Transition ④ · From the Mahāyāna Turn to the Sword of Prajñā

Part Four has walked up to the edge of a grandly adorned map, and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part Four done, the look of concentration is no longer at all what it was in the workshop. It has a new standing: the perfection of dhyāna—a crossing carried by great compassion and guarded by prajñā. It has a new ruler: the nine stages of mental abiding, nine graduations from strenuous effort to no effort at all. It has a new bearing: neither falling nor resting, able to enter and able to leave, able to turn around at the very door of nirvāṇa. It has new territory: a hundred named samādhis—pull one corner of the robe, and the whole robe comes up—the ten thousand concentrations gathered home into the Heroic-March samādhi.

All four chapters walked uphill—transforming, modeling, calibrating, expanding: building all the way. Concentration's adornment was built ever grander.

Is that enough?

It is precisely because the building grew so adorned that there is one thing the language of Part Four cannot handle, left hanging in mid-air.

Think back along this road: prajñā was in fact present the whole time, but always in the posture of a guardian. It dissolved the stickiness of dhyāna's flavor; it upheld the freedom of entering and leaving; it propped, arrow against arrow, the shaft that would otherwise have dropped into "the certification at the reality-limit." All along, prajñā was working on concentration's behalf. But prajñā has another face, and Part Four never let it leave the sheath—the face that turns back and examines the very things it has guarded with its own hands.

The principle, in truth, was planted long ago. In the very first chapter of Part Four we read the deepest sentence of all: "The bodhisattva grasps neither the mark of distraction nor the mark of absorption—because distraction and absorption are of one mark." Even the mark of absorption is not to be grasped—at the time, the sentence was spoken to the cultivator of concentration, to keep him from sticking. But heard all the way to the end, it points at something far larger: if the mark of absorption cannot be grasped, then everything this part has so laboriously built—the nine graduations, the hundred names, the king among samādhis—this entire map itself: where does it stand?

Leaving Part Three, a knife of substance was left hanging: is the substance of absorption a thing, or a name? The Mahāyāna added no weight to that scale and took none away; now prajñā will take the whole scale, with every reading upon it, place it into emptiness, and ask the question again.

Part Five is the home ground of this question. Two figures of the keenest edge step forward. One is the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī—foremost in wisdom, the sword in his hand made for cutting tangles; when in the sūtras he debates concentration with others, every stroke goes for the word "obtainable." The other is the layman Vimalakīrti—the elder who showed himself sick in the city of Vaiśālī; in the last part we already heard one sentence of his, "not to rise from the attainment of cessation and yet to display the bearings of conduct," and Part Five walks into that small ten-foot room of his, to watch him turn the word "sitting" completely over.

Let it be said plainly first, lest the reader grow alarmed: prajñā turning back does not mean tearing concentration down. The scale Part One set up, the jhāna-factors Part Three dissected, the adornment Part Four built—prajñā destroys not one of them. What it cuts has never been concentration; it is "obtainable"—the hand that reaches toward the state of concentration and would clench it into "mine." Where the sword's edge passes, the ladder still stands; only no one grips the ladder in his hand anymore.

Built, then broken; broken, then built the firmer. Between this building and this breaking lies the deepest tension in the Mahāyāna teaching of concentration.

We turn the page, to watch the sword leave its sheath.