Part Eight · Coda · Placing This Road Back in the Palm of Your Hand

The road of recollection has been walked to its end. From the recollection of the Āgamas to the dharma-realm buddha-recollection of the Flower Ornament — a thousand years and more, one map, spread open.

But a map is for walking. It is not for framing and hanging on a wall.

This last part adds no new sūtras and no new patriarchs. It does only two things.

The first is to set this road back into our own age — an age when even the machines can talk and answer back — and to ask: does buddha-recollection still count as recollection? Has this "recollection" gone out of date?

The second, and the last, is to gather this thousand-year road into a few of its plainest steps, and place them, one by one, back into the palm of your hand — so that buddha-recollection is no longer a subject you must go and "understand," but a thing you can, this very moment, "do."

We look first at buddha-recollection in this age.