Transition ⑤ · From the Great Mahāyāna Sūtras to the Two Streams

Transition ⑤ · From the Great Mahāyāna Sūtras to the Two Streams

Part Five was the deepest stretch of this whole book.

Coming out of it, you hold one statement in your hands: buddha-recollection is not just a buddha-name on the lips. It is gathering in the six sense-roots; it is the Universal Gate's calling of the name; it is keeping the precepts; it is confession; it is recollecting the mind; it is the whole warehouse of the storehouse consciousness turned over, from defiled to pure. And at the end, all of it was gathered back into that one line of the Mañjuśrī Prajñā: "tether the mind to one buddha, devotedly call the name, recollection-upon-recollection unbroken." Chan and Pure Land, the phenomenal and the principle — within this one buddha-name, they were originally one.

That is the country of the sūtras — where everything is perfectly fused and unobstructed, one from the very beginning.

But before the page turns, one thing must be recognized: what is "originally one" in the sūtras, once it lands among human beings, lands in history, very often is one no longer.

Not because it changed — because of people. Generation after generation of practitioners, patriarchs, and schools each took hold of one face of that single buddha-name, threw their whole strength in that one direction, and walked it to its utmost. And so water from a single source parted into streams.

Part Six tells the story of that parting.

That buddha-name of "tether the mind to one buddha, devotedly call the name, recollection-upon-recollection unbroken," over China's thousand years, parted mainly into two great rivers.

One river follows the face of "devotedly call the name" and flows downward and outward, becoming the Pure Land school. Its banner reads "honest niànfó, seeking birth in the West"; its patriarchs are Tanluan, Daochuo, and Shandao — men who set out to build this road so wide that even the most afflicted, the dullest, the most hopeless could walk in.

The other river follows the face of "the dharmadhātu of one mark — seeing the mind, seeing the nature" and flows inward, becoming a counter-thesis within the Chan school. It does not seek the West. It presses that buddha-name hard into one's own mind, until it presses out a single sentence — "Who, after all, is recollecting the Buddha?"

Two rivers: one flowing outward (seeking birth in that land), one flowing inward (seeing this mind directly). On the surface they flow further and further apart — even contending, even questioning each other. Yet they are two currents parted from one and the same buddha-name. Between the two rivers stands a bridge — Tiantai — resting on both banks. And far down the thousand-year stream, a company of patriarchs — Yongming, Yunqi, Ouyi — gathered the two long-parted rivers back into one.

Outward and inward, Pure Land and Chan, parting and confluence — this conversation across a thousand years is the story of Part Six.

We turn the page, and walk into those two great rivers, parted from a single buddha-name.