Preface · One Buddha-Name, a Thousand Years of Walking

The book in your hands is about something utterly ordinary, and utterly extraordinary — recollecting the Buddha.

Ordinary, because you have probably long known how. In the monasteries, at the family altar, on the lips of the old, at the ears of the dying — "Namo Amitābha Buddha" has sounded on Chinese soil for more than a thousand years; nearly everyone can say it.

Extraordinary, because this buddha-name you thought you had long known goes very deep. It existed while the Buddha was still in the world; across more than two thousand years it has been turned over, deepened, reversed, and settled by countless disciples, patriarchs, and great teachers. Behind the phrase you say so easily today stands a long, long road, walked for over a thousand years.

This book takes you down that road, from its beginning to its end.

One Word: Niàn

The book is called Niàn — the niàn of niànfó, "recollecting the Buddha."

This word is the book's protagonist. At its earliest, in the Āgamas where the Buddha taught, it was called "recollection" — calling to mind the Buddha's qualities. Later it traveled into China and grew into "holding the name" — the buddha-name on the lips; grew again into "contemplation" — the Buddha beheld within the mind; was pressed by the Chan school into the single demand "Who is recollecting the Buddha?"; and at the last, in the Flower Ornament Sūtra, stretched open into the buddha-recollection of the whole dharma-realm.

It has changed shape many times. Its core has never changed.

The book's subtitle — "from early Buddhist recollection to the Flower Ornament vision" — names exactly this road from end to end: setting out from the plainest recollection and walking all the way to the widest buddha-recollection of the Flower Ornament. A thousand years and more, one word niàn on this land — how it grew up, how it divided the household, how it flowed back together, and how it returned to that one plainest phrase.

A Road You Can Actually Walk

This road is no airy metaphysics. Every step of it rests on a real scene.

It sets out in the Nigrodha Park, south of Kapilavatthu — where a layman named Mahānāma, busy with the affairs of a great household, afraid that one day he might die suddenly in the crowded streets, flustered and forgetting the Buddha altogether, came to ask. It passes through a great assembly outside Rājagṛha, where a lay bodhisattva asked the Buddha before the whole throng: how does one practice, so as to see the Buddha face to face? It passes through a tragedy in the palace at Rājagṛha — a mother shut in a cell by her own son, crying out to the Buddha to show her a place free of sorrow. It passes through a street in Luoyang, where a monk from India spat once on the ground and woke a learned man who wanted only to live forever. It passes through one night's dream, in which a great golden drum, with the Buddhas of the ten directions appearing in its light, sounded out a confession of itself. And at the last it walks into the Jeta Grove of the Flower Ornament, where the youth Sudhana visits good teacher after good teacher, and Samantabhadra sets down his ten great vows.

Look — all along this thousand-year road stand people, one after another, just like you and me: people who panic, who fear, who err, who reach the end of their rope. The one recollection the Buddha left behind is the rope held out to them — and to you.

This Book Is Written for You

This book is not written for scholars.

It debates with no one, and it draws no comparisons between "Buddhist recollection" and practices from elsewhere. What it does is one plain and simple thing: it tells you, item by item, what that niàn the Buddha once taught really is — what it does, when He taught it, how He taught it, and what it means.

It is written for you — for someone willing, in later years or in the thick of busy days, to quietly recollect the Buddha. You need not know Sanskrit. You need not remember catalog numbers. You need not first become a scholar. You need only be willing to let an old monk tell you, slowly, the story of this road.

Walk Slowly; There Is No Hurry

The book is divided into eight parts, like eight stages of a road. You may read from the first page straight through to the last, following the road slowly. Or you may go first to whichever stage speaks to your heart.

And if you are impatient — if all you want to know is "then how, right now, do I actually practice?" — turn first to the final chapter. That chapter gathers this whole road into a few of its plainest steps and sets them in the palm of your hand. When you have read it, come back and walk the road from Part One, and you will see: behind those few steps in your hand stands a road this long, and this deep.

At the Last

Recollecting the Buddha, in the end, is very simple: turn the mind gently around, and lay it against the Buddha.

However thick this book, however much it says, it is all for one thing only: that you may do that simplest thing with a more settled heart, and a clearer one.

May there come a day, as you read, when the book can be set down — and in your hands, in your heart, only one phrase remains:

Homage to the Original Teacher Śākyamuni Buddha.

Namo Amitābha Buddha.