Praṇidhāna as the Eighth Perfection

I. The Question: Why Must the Bodhisattva of the Highest Ground Be Reminded of His Vow?

The Avataṃsaka's chapter on the Ten Grounds records a scene that is nearly perverse. A bodhisattva who has cultivated to the eighth ground, the Immovable, has entered the realm of "effortlessness"—what he accomplishes no longer waits upon exertion but comes of itself, like a ship that, once on the open sea, runs before the wind with no further labor of oars. His mind, at this point, is quieted almost to the point of a buddha's nirvāṇa. And yet, at just this highest, stillest, most effortless juncture, the buddhas of the ten directions arrive together before him—not to praise his attainment, but to speak a reminder:

"You should be mindful of the vow you first made: to bring great and universal benefit to all beings, and to lead them all into the gate of inconceivable wisdom."¹

Pause on the paradox of that line. A great bodhisattva who has reached effortlessness, whose stillness verges on nirvāṇa, ought by rights to need reminding of nothing—his practice has come to the point where it turns of itself, without recourse to effort. Yet what the buddhas insist on rousing is precisely his "original vow." It is as if to say: you have gone this high, this still, and stand on the verge of resting in this quietude—but do not forget the vow you first made; beings remain, and the road is not yet walked to its end.

This scene presses the paper's central question into the open. What kind of thing is vow, that even the bodhisattva of the highest ground must still be roused by it?

If vow were only a once-and-for-all "fixing of a goal" set at the first arising of the thought of awakening, then by the eighth ground it should long since have done its work and retired, needing no further mention. But this scene tells us otherwise: vow is not a virtue that, once aroused, is thereby complete; it is a power that must be continually roused, and that will otherwise sink into sleep within the very stillness it has reached. An earlier paper in this series established that vow is the mind's inclining-and-resolving, and that what it inclines toward can climb rung by rung from the wish for a good rebirth up to the orientation toward nirvāṇa, and finally to the undirected.² That was vow seen from the side of the Āgamas, as a direction of mind. The present paper takes a further step and looks from the side of the Mahāyāna treatises: once vow is formally entered into the ten perfections and granted the eighth seat, what exactly is its standing within the way of crossing to the far shore?

The thesis can be stated in a single line. Vow deserves the name of perfection not because it is one practice among others, but because it is the forward-leaning vow that orders all practice at its head, draws in what is to come, and must be roused again and again by the power of the buddhas' original vow. The root sense of pāramitā is "crossing to the far shore," not "completion"; and vow is precisely the perfection whose crossing is "not yet completed." What follows first sets out the textual witnesses (§II), then distills a threefold argument for vow's standing (§III), brings the relevant discussions of will from Western philosophy to bear as a clarifying mirror (§IV), corrects four misreadings into which it is easy to slip (§V), and closes by setting signposts (§VI).

II. The Canonical Basis

2.1 Why Vow Counts as a Perfection: Passing the Same Test

To show that vow deserves the name of perfection, the most direct course is to ask whether it can pass the test that makes a perfection a perfection. In treating the ten perfections, the Yogācārabhūmi gives a single criterion that applies to all alike:³

"These ten—giving and the rest—are matured across three great immeasurable eons… their own nature being supremely pure and excellent, and able to secure the consummate, marvelous fruit of awakening; and it is for this that they are named perfections."

This criterion has three points: each must be matured across three immeasurable eons (great length of time), each must be in its own nature supremely pure and excellent (purity of essence), and each must be able to bring forth the consummate fruit of awakening (ultimacy of aim). Every one of the ten—giving and the rest—must pass these three before it can bear the name "perfection." Vow, listed as the eighth of the ten, must be examined under the same heading—and it is by passing this test that it gains the standing of a perfection, not by being included incidentally in the light of the first six.

The same treatise also offers a distinct gloss on the "perfection of vow," pointing to where its particular character lies:⁴

"Longing for the knowledge that lies further and further ahead, in its excellence—this is to be known as the perfection of vow."

"The knowledge that lies further and further ahead" is knowledge that mounts higher and higher, rung after rung. What makes vow the perfection of vow, in its distinguishing mark, is just that it is a "longing for the knowledge that lies further ahead"—a mind that forever points toward an excellence not yet in hand, still out in front. This line is decisive: it fixes the nature of vow in the "forward" and the "not yet." Vow does not look back to tally what it already has; it leans out and gazes ahead at what it does not yet possess.

