Transition ④ · From the Four Great Vows to Amitābha's Original Vows

Part Four has walked up to "contending with empty space," and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part Four done, the bottom of the Four Great Vows lies open. A grammar: the four vows are the Four Noble Truths in the active voice—one and the same map of suffering, origin, cessation, and path; the hearer uses it to leave, the bodhisattva turns each truth into a vow; great compassion pulls out suffering and origin, great loving-kindness gives path and cessation; Tiantai's object lies outward, the Chan school's lies inward, and the sentence-form does not move. A structure: "numberless" is no frightening adjective but a construction that sets the terminus where it never comes true—the vow holds its office by never closing; that beings cannot all be liberated was never anyone's failure, for the horizon was never a point to be stepped on. A ground-color: knowing full well that beings are like space, one vows to ferry beings-like-space; like a bird flying through space, never dwelling in it—contending with empty space: only this is called the genuine raising of the awakening-mind.

Reading to here, a feeling may rise in the heart—quiet, but it will not be pressed down.

This road is too heavy.

To contend with empty space; within the nothing-whatsoever, I therefore seek it—vows of this temper are vast in their bearing, but from first to last it is one person's own vow-power doing the holding. Holding through this life, holding through the next, holding through measureless aeons. The young and strong may hear it and feel the blood stir; but a person well on in years, who knows his own capacity to be ordinary, his memory thinning, his strength going—weighing this load in his hands, he will ask in a low voice: these shoulders of mine—can they carry it? That question is not a retreating heart; it is the actual state of things. And toward the actual state of things, the Buddha's gate has never pretended not to hear.

The Buddha's gate did not sidestep the question.

Ages and ages ago, a king, hearing a Buddha teach the Dharma, was glad at heart; he relinquished his country, gave up the throne, and went forth as a śramaṇa named Dharmākara. He made vows of just this kind—not loosely, in one sentence, but clause by clause, forty-eight of them—and at the tail of every clause he pressed the same seal: should this not come true, may I not take the perfect awakening. Then he practiced through inconceivable long aeons, filling the vow with deeds, until all forty-eight clauses were filled.

He became a Buddha: Amitābha. His vow congealed into a land: the Land of Bliss in the West.

From then on, one more thing stood on this road: a vow already accomplished. Not someone's conception, not someone's blueprint—it is ready and present, in the West now, ten aeons since its Buddha awakened. Those who cannot carry the long road of self-power need no longer hold it up alone; they may entrust their direction to this vow, and ride it as they go. In the Buddha's gate this is called other-power.

But the words "other-power" are also the easiest to hear crooked. Heard as indolence: from now on nothing need be done; lie back and wait for the Buddha to come. Heard as a transaction: recite the Name enough times, and exchange it for a ticket of rebirth. Both hearings set other-power up as self-power's opposite, and both hear it small. This part sets the two crooked places straight together—other-power is not the absence of a vow; it is the entrusting of one's vow to a vow that holds.

Before entering, one boundary-line to set in the heart: this book speaks of other-power only as to what it is, never as to what it is better than. The road of self-power and the road of other-power are both true roads of the Buddha's gate; capacities differ by the ten thousand, conditions vary one by one—see the roads clearly, and each walks by his own conditions. This line does not move through the whole volume.

Part Five, two chapters: first, how that vow congealed into a land; then, how a person rides that land's vow.

We turn the page, and return to the seat of the Buddha Lokeśvararāja, to hear the monk Dharmākara speak.