Buddha-Recollection in This Age: The Machine Cannot Recollect for You

8.1 Buddha-Recollection in This Age: The Machine Cannot Recollect for You

The long road of recollection has been walked to its end. But before it can be laid back into the palm of your hand, it must first be set back into this age of ours, and one question must be asked:

In today's age — when machines can speak, can hold a conversation, can turn over a billion words in the blink of an eye — does buddha-recollection still count as "recollection"? Can a machine this clever recollect the Buddha for me? Has this "recollection" already gone out of date?

This question is not a quarrel with anyone. It is this age asking a question of itself.

To answer it, one thing must first be made clear: in "buddha-recollection," what exactly is that "recollection"?

Recollection Is Not a Contest of Faster and More

What dazzles most about that talking machine is its "fast" and its "many": in a blink it can read through, turn over, and pour out more words than you will read in a lifetime.

So someone thinks: isn't buddha-recollection just saying the buddha-name fast and saying it many times over? If a machine can recite it tens of thousands of times in a second, doesn't it leave us humans far behind?

This is to see "recollection" wrongly.

The Yogācāra treatise, the Cheng Weishi Lun, gives "recollection" its definition: "with respect to a previously experienced object, causing the mind to remember clearly and not forget — this is its nature." Recollection is taking something your mind has once held (a "previously experienced" object) and keeping it — firmly remembered, never forgotten: that is its very nature. Its key word is "mind" — a mind that can remember, can hold, can refuse to forget.

What the machine has is words in motion. It does not have that mind which can remember, can hold, can turn. However fast it pours out words, however many, that is words moving — not recollection moving. Fast is not the same as recollection.

The Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra holds a ready-made example that says this through to the bottom. Speaking of the conditions in which beings fall beyond the Dharma's reach, it names the "long-lifespan heaven": "if one is born in the long-lifespan heaven, a thousand myriad Buddhas pass, and — through attachment to the savour of concentration — one notices none of them." A god of that heaven lives a life stretched beyond measure; Buddha after Buddha appears in the world and enters nirvāṇa, thousands upon thousands of them, while he, sunk in the taste of his concentration, notices nothing at all. Look: a lifespan that long, that abundant, turns into the very "obstruction" that keeps one from ever meeting a Buddha.

The long-lifespan heaven's "too slow, too long" and the machine's "too fast, too many" are in truth the same mistake: both take recollection for a matter of quantity — who lives longer, who cycles faster. But recollection has never been a matter of quantity. It is a mind, and whether that mind is willing to turn around.

Where Is the Real Moment of Buddha-Recollection?

Then where, exactly, is the real moment of buddha-recollection — that one leap?

Not in the racing stream of thought after thought (that is what the machine does). Not in the written shape of the buddha-name (the Buddha is not those few characters — the Buddha is that trace of His qualities imbued deep in your mind, rising to the surface). And not in the felt effort of "I am recollecting hard" (if you can still feel "how mightily I recite," that "I" is precisely the clinging not yet set down).

The real moment of buddha-recollection lies here — between "the you who recollects" and "the Buddha who is recollected," that one flash of "correspondence."

It is the instant your mind turns its head and adheres to the Buddha. When we spoke earlier of Mahāsthāmaprāpta's "mother and child recollecting each other," we said: the Buddha, like a mother, has been recollecting you, His child, all along; but whether mother and child meet again rests entirely on the child — on you, on whether you are willing to turn back and recollect the mother in return. That turning back, that adhering — that is "correspondence."

And this turning back, no one and nothing in this world can do for you.

The machine cannot. Why not? Because this "correspondence" happens inside a mind — inside your mind. The machine has no mind that can turn back; however clever it is, it cannot turn your head for you. The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra told us earlier: the Buddha you recollect is, in the end, your own deepest mind. The machine cannot be your mind.

The Machine Can Help — but Only as an "Outer Condition"

Does that mean the machine is of no use at all in buddha-recollection?

Not that either. Earlier, in the Pure Land part, we distinguished two kinds of power: one called the "causal condition" — the principal that directly brings forth the fruit; the other called the "dominant condition" — the supporting power that helps from the side and gives things a lift.

What the machine can be, in buddha-recollection, is a "dominant condition" — that helping hand from the side. It can find a sūtra for you in an instant; it can explain a difficult term clearly; it can fetch the masters' teachings for you to read. These are all good aids — a new convenience this age has added.

But it cannot enter the slot of the "causal condition." The principals of buddha-recollection and rebirth are Amitābha's original vow, the wholesome roots within your own mind, and the seed of the buddha-name imbued deep in your heart — these three, intimately and personally, accomplish the matter of your rebirth, and no one can stand in for them. Into this slot the machine cannot squeeze.

Use the boat simile once more: the machine can find the ticket for you; it can point out where the boat is moored. But it cannot lift your foot onto the boat for you, still less become the water that carries you across the sea. The step aboard is yours. That turning back, that correspondence, is yours.

In This Age You Can Recollect the Buddha Just the Same

Having come this far, what this chapter really means to make plain is this.

There is no need to worry that this clever new age will turn buddha-recollection into something out of date — an antique.

However fast the machine, however many, however clever, it cannot do the one real thing of buddha-recollection: turning your own mind around and adhering it to the Buddha. And this turning, this adhering, you can do today exactly as Queen Vaidehī did in her prison; exactly as that person of lower-grade lower-birth on his deathbed, able only to call out ten times; exactly as the child in Mahāsthāmaprāpta's telling, turning back to remember his mother — the same, and not one bit less.

For this age of ours the sūtras long ago had a name: "the dharma-ending age." What it names is simply an age growing ever noisier, ever more disordered, where the pure Dharma is more and more buried. Yet the Buddha-Dharma, precisely for such an age, left its door at the very lowest (so low that lower-grade lower-birth, with ten recollections, succeeds), and set buddha-nature within every sentient being (so that even a person laden with evil karma possesses it from the start). This new age, however noisy, however chaotic, however many its novelties, falls entirely within that low, wide door — left open long ago for just such an age.

The machine cannot change the plainest fact of all: at this very moment, you, just the same, can turn around and recollect one phrase of the buddha-name.

Then How, Exactly, Does One Recollect?

That "correspondence" the machine cannot perform, that turning back — when all is said, what actually is it? I, at this moment, this perfectly ordinary person, wanting to turn back and recollect the Buddha — concretely, what are the steps?

This whole long road, walked for more than a thousand years, must come down at the last to this plainest of questions: inside buddha-recollection, what exactly are the steps?

That is the final chapter of this book — its close.

In the next chapter, we take those steps, one by one, and place them into the palm of your hand.