Part Three · The Vow as Perfection · A Seat on the Curriculum

The first two parts saw the vow's root and the vow's fuel clearly: the vow is the arousing that turns a direction around, and the arousing itself does not retreat; the force it relies on is the wholesome desire that comes to rest of itself; and its object can climb, rung by rung, to where no aspiring remains.

This part looks at where the vow sits on the "curriculum" of the bodhisattva path.

The Mahāyāna treatises opened the six perfections into ten, and the vow formally took the eighth seat—not a preamble before practice, but a perfection standing in line with giving and prajñā. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra records further: the moment a bodhisattva enters the first ground, the first thing he does is raise ten great vows, and these ten are the skeleton of the whole long road of the ten grounds thereafter. And Nāgārjuna said the vow's power to the bottom with one simile: merit is like the ox, the vow like the driver—the ox has the strength, but it takes the driver for the cart to arrive anywhere.

Three chapters in order. Chapter one, the vow's seat—and a strange scene: why a bodhisattva cultivated to a very high place must be reminded of his vow by the buddhas themselves. Chapter two, the vow's skeleton—the ten vows of the first ground, and those ten clauses of "exhaustion" that can never come true. Chapter three, the vow's power—it adds not one measure of merit, yet decides what all merit grows into.

Seat, skeleton, power. Read these three chapters, and the vow is no longer only a thought in the mind, but a force with name and seat, truly at work.