Four Sentences That Were a Map All Along

4.1 Four Sentences That Were a Map All Along

The assembly is about to disperse; the cantor raises the chant, and the whole hall, palms joined, sings together: 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.

No four sentences are recited more fluently in the Chinese tradition. The morning and evening liturgy has them; the receiving of precepts has them; assemblies great and small close with them. And the more fluently words are recited, the more easily they slide past, no longer thought about. But it is worth stopping to ask: why exactly these four? Would three not serve? Could one be exchanged? Are the four laid side by side at random, or is there an order to them?

Master Zhiyi of Tiantai's answer is unexpected. These four sentences, he says, are not four wishes at all. They are an old document everyone knows, rewritten in another voice—and that old document is the Four Noble Truths the Buddha taught at the first turning of the wheel: suffering, its origin, its cessation, the path.

The Gate of Vows and the Gate of Deeds

First, see how Master Zhiyi divides the whole bodhisattva path. In his commentary on the Diamond Prajñā Sūtra he says that the bodhisattva's way, though it has a thousand gates and ten thousand doors, gathered up—

"comes to no more than vow and deed. The gate of vows, though many, is summed up as the Four Great Vows; the gate of deeds, though measureless, is summed up as the six pāramitās."

The entire bodhisattva path, drawn together, is two great gates: the gate of vows and the gate of deeds. The gate of vows, in all its thousands of strands, has the Four Great Vows for its governing cord; the gate of deeds, measureless and boundless, has the six pāramitās for its own. The four vows and the six perfections—one governs the direction, one governs the steps. This is the last part's ox and driver, said another way. And the standing of the four vows is fixed from the start: they are the governing cord of the entire gate of vows.

One Sentence to Each Truth

Then how was this governing cord composed? The Tiantai teaching outline, the Sijiaoyi, hands over the whole account:

"From the first arising of the mind, taking the objects of the Four Truths as one's field, one raises the Four Great Vows and cultivates the conduct of the six pāramitās."

Taking the Four Truths as the field, one raises the Four Great Vows—the four vows are raised facing the Four Noble Truths. And not facing them loosely: one sentence is fitted to one truth, seam to seam.

The not-yet-delivered, to deliver them—"sentient beings are numberless, I vow to liberate them" takes the truth of suffering as its object. Beings are sunk in the sea of suffering; therefore the vow to liberate. The not-yet-released, to release them—"afflictions are inexhaustible, I vow to sever them" takes the truth of origin as its object. The origin is the root of suffering, the afflictions; therefore the vow to sever. The not-yet-settled, to settle them—"dharma-gates are measureless, I vow to study them" takes the truth of the path as its object. The path is the road out of suffering, and the road has measureless gates; therefore the vow to study. The not-yet-in-nirvāṇa, to bring them to nirvāṇa—"the Buddha-Way is unsurpassed, I vow to accomplish it" takes the truth of cessation as its object. Cessation is the ultimate nirvāṇa; therefore the vow to accomplish.

Suffering, origin, path, cessation—each truth heads one vow. These four truths are what the Buddha taught in the Deer Park at the first turning of the wheel—the oldest, most fundamental map in the Dharma: life has suffering; the suffering has its root; the suffering can cease; the ceasing has its road. The hearer-disciples take this map in hand to walk out: knowing suffering, severing its origin, longing for cessation, cultivating the path—seeking their own deliverance.

What the Four Great Vows do is take every line of that map and change its voice. "Know that there is suffering" becomes "sentient beings are numberless, I vow to liberate them." "Sever your own origin" becomes "afflictions are inexhaustible, I vow to sever them." Not a character of the map is altered; what is altered is the reader of the map—from "I will follow it out," to "I will follow it, and bring everyone out." One and the same map: the hearer uses it to leave; the bodhisattva uses it to stay.

Compassion Pulls Out Suffering; Loving-Kindness Gives Joy

Inside the four sentences runs one finer order still. In the Mohe Zhiguan—the Great Calming and Contemplation—Master Zhiyi says that the bodhisattva, seeing beings sunk and drowning, pained to the bone for self and others alike—

"thereupon, raising great compassion, raises two vows: 'sentient beings are numberless; I vow to liberate them; afflictions are without number; I vow to sever them.'"

