The Road Is Held Open by the Vow
3.2 The Road Is Held Open by the Vow
Of the ten grounds of the bodhisattva path, the first is named the Ground of Joy. A practitioner who has cut the binding of self-grasping and first entered the ranks of the noble—what rises in him is great joy. The sūtra says he recollects the buddhas, recollects the Dharma, recollects the bodhisattva conduct, with much gladness and much exultation; and so this ground takes "joy" for its name.
Having entered the ground, what is the first thing he does?
Not giving, not keeping discipline, not entering absorption. The chapter on the Ten Grounds in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra records it plainly: the first thing the bodhisattva of the first ground does is vow—in one breath, ten great vows. The vow to make offerings to and serve all buddhas with a vast mind; to receive and guard all the Buddha's Dharma; to request all buddhas to turn the wheel of the Dharma; to cultivate all bodhisattva conduct; to bring all beings to maturity; to serve and make offerings throughout all worlds; to purify and adorn all buddha-lands; to be of one mind and one practice with all bodhisattvas, never parted; to have all that is done and practiced benefit beings, with nothing passing in vain; to attain perfect awakening in all worlds. And the rim of every vow is sealed with the same phrase: vast as the dharma-realm, ultimate as space, to the very end of future time.
A road whose starting point is a string of vows. Inside this arrangement lies the whole of what this chapter has to say.
One clarification first, to head off confusion later: these ten are the ten vows raised by the bodhisattva of the ten grounds on first entering the first ground. They are not the ten great vows of Samantabhadra—paying homage to all buddhas, praising the Tathāgatas, vastly cultivating offerings, and the rest—which Part Six of this book will treat. Two sets of vows, from two passages of scripture, each with its own structure. What is spoken of here is the ten vows of the ten grounds.
Not a List—A Skeleton
By ordinary reckoning, ten vows would be ten items of business: vow to make offerings, then go make them; vow to liberate beings, then go liberate them; do one, strike one off, and the road is walked when the list is done. If that were so, these ten vows would be no more than a table of contents for the practice of the ten grounds, recited once for the record.
The text itself refuses that reading. The ten vows set out, the sūtra draws them together:
"Taking these ten vow-gates as chief, one fulfills a hundred thousand myriad incalculable great vows."
With these ten vow-gates as head and mainstay, the hundred thousand myriad incalculable great vows are gathered and governed. The ten are not ten entries among the myriad; they are the myriad's governing cord—lift the cord, and the whole net opens.
Vasubandhu, the bodhisattva who composed the treatise on the Ten Grounds, says this layer through. Comparing the excellences of the first ground, he sets an order:
"Comparative excellence is of three kinds: first, the excellence of vow; second, the excellence of practice; third, the excellence of fruit-benefit. What is the excellence of vow? The ten great vows."
Excellence of vow, of practice, of fruit—and vow stands first. Not the excellence of practice first, nor of fruit; the excellence of vow first—because practice and fruit can only unfold inside the direction the vow has held open. And Vasubandhu adds one stroke more: within, these ten are no ten parallel lines—
"Within these ten great vows, each single vow has a hundred thousand myriad incalculable great vows as its retinue."
Retinue means kin. Each great vow is like the head of a clan, with thousands upon ten-thousands of child-vows and grandchild-vows multiplying beneath it. The ten vows breed—not a list written out once and fixed, but a skeleton that holds up the flesh and keeps the flesh growing.
The Tang-dynasty master Chengguan, commenting on the Avataṃsaka, names what this skeleton does: practice and wisdom are steered by the vow—where the bodhisattva's conduct goes, where his wisdom shines, the vow leads the way in front. He goes so far as to say that the famous great vows of the later buddhas do not step outside these ten: the twelve great vows of the Medicine Buddha are gathered under the gate "to attain perfect awakening"; the forty-eight vows of Amitābha are gathered under the gate "to purify and adorn the buddha-land." The ten vows are the vow of all vows.
The skeleton stands first, and only then does the house stand; and the skeleton is not of use only on the day ground is broken—every moment the house stands, the skeleton is bearing its weight. So with the vow and the ten grounds: not a starting point that exits once made, but the spine that bears weight at every step of the long road.
Ten Clauses of "Exhaustion" That Can Never Come True
The deepest stroke of this skeleton is in its closing.
The ten vows raised, the text says this great vow is accomplished by means of ten clauses of "exhaustion"—sealed at the crown with ten sentences of "ended." Which ten? Should the realm of beings be exhausted, should the world be exhausted, should the realm of space, the dharma-realm, the realm of nirvāṇa be exhausted… ten "exhausteds" in a row, and then this:
"Should the realm of beings be exhausted, my vow would be exhausted… but because the realm of beings cannot be exhausted… the wholesome root of this great vow has no exhaustion."
If the day comes when the realm of beings runs out, then my vow runs out. But the realm of beings cannot run out—and so this great vow's wholesome root has no end.
Look carefully at how this sentence is built. It is a conditional: if such-and-such comes true, my vow terminates. But the condition it names—the exhaustion of the realm of beings, of the realm of space—will never come true. This is not the bodhisattva falling short of strength, unable to reach the road's end; it is the vow, in the moment of its raising, deliberately setting its own terminus at a place that will never arrive.
Vasubandhu, fearing the word "exhausted" might be read crooked, added a clarifying line: the "exhaustion" the sūtra speaks of is
"unbroken to the end, not a moment-by-moment ceasing"
—the "to the very end of future time" of unbroken continuance, not the "burnt out" of a fire that flares and dies. The vow's endlessness is not a weary holding-on that hasn't finished yet; by its very structure, it was always continuing.
One Thing to See Clearly Here
Reading "beings are boundless," "never to be exhausted," a feeling rises of itself: if they can never all be liberated, is this vow not doomed to fall empty? Why make a vow that can never be completed?
Exactly here the thing to see clearly is this: a list and a skeleton are two different kinds of thing. A list does its work by being struck through—and the day it is finished is the day it exits. A skeleton is the opposite: it does its work by holding up—and just because it is never dismantled, the road stays held open, stays pointed. Chapter one of this book said that a vow is not measured by its rate of completion; what it measures is the truth of the facing. At the ten clauses of exhaustion, that sentence finds its hardest ground: the vow's uncompletability is not its failure—it is its office. A vow that could be redeemed in full—once redeemed, where would the person go? It is precisely the vow that never closes that keeps this road forever supplied with a forward.
Walking On
The seat is held; the skeleton stands. But one plainest question is still unanswered.
The vow, after all, does no labor. Giving really hands the thing over; discipline really holds the conduct; meditation really gathers the mind—what has the vow done? It adds not one share of merit, raises not one degree of concentration; on what ground is it said to "steer" everything?
This question, Nāgārjuna asked aloud in the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, on behalf of a practical man: "If one makes no vow, does one then gain no merit?"—without a vow, is there no blessing at all?
His answer used one ox, and one driver. The next chapter listens to him tell it.