The Concentration That Does Not Abide

4.3 The Concentration That Does Not Abide

One who cultivates concentration will sooner or later meet a sweet pass. You sit down; the breath evens; stray thoughts subside; body and mind enter a security never known before—and that depth, that stillness, that comfort beyond saying will naturally give rise to a thought: this is the place. From there the work quietly changes substance: from "cultivating the gathering-in" it becomes "finding a way back to that place, and staying a little longer."

What this chapter speaks of is the bodhisattva's stance before this pass. One sentence, set out in front: the bodhisattva's concentration is not some higher state of absorption to be "dwelt" in; it is a capacity of non-abiding. It has three faces: able to enter and to leave; not enamored of its flavor; and, arrived at the door, not stepping in.

Say it plainly first, lest the three faces be read crooked. Non-abiding is by no means weak concentration, an inability to stay seated. To thread the nine levels forward and backward at will, to halt at the very gate of nirvāṇa—this takes not less concentration and wisdom but more; one who cannot stay seated has no standing to speak of non-abiding. Nor is non-abiding the discovery of yet a higher step; the ladder has not changed; what has changed is the person standing on it. Still less is non-abiding the abandonment of practice; one who can enter and leave, and one who never enters, are two different things.

Not Enamored of Its Flavor: The Watershed Is Great Compassion

The first face the previous chapter already half established: non-relishing of absorption. What remains is one deeper cut.

When the Yogācārabhūmi analyzes "concentration associated with relish," it makes an observation of great precision: when the practitioner gives rise to relish for the absorption he has entered, the relishing mind is, one should say, just now entering, while the absorption being relished is, one should say, already exited—the moment you begin to savor, to crave the state just tasted, your mind has already withdrawn from the absorption, back to the position of "savoring." At the instant of relishing the taste, the absorption is no longer present. Abiding in the flavor cannot, of itself, stand.

And what makes "not abiding in the flavor" Mahāyāna is still that same watershed: the two vehicles also do not adhere to the savor, but lacking great compassion, not abiding in the flavor accomplishes only a pure concentration. The bodhisattva does not stick, because beings are carried in his heart—he has both seen through the fact that to crave the flavor is to lose the absorption, and not for one moment forgotten that there are still people in suffering. Non-clinging, plus for-whose-sake: only together are they this face in full.

Mastery in Entering and Leaving: Absorption Becomes a Room to Enter and Leave at Will

The second face is the ripeness that moves freely among the absorptions.

The Prajñā sūtras give this ripeness names. One is called the lion's-roused-vigor samādhi: with the surge of a lion rousing itself, one can enter, following the sequence, from the first dhyāna level by level to the very end, and withdraw back, against the sequence, level by level—in with the order, out against it, without the least obstruction. Another is called the transcendent samādhi: no need to go rung by rung; one can leap—from this absorption straight into one several levels away, even dropping from deep absorption back to the scattered mind, then vaulting from the scattered mind into deep absorption again. The Dazhidu lun draws the line finely: the two vehicles' transcending is "skipping one but not two"—the force is thin, one level at most; the bodhisattva skips at will, leaping and joining as he pleases. The dividing point is not whether one can enter absorption; it is the power of the handling—and the root of that power is prajñā-wisdom.

The treatise also says this ripeness with the single word "play": the sportive samādhi—mastery attained in all three places, entering, abiding, and exiting, as easy and unobstructed as play. Play is not frivolity; it is mastery carried to its furthest point. And where does this mastery finally come to rest? The treatise says: the non-retrogressing bodhisattva is master of entering and leaving the absorptions so that he can come out of absorption at any moment, and be reborn back into the desire-realm to ripen living beings. Deep absorption is for him no longer a cage; it is a room to be entered and left at will—getting in is skill; consenting to come out is compassion.

Not Certifying the Reality-Limit: At the Door, Not Stepping In

The third face is the deepest, and shows the Mahāyāna's mettle most.

The "reality-limit" (bhūtakoṭi) is the limit of the final reality of dharmas—the point of certified entry into nirvāṇa's cessation. The bodhisattva, with his concentration and wisdom, has walked up to this door, fully able to step through. He does not step. The Dazhidu lun has a chapter whose very name is the proposition—"Learning Emptiness Without Realizing It": learning emptiness, and not certifying it. The chapter sets the hinge in a single sentence:

I am now in the time of training, not yet in the time of realization.

Not that he cannot certify; the time has not come—he is still in the season of learning: gathering roots of goodness far and wide, ripening beings. Were he to seize realization at this moment, he would land at the terminus of the two vehicles, never again able to come back and liberate beings. So this "not certifying" is the not-taking of one who sees with perfect clarity, not the cannot of one whose fire is not yet hot enough.

The treatise brings the matter alive with two similes. One is the archer: a strong man skilled in archery shoots upward into the empty sky; the second arrow strikes the tail of the first, the third props up the second—arrow propping arrow, the foremost never falling to the ground. The bodhisattva, by the power of skillful means, keeps the making of the certification at the reality-limit suspended, never letting it land—skillful means and great compassion are those arrows, propping up from beneath, one after another. The other is the load-bearing simile of the whole chapter:

A winged bird flies up into space and does not fall, yet though it is in space, neither does it rest in space.

A few words, and the whole proposition is gathered in. The bird flies in empty space: it does not fall—does not drop back to the ground; it does not rest—does not park itself in the sky. To fall is to fall back into birth-and-death; to rest in space is to sink into cessation. The bodhisattva's concentration takes neither end, and by flight itself—the unbroken working of great compassion and skillful means—holds that stance which neither lands nor halts. Concentration is not meant to land, nor to vanish into the sky. Concentration is flight.

Then by what is this non-abiding sustained? The treatise sets out a contrast: the bodhisattva without the power of skillful means goes straight to nirvāṇa, steps into cessation with one stride, and never returns; with the power of skillful means, then out of a mind of compassion he "turns the mind back and re-arises," and does not take nirvāṇa. At the very brink where the mind would sink into cessation, at the last instant it is turned back by compassion and means; thought rises again, and he re-enters the work of liberating beings. The bird does not rest in space because the wings never stop moving.

One Spine, Appearing Three Times

Gather in the thread Part Four has walked to this point, and you will see the same spine has shown itself three times: chapter one's "not reborn by dhyāna"; chapter two's "deliberately choosing to be reborn back in the desire-realm"; this chapter's "neither falling nor resting." Three vocabularies, one motion. The treatises of the Yogācāra give it a fourth saying—toward the conditioned activities of the world he "abides yet does not abide," and though he sees the quiescent virtue in cessation, "he likewise does not abide"—and at the last cast for it a systematic name: non-abiding nirvāṇa. Abiding neither in birth-and-death nor in nirvāṇa: hence, non-abiding.

There is a line in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa that says this stance to its utmost—the layman Vimalakīrti, on true meditative sitting: "not to rise from the attainment of cessation and yet to display the bearings of conduct." Not emerging from the deepest attainment of cessation, and at the same time walking, standing, sitting, lying down, meeting beings. This layman and his famous room have their home ground in Part Five; here, only set this one line down.

Return to the sweet pass at the opening. That deep security is not itself wrong; the error is to take it for a terminus and dwell there. The real work lies not in how deep one can sit, but in being able, however deep the sitting, to rise for what matters more; not in failing to taste that sweetness, but in tasting it and not being detained by it for a moment. Able to enter, able to leave, able at the door to turn around—neither falling nor resting, and this is what mastery means.

The stance of concentration is told. One last thing remains: into what shape did the Mahāyāna enlarge the very field called "concentration"? The next chapter, those hundred names.