Transition ① · From the Pāli Roots to the Vow in the Āgamas

Part One has walked up to the sentence "non-retreat is the vow's own affair," and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part One done, you hold three things in your hands. A distinction: what the vow turns is a direction, not an exchange for a thing—a wish adds something, a vow turns the direction; what a vow reaches for is not health or wealth, but the matter of "where I am turned" itself. A scene: in the Jeta Grove, one question from Upāli, and the Buddha told with His own mouth the way He had come—a lamp's worth of oil before the Buddha Treasure-Store; in the city of Padumā, five flowers, and a spread of hair laid on the muddy ground; a vow said out completely, past all taking back, and the prediction given on the spot. A root: such a vow cannot retreat—non-retreat is not gritted out by clenching the teeth; it is the vow's own nature; the great vow, the mind that cannot be moved, effort that does not retreat—three things, one structure, and the ground of it all in no-self.

This whole set is Śākyamuni Buddha's own story, told by His own mouth. It is high, and it is far; in one stroke it raised the ceiling of the vow out beyond measureless incalculable aeons.

Yet precisely because it stands so high, there are two things Part One never touched.

The first is fuel. The vow before Dīpaṃkara is the arousing; but the road is walked one day at a time. A person who has made a vow must still get up tomorrow morning, must still do the day's practice, will still tire, still slacken, still find the strength not there. What force in the heart pushes him through that day's stretch? And this force, many do not dare to own—does the Buddha's gate not teach the putting down, the having no desire? The "wanting" in wanting to practice—is that not also a craving? How many people are stuck at exactly that question, so that even their diligence is diligent with a guilty conscience. Part One showed only a corner of it at the very end: Ānanda said, in the monastery, that there is a kind of desire that goes out of itself on reaching the place it was going. But what this force actually is, how it is told apart from craving, why nourishing it is no fault but the very engine of the path—these, the language of Part One did not open out.

The second is high and low. The vow Part One spoke of is the topmost one: to become a Buddha, to liberate beings. But the vows most people in the world make are not that one. They are the new-year's-eve wish that the family be safe, the wish at a sickbed that this one trial be passed, the wish, with palms joined, for a good place in the life to come. These small vows, vows that ask for something—how does the Buddha regard them? Are they rebuked as clinging, to be put away one and all? Or does a road run, from the very start, between them and that highest vow before Dīpaṃkara—a road that can be climbed, one rung at a time?

These two things—the vow's fuel, and the vow's high and low—are exactly what the Buddha, in the Āgamas, set out clause by clause.

In the discourses of the Āgamas, the Buddha lays the matter of "wanting" open to view: He marks out which kind of wanting is the engine of the path, and which kind is the root of birth and death. He also lays the vow out as a ladder—there is a discourse whose very name is the Discourse on Wishes—starting from the wish that one's kinfolk be born in the heavens, rung upon rung, up to the wish that every taint be forever exhausted; and He kicks away not a single rung.

The vow of Part One is the summit of a far mountain, held up for looking. What Part Two examines is the soil of the road underfoot—how this force called "wanting" is taken in hand by the Buddha, recognized, nourished, and then led, step by step, toward the heights. The summit does not move; the road must be walked—and where the strength for walking comes from is the first thing to be settled once this page is turned.

One more layer, to be kept in mind in advance. The Buddha of the Āgamas teaches ordinary disciples—monks, householders, visiting brahmins; the scenes are all the monasteries and streets of the human world. In those discourses, the vow does not wear the solemn robes of the Avataṃsaka; it shows its plainest sinew and bone. And just because it is plain, it is seen most clearly—the inner logic of all the ever-grander vows of the parts to come is sounded to the bottom, first, in this one.

We turn the page, and go first to tell two kinds of wanting apart.