Practice · BookRecollectionTransition 4

Transition ④ · From the Three Pure Land Sūtras to the Great Mahāyāna Sūtras

Part Four gathered the scattered parts of Part Three into one clear and settled home.

One Buddha — Amitābha. One land — Bliss. Three doors — the vow, the contemplation, the name. The person who recollects the Buddha at last has a definite place to return to: recollect this Buddha, seek birth in this land, and choose any one of these three doors to enter by.

This home is safe, complete, and beloved. One phrase — "Namo Amitābha Buddha" — has sounded ever since, for more than a thousand years, in the monasteries of China, in the buddha-halls of ordinary homes, at the ears of the dying.

Is that enough?

For one who asks only to settle his life and be born in the Pure Land, this home is enough to live in for a lifetime.

But there is one thing the language of Part Four cannot fence in.

It is this: buddha-recollection was never the business of the Pure Land school alone.

The buddha-recollection of Part Four circles always around Amitābha, around the Land of Bliss. But the practice itself had long since overflowed the Pure Land courtyard walls and run into the deepest, greatest sūtras of Chinese Buddhism — the Śūraṅgama, the Lotus, the Laṅkāvatāra, the Flower Ornament. On the heights of these great scriptures, buddha-recollection is no longer only the one shape of "recollect Amitābha, seek the West." Each great sūtra takes it up in turn and shows a face of it never seen before:

In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, buddha-recollection is "gathering in the six sense-roots" — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, all six drawn into this one recollection. In the Universal Gate Chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, the name called is Avalokiteśvara's — one call, answered in a thousand places. In other great sūtras, buddha-recollection joins to "seeing the sign, obtaining the precept," joins to the One-Practice Samādhi, joins to that turning of consciousness into wisdom in the depths of Yogācāra.

Part Four gave buddha-recollection a home. What Part Five will show you is that this one practice has, in the whole country of the Mahāyāna, hall after deep hall we have never yet entered.

One buddha-name is about to walk out of its warm little courtyard, into the whole palace of the Mahāyāna.

We turn the page.