The Six Gates Were One Sentence All Along

8.2 The Six Gates Were One Sentence All Along

A road walked to its end, looked back upon, often shows its shape for the first time.

Recollection, giving, repentance, discipline, concentration, vow. Six volumes, six gates. Walking them one by one, recollection was recollection, giving was giving, discipline was discipline—each with its own sūtras, its own treatises, its own work, like six practices laid out in a row. But arriving at the last gate—and this gate having reached its utmost in "attaining anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi"—one looks back, and a question can no longer be avoided: these six gates—are they six things, or six faces of one thing?

The answer, the six volumes have written on their signposts all along; they have only never said it aloud. Now it is said.

One Sentence to State Before Anything Else

The full map about to be lifted—the correspondence of the six gates to the Heart Sūtra—is a reading this series undertakes and answers for. It is not the explicit written word of the Heart Sūtra, nor a settled verdict shared by the generations of commentators. The scripture is what the Buddha spoke; this map is what later people have read out of it. However smoothly the map reads, it must never pass itself off as something the scripture said of itself. At the laying down of the brush, this sentence is stated first—and this statement weighs exactly as much as the map.

Stated. Now look.

Six Segments of Scripture, Six Gates

The body of the Heart Sūtra is very short. From beginning to end, it can be divided into six segments.

The first segment opens the scripture:

"When Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva was practicing the deep prajñā-pāramitā, he illumined the five aggregates and saw them all as empty,"

One act of contemplation leads the passage—binding the scattered mind, illumining the five aggregates and seeing them empty. This is the gate of recollection: tying the mind to one place, and illumining as the recollection holds. The holding of the name, the binding of mindfulness, the illumining seen in the first volume—all of it lives inside this opening act.

The second segment follows at once:

"and so crossed beyond all suffering and distress."

One word—crossing. The emptiness seen, compassion wells of itself; and so the crossing-over, the giving of oneself to carry others across. This is the gate of giving: giving is the loosening of the hand clenched around "mine," the first outward step. What the giving volume taught is exactly this "crossing."

The third segment—the scripture suddenly stops, and speaks one whole passage of "emptiness":

"Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness not other than form; form is itself emptiness, emptiness itself form… such is the empty mark of all dharmas: neither arising nor ceasing, neither defiled nor pure, neither increasing nor decreasing."

Notice: this segment has no verb to perform. It teaches no doing—it cancels. If the one who crosses and those crossed are each grasped as real, the crossing becomes a new binding; so this segment empties out the "I" that even giving must be emptied of, together with the karma he carries on his back. This is the gate of repentance: repentance at its deepest contemplates the nature of wrongdoing as originally empty—emptying the I of "I made the karma, I carry the debt."

The fourth segment is a long file of "no" and "neither":

"Therefore in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, perception, formation, or consciousness… no suffering, origin, cessation, or path; no knowing, and no attaining."

Emptied through, the ground of the mind clean, one can now hold this file of "no" and "neither"—neither arising nor ceasing, unstained, unattached: abiding, and fabricating no more. This is the gate of discipline: guarding against wrong and stopping evil, holding fast to that word "no." To hold the "no" is an active sustaining, not a paralysis—the discipline volume, whole, taught exactly that holding.

The fifth segment, the landing-point of the bodhisattva's sentence:

"…leaving far behind all inverted, dreamlike thought, [the bodhisattva reaches] ultimate nirvāṇa."

Gathered in, layer upon layer, to the inward utmost—cessation present. This is the gate of concentration: the concentration volume closes on the bodhisattva's ultimate nirvāṇa, and closes there deliberately—it stops at that point, and leaves the half-sentence that follows to the next volume.

The sixth segment is the one the last chapter caught:

"The Buddhas of the three periods, relying on the prajñā-pāramitā, attain anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi—the unsurpassed, perfect awakening."

What carries ultimate nirvāṇa onward into the fullness of the Buddha's seat is transference-and-vowing. This is the gate of the vow—this volume.

Contemplating; crossing; emptiness; "no"; ultimate; attaining bodhi. Recollection, giving, repentance, discipline, concentration, vow. Six segments of scripture, six gates, each answering to each, the order unshuffled. The sequence of the Six Practice Gates is no one's arrangement—it is the Heart Sūtra's own sequence. Six volumes have been, all along, six passages of one sentence; and that sentence is the two-hundred-odd characters of the Heart Sūtra.

Five Movements, One Emptiness

Inside this map lies one stroke deeper than the rest, and it must be looked at on its own.

Of the six gates, five are movement. Contemplating is movement; crossing is movement; the "no" is movement (the holding is active); the ultimate is movement; attaining is movement—five gates, each a facing, each adding a share: a share of illumining, a share of giving, a share of the substance of discipline, a share of concentration, a share of the vow.

Repentance alone answers not to a verb, but to "emptiness."

The passage the Heart Sūtra sets between "crossed beyond all suffering" and "neither arising nor ceasing" speaks of the mark—form is itself emptiness; such is the empty mark of all dharmas—not of a doing. So repentance is the one subtractive gate of the six: the others all add; it alone subtracts. It adds nothing; it only empties the grasping that may have stuck to what the earlier gates accumulated. Why must this passage come after "crossing"? Because giving, practiced long, most easily grows one thing—the I of "I am ferrying people." Leave that I unemptied, and the discipline, concentration, and vow that follow are all built on sand. Five movements, one emptiness: five gates advancing, one gate clearing—this is the Heart Sūtra's own way of breathing.