The first two vows rise from great compassion, facing the truths of suffering and origin—beings are in suffering, the afflictions are suffering's root, and compassion moves to pull them out. And the latter two? Master Zhiyi says the bodhisattva then sees that he and all beings have sought joy from the beginning without ever knowing joy's cause—taking shards for jewels, calling fireflies the sun and moon—and only now understands; so great loving-kindness rises, and raises the latter two vows: the dharma-gates and the Buddha-Way are the true road of joy and the true fruit of joy, and loving-kindness moves to give them. He gathers it into one phrase: raising the four great vows—pulling out two sufferings, giving two joys.

The first two sentences pull out suffering; the latter two give joy. The Four Noble Truths were always a physician's frame—suffering the illness, origin its cause, cessation the recovery, path the prescription. The four vows take this medicine whole and fit it with the two wheels of loving-kindness and compassion: compassion goes to pull out illness and cause; loving-kindness goes to give prescription and recovery. First pull out the suffering, then give the joy—the very order of a physician before a patient. The sequence of the four sentences, it turns out, is not one word out of place.

A Form That Can Even Change Its Object

The four vows are a grammar for how vows are to be made, not four items of pending business—and the finest side-proof of this comes from the Chan school.

The Platform Sūtra records that the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, having transmitted the formless repentance to the assembly, went on to teach them to raise the Four Great Vows. But the four sentences in his mouth each carried three more words at the front:

"The sentient beings of my own mind are numberless; I vow to liberate them. The afflictions of my own mind are boundless; I vow to sever them. The dharma-gates of my own nature are inexhaustible; I vow to study them. The unsurpassed Buddha-Way of my own nature; I vow to accomplish it."

The beings of my own mind. The Sixth Patriarch points it out at once: the beings here are not other people outside the body—the deluded and erring mind, the deceitful and false mind, the unwholesome mind, the jealous mind, the venomous mind: minds such as these, all of them, are the beings. How are they liberated? When the wrong comes, liberate it with the right; when delusion comes, liberate it with awakening; when foolishness comes, liberate it with wisdom; when evil comes, liberate it with good—to liberate in this way is called true liberating. And his closing sentence: to practice with constant mindfulness—this is the dharma of vow-power.

Look at what has happened here. The Tiantai four vows liberate the multitudes in the sea of suffering—the eyes turned outward. The Chan four vows liberate the delusions of one's own mind—the eyes turned inward. The object has been exchanged entire; and the sentence-form—numberless, I vow to liberate; measureless, I vow to study—has not moved by one word. A form that can take on wholly different content and still remain itself: that proves its identity. It is a grammar of how a vow is to be raised, not a list of which four things were vowed. The grammar governs the form—any complete bodhisattva vow must be raised across the full breadth of the Four Truths: pulling out the suffering, severing the cause, studying the road, accomplishing the fruit. Lacking one face, it does not deserve the name "great."

One Thing to See Clearly Here

With this layer understood, the daily recitation of the four vows asks for one adjustment.

To recite the four vows is not to take inventory of progress—how many beings liberated today, what fraction of the afflictions severed. They are not for ticking off. Each recitation does another thing: it turns over, once more, the voice in which one receives suffering, origin, cessation, and path—calibrating it back from "seeking my own deliverance" to "for the liberation of all beings." The four vows are for turning, not for counting. Recite them twice a day, and twice a day the rudder is set straight.

And after the recitation, eight more characters from the Sijiaoyi, following directly on the four vows, are to be remembered: the mind once aroused, deeds must come to fill the vow. The vow first founds the direction; the deeds come to fill it in—step upon step of practice, filled into this vow. A vow not filled by deeds is a sentence hanging in the air; deeds not steered by a vow are labor without a direction. How vow and deed are filled into non-duality will be said to the bottom when this book comes to Samantabhadra's vows of practice.

Walking On

But there is a thorn inside these four sentences, and from here it can no longer be walked around.

Beings are "numberless." Numberless means without number—liberate to any day you please, and there remain beings unliberated. Then are the words "I vow to liberate them" not doomed to fall empty from the moment they leave the mouth? To make a vow one knows cannot be completed is either self-deception or wasted labor—and the argument, as it stands, sounds unanswerable.

Master Zhiyi did not walk around this thorn. He pulled it out, turned it over, and showed the world something no one expected. The next chapter watches him turn it.