To Abide In, Not to Keep Away From

8.3 To Abide In, Not to Keep Away From

The Lotus assembly is on Mount Gṛdhrakūṭa, above the city of Rājagṛha. The assembly had come to the difficulty of spreading the sūtra in an evil age after the Buddha's passing, and the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī rose and asked the Buddha: in the latter, hostile age—that age full of enmity—how can a bodhisattva preach this scripture?

The first word of the Buddha's answer is not "do not."

If a bodhisattva-mahāsattva would, in the latter, hostile age, preach this scripture, he should abide in four things.

"Should abide in"—the verb that governs the whole chapter is these three words, not "should keep away from." What the Buddha sets out is not a roster of prohibitions but four modes in which one is to abide: body, speech, mind, and vow, each with its own "peaceful practice."

Look first at the bodily peaceful practice. It has two faces: the sphere of action, and the sphere of intimacy. The phrasing of the sphere of action is wholly positive—"abiding in the stage of patient endurance, gentle, agreeable, and not given to sudden violence, the mind also unstartled; and again, doing nothing toward the dharmas, yet contemplating the dharmas in their true mark." In the whole stretch there is not a single "do not."

But the phrasing of the sphere of intimacy flips suddenly into a long string of negatives: does not draw near to kings, princes, great ministers, or heads of office; does not draw near to heterodox wanderers and Brāhman ascetics; does not draw near—read on, and it sounds exactly like a list of don'ts. Stop reading here, and the precept seems to have shrunk back into its old shape of prohibitions.

But wait. Hard on the heels of the list comes one sentence:

Yet should such persons come to him at times, he preaches the Dharma for them, with nothing hoped-for.

If the very persons to be avoided come of themselves before him—he preaches the Dharma for them all the same, only "with nothing hoped-for," the heart hanging no expectation on it. This one sentence turns the whole list over: what is truly barred is not the outward contact (contact made, he still preaches) but the inward grasping—that "hoping-for." A string of "do not draw near," and what it bars turns out to be that flicker of hankering in the heart. The second sphere of intimacy is more thorough still, positive from end to end: "contemplates that all dharmas are empty, their true mark—not inverted, not moving, not regressing, not turning." Not a single "thou shalt not" remains.

Then the verse settles it with one stroke:

These, then, are named the sphere of action and the sphere of intimacy; by these two spheres one is able to preach in peace.

"One is able to preach in peace"—the two faces, sphere of action and sphere of intimacy, are judged to be the very competence by which the dharma-preacher in an evil age can preach, and can preach in peace. The precept here is not an external restriction upon preaching, not "the rules one is obliged to keep in order to preach"; the precept is the power and the abiding that make one able. That the dharma-preacher of the latter age can dwell secure, not regress, and give light—what he relies on is this very mode.

A precept like this may as well be given a name: the practice-precept—the precept that unfolds along the course of practice and draws one toward the Way. Set against it is the restriction-precept—the precept whose form is a prohibition-list of "what not to do." The relation the Chapter on Peaceful Practices displays is this: the restriction is not erected outside the practice-precept; the restriction is turned out from within it. The prohibition is still there—the list is still a list, still to be faced item by item—only it has been gathered into a larger positive mode, become an inner moment of the abiding. The prohibition is not abolished; the prohibition is re-housed.

This is no new invention; the Vinaya learning had this division all along. The Vinaya master Daoxuan's Xingshichao sets up the two upholdings: precept-by-restraint—"forbidding and warding off body and speech so as to commit no evils," commit no evil: this is the restriction face; precept-by-action—"spurring on the three modes of action and cultivating the conduct of the precept," practice every good: this is the practice face. The three clusters of pure precepts read in Part Four—the restraint cluster, the accumulation-of-virtue cluster—answer to these two upholdings from afar. And Daoxuan has a heavier sentence still. He establishes the heading of the offense-of-omission: one commits no evil, yet "toward the excellent undertakings one wearies and does not cultivate or learn"—toward the good that ought to be cultivated, one slackens and does not cultivate—and the Vinaya judges: this too is a breach. Doing good is not extra credit beyond precept-keeping; doing good is the precept's own proper charge; not to do good is itself to break the precept. The practice-precept is what the precept-substance commands.

The great master Zhiyi of Tiantai, commenting on the Chapter on Peaceful Practices, gives the perfect teaching's same verdict. Of the sphere of action and the sphere of intimacy he says: "Reaching toward the principle, stated in brief, it is named the sphere of action; appended to the phenomenal, stated at length, it is named the sphere of intimacy. The statement has its brevity and its length, but in principle there is no shallow or deep"—one principle, one phenomenon, differing only in how fully the statement runs; in principle, no higher and lower. And the weightiest sentence: that string of "keep far from," he judges to be "an aid to contemplation belonging to the precept-gate"—even the keeping-far that looks like pure prohibition, the perfect teaching does not read as bare restriction, but judges expressly to be a cultivation of the precept-gate.

One thing must be seen clearly here: that the practice absorbs the restriction in no way means one may now stop keeping the precepts. The list is still to be faced in earnest. Only, beyond the list, and more fundamental than it, is whether that abiding—able to dwell secure in an evil age, not regress, give light—has truly arisen. The fullness of the precept lies not in keeping the prohibitions without a leak, but in whether "able to preach in peace" can be made to stand.

The practice-precept answers "in what circumstance, and with what attitude, the precept is kept"—the horizontal face. But there is still the vertical question: on the long road of the bodhisattva path from shallow to deep, on which rung is the precept placed? Is it a threshold crossed once at the entrance and done with, or something that keeps company the whole way?

For that question, one must climb the Avataṃsaka's ten grounds and see.