Vimalakīrti's One Silence

5.3 Vimalakīrti's One Silence

Those who cultivate concentration almost all measure it by "sitting": how long one sits, how steadily; whether, through one stick of incense, the body stirs, whether a thought rises. "Concentration" thus quietly turns into an assignment that can be measured, and the "I who can sit long," inside the measuring, sits itself more and more solid.

The one who takes this ruler away is Vimalakīrti.

The Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa records: the venerable Śāriputra was at meditative sitting (pratisaṃlayana) under a tree in the forest—meditative sitting: to sit alone in quiet contemplation, settled and at ease, the standard posture of the śrāvaka's cultivation of concentration. The elder Vimalakīrti came by, and what left his mouth is a rebuke that has rung for a thousand years:

Śāriputra—this sitting is not necessarily what makes sitting-in-meditation. For one who sits in meditation: not to manifest body or mind within the three realms—that is sitting in meditation; not to rise from the attainment of cessation and yet to display the bearings of conduct—that is sitting in meditation; not to forsake the dharma and yet to appear amid the affairs of ordinary beings—that is sitting in meditation; for the mind to dwell neither within nor without—that is sitting in meditation; to be unmoved amid all views and yet to cultivate the thirty-seven factors of awakening—that is sitting in meditation; to enter nirvāṇa without cutting off the afflictions—that is sitting in meditation.

First hear the opening line exactly: "this sitting is not necessarily what makes sitting-in-meditation." What he takes away is not the act of sitting—from beginning to end Vimalakīrti never says do not sit in meditation—what he takes away is the mark of sitting: he lifts meditative sitting out of "a way of sitting" and sets it upon the markless mind that "does not manifest body or mind within the three realms." Concentration is not in the posture; it is in the markless mind.

The six clauses should be read in order; each strips one more layer of mark away from "sitting." "Not to manifest body or mind within the three realms" is the headline: neither body nor mind puts forward, anywhere in the three realms, a position that could be grasped. "Not to rise from the attainment of cessation and yet to display the bearings of conduct" strips the mark of "concentration and movement kept apart": when the śrāvaka enters the deepest attainment of cessation, body and mind are wholly stilled, and he cannot at the same time walk, stand, sit, or lie down; Vimalakīrti's meditative sitting displays the bearings of conduct without rising from the attainment—stillness and motion are no longer two stretches of time. "For the mind to dwell neither within nor without" strips the mark of "concentration has a place to dwell": not gathered inward into a stronghold, not climbing outward onto an object—concentration has no location. "To be unmoved amid all views and yet to cultivate the thirty-seven factors of awakening" strips the mark of "only when everything halts does it count as concentration": unmoved, just as it is, and the factors of the path cultivated all the while—being unmoved is not shutting down, and the markless is not a blank.

The last clause, "to enter nirvāṇa without cutting off the afflictions," calls for special care; it must not be read in isolation. It absolutely does not say that the afflictions need not be cut, or that conduct does not matter—to read the most thorough purity backwards into the cheapest license is this sentence's most dangerous misreading. What it speaks is the "neither taking nor rejecting" seen from the markless standpoint of the dharma-body: it does not set up "affliction" as a thing to be destroyed, nor "nirvāṇa" as a yonder place to be reached—within the markless, no solid object is found at all that could be treated as "my affliction," to be cut or to be kept. This is a deeper purity, not a loosening of the rope. In the eyes of one who stands at the summit there is no ladder to grasp—and underfoot, not one rung of the ladder is missing.

The Footnotes of Three Ancients

Where exactly does Vimalakīrti's rebuke land? The three ancient worthies who annotated the Vimalakīrti take the measure with great exactness.

