Part Six · Bhaiṣajyaguru's Twelve Vows · Guarding the Conditions of the One Who Keeps Precepts

Part Five carried the precept to the deepest place in consciousness—and it also made a diagnosis: a seed can be wounded; keeping augments it, breaking damages it. The question asked on the transition page hangs here still: the one who has fallen—what then?

Part Six's answer comes from the East.

In the Bhaiṣajyaguru-sūtra, the Buddha tells of Bhaiṣajyaguru (the Medicine Buddha), the Tathāgata of Lapis-Lazuli Radiance in the Eastern world of Pure Lapis Lazuli—who, while He walked the bodhisattva path in His causal ground, made twelve great vows. Among the twelve, one vow sets up a way back expressly for those who have broken the precepts; the other eleven, looked at closely, guard nothing but the conditions of precept-keeping—body, eyes, food and clothing, livelihood, circumstance.

Two chapters, asking two questions. Chapter one asks: what have these twelve vows to do with the precept?—The answer: one vow is the precept proper, and eleven vows are the precept's foundation; the transgressor's way back is written into the Buddha's original vow. Chapter two asks: do the twelve vows have a sequence?—The answer is unexpected, and it is exactly this answer that lights up one more layer of the truth of what "keeping the precepts" is.

Read this part through, and a plain sentence becomes clear: the precept is not only a matter of will; it is also a matter of conditions. And there is a Buddha who made the conditions of beings' precept-keeping His own original vow.

We go now outside Vaiśālī, beneath the Tree of Resonant Music.