Part One · Pāli Roots · That First Vow

This book is the last volume of the Six Practice Gates. Five volumes have gone before it—recollection, giving, repentance, discipline, concentration: the mind has learned to abide, the hand has learned to come open, what was done has learned to be laid bare, conduct has learned its bounds, the mind has learned to gather itself in. Walking to here, one last gate remains: the vow.

The word "vow" is no stranger to anyone today. At the new year, people press their palms together in the temple and silently say one sentence in the heart—that is called making a wish; before blowing out the candles, one thinks of a thing first—that too is called making a wish. But the vow of the Buddha's gate—the sentence the bodhisattva speaks before the Buddha, "I vow to liberate the boundless beings"—though the outward gesture looks almost the same, what moves inside it walks another road altogether. This road takes the direction of a person's entire life, turns it around, and hands it over to awakening.

To see this road clearly, we must return to the place where it was first aroused. It is a very old scene: ages and ages ago, a young practitioner, before a Buddha named Dīpaṃkara, scattered five flowers, spread out his own hair, and made a vow. The whole of Śākyamuni Buddha's road to Buddhahood set out from that one vow.

The three chapters of Part One open out from this root. Chapter one: see clearly what the vow is—what it turns is a direction, not an exchange for some thing. Chapter two: return to that scene before Dīpaṃkara—see how a vow is aroused, and how, in the moment of its arousing, the person is already different. Chapter three: see why this vow cannot retreat—non-retreat is not gritted out by clenching the teeth; it is the vow's own nature.

Only when the direction is set does the road run straight. We begin with chapter one.