Part Four · The Mahāyāna Turn · The Precept, Laid Out to the World of Beings

Part Three ended on two questions. The Vinaya can judge conduct, but it cannot judge intent—what of the mind? The Vinaya can hold the saṅgha-boundary, but its light does not reach past the wall—what of sentient beings?

Part Four is Mahāyāna Buddhism's answer to these two questions.

The answer does not light a new stove. The whole of the Vinaya canon is taken in intact, not one rule dropped; then, on top of it, the word "precept" is stretched wide—wide enough that the good to be cultivated and the beings to be liberated are all established as precepts; wide enough that the precept's root moves from the conduct of body and speech onto the mind.

Four chapters, four steps. Chapter one: hear Upāli, foremost in keeping the Vinaya, ask the Buddha a new question he himself cannot answer—and from it the three clusters stand up: beyond the ceasing of evil, the two further clusters of cultivating good and liberating beings. Chapter two: see what the precept looks like kept to its utmost by prajñā—transgression unobtainable, and the precept unbreakable: a poison-dragon, with the one-day precepts, kept those eight words unto death. Chapter three: see the Yogācārabhūmi draw the bodhisattva precepts as a completed map—nine kinds of śīla, linked head to tail. Chapter four: see how such a precept is "received"—a thousand li without a preceptor, self-vow before the Buddha-image; once received, not lost unto the very end of future time.

Read these four chapters through, and the precept is laid out from inside the Saṅgha's wall to the whole world of beings—and laid onto the mind. Once the word "mind" stands firm, the gate of Part Five has arrived.

We begin with Upāli's morning.