Practicing the Deep Prajñā: One Road, Not Six Chess Pieces

Setting six gates into six segments, the readiest misunderstanding is this: that they are merely six chessmen placed into six squares—still six separate pieces, each its own.

They are not. The clue is one word at the scripture's opening. The text does not say "practicing the prajñā-pāramitā"; it says "practicing the deep prajñā-pāramitā." Deep is graded—it can be practiced shallow, practiced deep, deepened layer by layer. The Great Prajñā Sūtra says it in so many words:

"Cultivating the prajñā-pāramitā, increasing by gradual stages, adorning and purifying buddha-lands, ripening sentient beings."

Increasing by gradual stages. The practice of prajñā is, by nature, a road that deepens in sequence. The six gates are not six things laid side by side; they are six depths of one and the same practice of prajñā, walked ever deeper—like one breath at six stations, shallow to deep: first bind the mind and illumine (recollection); the emptiness seen, compassion wells and crosses over (giving); the grasping of crosser and crossed arises, so empty it once through (repentance); emptied, hold the "neither arising nor ceasing" (discipline); gather in, layer by layer, to ultimate nirvāṇa (concentration); and this breath does not stop at the gate, but carries on into the attaining of bodhi (vow).

Each later gate stands on the shoulders of the one before. Six stretches of one road; the whole course of one practice of deep prajñā.

First Death, Then Birth

In the middle stretch of this road hides one small arc, like a convex lens, in which the shape of the whole great road shows with particular sharpness. It lies across the three gates of giving, repentance, and discipline.

Giving: the losing of the I. Carried to its end, the three wheels empty—what is given away is not only goods, but the I of "I am giving." Repentance: the emptying of karma. At its deepest, the nature of wrongdoing is originally empty—what is emptied is the karma-bearing I, one layer deeper than the first. And then discipline—new birth. The Sūtra on the Practice of Contemplating Samantabhadra says that when repentance has been made clean:

"One naturally accomplishes the five-part Dharma-body: discipline, concentration, wisdom, liberation, and the knowledge-and-vision of liberation. The buddha-tathāgatas are born from this dharma."

The one word "born" stands in the scripture's own text. The Brahmā Net Sūtra says it more directly still:

"When beings receive the Buddha's precepts, they enter at once the station of the buddhas; their station equal to the Great Awakened, they are truly children of the buddhas."

To receive the Buddha's precepts is to enter the station of the buddhas—a birth. Giving loses the I; repentance empties the karma; discipline is born anew: first death, then birth. And this small arc has the same shape as the whole great road—the great road too first empties all the way out (practicing the deep prajñā, down to "no knowing and no attaining"), and then, on the ground of that emptying, attains anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi. The small arc's losing-all-and-then-being-born is the great arc's emptying-all-and-then-attaining-bodhi, in miniature.

Two old boundary-lines, restated here, not to be forgotten. First, this new birth is no pardon—in the Buddha's gate there is no lord who absolves; wrongdoing comes clean because one's own mind illumines its nature as originally empty and it clears of itself, not because anyone struck the debt from anyone's ledger. Second, what is born is not a new, everlasting "I"—the five-part Dharma-body is a pure continuity on the ground of no-self, not a finer soul exchanged for the old. What dies is the grasped I; what is born is not another I.

And one more statement of the same kind owed here: stringing giving, repentance, and discipline into this arc of "first death, then birth"—every hook has its scriptural warrant: the word "born," the "entering the station of the buddhas," the order that sets repentance before the receiving of precepts; but the stringing of the hooks into an arc is this series' synthesis, not a sentence the scriptures strung for us.

The Summit Does Not Discard the Stairs

The full map is lifted; one last misunderstanding remains to be fenced off. If the six gates are one, are the first five not thereby annexed—recollection a mere prelude to the vow, giving a mere half-finished thing?

The very opposite. One who reaches the summit does not, for having reached it, discard the stairs underfoot—each stair remains in its place, and not one can be spared. Recollection is still recollection; giving is still giving; repentance is still repentance. The one who recites the Buddha's name in the old steady way goes on reciting; the one who gives daily goes on giving; the one who recites the precepts each half-month goes on reciting them. What the backward look gives is not a tower that swallows everything; what it gives is one seeing—the seeing that the six steps were, all along, one breath walking.

Seeing is not annexing. Seeing is prajñā.

The Six Gates, to Here

Last, return what is owed.

The six gates were never outside the oldest skeleton of the Dharma—discipline, concentration, wisdom: the three trainings without taint. The four gates of recollection, giving, repentance, and discipline are the training in discipline, unfolded at different depths; ultimate nirvāṇa is the training in concentration; and what runs the whole length, completing itself in the attaining of bodhi, is the training in wisdom. Keeping discipline gives rise to meditative concentration; concentration gives rise to real wisdom—this ancient chain, the six gates have only walked finer, and longer. Where the six volumes close, they fold back into the three words discipline, concentration, wisdom—and everything is returned to its owner.

And the terminus the six gates arrive at is the Heart Sūtra's own last sentence: the buddhas of the three periods, relying on the prajñā-pāramitā, attain anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi. All the awakened of the three periods, without exception, came to full awakening by this road—the road truly goes through. And at the close of its body, the Heart Sūtra passes its own verdict on this road:

"It removes all suffering; it is real, not false."

It removes all suffering. It is real, not false.

From this day on—when the four great vows rise in the morning chant, when the evening recitation reaches Samantabhadra's conduct-vows, when the palms come together at the end of the day's practice to transfer the merit—may you remember where you stand: on the last sentence of the Heart Sūtra, inside the one unbroken breath the buddhas of the three periods have walked.

The six gates, to here—sealed.