The Secret Adornment: That Warehouse, Turned Over Whole

5.7 The Secret Adornment: That Warehouse, Turned Over Whole

The last chapter, on the Laṅkāvatāra, left a question standing. The buddha you recollect is the deepest "storehouse consciousness" of your own mind — the tathāgatagarbha. But this storehouse consciousness is at the same time the great warehouse of all your defiled habits — pure in nature, yet covered over with dust. Then how does buddha-recollection turn this great warehouse, at once pure and defiled, into a pure one?

The Sūtra of the Secret Adornment — the Ghanavyūha-sūtra — takes up exactly this question.

Gold, and the Gold Ring

There is a line in the Secret Adornment Sūtra that settles, with one stroke of the hammer, the relation between the tathāgatagarbha and the ālaya (the storehouse consciousness):

The Buddha declares the tathāgatagarbha and thereby sets it forth as the ālaya; as gold and its ring, they unfold without difference.

What is the relation between the tathāgatagarbha and the ālaya? The relation between gold and a gold ring.

The ring is forged of gold. Gold is the ring's very substance. Would you say they are two things? No — the ring is nothing but gold; the gold stands there, ready-made, as the ring. One and the same gold, two shapes, two names, "unfolding without difference."

The tathāgatagarbha is the gold — the substance, pure from the start. The ālaya is the ring that gold has been forged into — the same gold, only for now in the shape of a "ring": shaped, wrapped, stained.

So when the Laṅkāvatāra says "the buddha you recollect is your own storehouse consciousness," the Secret Adornment adds one line: yes — and that storehouse consciousness, in its bones, is a piece of pure gold.

"Secret Adornment" Is That Warehouse, Turned Over

The Secret Adornment Sūtra has another line, weightier still:

The subtly-wrought realm of Ghanavyūha — its very substance is the consciousness-that-has-been-transmuted.

"Secret Adornment" — Ghanavyūha — is the name of the adorned buddha-land this sūtra teaches. And the sūtra says: the "substance" of this land of Secret Adornment, its very body, is "the consciousness-that-has-been-transmuted" — the consciousness after the transmutation of the base.

What is the "transmutation of the base"? The "base" is the root on which you stand — that great warehouse of the storehouse consciousness. To "transmute the base" is to turn this whole warehouse over — from "defiled" in charge to "pure" in charge.

So the buddha-land called Secret Adornment is not out beyond the sky; it is not another place. It is your own warehouse of storehouse consciousness, after it has been turned over and the pure-gold face has come to light. Near its close the sūtra simply says it outright: "The ālaya itself is the Ghanavyūha — the wondrous substance, in itself pure." The storehouse consciousness is the Secret Adornment; its wondrous substance was pure from the very start.

Listen — the buddha-land you seek to be born in turns out to be your own mind, turned over.

Buddha-Recollection Is the Hand That Turns the Warehouse

Then by what is this warehouse turned over?

The Secret Adornment Sūtra gives the clue. It says: "This is the field of the contemplative practice of buddha-recollection, and it is called the tathāgatagarbha." The field you face when you recollect the Buddha, when you do the contemplative practice of buddha-recollection, bears the name tathāgatagarbha.

Now string the threads together: the field that buddha-recollection faces is the tathāgatagarbha; the tathāgatagarbha is the pure gold of the storehouse consciousness; and Secret Adornment is the scene once that gold has been turned to the light. One line straight down — buddha-recollection is precisely the hand that turns the warehouse of the storehouse consciousness from defiled to pure.

How does it turn? This needs to be said carefully, because there is nothing mysterious in it.

That pure gold has been there all along — only covered by the "ring," the entangled shape. And what covers it? The most stubborn thing in our mind — manas, that self-grasping which never pauses for a moment, clutching this whole warehouse as "me, mine." It is this hand that has clenched the pure gold into the ring named "I."

What buddha-recollection does is this: it gives this mind an object that is not "I" — the Buddha — and lets it rest there, time after time. While you recollect the Buddha, the mind adheres to the Buddha, not to "I"; and as the recollecting goes on, the hand clutched dead around "I" loosens a little; and as the hand loosens, the pure gold beneath shows through a little.

One utterance of the buddha-name, a little loosening; a thousand utterances on, and the one in charge of that warehouse slowly turns from "defiled" (the face clenched into a self) to "pure" (the face of gold showing through). This turning-over is the "transmutation of the base."

Remember: it turns gradually — not all at once in a single thought. Nor is it done by buddha-recollection alone — but buddha-recollection is the most capable and most enduring hand. It does not hurry and does not force; it only gives your mind, once and once again, a pure object on which it can come to rest, and unclenches that fist, inch by inch.

The Buddha You Recollect, the Land You Go To, and This Mind Are One

Here, the threads converge.

The buddha you recollect (the Laṅkā) is the deepest core of your mind; that core (the Secret Adornment) is a piece of gold, pure from the start; to recollect the Buddha is to turn this gold from the defilement of "clenched into an I" to the purity of "light showing through"; and the scene after the turning is called Secret Adornment — is called the Pure Land.

So — the buddha you recollect, the land you are going to, and this mind that is recollecting right now were never three things. They are one. Buddha-recollection is this mind recognizing that it was pure gold all along, and then loosening, dissolving, little by little, the ring stamped "I" that covers it.

Part One spoke of "recollection as another track, running apart from mindfulness." Here that track reaches its deepest point: it runs all the way down to the warehouse at the floor of your mind — and it is precisely the hand that can turn that whole warehouse from defiled to pure.

Then How, Exactly, Do You Recollect?

The principle, by the time we reach the Secret Adornment, has gone as deep as it can go: to recollect the Buddha is to turn out the pure gold of your own mind.

But — concretely, how exactly do you recollect?

When we read the Laṅkā, we noted that Daoxin, the Fourth Patriarch of Chan, founded his gate of buddha-recollection on two sūtras: the Laṅkā, which settles what to recollect (the hearts of all Buddhas); and another sūtra, which settles how — the One-Practice Samādhi of the Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra.

The principle has been told to its very top; now it is time to return to the plainest question of all: method. The One-Practice Samādhi gives exactly that — the most precise and also the simplest method — and it gathers every line told along this whole road, Chan and Pure Land, calling the name and seeing the mind, into a single sentence.

That is the final chapter of Part Five.