Transition ⑦ · From the Sign-less Precept to the Precept as the Ground of Concentration

Part Seven has walked up to the place where not a single mark is set up, and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

With Part Seven done, you hold a complete set of things in your hands. A riddle solved: the Diamond Sūtra's silence on the precept was, all along, a division of labor within the great scripture of six hundred fascicles—keeping and breaking are by their very nature empty, and the true keeping, taking non-apprehension as its skillful means, is stricter than the keeping that merely resembles it. A healing word: Remove it directly, do not perturb their minds—the nature of the offense lies neither inside, nor outside, nor in between; principial repentance is the depth of phenomenal repentance—healing, not license. A full gathering-in: the I who keeps, the beings protected, the precept and its fruit—the three wheels are pure; and "upholding pure precepts yet parting from the mark of the precept"—empty all the way down, and the practice is still there.

This set of things has spoken the precept to the very end of what can be spoken. The mark has been set down; the practice stands firm. Seven parts of precept-learning have here closed a circle: from the plain first question, "What is the meaning of keeping the precepts?" to the sign-less answer, "to see neither keeping nor breaking—this is called the precept."

Is it enough?

In prajñā's language, yes. The marks are emptied to the last; there is no mark left to break.

But this book owes a debt—owed now for six parts.

At the close of Part One a sentence was set down: when the precept is pure, concentration comes of itself. This is the nature of things. The chain of the Heyi-jing runs from the precept, its first link, all the way through to concentration, through to liberation. Back then we looked only at the chain's beginning. In Part Two the verse of the fragrance of virtue, at the height of its song, turned its brush: "Right-facing the marvelous concentration"—at the end of the fragrance stands the gate of concentration. In Part Five's three-school judgment, the Perfect-Teaching school's following-conduct "is cultivated in full together with the three clusters"—and what that gathers in is concentration and wisdom too. All along the road, how many times have we passed concentration's gate—and every time we only glanced in, and did not enter.

Now that the precept has been spoken up to the sign-less, the debt can no longer be dodged: between the sign-less precept and the profound concentration, where exactly does the seam lie? How does the precept hand a person over, with its own hands, into the hands of concentration? Among those who cultivate concentration, why does one sit his way into true samādhi while another sits his way into demonic realms—if the watershed lies in the precept, then in which layer of the precept does it lie?

These questions one Dharma assembly answered head-on. At the Śūraṅgama assembly, Ānanda came back from his calamity and, weeping, begged the Buddha to teach the very first skillful means by which the Tathāgatas of the ten directions attained bodhi—and before the Buddha spoke of concentration, He spoke first of the precept: 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. The precept as the ground of concentration—these words are to be raised, in Part Eight, to their place of full completion.

We turn the page.