The Concentration of the Peaceful Practice

8.1 The Concentration of the Peaceful Practice

To picture concentration as a tower to be climbed story by story is the most natural imagining for one who cultivates it: the longer you sit, the deeper you enter, the higher—it seems—you have climbed. What this volume has been loosening, all along its road, is exactly this picture: the deepest place of concentration is not on that tower's top floor.

The previous part closed this line of questioning with Chan: Chan's concentration is not some station within sitting, but the living concentration that is amid signs, free of signs—speaking or silent, moving or still, the body at ease. That was concentration gathered inward—gathered into a single thought, gathered to that utmost point which is free of signs yet does not leave the world.

This chapter opens another door, and it comes out of an entirely different scripture—the "Chapter on Peaceful Practices" of the Lotus Sūtra. What gives one pause is that it leads to the same conclusion: concentration is not a seated station. But the direction it walks is exactly the opposite—not gathering concentration into a single thought, but spreading concentration open, laying it across the whole bearing of walking, standing, sitting, and lying, of speech and silence, motion and rest. Chan gathers concentration inward to the utmost; the Lotus spreads it outward to fill the whole round.

The Scripture's Two Placements

The "Chapter on Peaceful Practices" is, at root, the chapter in which the Buddha sets out, for the bodhisattvas who will uphold the sūtra in the latter age, the four peaceful practices—of body, speech, mind, and vow. And within the long roll of the "sphere of intimacy" under the bodily peaceful practice hides one leaf soaked through with the vocabulary of dhyāna.

The scripture first points to dhyāna as a source. Of the bodhisattva before he preaches, it says: "entering a quiet room, with right recollection, contemplating dharmas according to their meaning. Rising from dhyāna"—he enters the quiet room, recollects rightly, contemplates dharmas according to their meaning, and then, "rising from dhyāna," preaches for others. This sequence deserves a close look: dhyāna is not the interruption of preaching, nor its opposite; it is the place from which preaching "rises." Preaching is something done by rising up out of concentration. Concentration is the source of conduct.

Weightier still is the second placement. Onto the sphere of intimacy—a matter of everyday conduct—the scripture lays the vocabulary of dhyāna: "ever fond of seated meditation, in a quiet place, gathering and disciplining the mind." Seated meditation, the quiet place, the gathering and disciplining of the mind are listed inside the sphere of intimacy, shoulder to shoulder with every other kind of conduct—not isolated into a free-standing "session for cultivating concentration," but woven in as one facet of the bodhisattva's daily life. The verse gathers this facet into a famous image:

In a quiet place, gathering and disciplining the mind, abiding unmoved as Mount Sumeru … abiding ever in one mark.

Mount Sumeru's unmovedness figures the steadiness of the abiding; "abiding ever in one mark" points to the mark of one-pointedness—the mind set upon a single object and never shifting. And at the chapter's end, "entering deep into dhyāna, seeing the buddhas of the ten directions" is given as the fruit toward which this peaceful practice tends. So within this one chapter concentration answers itself from head to tail: it is the source of conduct (rising from dhyāna to preach), and it is conduct's fruit (entering deep into dhyāna and seeing the buddhas).

Here a detail slips by easily. The four graphs "gathering and disciplining the mind" are themselves embedded, in the scripture, within the list of the sphere of intimacy, shoulder to shoulder with the prohibitive clauses—"keep far from such-and-such." One and the same passage, read from its prohibitive face, is the precept of the conduct-gate (what to keep far from, what to draw near to); read from its gathering face, it is the concentration of the conduct-gate (how the mind is to abide). Precept and concentration were, from the first, two leaves of a single passage—volume four, The Precept, took the precept leaf; this chapter takes the leaf of concentration; each has its own home, and they do not collide.

The Formless Practice Just Is the Peaceful Practice

The one who gathered this concentration-face into a single defining sentence was the first patriarch of Tiantai, Chan master Huisi of Nanyue. That sentence in The Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra's Course of Peaceful Practice is the hinge of this chapter:

The formless practice just is the peaceful practice … One abides ever in every kind of profound and subtle dhyāna: walking, standing, sitting, lying, eating, speaking—in all four postures, the mind is ever in concentration.

The formless practice "just is" the peaceful practice—the two are one matter, two names for a single practice. And what makes it "concentration" lies exactly in the two clauses: "abides ever in every kind of profound and subtle dhyāna," "in all four postures, the mind is ever in concentration." Look at "ever" and "all four postures": concentration is no longer some station of entering and leaving, not some seat accomplished within sitting, but that kind in which, across the whole range of bearing—"walking, standing, sitting, lying, eating, speaking"—"the mind is ever in concentration." The tension the scripture left hanging and unnamed—is concentration a station of entry and exit, or a constant abiding within conduct?—Huisi judges plainly toward the latter. And this is just what this chapter would establish: concentration as a way of conduct running through the four postures.

