Transition ⑦ · From Chan to the Lotus and Huayan

Part Seven has walked up to the place where a spine closes, and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

Five chapters, five things, packed into the satchel: Bodhidharma's naming (pacifying the mind—concentration, from then on, no longer on the ladder of the four jhānas and eight attainments); Huineng's establishing of the meaning (concentration is the substance of wisdom; wisdom is the function of concentration—the sequence of concentration-first-then-wisdom canceled there and then); Hongzhi's manner of sitting (silence and illumination simultaneous—when illumination loses its silence, intrusion appears; when silence loses its illumination, it all becomes leftover dharma); Dahui's manner of investigation (turning the light back—the gathering-in of the doubt is concentration; the bursting open of the source of seeing is wisdom); and the one meaning where the four streams converge (the living concentration that is amid signs, free of signs—if, seeing all objects, the mind is unconfused—that is true concentration). The subtitle, "from Pāli jhāna to silent illumination and huatou," is at this point redeemed in full.

And the pairings met along the way—South and North, sudden and gradual, silent illumination and huatou—are all set side by side, not ranked. As the sun rises suddenly, frost and dew melt gradually; the dividing lies in the capacity, not in the Dharma.

Is that enough?

Chan gathered concentration down to the very small—small as a single thought: Walking is Chan, sitting is Chan; speaking or silent, moving or still—the body at ease. Concentration is no longer a mountain to climb or a state to enter; it lies thin against daily life, thin as breathing. This is the utmost of the gathering-in.

Yet all along this volume there has lain buried a thread running the opposite way, left hanging, not yet gathered.

When Part Four read the hundred-and-eight samādhis, one name was met only in passing: the Ocean-Seal samādhi—the great sea, wind and waves stilled, printing in one moment the myriad images of the sky. It was said then that its home ground lay in Part Eight. And Vimalakīrti's room in Part Five, ten feet square yet holding thirty-two thousand lion thrones, was news from the same direction: concentration can not only be gathered small; it can also be opened large—so large that within a single thought the whole dharma-realm appears together.

This is the direction Chan did not take, and another tradition carried to the very end. In the Lotus Sūtra, before teaching, the World-Honored One again and again first enters samādhi, sending out the ray of white light from between His brows, illuminating eighteen thousand worlds to the east—concentration here is the prelude that opens the One Vehicle. In the Avataṃsaka, the whole sūtra is spoken from within the Ocean-Seal samādhi: the Buddha does not rise from His seat, and yet the seven places and nine assemblies, the dharma-realm infinitely multiplied and endlessly interpenetrating, blaze forth together within a single thought. In these two great sūtras, concentration is no longer only a work upon the practitioner's mind; it has become the very field in which the Buddha unfolds the whole of His teaching.

Part Eight's two chapters are exactly these two sūtras. The first: the Lotus—the concentration of the peaceful practice: where the one who walks and teaches in a turbid world sets concentration down. The second: the Huayan—the Ocean-Seal samādhi: how concentration grows large enough to be commensurate with the dharma-realm. The seed of Part Four flowers here; and at the place of flowering the reader will discover a strange thing: the Chan that gathered concentration to its smallest and the Huayan that opened it to its largest seem to be speaking of the two ends of one and the same thing—the single thought and the dharma-realm were never apart.

Between the gathering and the opening, we turn the page, to see the Lotus's ray of white light.