Sand Cannot Be Steamed into Rice
8.1 Sand Cannot Be Steamed into Rice
The Śūraṅgama assembly begins with a peril. The Buddha was at the Jeta Grove monastery in the city of Śrāvastī; Ānanda had gone out alone for alms, begging in due order from house to house, and, passing a house of prostitution, was caught by the Mātaṅgī woman with a heterodox spell of illusion—his precept-substance nearly destroyed. From the crown of the Buddha's head light streamed forth; He proclaimed the divine mantra and brought him back. Ānanda returned, bowed at the Buddha's feet, and in grieving tears reproached himself: all along given to much learning, his power in the Way not yet whole. The entire Śūraṅgama Sūtra is the Buddha's answer to that peril.
Late in the assembly, Ānanda rose from his seat and asked on behalf of the practitioners of the latter age: one who would gather in the mind and enter concentration—how should he establish the place of practice, and keep demonic affairs far away? The Buddha did not answer first about the place of practice; He answered first with three clauses:
You have long heard me, in my Vinaya, expound the three decisive senses of cultivation—namely, gathering in the mind is what I call the precept; from the precept concentration is born; from concentration wisdom is unveiled. These are called the three trainings free of outflows.
Two "from"s string the precept, concentration, and wisdom into one road whose direction is plain: the precept is the cause of concentration; concentration is the cause of wisdom. The precept is not another course of study set side by side with concentration; it is the foundation from which concentration is born. And the word "decisive" says that this sequence is not an optional item of refinement, to be taken up or left—it is necessarily so.
How is the foundation laid? The Buddha went on to set out four instructions, which later generations call "the four pure and clear instructions": cutting off lust, cutting off killing, cutting off stealing, cutting off the great lie. The four share one form of sentence—"if the (such-and-such) mind is not removed, the dust cannot get out"—and each carries a metaphor of its own; and the four metaphors all say one and the same "utterly impossible."
To cultivate concentration without removing the lustful mind is "like steaming sand and gravel hoping to make rice: through hundreds of thousands of kalpas it is still only hot sand. Why? Because this is not the stuff of rice, being made of sand." The crux lies in one phrase: "this is not the stuff of rice"—sand is not the stuff of rice; steam it however long, sand is still sand. To cultivate concentration without removing the killing mind is like a person stopping his own ears and shouting aloud, hoping no one will hear—the text passes its verdict in one phrase: "the more one would hide it, the more it shows"; the more it is screened, the more it appears. To cultivate concentration without removing the stealing mind is "like a person pouring water into a leaking vessel and hoping to fill it: though kalpas pass, it is never made level." This metaphor is bound most tightly to the sūtra's own vocabulary: the "outflow" of the three trainings free of outflows and the "leak" of the leaking vessel are one and the same word. The uncut stealing mind is a leak-hole in the vessel's wall—pour in as much water as you will, a vessel with a leak is never full. How diligently one cultivates is one matter; whether the vessel leaks is another.
The fourth instruction is the most decisive. The sūtra imagines one in whom killing, stealing, and lust are all cut off to the last—"the three deeds already complete"—yet let the great lie be committed, claiming attainment unattained, claiming realization unrealized, and "then samādhi is not pure; they become demons of love-and-views and lose the seed of the Tathāgata." The metaphor: carving human excrement into the shape of sandalwood and seeking fragrance—there is no such possibility. The shape resembles sandalwood; the substance is excrement. This instruction makes the structure of the four plain: the four are not a matter of doing most of them; they are one complete set—lack any one, and the whole foundation fails to stand. If this is so even where the three deeds are already complete, how much more where two or three are lacking.
Two things, in passing, must be seen clearly. First, the four instructions put the cutting-off of lust at the head, unlike the usual order "killing, stealing, lust, lying." This is not the Buddha re-ranking the gravity of the precepts—this sūtra arose from the Mātaṅgī peril; the teaching is spoken to Ānanda's ordeal, and so it naturally begins from lust. The order is fixed by the occasion; the weight of the four is the same: a complete set, not one to be lacked. Second, when the sūtra says "if one cultivates dhyāna without cutting off lust," that "dhyāna" is a generic word; when it says "samādhi is not pure" and "the wondrous gateway of cultivation for entering samādhi," it means this sūtra's own great Śūraṅgama samādhi. What the four instructions bear is that samādhi, not generic sitting—and this measure must be held steady as one reads.
The four instructions spoken, the Buddha gathered them with one sentence: to seek the bodhisattva path, one must "first uphold these four kinds of restraint, pure as ice and frost—then of itself it cannot put forth any branch or leaf." Pure as ice and frost is flawless purity; "of itself it cannot put forth any branch or leaf" says there is no need to press down, one by one, the evils already arisen—cut off the cause that can give rise to them, and evil "has no cause to arise."
One more thing must be seen clearly here: "from the precept concentration is born" does not mean gritting the teeth and forcing concentration out by the merit of precept-keeping. Do you remember the chain from the opening of Part One?—in the Heyi-jing, from upholding the precepts one gains non-remorse; from non-remorse, gladness; link causing link, until from joy, concentration; and from concentration one comes to see things as they really are and know them as they truly are, all the way through to liberation. The text itself exclaims: "dharma benefits dharma and dharma causes dharma," and "this precept advances to the foremost: crossing from this shore, one reaches the far shore"—the precept is not only the starting point; the precept is itself the head of this road that crosses to the far shore. And hard upon it the text has one more sentence: the precept-keeper need not think "let me be free of remorse"—"this is the nature of things." Dharma causes dharma of itself; it does not wait to be forced. A vessel without a leak fills of itself; the essential of precept-keeping is to make the mind free of outflow, not to force. The Śūraṅgama's "from the precept concentration is born" is exactly this old Āgama chain spoken in a Mahāyāna idiom—the precept as the ground of concentration is no new house-rule of the Śūraṅgama; it is a sequence the Buddha's teaching set down from the very earliest.
One layer more: mark the place of concentration on that chain. Concentration is not the chain's terminus; it is the chain's middle stretch—receiving the precept from below, opening onto wisdom and liberation above. Concentration stands in the middle as a hinge. And this is exactly the position of this book at this moment: the precept gate is drawing to its close, just now handing the precept it has carried through eight parts into the hands of concentration.
Zixuan of the Song, commenting on this sūtra, pushed the matter a layer deeper: on their surface the four instructions restrain body and mouth, yet in truth "each one governs the mind"—every one lands on the ground of the mind; and once the precept accords with concentration and wisdom, "form, scent, taste, and touch are nothing other than true reality." Called by the same name "precept," this is already a precept of the mind, inwardly guarding each thought. Zhenjian of the Ming said it more bluntly still, in one hinge-sentence: "The former does not subsume the latter, but the latter necessarily subsumes the former." The precept need not contain concentration; concentration necessarily contains the precept—having entered concentration, the precept is not left outside the gate but gathered into concentration, present along with it. So the "born" of "from the precept concentration is born" is, seen from outside, a sequence; seen from within, a subsumption: the precept never quit the field; it has become the inwardness of concentration.
The precept is the foundation—that sentence now stands firm. But a foundation, in the end, lies outside the gate. A question springs up at once: the precept itself—precept-keeping, the thing itself—does it count as a gate straight into concentration?
The answer is in the earlier part of the same sūtra.