Transition ③ · From the Vow as Perfection to the Four Great Vows

Part Three has walked up to "merit is the ox, the vow the driver," and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part Three done, the vow's name and standing on the bodhisattva path are complete. A seat: among the ten perfections the vow sits eighth, the perfection of the not-yet-across—no preamble made and forgotten, but a power that must be wakened again and again; even the bodhisattva of the eighth ground, entered into effortlessness, needs the buddhas to call him to "be mindful of the vow you first made," lest he moor in the quiescence. A skeleton: the ten vows of the first ground, the cord that opens the whole net, each vow breeding a hundred thousand myriad as its retinue—the twelve vows of the Medicine Buddha and the forty-eight of Amitābha all gathered within its gates; and sealed at the crown with ten clauses of "exhaustion" that never come true—should the realm of beings be exhausted, my vow would be exhausted; but the realm of beings cannot be exhausted. A power: the driver pulls no cart, yet fixes where the cart is going—the vow adds nothing to merit's measure and fixes only merit's direction; and at the place where prajñā sees emptiness, it is the vow again that holds the bodhisattva from falling into cessation, liberating all within the actionless.

And yet—think back a moment—how far the things this part spoke of stand from ordinary people.

The reckoning of the ten perfections comes out of the treatises; the scene of the ten great vows opens on the first ground—the station of one who has cut the delusions of view and first entered the ranks of the noble. To make offerings to all buddhas, to purify all buddha-lands, to the very end of future time never parted from the bodhisattvas—vow-texts like these an ordinary person can hardly recite to the end, let alone raise. A lay practitioner of seventy, palms joined before the Buddha in the morning—ask him to vow "with the ten vow-gates as chief, fulfilling a hundred thousand myriad incalculable great vows," and the words will not fit his mouth. However high the vow's doctrine is built, if there is no stair an ordinary person can set foot on, it remains a solemnity inside a book.

Here the patriarchs of the Chinese tradition did a great kindness. They condensed this whole lofty skeleton into four sentences. Four sentences that nearly everyone who has entered a temple has heard, and many can chant with their eyes closed:

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 assemblies chant it; the morning and evening liturgy recites it; the receiving of precepts vows by it. It set the vow of the first-ground bodhisattva into every ordinary mouth—whoever you are, wherever on the road you stand, the moment these four sentences leave your lips, the vow you have made is the bodhisattva's. A stair running straight from an ordinary person's mouth to the first ground was laid in just this way.

But precisely because everyone can recite them, few ever stop to ask: why exactly these four? Would three not do? Is there an order among them, or are they four lines laid side by side at random? And inside the four hides a thorn—beings are "numberless": how can they ever all be liberated? To make a vow one knows cannot be completed—is that not deceiving oneself? Until that thorn is drawn, the four vows may be chanted ever so fluently; somewhere in the heart, a place stays unsettled.

The two chapters of Part Four take one question each: one answers the first, one draws the thorn. Both answers come from the hand of Master Zhiyi of Tiantai—he traced the four sentences' origin back to the night the Buddha first turned the wheel of the Dharma; and he turned that thorn over to its other face, and showed the deepest light this vow carries.

One sentence to set in the heart beforehand: Zhiyi's answer adds no new meaning to the four vows; it turns over the card they were holding all along. That these four sentences have borne a thousand years of chanting, serving everyone who takes them up, is precisely because beneath them lies the oldest foundation-stone in the Dharma—suffering, its origin, its cessation, the path. An old saying newly sung, many sing; an old saying seen to its bottom, few see. This part takes the reader down to see the bottom once.

We turn the page, and look first at what lies beneath the four sentences—they were never four wishes; they are an old map everyone knows, walked in a different way.