Kumārajīva says: the bodhisattva settles the mind upon the true realm, his cognition not racing outward, and the dharma-body transcends the three realms—"body and mind alike hidden, the very acme of meditative concentration"; the śrāvaka, though able to hide the mind's cognition within the attainment of cessation, is "not yet able to be unseen in his body … hidden yet still manifest, not yet well-gathered." The criterion lies between "alike hidden" and "still manifest"—however deep Śāriputra sits, the mark of his body still shows within the three realms, and that one thread of "still manifest" is the last mark not yet pared away.

Sengzhao goes a step further: the dharma-body's meditative sitting is "form and spirit alike extinguished, the Way cutting off the realm of the constant"—and Śāriputra draws the rebuke because he still has a body summoned by karmic recompense and a mind-faculty resting upon karmic recompense, which can appear, can practice, and upon which a mark of concentration can be set. What Vimalakīrti takes away is exactly this last foothold.

Daosheng goes one layer further still, and turns the blade's edge upon the thought of "hiding" itself: if one supposes the utmost of concentration is to hide the mind deeper and conceal the body more closely, then the thought "I have hidden" is itself still a mark—hiding must always have a hiding-place; the markless concentration has not even a hiding-place. The perfection of concentration is not stowing the self where no one can find it; it is that no mark appears, and there is no place to hide.

Read the three together and one criterion runs through: the divide between the śrāvaka's sitting and the dharma-body's meditative sitting is not how deep the sitting goes, but whether one mark still remains. Vimalakīrti's rebuke does not fault Śāriputra for sitting too little; it would have him step free, completely, of this—that however well one sits, there is still an I doing the sitting.

The One-Practice Samādhi: Wisdom as Concentration's Gate

The mark of sitting taken away, upon what does concentration still "settle"? The Mañjuśrī Prajñāpāramitā answers face on, and sets up a name—the One-Practice Samādhi (ekavyūha-samādhi):

The single mark of the dharma-realm, with the meditative object bound to the dharma-realm—this is called the One-Practice Samādhi. If a good son or good daughter would enter the One-Practice Samādhi, one must first hear prajñā-pāramitā and cultivate it as taught, and only then can one enter the One-Practice Samādhi.

Concentration's object loosens, from "some one thing I take as my object" into "the single mark of the dharma-realm"—and the single mark of the dharma-realm is precisely the mark of marklessness: the dharma-realm has no manifold differentiated marks, hence "a single mark," and this "one" is not yet another mark standing over against "many." To bind the object to the dharma-realm is to bind it to the markless—an object with no mark of an object there to take.

Still less to be passed over is the threshold clause: "one must first hear prajñā-pāramitā … and only then can one enter." It is not that one first perfects a concentration and then adds prajñā as trim; prajñā comes first, illumining through the supposed reality of the object, and only then can concentration truly be bound to the markless. Wisdom is concentration's gate—concentration and wisdom here are not added one after the other; wisdom opens the door, and concentration enters the hall.

And the sūtra gives an expedient for getting started: "not seize upon marks, fix the mind on a single Buddha, exclusively reciting the name … and within that mindfulness one is able to behold the Buddhas of past, future, and present." The reader of the mindfulness gate will recognize this face—fixing the mind on a single Buddha, exclusively reciting the name: that is the very road volume one walked. See clearly the bearing it takes here: it takes the single-pointedness of recollecting the Buddha as the way in; from minding one Buddha it comes to behold the Buddhas of the three times, and settles at last into the single mark of the dharma-realm—the landing-point is the markless. The same door: in the mindfulness gate it leads to the Buddha; in the concentration gate it leads to the markless. One door—and each destination has its own master.

No Near Shore, No Far Shore

The "one practice" of the One-Practice Samādhi the Dazhidu lun explains most thoroughly: this concentration "constantly runs as one, in correspondence with ultimate emptiness," with "no further sequence of practices." And the sentence that follows on its heels is the sharpest dotting-of-the-eye in all of Part Five:

The bodhisattva, within this samādhi, sees neither the near shore nor the far shore. For the various samādhis, the mark of entering is the near shore, the mark of exiting the far shore; the mark of first-attaining is the near shore, the mark of ceasing the far shore.

