Twelve Vows That Guard the Conditions for Keeping Precepts

6.1 Twelve Vows That Guard the Conditions for Keeping Precepts

At one time the Bhagavān, traveling and teaching through the lands, came to the City of Broad Adornment and stayed beneath the Tree of Resonant Music, together with a great assembly of eight thousand bhikṣus.

The City of Broad Adornment—look closely at this city. It is Vaiśālī: in Part Three, Sudinna's first precept was laid down here, and the seven hundred elders ruled on the ten points here. The two deepest cuts in the whole history of the Vinaya both fall on this one city. Now the Buddha has come outside the city again and sits beneath the Tree of Resonant Music; the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, sustained by the Buddha's awesome spiritual power, rises from his seat and asks the Buddha to expound the names of the Buddhas and the merits of their original vows. What the Buddha speaks of is Bhaiṣajyaguru (the Medicine Buddha), the Tathāgata of Lapis-Lazuli Radiance in the Eastern world of Pure Lapis Lazuli—who, when He walked the bodhisattva path, made twelve great vows.

For five parts this book has been speaking of the precept; and outside the city where the first precept was laid down, the precept meets a Buddha who made vows.

The Fifth Vow: The Transgressor's Way Back

Among the twelve vows, one speaks of the precept head-on—the fifth great vow:

"When in a future age I attain bodhi, may all the countless and boundless beings who cultivate the brahmacarya within my Dharma be made, all of them, to obtain the unbroken precepts and to complete the three clusters of pure precepts; and should any transgress, then upon hearing my name they shall regain purity and not fall into the evil destinies."

Two sentences, two weights.

The first sentence: "to complete the three clusters of pure precepts." The three clusters—the master map Part Four set up: ceasing evil, cultivating the good, delivering beings. What the Medicine Buddha's vow promises is not the keeping of a few rules; it is that beings be endowed with the complete precept of all three clusters. In the whole sūtra, "brahmacarya" and "the three clusters" appear in this one vow and nowhere else—among the twelve, this is the sole precept-vow.

The second sentence weighs more: "and should any transgress, then upon hearing my name they shall regain purity and not fall into the evil destinies." If someone has transgressed—upon hearing my name, they regain purity. Weigh what this means: a Buddha, making His root great vows in His causal ground, wrote "how does the one who has broken the precepts come back" into the very conditions of His own buddhahood. On the blueprint of Part Four stood four words, re-purification after a breach; Part Five's cross-section made the diagnosis, breaking damages the seed—and here, the road back to purity is guaranteed in person by a Buddha's original vow. That dead-of-night question on the transition page—"can I still be saved?"—the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajyaguru's answer stands right here: yes.

What Hearing the Name Awakens Is Your Own Seed

But "upon hearing my name they regain purity"—does that not sound too easy? Recite a Buddha's name once, and the transgression is wiped away?

The Tiantai master Lingyao, of the early Qing, settles this layer of meaning with utter steadiness in his Direct Explanation of the Bhaiṣajyaguru-sūtra. He says that the transgressor's regaining of purity rests on two great conditions:

"First, the merit of precept-keeping that was one's own from the start within Bhaiṣajyaguru's Dharma; second, that hearing Bhaiṣajyaguru's name is like the agada medicine that heals every illness."

The first condition is the merit of this person's own receiving and keeping of the precepts, back at the start, within Bhaiṣajyaguru's Dharma—he himself once planted the good of the precept; the second condition is the Buddha's name, like the agada medicine—one single medicine that heals every illness. However potent the medicine, what it heals is the living force in the sick person's own body; however great the name, what it awakens is the wholesome seed this very person once planted. Regaining purity is not an absolution out of thin air; it is medicine matched to the illness, bringing the dust-dimmed, damaged seed back to life.

An ancient Commentary on the Bhaiṣajyaguru-sūtra recovered at Dunhuang had read this line, earlier still, in Part Five's own words. Citing a treatise, the commentary says: gathering in the mind and single-mindedly recollecting the Tathāgata's name, that one thought is "a seed of right hearing-perfuming"—though it sits within a worldly, tainted mind, in its very nature it "is a supramundane, untainted mind-seed." The single thought of hearing the name is itself one act of perfuming, dropping an untainted seed into the store-consciousness. The cross-section Part Five drew—the ancients were already holding it, and with it they read the Medicine Buddha's vow through.