2.2 The Nature of Vow: The Two Vows of Seeking Awakening and Benefiting Others

What, then, is the "own nature" of the perfection of vow? The Cheng weishi lun gives the most economical division:⁵

"Vow is of two kinds: the vow to seek awakening, and the vow to benefit beings."

The nature of vow is, on one face, "seeking awakening"—reaching upward for enlightenment; and on the other, "benefiting beings"—reaching downward to liberate the living. These two vows answer exactly to the two wheels of the awakening-mind: "above, seeking the buddha-path; below, transforming beings." Here one sees one reason vow deserves the name of perfection: it embraces in itself both the self-benefiting face (seeking awakening) and the other-benefiting face (benefiting beings), and is not a particular good deed leaning to one side. A mind that can hold up both the upward seeking and the downward transforming at once has, of itself, the standing to be counted as a distinct link in the way to the far shore.

In establishing what may be set up as a perfection, the Cheng weishi lun also sets a stricter threshold—the "seven excellences":⁶

"Only what is embraced by the seven excellences may be established as a perfection… What is not embraced by these seven—the giving and the rest that one practices—does not cross to the far shore."

Note especially the wording of the closing clause: of the practices of giving and the rest that are not embraced by the seven excellences, the Yogācāra masters judge that they "do not cross to the far shore." In other words, in glossing "perfection" the Cheng weishi lun itself uses the very phrase "crossing to the far shore," not "completion." This gloss matters greatly; §§III and IV will return to it repeatedly, for it directly settles which frame we should use to understand "the perfection of vow."

2.3 The Immovable Ground: Vow-Perfection Predominant

The ten perfections and the Ten Grounds are set in correspondence: at each ground a particular perfection is "predominant" (preeminent, especially manifest). The perfection that answers to vow is precisely the eighth, the Immovable Ground. On the Immovable Ground, the Avataṃsaka's chapter on the Ten Grounds states plainly:⁷

"In this bodhisattva, among the ten perfections, the perfection of vow is predominant; it is not that the remaining perfections are not practiced, but that they are practiced according to capacity and measure."

This line must be read closely, and especially its latter half must be held fast. To say "the perfection of vow is predominant" is to say that, among the ten, the eighth-ground bodhisattva has vow as that which is especially manifest, especially preeminent; but the Avataṃsaka at once adds a guarding clause—"it is not that the remaining perfections are not practiced, but that they are practiced according to capacity and measure." That is: the other nine are not at a standstill; they are merely practiced in proportion to capacity, simply not as conspicuously as vow. "Predominant" means preeminent, not practiced alone; the eighth ground is by no means a ground on which only vow is cultivated and the rest set aside. §V will return to nail this guarding clause down.

Look back to the scene of §I: that the buddhas, on the eighth ground, rouse the bodhisattva's "original vow" sits exactly upon the ground where "the perfection of vow is predominant." The eighth is the ground of effortlessness and near-quietude, and it is precisely the ground on which vow most needs to be made manifest and least may be allowed to sleep—no accident, but the inner logic of the correspondence between the Ten Grounds and the perfections.

2.4 The Architectural Place of Vow: Auxiliary, and the Drawing-in of Future Conditions

Within the architecture of the ten perfections, vow is not an isolated link but stands in a directed, cooperative relation to the others. The Yogācārabhūmi points to the auxiliary relation between vow and vigor:⁸

"For the sake of slighter affliction in future lives, one raises a right vow… the perfection of vow serves as auxiliary to the perfection of vigor."

Vow can serve as auxiliary to vigor: only when there is first a right vow raised "for the sake of future lives" does vigor have something to head toward and to sustain. What vow plays here is the role of giving direction and continuing impetus to the practice that follows.

More important still is a single defining clause from the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha on the function of vow:⁹

"The perfection of vow is the raising of all manner of subtle and great vows, so as to draw in the excellent conditions of perfection that are to come."

"Drawing in… the excellent conditions to come"—the office of vow is to draw forward and gather in, in advance, the various excellent supporting conditions that future practice will require. This answers exactly to §2.1's "longing for the knowledge that lies further ahead": vow is a power facing the future, paving the road for what is to come. It does not settle anything in the present moment; it opens conditions in advance for what has not yet arrived.

