Tanluan and Daochuo: Dredging the Pure Land River Deep

6.1 Tanluan and Daochuo: Dredging the Pure Land River Deep

This one phrase of buddha-recollection, flowing downstream along its face of calling the name, flowed into the Pure Land school. The earliest to dredge this river deep were two patriarchs: Tanluan of the Northern Wei, and Daochuo of the Tang.

What they dug down to were two things: a way of speaking, and a person.

Self-Power, and Other-Power

Take the way of speaking first. Tanluan set up a pair of terms of the utmost importance: self-power, and other-power.

What do they mean? He said: the practice of the Buddha-Dharma runs, broadly, along two roads. One road relies on your own exertion — keeping the precepts, cultivating concentration, opening wisdom, climbing up step by step. This is called "self-power," and also "the path of difficult practice" — the hard road. The other road does not rest wholly on yourself: you board the power of the Buddha's vow and are carried across. This is called "other-power," and also "the path of easy practice" — the passable road.

Tanluan gave a picture for it. The path of difficult practice is like a man both lame and feeble who wants to mount a donkey by his own strength — he strains to the last of it and still cannot get astride; who wants to walk on these two legs to a place very far away — a few steps and he stumbles, and in measureless eons he will never arrive. And the path of easy practice? The same lame, feeble man gives up the donkey. He steps onto a great ship — the Buddha's original vow is that ship — and steadily, safely, he is carried across the wide water he himself could never have swum.

By the land road, going on foot, there is hardship; by the water road, riding a boat, there is ease. The whole difference between difficult and easy lies just here.

The Truly Great Matter: Who Is Being Saved?

And yet the deepest place Tanluan and Daochuo dug was not this pair of terms. It was the weightier question underneath — for whom was this ship prepared?

The Buddha-Dharma before them, when it spoke of practice, quietly presupposed a certain kind of person: a person of capacity — one who could take up the precepts, sit firm in concentration, open wisdom. If the practice did not succeed, the fault lay in your thin provisions, your slack diligence — try harder, gather more, and in time you would succeed.

Tanluan and Daochuo replaced this "person being saved" entirely. They said: this ship was prepared for the ordinary being (fánfū).

What is an ordinary being? Not the one standing on the lowest rung of the ladder of practice — the one who cannot climb onto the ladder at all; precisely that lame, feeble fellow who, strain as he may, cannot mount the donkey. The busy, the dull, the heavy with karmic burden, those who turn around only on their deathbed — the vast majority of this world, plain ordinary people who, by self-power, will never practice their way to anything.

The phrase "other-power" was prepared exactly for such a person. If the one being saved were a person of capacity, salvation would be nothing more than "gathering a little more provision." But if the one being saved is an ordinary being whose self-power cannot reach, then salvation must include a strength he cannot generate from himself — and that strength is the power of the Buddha's original vow.

This "ordinary being" was not something Tanluan conjured out of thin air. The Three Pure Land Sūtras of Part Four had long since opened the door for such a person: the eighteenth vow gathers in "the beings of the ten directions," not only bodhisattvas who have mastered concentration; the lower-grade lower-birth saves the one steeped in the five heinous deeds and the ten evil deeds, so racked at life's end that he cannot even recollect the Buddha and can only cry the name aloud. Tanluan looked at the person standing inside that door, saw him clearly, and fixed him in place.

What is more, Tanluan counted himself as just such an ordinary being. Daochuo recorded a confession of Tanluan's own: "I must keep the mind tied in the stall — like tethering grass-bait to draw an ox." This heart must constantly be tethered, like an ox, to the grass beside the stall, or it cannot be led. A great patriarch, bowing this low, owning himself an ox that can be drawn only by grass. The ordinary being who is saved is no one else — first of all, it is he himself.

Daochuo: This Is the End of the Dharma, Not the End of the World

When it came to Daochuo, he gave this ordinary being a coordinate in time — the end of the Dharma (mòfǎ).

Daochuo said: "The present is the end of the Dharma; this is now the evil world of the five turbidities; only the one gate of the Pure Land is a way one can still pass through." Right now it is the end of the Dharma, the world of the five turbidities; the only door still passable is this one door of the Pure Land.

Hearing "the end of the Dharma," a modern reader slides easily toward "the world is ending" — that kind of gloom. But Daochuo's end-of-dharma was no free-floating cosmic pessimism. It was something he had seen with his own eyes.

In the year Daochuo turned twelve, Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou ordered the Dharma destroyed — monasteries confiscated, monks driven back into lay life, scriptures burned. That calamity was his own childhood. Fifty years later, when he set down the words "end of the Dharma, five turbidities," he was not describing some remote decay of the cosmos; he was naming what he had witnessed — the living fact of the Buddha-Dharma being broken off in the human world.

So when Daochuo said "in the end of the Dharma only the Pure Land gate remains," he was not saying the other dharma-gates were "wrong." What he said was: those gates that rely on self-power (he called them the Sacred Path gate) are not bad — they simply do not meet the occasion; they do not fit this age, this kind of person. Like a good prescription that must match the illness: the medicine is not at fault; it is this disease, at this hour, that cannot use it. And the gate of the Pure Land is precisely the door, still passable, opened for this age and this ordinary being. The teaching must answer the time — this is called time-and-teaching correspondence.

"Other-Power" Is Not Lying Back and Waiting

Here is the place most easily misheard, and it must be said plainly.

The moment people hear "other-power," "relying on the Buddha's vow-power," they think: then I need do nothing at all — just lie back and wait for the Buddha to come and save me.

No.

Tanluan and Vasubandhu said it very clearly: the one who practices niànfó is to cultivate the five recollection gates — prostration, praise, aspiration, contemplation, dedication — a whole regimen of active work, to be done day after day. The Buddha's original vow-power is the dominant condition of this work, not its causal condition.

The two terms are distinguished with great care. The "causal condition" is the cause that directly brings forth the fruit; the "dominant condition" is the strength that stands at its side — helping, holding up, bringing to completion. The vow-power does not come to practice in your place; it comes to hold you up as you practice. When the provisions of your self-power fall short and you cannot make the crossing on your own, it bears you from alongside — you, together with your practice, carried over as one.

Come back to the figure of the ship. The ship is the Buddha's vow-power — that much is true. But you must still lift your own foot and step aboard. The step aboard is yours; the ship that bears you over the water is the Buddha's. Without the ship, these legs of yours cannot swim across; but without your stepping aboard, the ship has no one to carry. Practicing actively, and being borne across — the two work together; neither cancels the other.

This, and nothing less, is the true watercourse of the Pure Land river that Tanluan and Daochuo dredged: not that you should drop all effort and lie flat awaiting rescue, but this — go ahead, as the ordinary being you are, plainly and steadily lift your foot onto the ship and recite phrase after phrase; and for that stretch of water you cannot cross yourself, the Buddha's vow-power is there, holding you up.

The Same Buddha-Name, Pressed Inward

Tanluan and Daochuo turned that buddha-name outward — toward the Buddha on the far shore, toward the land in the West, leaning on the vow-power at the other end.

But even as the Pure Land river rushed outward, another river was quietly rising. It took up the very same buddha-name — and pressed it, hard, inward.

Not seeking the West; not relying on a buddha elsewhere. It drives this one phrase of buddha-recollection into one's own mind, drives it to the very end, until it forces out a question:

Who is recollecting the Buddha?

That is the Chan counter-thesis. In the next chapter, we listen to that blow — the interrogation turned inward.