Reading Map · How to Read This Book

This book is one road, walked in eight stages. Let me point the eight out to you first — with a map in your mind, the walking will not feel uncertain.

Not one stage is abstract doctrine spun out of nothing. Each one sets out from a real scene — some mountain, some assembly, some person, asking the Buddha a single question. Follow these scenes, and you follow the road.

The Eight Stages

Part One · Pāli Foundations. Back to the very source. The place is the Nigrodha Park, south of Kapilavatthu — the park where the Buddha often stayed when He came home. A Sakyan layman busy with his household, Mahānāma, brings his disordered days to the Buddha again and again: the streets are full of mad elephants, mad people, careering carts; if I die out there suddenly, my mind in a panic, forgetting the Buddha, the Dharma, the Saṅgha — where will I go? The Buddha's answer is where this book begins — "recollection." This part makes four things clear: the recollection the Buddha taught with His own hands is a track distinct from seated meditative absorption; it has a ready-made format, the nine epithets; it is a whole system, six objects facing outward and inward; and at its tail it hides an insurance for the hour of death (like a tree long leaning one way, whose root once cut, it falls that way; like a pot of ghee sunk in deep water and broken — the ghee rises).

Part Two · The Earliest Chinese Translations. Recollection speaks Chinese for the first time. Emperor Ming of the Han dreamed one night of a golden man and sent envoys west, who brought back what tradition calls the first Buddhist scripture on Chinese soil — the Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections. Yet search it through, and the word niànfó never once appears; what appears first is niàndào — recollecting the path. In this part, we listen to recollection's earliest sound in the Chinese tongue.

Part Three · Early Mahāyāna. The Buddha steps to the front of the stage. At a great assembly outside Rājagṛha, a five-precept lay bodhisattva named Bhadrapāla puts a question before the whole throng; the Buddha answers him: stand for seven days, single-mindedly recollecting, until the Buddha appears before your eyes (the pratyutpanna-samādhi). From recollecting the Buddha's qualities, to seeing the Buddha face to face, to calling the Buddha's name — buddha-recollection, in this part, begins to grow.

Part Four · The Three Pure Land Sūtras. The land called "Bliss," seen clearly. Three sūtras, each with its own opening: one from the World-Honored One's unwonted radiance and a question from His attendant Ānanda; one from the harrowing tragedy in the palace at Rājagṛha — Prince Ajātaśatru imprisoning his father, raising a sword against his mother — where the cornered mother, Queen Vaidehī, cries out from her cell, begging the Buddha for a place without sorrow, and to be taught how to see it; and one with no one petitioning at all, the Buddha turning to Śāriputra, foremost in wisdom, and beginning of His own accord. The forty-eight vows, the sixteen contemplations, holding the name — here, buddha-recollection settles into a home.

Part Five · The Great Mahāyāna Sūtras. A thousand faces of one buddha-name. This part leads you through the deepest halls of Chinese Buddhism, one chamber at a time, each with its own scene: at the Śūraṅgama assembly, Mahāsthāmaprāpta Bodhisattva rises from his seat to teach "gathering in the six sense-roots," and gives that moving figure — a mother always holding her child in mind, the meeting waiting only on whether the child will turn his head; within the Golden Light, a bodhisattva dreams by night of a great golden drum, the Buddhas of the ten directions appearing in its light, a confession sounding out of the drum itself; and by the Secret Adornment, even the lecture hall is set within a buddha-land. The Śūraṅgama, Lotus, Perfect Enlightenment, Brahmā Net, Golden Light, Laṅkāvatāra, Secret Adornment, Mañjuśrī Prajñā — great sūtra after great sūtra, each lighting up a new face of buddha-recollection: that keeping the precepts is buddha-recollection, that confession is buddha-recollection, that to recollect the Buddha is in truth to recollect the mind, that buddha-recollection can turn that mind from defiled to pure. This part goes deepest; yet at the last it tells you that all this depth is gathered into one line — "tether the mind to one buddha, devotedly call the name."