Among the ten perfections, the first six (giving, discipline, patience, vigor, meditation, wisdom) are the main body of right practice, while the last four (skillful means, vow, power, knowledge) are established by the treatises as "aiding the first six"—and vow stands as one of these four auxiliaries. Its place, from the start, is that of a directing power, "drawing in conditions for the fulfillment of the first six."

2.5 The Power of the Original Vow: The Line That Rouses the Eighth-Ground Bodhisattva

Return, finally, to the scene of §I and set it back in its textual context. The Avataṃsaka records that, just as the eighth-ground bodhisattva enters effortlessness and his mind is about to fall still, it is the buddhas who come, by "the power of his original vow," to rouse him to "be mindful of the vow he first made, to bring great and universal benefit to all beings" (the passage cited at ¹). This scene is the eye of the paper because it discloses a most unusual aspect of vow's standing: vow turns out to be a power that is "not self-sufficient"—it will sink into quietude on the highest ground, and must wait for an external condition (the buddhas' power of the original vow) to rouse it, lest it veer onto the path of seeking only its own stilling. The next section unfolds the argument from here.

III. The Argument: Vow Is the Perfection That Has "Not Yet Reached the Far Shore"

3.1 Vow Is Not an Appendage to the First Six Perfections

Gathering up the witnesses of the last section, the first judgment to fix is this: vow deserves the name of perfection because it passes, in its own right, the test of a perfection—not because it leans upon the first six. The Yogācārabhūmi's three criteria (three eons, purity of nature, the securing of the fruit of awakening) apply alike to "the ten—giving and the rest"; and vow, being listed among these ten, enters by the very same test, not as a stowaway carried in by the first six. The Cheng weishi lun's two-vow nature (seeking awakening, benefiting beings) drives the point home: vow embraces in itself both the upward seeking and the downward transforming, and so has its own full content, needing no other perfection to lean on in order to stand.

This judgment carries weight. The common impression is that "real practice" lies in the "actually done" disciplines—giving, keeping precepts, meditation, wisdom—while "making a vow" is no more than an opening line, a piece of psychological preparation, spoken before one does any of these. The treatises establish otherwise: vow has its own standing as a perfection and occupies one of the ten seats in its own name. It is not the prologue; it is a character in the play.

3.2 The Last Four Aiding the First Six: Vow as the Power of Direction

What, then, is vow's role among the ten? The answer is hidden in the architecture of "the last four aiding the first six." Vow (together with skillful means, power, and knowledge) is established as one of the four auxiliaries; its office is not to set up another set of good practices from scratch, but to give the first six "direction" and "continuing impetus."

The Yogācārabhūmi says vow "serves as auxiliary to the perfection of vigor"; the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha says vow "draws in the excellent conditions to come." Read together, vow's mode of working becomes clear: it is the power that "gives direction to practice before practice, and draws in future conditions for practice." A person who merely cultivates the six perfections diligently but without a great vow to hold them together may practice intensively and yet, like a rudderless boat, have strength to spare and direction unfixed. Vow is the very link that fits a direction to all of this practice. It is for just this reason that vow may be called "the practice that orders all practice"—it is itself one practice, yet it is the one practice that gathers and gives direction to the rest. And this is the deeper reason it deserves to be counted a perfection: what can fix the direction of all practice must itself be a distinct link in the way of crossing to the far shore.

3.3 The Forward-Leaning Vow: Crossing to the Far Shore, Not Completion

Here the thread laid down in §2.2 must be taken up. Pāramitā, on the Yogācāra masters' own gloss, is "crossing to the far shore"—the giving and the rest not embraced by the seven excellences "do not cross to the far shore," in the Cheng weishi lun's own wording. So between the two readings, "crossing to the far shore" and "completion (perfection)," which fits vow better?