There is one more layer, plainer still in the history of the translations. This sūtra was rendered into Chinese three times: in Dharmagupta's Sui-dynasty version, the fifth vow is only a wish—"with none breaking the precepts and bound for the evil destinies"—with no mechanism of recovery yet; by Xuanzang's early-Tang version, "upon hearing my name they regain purity" stands forth; and Yijing's version, from after the Wu Zhou era, adds eight more characters—"single-mindedly hold it, and with utmost sincerity disclose their faults." To disclose is to repent. The three translations advance step by step, laying the road out ever more plainly: beyond hearing the name, there is holding; there is repenting. The way back is real—but the walking is still yours to walk.

The Remaining Eleven Vows: Guarding the Foundation

And the other eleven vows? Read through, they look like nothing but this-worldly benefits: sickness removed, food obtained, clothing obtained, prison and punishment escaped … what have these to do with the precept?

First ask a plain question: why can some people keep the precepts, and others cannot?

It is not all a matter of will. A person with a hollow, growling stomach will do anything "for the sake of seeking food"; a person bound in fetters—what deportment is there to speak of; a person racked with sickness, faculties incomplete, can hardly even listen to the Dharma. For precept-keeping to stand, there must first be ground underfoot—body, eyes, food and clothing, livelihood, circumstance. Check the eleven vows off one by one, and what they guard is exactly this ground:

The sixth vow, the faculties—"faculties incomplete, blind, deaf, mute … upon hearing my name, all attain to being upright and keen-witted, complete in their faculties." The seventh vow: all sicknesses removed. The eighth vow: removing the manifold oppressions of the circumstance of the female body (looked at closely in the next chapter). The ninth vow: drawn out of the net of Māra's wrong views and established in right view. The tenth vow, peril before the law—"seized by the law of the king, bound with rope, flogged, imprisoned, or facing execution … all gain release from every sorrow and pain." The eleventh vow: food. The twelfth, clothing—"poor and without clothing, tormented day and night by mosquitoes, gnats, cold and heat … at once obtaining fine garments of every kind."

Body, faculties, view, circumstance, food, clothing—taken together, the eleven vows are a list of the conditions of precept-keeping. The fifth vow establishes the precept proper; the eleven guard the precept's foundation.

This reading is no modern invention. When the eighth-century Silla master Taehyŏn commented on this sūtra, he outlined the twelve vows into six paired gates—and one of them he named, with his own hand, "the gate of preserving the precepts and preserving the body," setting the precept-vow and the body-vow side by side as one gate; and he set up "the gate of resolve, of food and clothing," food and clothing forming a gate of their own. Twelve hundred years ago, the old commentary had already placed the vows of body, of food, and of clothing side by side with the precept, and looked at them together.

Sliding Down Happens Stair by Stair

The sūtra has one more passage, which draws the process of a person's slipping from the precept as a stairway:

"Though they receive the points of training under the Tathāgata, they break the śīla; some, though they do not break the śīla, break the rule; some, though their śīla and rule remain unbroken, yet destroy right view; some, though they do not destroy right view, cast away learning …"

Before the precept breaks, what breaks first is the rule—the workaday rules have gone slack; before the rule, right view was ruined; and before that, learning was cast away. A person does not fall to the bottom in one step; they slide down, stair by stair. And the sūtra goes on: a person on any of these stairs, "coming to hear the name of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajyaguru, forsakes evil conduct, cultivates wholesome dharmas, and does not fall into the evil destinies"—the door of the way back stands open at every stair.

Reading the twelve vows to this point, a question rises of itself: do these twelve vows have a sequence? Are they, too, like a stairway—first the body settled, then the precept kept, then wisdom opened, climbing up rung by rung?

The answer to this question is unexpected. In the next chapter, we count the twelve vows over again.