Part Five · The Precept-Substance · After Reception, What Is New in Body and Mind

Part Four closed on a single word: substance. "Mind as its substance"—when the three declarations of reception are finished, what exactly has been received into body and mind? What is it, that it can make "once received, not lost even by transgression, unto the very end of future time" hold?

This question the Āgamas do not ask, and the Vinaya canon does not answer. The ones who took it apart head-on and built it into a discipline of learning were the vinaya masters of China. That discipline is called the study of the precept-substance—one of Chinese Buddhism's deepest contributions to the Buddhism of the world, and the deepest layer this book will reach.

Three chapters, three steps. Chapter one asks the question itself clearly, then hears the three schools' answers—is the precept-substance material, a form-dharma? neither form nor mind? a seed?—and watches, at the last, how Vinaya Master Daoxuan judges and how Master Zhiyi opens the matter out. Chapter two meets the book that holds all of this up—Daoxuan's Xingshichao: first raise the perimeter wall, then build the house; receiving and following sustaining each other; a canonical standard of a thousand years. Chapter three walks into the depths of that single seed—where it lives, who stands in its way, and what, in the end, it is to grow into.

These three chapters are the densest doctrinal stretch in the whole book. There is no need to hurry; walk it passage by passage. Walk it through, and the words "keeping the precepts" will light up at the deepest place of the mind.

We begin by asking the question itself.