Huisi then sets up a counter-face to show it against. He distinguishes the "practice-with-marks" from the "formless practice": the practice-with-marks is that valiant mode of reciting and upholding the Lotus—zealous with a scattered mind, going day and night without lying down, as though to save one's burning head. He does not deny its valor, yet he points to the vital spot—such practice is "not cultivating dhyāna, not entering samādhi"; it is the zeal of "a scattered mind": the mind's force fierce, but not gathered into one object. Setting scattered-mind recitation against the formless practice's mind-ever-in-concentration shows that "concentration" is not a matter of how fiercely one practices, but of whether the mind is gathered into one and constantly unmoved.

The most crucial judgment of all is Huisi's cutting this "profound and subtle dhyāna" free of the three realms' ladder of the four jhānas and eight attainments:

It does not rest on the desire realm, nor abide in form or formlessness … this is the bodhisattva's pervading practice—in the end without thought of mind, and therefore called the formless practice.

It is neither the scattered mind of the desire realm, nor an abiding in the concentration-states of the form and formless realms—it is not some concentration-state set higher than the four jhānas and eight attainments, not a further floor of that tower; it is "the bodhisattva's pervading practice," a concentration pervading all four postures and tied to no ground of the three realms. This judgment answers the very spine of this volume: the four-jhāna ladder is a structure of stations that ascends by shedding the jhāna-factors layer by layer; the concentration of the peaceful practice is not on that ladder, nor is it the ladder's higher rung—it is a different kind of concentration, concentration-as-conduct, laid out on the level ground of walking, standing, sitting, and lying.

Governing amid Violence, at Peace amid Alarm

After Huisi, the one who took the peaceful practice up into a larger system was his disciple Zhiyi. Zhiyi fixed the samādhi of the Lotus line under the name "the Lotus-samādhi," and assigned it to the half-walking, half-sitting class among the "four kinds of samādhi"—neither the full stillness of pure sitting nor the full motion of pure walking, but a concentration between walking and sitting, between motion and rest, in exact accord with "concentration pervading the postures."

Reading the sphere of intimacy in the "Chapter on Peaceful Practices," Zhiyi divides it three ways: keeping far from disturbance is the precept-gate, "gathering and disciplining the mind" is the concentration-gate, and contemplating dharmas as empty is the wisdom-gate. What this chapter takes is the leaf of the concentration-gate. And one sentence he speaks under that gate most repays turning over:

By the power of concentration, one governs amid violence and is at peace amid alarm.

Concentration is not the drawing of a person out of clamor and dread and the setting of him down in some untroubled quiet; quite the reverse—it is the being able to govern "amid violence," to be at peace "amid alarm." The clamor need not first be quieted, the dread need not first be dispelled, and the mind can already govern within them, be at peace within them—this is "in all four postures, the mind is ever in concentration" brought down onto concrete circumstance. The reader will recognize the echo of Part Seven: Huineng said that true concentration is tested in the seeing of objects, not preserved where no objects are; Dazhu said, "facing objects with no-mind, unmoved by the eight winds." This one line of the Lotus is the same truth made good in Tiantai.

Zhiyi then grounds the sense in the three-action method of half-walking, half-sitting: the body has its opening and restraint, the mouth its speaking and silence, the mind runs calming and contemplation in tandem. The body not confined to a single sitting, the mouth not held to a single silence, the mind running between calming and contemplation—and so "in all four postures, the mind is ever in concentration" is no longer only a program in one sentence; it comes to ground as the concrete shape of body, speech, and mind all running between motion and rest.

Part Eight, Half Walked

The contribution of the "Chapter on Peaceful Practices" to "concentration" can be gathered in a single line: it reconstructs concentration into a way of conduct running through walking, standing, sitting, and lying, through speech and silence, motion and rest—not some station of entering and leaving within sitting. The scripture spreads dhyāna into daily life with "gathering and disciplining the mind" and "abiding unmoved as Mount Sumeru"; Huisi fixes its root sense with "in all four postures, the mind is ever in concentration" and judges it no stage of the three realms' sequence; Zhiyi grounds it with the three-action calming-and-contemplation of "governing amid violence, at peace amid alarm."

Set back into this volume, it stands exactly paired against the previous part. Chan gathers concentration inward, to the utmost of a single thought free of signs; the Lotus spreads concentration outward, to fill the whole round of the four postures. The two issue from wholly different scriptural lineages—one from the Chan records, one from the Lotus and Tiantai—yet they meet at the same place: concentration is not a seated station. To those who treat seated meditation as a measurable attainment to be accumulated, the Lotus, beyond Chan, strikes the same note once more: the depth of concentration is not in how long you sit or how deep you enter, but in that mind-ever-in-concentration which, amid walking, standing, sitting, lying, eating, and speaking, has never once left its seat.

Concentration can fill the whole bearing of one body. Then—can it grow larger still? And how large?

The next chapter, the Ocean-Seal samādhi.