The paper holds that reading vow through "crossing to the far shore" far outdoes reading it through "completion." The reason is that vow is, in its nature, "forward-leaning." The Yogācārabhūmi says vow is "longing for the knowledge that lies further ahead"; the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha says vow "draws in what is to come"—both lines fix vow upon "what faces the not-yet-arrived." Vow never looks back to tally "what I have already perfected"; it always gazes forward at "what has not yet been reached." If perfection is read as "completion," then "a completed vow" is nearly self-contradictory: a vow already completed, with nothing left to seek, is hardly a vow at all. But if perfection is read as "crossing to the far shore," then "the perfection of vow" falls at once into place—vow is precisely the power that is still on the near shore, yet has already settled the direction of the crossing to the far one. Its fullness lies not in having arrived, but in leaning forever toward what has not been reached.

So vow may be given a summary verdict: it is the perfection that has "not yet reached the far shore." Its perfection-character is lodged precisely in its "not-yet-completion"—and this is no defect but its proper office.

3.4 A Non-Self-Sufficient Power: Vow Must Be Roused

The last layer, disclosed by the scene of the eighth ground, is the deepest stroke in vow's standing.

If vow were a virtue that, once aroused, sustained itself, there would be no reason whatever for the eighth-ground bodhisattva to be "reminded" by the buddhas. But the Avataṃsaka records otherwise: as the eighth ground enters effortlessness and a quietude close to nirvāṇa, the bodhisattva's own vow can sink into stillness, and must wait for the buddhas to come, by the power of his original vow, to rouse him to "be mindful of the vow he first made." This means: vow is not a once-and-done self-sufficient power, but a power that tends to sleep at the very highest point and must be continually roused if it is not to fall.

This stroke matters greatly, for it corrects a most natural misconception—the supposition that vow is something the will of the one who vows can accomplish by its own perfection, as though, given a first arising vehement and pure enough, it would suffice to carry through to the end. The Avataṃsaka's answer is no: even cultivated to the eighth ground, even entered into effortlessness, vow must still be roused. The highest showing of vow lies not in the vehemence of its first arising but in its being roused again and again and never falling. It is not a self-kindling, unquenchable fire, but a fire that needs someone forever adding fuel, and that must in the end be guarded by the power of the buddhas' original vow. Vow as perfection, in its ultimate aspect, is just this "non-self-sufficiency"—it consigns its own fullness to a field of vow-power greater than itself.

IV. Interdisciplinary Bridges: A "Perfection" of Will That Is Constitutively Non-Self-Sufficient

To make plain the paradox of "a vow that deserves to be called a perfection, and yet is not self-sufficient," several discussions of will in Western philosophy can supply some useful mirrors. A caveat first: what follows is heuristic illumination only, not an equating of theories.

Higher-order forms of will. Harry Frankfurt distinguishes "first-order desires" from "second-order volitions": a person not only has various wants (to eat, to sleep, to achieve), but can take a further attitude toward those wants—deciding which of them he "wants to be moved by." It is that endorsed, willed higher-order volition that truly defines a person's will. This distinction illuminates vow's standing among the ten perfections: vow is not one more "good thing one wants to do" set beside giving and discipline, but the higher-order intent that gathers, endorses, and gives direction to the rest—the "practice that orders all practice." Aristotle's prohairesis (a deliberated choice, an intention toward some end) and the architecture in which ends nest within ends layer upon layer chime here as well: vow is the link that caps the whole architecture of practice and fixes its final orientation. But a boundary must be held at once: the layering of will, and the full analysis of the relation between vow and will, are the matter of a dedicated treatment that opens this volume; the appeal to Frankfurt here serves only to illuminate vow's standing as "a higher-order directing intent," and in no way restates the claim about the levels of will.

A dispute over translation: completion, or crossing to the far shore? Western Buddhist scholarship has long taken two routes in rendering pāramitā. One (as in Edward Conze's familiar usage) renders it "perfection," that is, "completion, consummation"; the other follows the etymology (pāram-itā, "gone to the far shore") and reads it as "crossing to the far shore." A distinction must be drawn. On the side of the sense that "only what is embraced by the seven excellences may be called a perfection," rendering it "completion" is not amiss—pāramitā does carry the sense of "reaching the utmost." But once one comes down to the perfection of vow, this rendering shows its strain: vow is in its nature a forward power that "draws in what is to come" and "longs for what lies further ahead," and "a completed vow" verges on a solecism. Here the paper's distinction is not imposed from outside but rests on the Yogācāra masters' own gloss—the Cheng weishi lun says expressly that what is not embraced by the seven excellences "does not cross to the far shore," which shows that "crossing to the far shore" is itself the native gloss of Chinese Yogācāra when establishing the perfections. To read vow through "the far shore" is to return to the treatises' own idiom, not to frame it with an imported scheme.

