A Ladder, or a Piece of Level Ground
6.2 A Ladder, or a Piece of Level Ground
Count the twelve vows over from the beginning, and a thought arises quite naturally: is this not a ladder? First settle the body, then keep the precept, then move on toward wisdom—rung by rung, an orderly sequence.
Count, and you know: it is not.
The evidence is threefold. First, the precept-vow stands fifth—were this a ladder, that root vow should either crown the top or lay the base at the bottom; instead it stands at the neither-high-nor-low fifth place. Second, the most basic of all, food and clothing, come eleventh and twelfth, bringing up the rear—what ladder puts its two bottom rungs at the very top? Third, read the whole sūtra through and you will not find a single word "sequence," not a single sentence "first gain this, and only then can that be gained." The old commentaries read it the same way: Taehyŏn's six paired gates are a classification, not a progression; the two ancient Dunhuang commentaries gloss evenly on, vow after vow, without one word about order.
The twelve vows are not a ladder.
Then what are they? Take it this way: a piece of level ground.
A ladder is climbed rung by rung; ground has to be leveled all at once. A person keeping the precepts stands on the whole stretch of ground—body, eyes, food and clothing, livelihood, circumstance—and whichever patch caves in, from that patch the person falls. Hunger does not wait for you to finish some rung before it comes; nor do prison, sickness, oppression. The twelve vows of the Medicine Buddha set no order precisely because conditions, by their nature, keep no order: they have to be there all together. The Medicine King's vows are a piece of ground laid out all at once, not a ladder mounted step by prescribed step.
A "First" and "After" Built into One Vow
Having said that the twelve vows keep no sequence, one place must be confessed as it stands—there is one vow that carries a before-and-after inside itself. The eleventh:
"If there are beings tormented by hunger and thirst who, for the sake of seeking food, commit evil deeds—should they come to hear my name and single-mindedly hold it in mind, I shall first satisfy their bodies with excellent food and drink, and afterward, with the savor of the Dharma, establish them in ultimate peace and joy."
Look at the eye of this vow: "for the sake of seeking food, commit evil deeds"—hunger pushes a person into evil. So the Medicine King puts His order in eight words: first with food and drink, afterward with the savor of the Dharma. Feed the person full first; then, with the savor of the Dharma, establish them.
The compassion of the Buddha's gate lands just this plainly. Speak of the precept to a hungry person and the precept cannot get through—not that they refuse; the fire of hunger is burning, and the savor of the Dharma cannot pass their lips. The eleventh vow writes this truth into a vow: the body filled, then the Dharma established. This is not a ladder between the twelve vows; it is a tenderness within a single vow—and a miniature of the whole "ground": guard the conditions first, and only then can the precept stand.
The Only "Order" in the Old Commentaries Is Depth
Among the old commentators, only one ever set the twelve vows in an order—Lingyao, of the early Qing. But what he ordered was not before-and-after; it was shallow-and-deep:
"Within the bestowing of happiness, the benefit admits a difference of shallow and deep: those lacking faculties at once become complete in their faculties, the poor at once obtain abundance, those in a female body at once become men—all of these are reversals-of-opposites, belonging to the shallower benefit of the two siddhāntas of the remedial and of the personal; whereas to attain unsurpassed bodhi is the ultimate sense, the deep and far-reaching benefit."
The bodily turnings—the faculty-lacking made complete in their faculties, the poor given wealth, the female body become a man—are all "reversals-of-opposites": whatever the suffering, that is what is reversed, medicine answering illness; these belong to the shallower benefit. To attain unsurpassed bodhi is the deeper benefit of the ultimate sense. Shallow and deep are two tiers on the vertical, not a before-and-after on the horizontal—one more proof: this is ground, not ladder.
More interesting still, Lingyao himself was once caught by the problem of the vow-order. In his commentary he asks himself:
"Since, following the Nirvāṇa-sūtra and the ordinary course of practice, the training in the precepts should come first, why here does wisdom come first?"
By rights the training in the precepts should come first—why, here, does wisdom come first? A commentator three hundred years ago was asking the very question of this chapter. He answers by the Perfect Teaching, an answer in his own house's manner; but the question itself already bears witness: the riddle of the vow-order is an old problem, and its answer was never to be found in "setting out a sequence."
