Part Four · The Four Great Vows · The Bodhisattva Vow in Everyone's Mouth

The first three parts set the vow's root, its fuel, and its name and standing. This part returns to the four sentences most familiar to every student of the Buddha in the Chinese tradition—sentient beings are numberless, I vow to liberate them; afflictions are inexhaustible, I vow to sever them; dharma-gates are measureless, I vow to study them; the Buddha-Way is unsurpassed, I vow to accomplish it.

The Four Great Vows are the common bodhisattva vow of the whole way: no school excepted, no capacity excluded—everyone who arouses the mind of awakening starts from these four sentences. But the more familiar the words, the fewer ask where they came from. The two chapters of this part ask two questions.

Chapter one asks: why these four? Master Zhiyi of Tiantai's answer is unexpected—these four are not four wishes, but the Four Noble Truths the Buddha taught at the first turning of the wheel, spoken in another voice. The old map of suffering, origin, cessation, and path: the hearer-disciples use it to leave; the bodhisattva uses it to vow.

Chapter two asks: if beings are "numberless," is this vow not doomed never to be completed? Master Zhiyi turned that thorn over into the vow's deepest light—knowing full well that beings are like empty space, one vows to ferry beings-like-space; this is not called futility; it is called "contending with empty space," called "the genuine raising of the awakening-mind."

Four sentences, one map, one long contention with the void. Read this part through, and at every chanting of the four vows thereafter, the words in the mouth will be the same words—the weight in the heart will never be the same again.