Part Six · Two Streams. One buddha-name divides the household, then flows back together. Tanluan of the Northern Wei had gone south seeking scriptures of long life; on the road home at Luoyang he met the Indian master Bodhiruci, and asked whether the Buddha-Dharma held any method of long life surpassing them — Bodhiruci spat once on the ground and handed him instead a Sūtra on the Contemplation of Amitāyus; Tanluan received it on the spot, burned his ten scrolls of immortality-scriptures, and turned wholly to the Pure Land, dredging that river of "outward, seeking birth" wide and deep. At the other end, the Chan school pressed out a counter-thesis: pressing the buddha-name into the mind until it pressed out the question, "Who is recollecting the Buddha?" The two great rivers — one seeking birth outward, one seeing the nature inward — how they parted, how they faced each other across the Tiantai bridge, and how at last, in the hands of masters like Yongming Yanshou, Yunqi Zhuhong, and Ouyi, they rejoined.

Part Seven · The Flower Ornament. Buddha-recollection opens into the whole dharma-realm. The youth Sudhana makes his fifty-three visits, calling on one good teacher after another; and Samantabhadra sets down the ten great vows — reverence, praise, offerings, repentance, rejoicing, requesting the turning of the Dharma-wheel, requesting the Buddhas to abide, constant study under the Buddha, accommodating all beings, universal dedication. Here, buddha-recollection is no longer one buddha-name only; it has stretched reverence, offering, repentance, dedication — a whole way of living — into recollection of the Buddha.

Part Eight · Coda. Placing this road back in the palm of your hand. In an age when even the machines can talk, and can recite the buddha-name, does buddha-recollection still count as recollection? And — most important of all — setting aside every question of deep and shallow: what, exactly, are the steps inside buddha-recollection?

The Bridges Between the Stages

Between the eight parts lie seven short "transitions." They are bridges between one stretch of road and the next — a place to catch your breath at the end of a stage, look back at the way come, look ahead at the way to go, and then set out again. They each do the same work: gather up what the part before has won, point out the question the part before could not answer in its own language, and lead you on to the next. Do not skip them; those breaths are the breathing of this road.

Three Ways to Read — As You Please

One: walk it from beginning to end. This is best. A thousand years of road, stage upon stage; you will watch with your own eyes how buddha-recollection grew, step by step, into what it is today — and you will see that however elaborate and lofty it grew, beneath it all runs the same plain track that Mahānāma of Part One was taught by the Buddha.

Two: read the final chapter first. If you are impatient and want to begin practicing at once, turn first to the final chapter in Part Eight, where this whole road is gathered into a few of its plainest steps, set in the palm of your hand. Begin practicing, then come back and walk the road from Part One slowly, and you will see: behind those few steps in your hand stands a road this long, and this deep.

Three: read whichever stage speaks to you. If one part's title stirs something, start there. Each chapter largely stands on its own and can be read alone.

A Few Small Conventions

A few small conventions, stated plainly so nothing trips you as you read:

• When the Buddha is meant, this book writes "He" with a capital, as a mark of reverence; for patriarchs, bodhisattvas, elders, and practitioners, ordinary "he."
• The Original Teacher's name is written in this book as "Homage to the Original Teacher Śākyamuni Buddha."
• The sūtras' own words are set off as indented quotation blocks, so that you can tell at a glance which words are the scriptures' and which are my explanations to you. Whatever is set as a quotation is a real line from the sūtras and treatises; where I offer a figure of my own, I say plainly that it is a figure, and never pass it off as scripture.
• Catalog numbers and scholarly footnotes are kept out of the body text entirely, so as not to trouble the mind that wants to recollect the Buddha. Pāli and Sanskrit terms appear in the body only in passing, in italics, each explained in plain words at its first appearance. Everything you might wish to check is gathered in the two appendices at the back: the scriptural sources behind each chapter (Appendix A · Academic Notes Index), and a table of names and terms with their full romanizations and diacritical marks (Appendix C · Glossary). The body text does one thing only: it tells you this road, cleanly.

Setting Out

The map points this far.

A road is for walking, not for framing and hanging on a wall. May you carry this map, and walk steadily, and walk gladly.

We set out from Part One, the Pāli foundations — back to that Nigrodha Park, to hear the first thing the Buddha said to Mahānāma.