Binding the Three Periods: Circling Off a Stretch of Days to Recollect

5.3 Binding the Three Periods: Circling Off a Stretch of Days to Recollect

The calling of the name in the last chapter could be done anywhere, at any time, even with a scattered mind — a door standing open toward every time and every place.

This chapter takes the opposite stance entirely. It comes from the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment and is called "binding the three periods": take a stretch of days, circle the whole of it off, shut the door, do nothing else, and recollect with a single mind.

We Are Living in the "Final Age"

The Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment has one phrase that returns again and again, running through the whole text: "sentient beings of the final age."

What is the "final age"? The sūtra says it bluntly: "The Buddha grows ever more distant, the sages and worthies fall hidden, heterodox dharmas grow ever more ablaze." We are farther and farther from the days when the Buddha walked the world; the sages of real practice and real realization have vanished one by one; and dharmas that sound right but are not grow noisier by the day.

That is, more or less, a picture of our own time.

Many people, on hearing "final age," feel their heart sink halfway: the Buddha is long gone, the sages are nowhere to be seen — are we dull-rooted latecomers fit only for some discounted, degenerated version of the path?

The Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment refuses to say so. It says this same gate works "whether the Buddha is in the world, after the Buddha's extinction, or during the final age of the dharma" — with the Buddha here, with the Buddha gone, all the way into the age of decline — just the same. The final age is not a degraded edition. It is the same Perfect Enlightenment, meeting a different season. The season has changed; the awakened nature that everyone possesses in full has not lost one part.

Circling Off the Days

Then how, concretely, should people of the final age practice? The Perfect-Enlightenment chapter of the sūtra gives a very down-to-earth method — binding the three periods.

It says: whoever wishes to practice should first "build a ritual site" — arrange a clean, quiet place of practice — then "set a period," fixing a stretch of days: a long period of one hundred and twenty days, a middle of one hundred, a short of eighty. For those days, settle yourself in that pure place and close the door.

If the Buddha were still in the world, you would contemplate Him directly, face to face. Since He is gone, you "set up His likeness" — enshrine an image — "holding it in mind, with the eye imagining, giving rise to right recollection": the mind keeping the Buddha, the eye picturing the Buddha, thought after thought a right remembering. Then it is "as though returning to the days when the Tathāgata constantly abided."

Remember those eight characters — "as though returning to the days when the Tathāgata constantly abided." They mean: though you were born into a final age the Buddha has long since left, the moment you recollect Him and contemplate Him like this, it is as if you had returned to the days when He was still in the world, teaching every day. Buddha-recollection cancels that distance of a thousand years at a single stroke; between you and the Buddha, it is suddenly as close as face to face. This is one of the deepest powers of the practice: it compresses time back to the living scene of the true Dharma.

And within those days, how does one recollect? The sūtra divides it into two beats. For the first three seven-days — twenty-one days — "bow to the names of the Buddhas of the ten directions and ardently seek repentance": prostrate to the ten-direction Buddhas, repent in earnest, wash the karmic obstructions from the heart. After those three seven-days, "single-mindedly gather in recollection" — with one mind, gather the thought in and settle it on this one recollection of the Buddha.

First repentance, then recollection — that is the rhythm of binding the three periods. The seven-day buddha-recollection retreats of later Chinese Buddhism, the summer rains retreats, the sealed retreats of niànfó — their root is all here.

The Four Diseases of Practice

The Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment has another passage, on the "four diseases" — the four ailments practitioners most easily contract, and exactly the four directions in which buddha-recollection most easily goes crooked. Anyone who recollects the Buddha should keep them in mind.

The first is the disease of fabrication. The thought runs: "I must work furiously, strain with all my might, to obtain Perfect Enlightenment." But Perfect Enlightenment is not something you can "make." If buddha-recollection turns into this — teeth gritted, force overdone, always feeling "I must push harder before the Buddha will answer me" — that is the disease of fabrication.

The second is the disease of passivity. The opposite: "Since the mind is already Buddha, I need sever nothing and seek nothing; just let it all be." It sounds free-spirited; in truth it is laziness. If buddha-recollection turns into this — "mind is Buddha, so reciting or not makes no difference," and one simply stops, or lets the mind drift where it will — that is the disease of passivity.

The third is the disease of cessation. The thought: "I will press every thought dead, make the mind a dead stillness — that will be Perfect Enlightenment." But Perfect Enlightenment is not "stopped" into being either. If buddha-recollection is used only to crush thoughts, a mere tool for entering trance — that is the disease of cessation.

The fourth is the disease of annihilation. The thought: "I will extinguish every affliction, body and mind utterly empty, nothing at all left — then I will have arrived." But Perfect Enlightenment is not that dead blank of "nothing whatsoever" either. If buddha-recollection ends in an emptiness where nothing remains, the recollecting itself negated — that is the disease of annihilation.

Fabrication, passivity, cessation, annihilation — straining to make, too lazy to practice, forcing thoughts down, extinguishing into blankness. These four are the four walls of practice: lean against any one of them, and you cannot get out. The sūtra says: "One who is free of the four diseases then knows purity." Only when all four are left behind do you touch the purity that was always there.

Buddha-recollection walks the road that runs straight between those four walls: no need to strain (free of fabrication), yet no license to laze and not recollect (free of passivity); not a tool for crushing thoughts (free of cessation), nor a reciting of yourself into a blank void (free of annihilation). Just plainly, steadily, one utterance after another — holding Him in mind, the eye picturing — recollecting the Buddha rightly.

Severing, Leaving, Binding

In the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment, the teaching on final-age practice in fact spans three chapters in a row — three verbs in a row. The Maitreya chapter teaches "severing" — severing the root of cyclic existence (and that root is craving, is desire). The Universal-Awakening chapter teaches "leaving" — leaving the four diseases we have just seen. The Perfect-Enlightenment chapter teaches "binding" — binding the days into a period, setting up the rhythm of practice.

Severing, leaving, binding — these three are not a staircase, one finished before the next begins. They move together, all at once, inside every utterance of the Buddha's name: to recite this one utterance is to sever once (loosening this moment's grasping), to leave once (falling into none of the four diseases), and to bind once (setting this one thought into the rhythm of the days you have circled off).

Only when all three move together does one utterance of buddha-recollection reach the full measure the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment promises.

Repentance, and That Light

The first three seven-days of "binding the three periods" are for "ardently seeking repentance." Why must repentance come before recollection? The sūtra adds: when repentance has gone deep enough, "should good signs come, the mind obtains tranquil ease" — some wholesome vision appears, and the heart turns at once light and settled.

Buddha-recollection, repentance, seeing the sign — these three are joined.

And this "seeing the sign," in another great sūtra, is pushed to a position of utmost weight: when no qualified teacher is left in the world to transmit the precepts to you, how do you receive them? The answer — by recollecting the Buddha, by repenting, and by yourself: in samādhi or in dream, seeing with your own eyes the Buddha appear and bear witness for you. See that sign, and you have received the precepts.

That is the next chapter — "seeing the sign, obtaining the precepts."