The treatise's author unpacks his own simile: the mark of entering the absorption is this shore, the mark of leaving it the other; the time of first attaining is this shore, the time of its perishing the other. The samādhi as ordinarily understood is always pinched between the two shores by these four marks—there is a threshold, a span of time; concentration is a room one goes into and comes out of. But the One-Practice Samādhi that corresponds with ultimate emptiness sees neither shore at all: no mark of "I have entered concentration," no mark of "I have come out of it"; no time of gaining, no time of losing. Concentration is no longer a place you enter and exit; it is the present moment of the dharma-realm's single mark.

The knife Part Three left hanging finds its resting place here: the scale that asked whether the substance of absorption is a thing or a name is set down—near shore and far shore along with it—into ultimate emptiness.

A Silence Like Thunder

Concentration's "marks" have returned to the markless; one last dimension remains: words—for even the sentence "it is markless" is still a sentence. What hands this last dimension back is that famous silence in Vimalakīrti's ten-foot room.

In the chapter on entering the Dharma-gate of non-duality, after thirty-some bodhisattvas have each spoken one account of "not-two," it falls to Mañjuśrī to conclude:

To my mind, with respect to all dharmas, to be without word and without speech, without showing and without cognizing, apart from all question-and-answer—this is entering the Dharma-gate of non-duality.

This is already the utmost—with one sentence, he has spoken the "without word and without speech." Then Mañjuśrī turns the question back upon Vimalakīrti: good sir, what is the bodhisattva's entering the Dharma-gate of non-duality?

Then Vimalakīrti was silent, without a word.

The whole room fell still. Mañjuśrī exclaimed:

Excellent, excellent! To be without so much as letter or word—this is truly entering the Dharma-gate of non-duality.

A speech, a silence, a seal—three steps, each beyond the last. Mañjuśrī performs the wordless by means of words: wordlessness is treated as a content, and pointed out by language. Vimalakīrti does not "say" that wordlessness; on the spot, he does it. And Mañjuśrī straightway seals it with his own mouth: this silence, more than the speech just given, is the true entering.

Recognize what this silence is. It is not having nothing to say, not a lapse in the room, not falling silent for want of words—the sūtra itself supplies the iron proof: "Among that assembly, five thousand bodhisattvas … attained the forbearance of the unborn dharmas." If it were a mere lapse, how could five thousand in one assembly realize entry then and there? Precisely because that silence is not the absence of speech, but the markless concentration's complete manifestation on the spot—concentration having returned to the markless, wordlessness is exactly its most complete sermon. Later ages praised it: a silence like thunder.

The last chapter's sword cut until even the sword was empty; this chapter's silence lets even the act of "cutting" come to rest. Mañjuśrī had reached the utmost of "speaking the wordless"; Vimalakīrti stepped across the final threshold, from speaking to not speaking.

Part Five Is Walked

Three chapters, three steps. Its flavor cut: craving the sweetness and stagnating in the quiescence—search everywhere, and it cannot be found. Its love cut: dharma-attachment, the conceit of false attainment, "I am pure, others are defiled"—where the blade lands, even the blade is empty. Returned to silence: the mark of sitting taken wholly away, words handed back, one silence and five thousand realize the forbearance. Prajñā has loosened concentration all the way to the markless and the wordless—and concentration is not one inch the less; the only thing less is the hand that was gripping it.

And having walked this far, a new question rises of itself. What prajñā loosened were concentrations with entering and exiting, with steps and grades, one seat after another. Then—is there a great samādhi that is itself no ladder at all: awaiting no entry, awaiting no exit, perfect and all-pervading, already complete from the first?

There is a sūtra that speaks of this great samādhi face on. And the entrance it gives is unexpected: not in deeper seated meditation, but on a brick handed over from the precept gate.

The next part, the Śūraṅgama.