Non-self-sufficiency: a contrast with Kant's good will. The most telling contrast is with Kant's "good will." Kant holds that in the world only a good will is unconditionally good: its worth does not hang on the consequences it brings about but lies wholly in the willing itself—even if, by some misfortune of circumstance, it should accomplish nothing at all, it would still, like a jewel, shine with its full worth, complete in itself within its own willing. The Buddhist vow parts ways with this just here. Vow is not self-sufficient: the eighth-ground bodhisattva's own vow can sink into stillness, and must be roused by the buddhas' power of the original vow and have its impetus continued by the perfection of power. The fullness of vow never resides in "the willing itself being already enough"; it resides precisely in its "not being enough on its own"—it must be held and roused by a greater field of vow-power. This is just the point on which the Buddhist vow differs from every conception of "what the purity of the will can accomplish by itself": it is a perfection of will that is non-self-sufficient. Full yet not self-sufficient—seemingly a contradiction, yet just this is vow's ultimate aspect as the perfection of vow: its fullness lies not in being able to carry through alone, but in its willingness to be held by a vow greater than itself.

A statement of irreducibility. It must be said plainly: these three contrasts are mirrors that show an outline, not the thing reflected itself. Frankfurt's second-order volitions, Aristotle's teleology, Kant's good will are all philosophical analyses of the structure of human will, and carry within them no ontology of the bodhisattva path and no soteriological commitment. The paper borrows them only to illuminate the points that "vow is a higher-order directing intent," that "perfection is best read as crossing to the far shore," and that "vow's fullness lies in its non-self-sufficiency"; in no way may one infer back that the perfection of vow is equivalent to any school of Western philosophy of will, still less reduce the practice of the ten perfections to a theory of the will. A mirror can show the shape; it cannot stand in for the substance.

V. Corrections of the Middle Way

This section marks four readings into which it is easy to slip (❌ for distortions of doctrine, ⚠️ for traps in sources and technical terms), as boundary-stakes for holding to the middle way.

❌ "Vow-perfection predominant" is not "the eighth ground cultivates only vow." The readiest misreading is to take the Avataṃsaka's "in this bodhisattva… the perfection of vow is predominant" to mean "the eighth-ground bodhisattva cultivates only vow and not the other perfections." The Avataṃsaka has itself blocked this fork—immediately adding, "it is not that the remaining perfections are not practiced, but that they are practiced according to capacity and measure." In the correspondence of the Ten Grounds and the ten perfections, "predominant" throughout means preeminent, especially manifest, not sole, exclusive. Every ground cultivates all ten together; only one is especially manifest at each. The reader must not, on the strength of "vow-perfection predominant," imagine the eighth as a stage where one only makes vows and does nothing; on the contrary, the eighth is the ground of effortlessness, where all practices run of themselves, and the reason vow is "predominant" there is just that it is then that a mind near quietude most needs vow to hold it together, lest it fall into seeking only its own stilling.

⚠️ Three terms not to be conflated: vow, resolution, resolve. The single word "vow" is, in differing contexts, easily confused with two neighboring terms, and each must be pinned down. First, vow (praṇidhāna) is not "resolution" (adhimokṣa)—the latter is one of the five object-specific mental factors in Yogācāra, the deep acceptance and conviction regarding an object grasped. The nature of vow certainly contains components such as desire, resolution, and faith; but "the perfection of vow" is a whole mental act that gathers and directs practice and longs for what lies further ahead, and may not be flatly equated with the single mental factor "resolution." Second, vow (the eighth of the Mahāyāna ten perfections) and "resolve" (adhiṭṭhāna) among the ten perfections of the Theravāda are only parallel in slot, not identical in essence: in the two tables of ten perfections this seat falls, in both, at the eighth place (a structural coincidence worth noting), but the mental acts intended are not quite the same—the Mahāyāna vow leans toward "the great vow to awaken and to liberate beings," the Theravāda resolve toward "an unshakable determination upon a goal once set." Correspondence of slot is not equivalence of term, and the two may not be grafted onto each other. Third, vow (praṇidhāna) and the "undirected" (apraṇihita, one of the three doors of liberation) treated in the previous Part run in opposite directions: the former is an inclining-and-resolving, the latter a no-longer-inclining toward any "becoming." Though the two share a Sanskrit root, their tendencies are opposed;² in reading, one must not let them seep into each other on the strength of their surface resemblance.

