When the Precept Is Pure, Concentration Comes of Itself

1.4 When the Precept Is Pure, Concentration Comes of Itself

The last chapter left a question behind: recollecting the precepts can bring the mind to the doorstep of concentration—why can it not get inside the door?

First, divide "concentration" into two stretches.

One stretch is called access concentration—call it the doorstep of concentration. When the mind arrives here, the five things that cover it—craving, ill-will, dullness, restlessness-and-remorse, doubt—are pressed down for the time being; joy, tranquility, and steadiness have all arisen; the mind is very stable—but it has not yet drawn into a single point and locked there. It is steady, yet still moving.

The other stretch is called full absorption—inside the door. The mind gathers in, congeals on one point, and moves no more. This is the true depth of meditative concentration.

Recollecting the precepts reaches the doorstep; it does not get inside. The key is not the depth of one's skill but the shape of the object.

One Candle-Flame, and a Row of Eight Lamps

One kind of object is single. Like the thread of touch at the tip of the nose as the breath goes out and in—one in, one out, a single simple strand. The mind keeping watch on it can draw in and draw in, until at last it congeals into a point and sinks inside the door. Watching the breath—counting the breaths—is of this kind.

The object of recollecting the precepts is many-faced. The precept-virtue has eight features: unbroken, without lack, unstained, unmottled, not taken by others, well-guarded, praised by the bright, the wise never wearying. Recollecting along, the mind finishes attending to one and must move to the next. It is like watching a single candle-flame: the gaze can gather to a point. Watch a row of eight lamps, and the gaze must patrol them one by one—patrol however evenly, however quietly, it will not gather to a point.

So in recollecting the precepts, the mind is always moving along the whole row of lamps: steady, but never locked. It can reach the steadiness of the doorstep; it cannot reach the locked stillness inside the door.

This dividing line does not look at the name of the practice; it looks only at the shape of the object. Within the same family of recollective practices, counting the breaths keeps watch on a single touch, and so it gets inside the door; recollecting the precepts or recollecting the Buddha keeps watch on many-faced virtues, and so it halts at the doorstep. It is not that one gate is higher and another lower; the object each has chosen sets the depth each can reach—plain and clear, laid out in the open.

The Doorstep Is Where Recollecting the Precepts Was Meant to End

Here is the most important sentence: arriving at the doorstep is not the half-finished state of "not yet inside"; it is the native end-point of the practice of recollecting the precepts.

Think back to the scene before the sewing hall in the last chapter—what the Buddha taught Mahānāma was a practice to be done whether the teacher can be seen or not: a practice serviceable at home, on the road, in the middle of clamorous days. The full absorption inside the door is reached only by sitting down in quiet and entering deep; the steadiness of the doorstep can be held in the very midst of walking and working. And that steadiness which can be carried anywhere is exactly what recollecting the precepts is for.

So if your recollecting of the precepts yields no feeling of deep concentration, do not conclude you have recollected wrongly, or weakly. The steadiness of the doorstep—greed, ill-will, and delusion not arising, the mind upright, joy arising of itself—is where recollecting the precepts is meant to arrive. Standing at the doorstep is already enough.

One more layer needs naming: the congealing of the mind into one point is, in itself, neutral. If the object is wholesome, what congeals is right concentration; if the object is craving, or harm, or wrong view, what congeals is wrong concentration—a hunter fixing his gaze on his prey has a tightly gathered mind too, and that is not right concentration. Whether the mind congeals is one matter; what it congeals upon is another. This is also why, when the Buddha's teaching speaks of concentration, it never speaks of the technique of focusing alone; it speaks of the object, and of the precept, in the same breath.

While we are here, learn three names. This state of the mind congealed on one has gone by several renderings in the Chinese translations: the Saṃyukta Āgama renders it "one-mind" and "inner-purified one-mind"; the Madhyama Āgama renders it "inner-stilled one-mind"; and when Xuanzang of the Tang translated the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, the technical term "mental one-pointedness" was established. The terms grow ever more precise; they speak of one same thing: the mind, gathered into one.

"This Is the Nature of Things"

Gather all this up, and a deeper thing comes into view: between precept and concentration the relation is not "finish one stage of the work, then force the next." Concentration is what the precept grows by itself.

Nāgārjuna, in the Dazhidu lun (the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra), has a passage that lays this road out with utter clarity:

The person who upholds ethical conduct, their mind does not regret. Because their mind does not regret, they attain joy and bliss. Because they attain joy and bliss, they attain one-mind. Because they attain one-mind, they attain true wisdom… thus ethical conduct is the root of all wholesome states.

Look at that string of becauses. The mind does not regret—because of that, joy and bliss; joy and bliss attained—because of that, one-mind. This because is the of-itself kind, not the strained kind. When the foundation is firm, the wall stands up on its own.

The Buddha Himself put this meaning even more thoroughly. In the very next discourse after the Heyi-jing—in the same chapter, still speaking to Ānanda—He said it outright:

Ānanda, the precept-keeper should not think: "Let me be without regret." Ānanda, this is the nature of things: the precept-keeper gains non-regret.

One who keeps the precepts need not raise even the thought "may I be without regret for this." This is the nature of things—the dharma walks by itself. You need only keep the precept pure: non-regret comes of itself; non-regret come, joy comes of itself; all the way to concentration, to liberation, every link is "this is the nature of things."

Those words—this is the nature of things—are the floor under the whole of Part One. The chain of the Heyi-jing looks like a work-order of causes and effects; in truth it is a watercourse: when the water arrives, the channel forms of itself. The one place on this chain where the practitioner must put forth strength is the first link—keeping the precept pure; as for the rest, the harder one strains to "seek" them, the more it is like building dams in the channel.

For practice today, this is a very practical word. Entering concentration is nowadays often taught as a set of techniques: adjust the posture, control the breath, counter distraction, break through dullness—as if concentration were a state to be wrested by willpower. And the wresting is bitter, often precisely because the foundation underneath has not been driven firm. A person with debts in the heart may sit never so straight; the thorn of regret is still in him. A person whose precept is pure has had the thorn drawn, and the mind quiets and settles by itself. Concentration is not wrested; it is the place the water comes home to when the channel has formed of itself.

Here Part One has been walked to its end.

From the root we have seen what the precept first looked like: under the one word "precept" three things are carried—an ability grown into the body, a watch kept at the six sense-doors, a living casebook (chapter one); in the person who has entered the stream, the precept is the fourth factor ruled on by the Buddha's own lips, a tree leaning toward nibbāna (chapter two); the precepts you have kept into being can be invited back into the mind and recollected—a practice that needs no teacher present and goes with you wherever you walk (chapter three); and this practice carries the mind to the doorstep of concentration, where the doorstep is its own native end-point—because when the precept is pure, concentration comes of itself; this is the nature of things (this chapter).

One sentence to gather up Part One: the precept is the foundation; the precept pure, concentration comes.

All of this is the root the Buddha and the earliest texts laid down. But the words at the root mostly say what the precept is and where it stands. A real practitioner, having heard it all, is left with a very concrete question: then—which lines, exactly, are the precepts? In this life of mine, in this one day and one night, how, concretely, do I keep them?

To answer that, we must walk into the fields of the Āgamas, and watch how the Buddha, facing one living person after another, handed the precept into their hands.