Transition ⑤ · From the Sword of Prajñā to the Śūraṅgama

Part Five has walked up to the end of a great silence, and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

The sword left the sheath, three strokes, and returned to the sheath. The first stroke cut the flavor: stuck to sweetness or stuck to stillness, both graspings dissolved by one and the same move—"search everywhere, and it cannot be found at all." The second stroke cut the attachment: dharma-attachment, the conceit of false attainment, "I am pure, others are defiled"—fine graspings dressed in the robes of goodness; and the sword that could cut was cut away along with them. The third step was no longer a stroke: Vimalakīrti's one silence—the mark of sitting stripped wholly away, the work of words handed back, five thousand bodhisattvas attaining the forbearance of the unborn dharmas right where they sat. Prajñā loosened concentration all the way to the markless, the wordless.

Was concentration destroyed? No. Count back over it: the scale of the four jhānas still stands; the ruler of the nine stages of mental abiding still stands; the sequence—from the precept concentration is born, from concentration wisdom is unveiled—still stands; the fruits of the dhyāna heavens, the matching of meditation-subjects, the freedom of entering and leaving: every one of them still stands. From first to last, prajñā has not touched a hair of them—what it takes away is only the word "obtainable" in the hand that held all this.

And yet it is precisely in the stillness of that great silence that a new question floated up of itself.

Every concentration met along this road, shallow or deep, has come one structure at a time: an entrance, an exit, a scale, a sequence—from the first breath of breath-counting to the last thought before the attainment of cessation, all of them concentrations "cultivated upward." Prajñā loosened the grasping upon them, but it did not change their shape: they are still a ladder.

Then—is there a concentration that is not, in itself, a ladder at all?

Not cultivated upward but there from the first; not awaiting entry, not awaiting exit, because it has never had an "outside"; neither increasing nor decreasing, complete and all-pervading, present at every moment—if such a great samādhi truly exists, then practice is not a climb; it is a homecoming.

Chinese Buddhism has a scripture that speaks of this great samādhi head-on, and speaks of it earth-shakingly. It is called the Great-Crown Śūraṅgama-sūtra—the very text Part Four distinguished: same name, different scripture from the Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra that Kumārajīva translated; the Śūraṅgama-sūtra known in every Chinese household and chanted in its services for a thousand years. In it the venerable Ānanda meets disaster, and Mañjuśrī carries the mantra to his rescue; on his return, Ānanda bows in tears and begs the Buddha to teach the wondrous śamatha, samādhi, and dhyāna by which the Tathāgatas of the ten directions attained bodhi—the foremost expedient. The entire scripture is the answer to that one request: the great Śūraṅgama samādhi, not built by cultivation but complete of itself from the first—and, along the road that leads toward it, the light and the pitfall of every single step.

And the entrance this scripture gives is unexpected. It does not say "sit deeper"; it does not say "contemplate more finely." It sets the entrance at a place we thought we had long since walked past—the precept.

At the close of the previous volume, The Precept, a brick was handed toward the concentration gate: the four pure and clear instructions—gathering in the mind is the precept; from the precept concentration is born; from concentration wisdom is unveiled. It was said then that this brick would be built into the wall in the volume on concentration. Now the time for building has come. Part Six, three chapters. The first: the door into samādhi—how that brick becomes the foundation of the great samādhi. The second: twenty-five sages, each telling by which faculty, which sense-object, he entered perfect penetration—twenty-five gateways returning to one place. The third, and the most urgent: the fifty skandha-māras—the deeper the concentration, the finer the wrong turnings; at the scripture's end the Buddha names, one by one, fifty states met within concentration, with a compassion that verges on severity, all for the sake of one admonition: Form no notion of sagehood, and it is a good state; construe it as sagehood, and you fall prey to the host of māras.

Prajñā has loosened the hand; the Śūraṅgama has pointed home. The first brick at the door of home is the precept.

We turn the page, to enter the Śūraṅgama.