on, and they read it as one of two things: either "the shallowest of the three sūtras, a little primer for beginners," or "the first two are too elaborate and too hard, so this one was condensed out of them as the easy version."

Both readings are wrong.

Take the "condensed version" misunderstanding first. This shortest of the three, the Amitābha Sūtra, was translated by Kumārajīva in 402 CE; the Sūtra on the Contemplation of Amitāyus, the one that teaches the sixteen contemplations, would not be translated for another twenty or thirty years; and the Sūtra of Immeasurable Life, the one that teaches the forty-eight vows, reached its finished form later still. Which is to say—this "simplest" of the sūtras came into the world earlier than those two "most elaborate" ones.

Since the simple came first and the elaborate came after, "the simple is a condensation of the elaborate" cannot stand.

The truth is this: the three sūtras are not a chain running from elaborate to simple. They are three doors standing side by side. The Sūtra of Immeasurable Life is the door of the vow—the blueprint of a land. The Sūtra on the Contemplation of Amitāyus is the door of contemplation—the ladder by which that land is seen. The Amitābha Sūtra is the door of the name—one buddha-name, entering directly. Three doors, each independent, each a complete way in, none subordinate to another.

And the sūtra itself blocks the "cheap and easy" road first. Just before that core passage, the Buddha says: "one cannot, with few roots of goodness and little merit, be born in that land." Few roots of goodness, little merit—these cannot reach that land. Only then does He say: hold the name, for one day up to seven, one mind undistracted. On this sūtra's own scale, that one buddha-name is no light thing.

A Thousandweight Hidden in a Single Buddha-Name

Then what of the "simple"? Isn't simple just another word for less content?

No. This sūtra's simplicity is a simplicity of the surface; in its bones, it is as dense as anything can be.

The Ming-dynasty Master Lianchi, in his Commentary with Notes on the Amitābha Sūtra, took the two characters of "holding" and split them open:

To grasp is to receive it on hearing—with courage, resolute and decisive, so that it cannot be shaken or wrested away. To hold is to guard it once received—abiding, unwavering, steadfast, so that it is never forgotten.

Look at it: the single phrase "holding the name" already strings taut several strands of mind-force—catching the name decisively, guarding it firmly, not for one moment letting another thought wrest it away, not for one moment letting the name slip from memory. So holding the name is not at all a mechanical repetition on the lips. It is an intensely attentive act. Someone who merely goes blank, mumbling the buddha-name while the mind has long since drifted off—that is not holding.

Another Ming master, Ouyi, in his Essential Explanation of the Amitābha Sūtra, put it more thoroughly still. He first set up three things—faith, vow, practice:

Without faith there is nothing to open the vow; without the vow there is nothing to guide the practice; and without the wondrous practice of holding the name, there is nothing to fulfill what was vowed and confirm what was believed.

Faith is truly believing that this Buddha and this land exist, truly believing that one's own recitation can succeed; vow is truly wanting to go; practice is just this reciting, utterance after utterance. The three clasp one another so tightly that if one is missing, the other two are no longer real—as Ouyi says, "without vow and practice it is not true faith; without practice and faith it is not true vow; without faith and vow it is not true practice." And where do these three come together? Ouyi answers:

Now, since it is wholly out of faith and vow that one holds the name, in each and every utterance the three—faith, vow, and practice—are all completely present; and this is why it is called the cause and condition of abundant roots of goodness and merit.

Within this one buddha-name. One buddha-name recited truly, and faith, vow, and practice arrive together, all three at once.

Do you see it now? This one short buddha-name, light on the surface, gathers faith, vow, and practice—all three, complete in a single utterance. Its threshold is low enough for anyone to step across; its interior is dense to the point that not a hair's breadth can be added or removed. The door is low, and the heart is dense—this, and nothing less, is the true face of this sūtra.

The Hardest Thing Is Faith

At the sūtra's close, the Buddha calls the Buddhas of the six directions to bear witness together, and then speaks a heavy line: that He, in the midst of the five defilements, "expounds for beings this Dharma that is hard for all the world to believe."

Hard to believe—this is the verdict the sūtra passes on itself. Ouyi peels that word "hard" apart, layer by layer: to attain awakening in the Pure Land is easy, to attain it in a defiled world is hard; to teach beings of a defiled world is hard; to teach the sudden Dharma is harder; to teach the sudden Dharma of the Pure Land's crosswise transcendence is harder still; and to teach this gate—"without the toil of cultivation and realization, holding the name alone, to ascend directly to non-retrogression"—no hard cultivation, no hard realization, just hold one name and rise straight to non-retrogression—is the hardest of the hard.

That strikes the vital point. Anyone can say the buddha-name aloud; but that flicker of half-belief in the heart—"Just recite like this, and really be reborn? How could anything come that cheap?"—that sliver of doubt is the real barrier. So this sūtra, which looks the easiest of all, asks for the deepest measure of faith. Here lies the reason the Buddha called out to Śāriputra by name to deliver it: "because, without the foremost wisdom, one cannot be directly free of doubt."

The four characters "one mind, undistracted" say the same thing. It is not about how loud or how fast the mouth recites—it is this mind: trusting fully, holding steady, no longer of two minds.

One Name, Walking Into the Great Sūtras

Buddha-recollection has walked to this point, and the three doors of the Three Pure Land Sūtras—vow, contemplation, the name—now all stand. One phrase, "Namo Amitābha Buddha," has gathered the blueprint of that land and the ladder of the sixteen contemplations into its six short characters.

But the story is not finished.

This buddha-name is about to walk into the deepest and greatest sūtras of Chinese Buddhism—the Śūraṅgama, the Lotus, the Flower Ornament. In the high places of those great sūtras, this recitation will be pressed toward a deeper telling. In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, for instance, Mahāsthāmaprāpta Bodhisattva describes his own gate of buddha-recollection in just eight characters: "gathering in the six sense-roots, with pure recollection uninterrupted."

From "holding the name, one mind, undistracted" to "gathering in the six sense-roots, with pure recollection uninterrupted"—this one buddha-name, inside the great sūtras of the Mahāyāna, is about to undergo one more rebirth.

That is Part Five—the deepest stretch of this whole book.