Part Eight · Lotus and Huayan · Concentration's Two Outward Reaches

Chan gathered concentration down to the very small—small as a single thought, thin as a breath lying close against daily life. Part Eight looks in the opposite direction: concentration's two outward reaches.

Two chapters, two great sūtras.

Chapter one: the Lotus's "Chapter on Peaceful Practices." It spreads concentration open—not a stretch of time within sitting, but the whole bearing of walking, standing, sitting, and lying, of speech and silence, motion and rest. With one line of Huisi's—"in all four postures, the mind is ever in concentration"—concentration is let out of the seated form and laid on the level ground of a body's whole conduct.

Chapter two: the Huayan Ocean-Seal samādhi. It pushes concentration to the very end—bounded not by one person's body but by the whole dharma-realm: within a single thought, the ten directions appear together; within each mote of dust, Samantabhadra enters alike. Fazang judged this one concentration to be the "essential body" of the whole of Huayan—concentration no longer one among the concentrations, but the crown that gathers in the whole teaching and lets the dharma-realm manifest all at once. The Ocean-Seal seed buried in Part Four, when we pulled one corner of the robe, flowers here.

Taken together, the two chapters will bring a strange thing to light: Chan, which gathers concentration to its smallest, and Huayan, which lets concentration out to its largest, turn out to speak of the two ends of one and the same thing. One gathers inward until there is no further to gather; one reaches outward until there is no further to reach; and what the two ends jointly attest is a single sentence—the essence of concentration does not lie on the ladder of the four jhānas and eight attainments.

We begin with the Lotus's Mount Sumeru.