The Eighth Vow, Read Back in Its Own Age
Of the twelve vows, the one at which today's reader most easily stops short is the eighth:
"If there are women oppressed by the hundred ills of being a woman, who grow utterly weary and wish to cast off the female body—having heard my name, all of them obtain transformation from female to male, complete in the marks of a man, on up to the attainment of unsurpassed bodhi."
This vow must be read back inside its own age. In the world of that age, a female body meant a chain of concrete oppressions—the sūtra's own words are "oppressed by the hundred ills of being a woman"—marriage not one's own to decide, movement not one's own to decide, the practice of the way hemmed in on every side. What the eighth vow promises is the removal of this one layer of circumstantial suffering: whatever circumstance makes precept-keeping hard, that is the circumstance the Medicine King's vow reverses. It stands in line with "the poor given wealth" and "the faculty-lacking made complete"—the same mending of the same one ground.
Read the three recensions side by side and the shift of measure shows still more plainly: the Sui version has "the hundred ills of womanhood," Xuanzang "the hundred ills of being a woman," and Yijing changes it to "the many sufferings of being a woman"—the diction softening all the way—while adding "with utmost sincerity invoke it" and "in this very body." And the tradition itself long ago set this vow's place steady: Lingyao judges it the shallower benefit—medicine answering illness, reversing the circumstance before one's eyes; the deeper benefit of the ultimate sense is bodhi, and bodhi is neither male nor female. In the Vimalakīrti, the goddess says it most directly: "the Buddha says that all dharmas are neither male nor female." At the deep level, gender is empty from the start; at the shallow, the oppression at hand is removed first. One vow, two tiers—and the sūtra has provided for both.
The Road Before the Foot of the Ladder
At the last, let us join Part Six to the book's first page, and close a ring.
The first scene of this book's opening was the Heyi-jing: keeping the precepts brings non-regret, non-regret gives rise to joy, joy gives rise to rapture—all the way to concentration, to liberation—"dharma benefits dharma and dharma causes dharma." That is a true ladder: setting out from the precept, rung by rung, through to the far shore.
But that ladder has one premise too self-evident to be spoken: a person must first be standing at its foot. The hungry, the sick, the one chained in prison, the one harried day and night by circumstance—the ladder stands right there, and they cannot reach it.
What the twelve vows of Bhaiṣajyaguru guard is exactly the stretch of road before the foot of the ladder. Feed the person full, heal them, unbind them, settle them—and bring them to the foot of the ladder. What the Heyi-jing chain says is: after the precept is kept, the dharmas walk on of themselves. What the Medicine Buddha's vows say is: before the precept is kept, someone is guarding the road for you. One governs what is above the ladder; one governs what is below it. Only together do they make one complete road—and only together are they the Buddha's gate's complete compassion toward the words "keeping the precepts": it asks something of the person, and it also makes the person able.
With this, Part Six is walked to its end.
Two chapters, and two things acknowledged: the twelve vows of Bhaiṣajyaguru are an architecture with the precept at its heart—the fifth vow establishes the precept proper, writing the transgressor's way back into the Buddha's original vow, while the eleven vows guard the foundation of precept-keeping (chapter one); and the twelve vows are not a stairway but a piece of ground laid out all at once—conditions keep no order, though within one vow there lives the tenderness of "food first, Dharma after"; the tradition itself judged only depth; and the ladder stands elsewhere, on the Heyi-jing chain (chapter two).
One sentence to close Part Six: the precept is not only a matter of will but a matter of conditions—and there is a Buddha who made the conditions of beings' precept-keeping into His own original vow.
By now the precept grows more solid with every telling: it has a substance, a seed, conditions, a way back. But the book still owes one stroke of the blade—the stroke prajñā buried in Part Four: transgression unobtainable. When the precept is kept to the very end, is even "the mark of the precept" to be set down? When keeping is kept to where there is no keeping left to do—what does that look like?
Prajñā is about to drive that stroke all the way down. And the patriarchs of the Chan gate set the precept so cut to the bottom under a name of its own—the sign-less precept.