⚠️ The rendering of "perfection": crossing to the far shore, not completion. Following §IV, this must be nailed down again: the paper, at the perfection of vow, holds that pāramitā should be read as "crossing to the far shore" rather than "completion (perfection)," and this distinction rests on the Cheng weishi lun's own gloss of "does not cross to the far shore," not on something the paper sets up of itself. Where the reader meets, elsewhere, the rendering "perfection = consummation / completion," there is no need to treat it as an error—on the sense "reaching the utmost," that rendering too holds; only at this specific link, the perfection of vow, can the reading "crossing to the far shore" settle vow's nature as "forward and not yet done." Each gloss has its proper place, and one may not seize on one to deny the other.

⚠️ The handling of sources for the Theravāda "perfection of resolve." Since the last section mentioned that the Theravāda ten perfections place "resolve" (adhiṭṭhāna) among them, an honest accounting of sources is owed. The Pāli loci relevant to this term (the perfection of resolve as treated in the Jātaka, the Buddhavaṃsa, and the Cariyāpiṭaka) survive in Chinese mainly through a twentieth-century modern translation series (the Yuanheng-si edition of the Chinese Translation of the Pāli Canon), a modern translation not in the public domain. The practice of this series is, for such modern translations, to acknowledge their existence and state their import only, and not to embed their text; where citation is needed, it reverts to the PTS pagination of the Pāli original. Hence the discussion above of the Theravāda perfection of resolve is throughout a doctrinal contrast in substance, with no verbatim quotation of a modern translation appended—this being the source discipline consistent across the series, not a rule set up specially here.

VI. Conclusion

Restatement in brief. Vow deserves the name of eighth perfection on three counts: it passes the very test that makes a perfection a perfection (three eons, purity of nature, the securing of the fruit of awakening), and so is no appendage to the first six; its nature embraces both the vow to seek awakening and the vow to benefit beings, and so is complete on the self- and other-benefiting faces alike; and it is a forward power that "longs for what lies further ahead and draws in what is to come," so that its standing lies in "not yet having reached the far shore" rather than in "being already completed." A pāramitā, on the Yogācāra masters' own gloss, is "crossing to the far shore"; read through "the far shore," vow shows itself as just the power that is still on the near shore yet has already settled the direction of the crossing. And vow's ultimate aspect, disclosed by the scene of the eighth ground, is a "non-self-sufficiency": even cultivated to the high ground of effortlessness, vow must still be roused, by the buddhas' power of the original vow, if it is not to fall. In a word: vow is the perfection that has not yet reached the far shore, and its fullness lies not in being self-sufficient but in being held.

A doctrinal pointer. From this a directional recognition follows: vow is not the opening line of practice, to be uttered and forgotten; it is a directing power that runs through the whole course and must be roused again and again. The point of exertion upon vow, therefore, lies not in "how vehement the first arising was," but in "whether it can be recalled, roused, and kept from sleeping in quietude or fatigue, again and again." If even the eighth-ground bodhisattva must still be roused by the buddhas, how much more the beginner. The continuance of vow has never rested on a single burst of vehemence, but on continual rousing and on the guarding of a field of vow-power greater than itself.

Open questions. Yet the paper stops at vow's "standing," and two questions remain unsettled. First, given that vow deserves to be a perfection and answers to the Immovable Ground, how exactly does it form the skeletal architecture of the whole course of practice across the Ten Grounds? What relation holds between the great vows raised at a bodhisattva's first entry into the grounds and the sequence of the Ten Grounds themselves? Second, the paper has said that vow is a "directing power," but how does this power work? How does it mediate between the accumulation of merit and the illumination of wisdom, so that the two do not obstruct each other but head together toward awakening? These two questions—one bearing on the architecture of vow, the other on its operation—exceed what an account of vow's standing can settle. Their detail is reserved for the papers that follow in this Part.

