Transition ② · From the Vow in the Āgamas to the Vow as Perfection

Part Two has walked up to "the undirected is the vow's highest rung," and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part Two done, two more things have been added to your hands. One is fuel: the force of "wanting" beneath the vow has been told apart—craving is boundless, wanting more once it has gotten, and is to be cut; wholesome desire is bounded, going out on arrival, and is to be nourished. The vow relies on the latter. Ānanda's question in Ghosita's Park was asked exactly right: did you not set out for this monastery on the thought of coming—and now that you are here, does that thought remain? The path, it turns out, runs on a wanting that extinguishes itself. The other is a spectrum: the "may I" ladder of the Discourse on Wishes—one and the same mind, its object climbing rung by rung, from the wish that kinfolk be born among the gods up to the wish that every taint be forever exhausted, and the Buddha kicking not one rung away; climbed to the summit, the seeking loosens of itself, the undirected appears, and the original vow remains unbroken.

These two things bring the vow down from the far mountain and set it back inside every ordinary heart. The old grandmother wishing her family safe on new year's eve, and the practitioner vowing Buddhahood before Dīpaṃkara, use one and the same mind; the difference is only which rung of the ladder the thing wished-for stands on.

And yet, the eyes of Part Two were fixed throughout on one place—a single person's own heart. It spoke of how the force in that heart is nourished, how that heart's facing is raised. That is the root, and it is right. But there is one thing it never touched.

The bodhisattva path is not the affair of one heart alone. It is a road laid out in full order by generations of treatise-masters and patriarchs—giving, discipline, patience, effort, meditation, prajñā: the six perfections, each subject with its name and its seat, its method, its sequence, its office on the road. Then what, on this road, is "the vow"?

A line of preamble before the six courses begin? A bit of good intention outside the practice proper? Open the list of the six perfections, and there is no entry called "vow." A thing that holds no name and no seat on the curriculum will, in time, be held lightly—people come to think the making of vows is the hollow part and the making of merit the solid part; fine for chanting at a Dharma assembly, but real practice is "real work." In how many hearts is the weighing done exactly so.

It is precisely here that the Mahāyāna treatises made a great stroke. The treatise-masters opened the six perfections into ten—after prajñā, establishing four more: skillful means, vow, power, knowledge—and "vow" formally took the eighth seat. Not tucked under some other perfection: a seat of its own, admitted by the very same test that admits giving and prajñā. Nor only a seat—the Avataṃsaka Sūtra records that the moment a bodhisattva enters the first ground, the first thing he does is not giving, not absorption, but the raising, before the assembly, of ten great vows: the vow is the skeleton set up before the long road of the ten grounds even breaks ground. Nor only a skeleton—Nāgārjuna answered, in so many words, the question "what does the vow actually have the power to do"—and the simile he struck, one ox and one driver, has not been bettered in seventeen hundred years.

The three chapters of Part Three look at exactly these three things: the vow's seat, the vow's skeleton, the vow's power.

Read this part through, and the weight of the words "to make a vow" will sit differently in the heart. No longer a stick of incense before class, but a course in its own right on the curriculum—and the one course that sets the direction for all the others.

One more sentence, set down here in advance. Seat, skeleton, power—they sound like three things; they are three faces of one thing: what the vow is (the seat), where the vow stands (the skeleton), what the vow does (the power). Only with the three faces together is the vow truly installed on the bodhisattva path. When you come later to the still greater vows—the four great vows, Amitābha's, Samantabhadra's—the ground underfoot is the foundation this part lays.

We turn the page, and begin from a strange scene: a bodhisattva cultivated to a very high place, cessation in sight, all things set down—and the buddhas of the ten directions arrive together before him, to remind him, with full gravity, of one thing. Of what? Of the vow he himself once made.