---

---

References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

• Yogācārabhūmi, spoken by Maitreya, translated by Xuanzang (Tang), Taishō vol. 30, No. 1579.
• Avataṃsaka-sūtra (eighty-fascicle), translated by Śikṣānanda (Tang), Taishō vol. 10, No. 279.
• Cheng weishi lun, composed by Dharmapāla and others, translated by Xuanzang (Tang), Taishō vol. 31, No. 1585.
• Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, composed by Asaṅga, translated by Xuanzang (Tang), Taishō vol. 31, No. 1594.
• Pāli parallel (doctrinal contrast only, no text reproduced): the perfection of resolve (adhiṭṭhāna-pāramī) among the Theravāda ten perfections (dasa pāramī), in the relevant loci of the Jātaka, the Buddhavaṃsa, and the Cariyāpiṭaka, cited at PTS reference-level.

II. Modern Scholarship

• Frankfurt, Harry G. "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person." The Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): 5–20. (The distinction of first-order desire and second-order volition.)
• Kant, Immanuel. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785). (The doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the good will.)
• Conze, Edward. Buddhist Thought in India. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962. (Representative of rendering pāramitā as "perfection.")
• Nattier, Jan. A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003. (Study of the bodhisattva path and the system of perfections.)

III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Short title	Full title	Taishō / PTS no.	Author / Translator
Yogācārabhūmi	Yogācārabhūmi	T30 No. 1579《瑜伽師地論》Yogācārabhūmi-śāstraT30, No. 1579Xuanzang (Tang, 646–648 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗	Maitreya / Xuanzang
Avataṃsaka (80)	Avataṃsaka-sūtra (eighty-fascicle)	T10 No. 279《大方廣佛華嚴經》(八十華嚴)Avataṃsaka-sūtra (80-fascicle)T10, No. 279Śikṣānanda (Tang, 695–699 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗	Śikṣānanda
Cheng weishi lun	Cheng weishi lun	T31 No. 1585《成唯識論》Vijñaptimātratā-siddhi-śāstraT31, No. 1585Xuanzang composite (Tang, 659 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗	Dharmapāla et al. / Xuanzang
Mahāyāna-saṃgraha	Mahāyāna-saṃgraha	T31 No. 1594《攝大乘論本》(玄奘譯)Mahāyānasaṃgraha (Xuanzang tr.)T31, No. 1594View on CBETA online reader ↗	Asaṅga / Xuanzang
adhiṭṭhāna-pāramī	the perfection of resolve	Jā / Bv / Cp (PTS)	— (Pāli contrast; no text reproduced)

---

Cross-References to Other Papers in the Series

• Carrying forward P05 (the directed and the undirected): this paper turns from "vow as a direction of mind" to "vow as the eighth of the ten perfections," treating vow's standing—established by the same test of a perfection, embracing the two vows of self- and other-benefit, a forward and unfinished power, and a power that is not self-sufficient.
• Opening Part III (vow as a perfection): this paper opens Part III and sets vow's standing; the two papers that follow will treat, respectively, vow's skeletal architecture across the practice of the Ten Grounds, and the operation of vow-power shown by Nāgārjuna (how the power of vow integrates merit and wisdom toward awakening). Standing, architecture, and operation together seal this Part.
• Treated elsewhere (the full analysis of vow as a higher-order form of will): the complete treatment of vow as a higher-order form of will has its own dedicated treatment opening this volume and is not restated here; §IV's appeal to Frankfurt and Aristotle serves only to illuminate vow's standing as a perfection.

Footnotes

1. Avataṃsaka-sūtra (eighty-fascicle), fascicle 38, chapter on the Ten Grounds, the eighth Immovable Ground, Taishō vol. 10, No. 279, p. 199a. This is the passage in which the buddhas, by the power of his original vow, rouse the eighth-ground bodhisattva who has entered effortlessness and a quietude close to nirvāṇa. ↩ ↩²

2. See the previous paper in this series, The Directed and the Undirected: Paṇidhi in the Nikāyas (Part II · P05). That paper argued that vow is the mind's inclining-and-resolving, whose object can climb rung by rung from the wish for a good rebirth up to the orientation toward nirvāṇa, and that the "undirected" (appaṇihita / apraṇihita) among the three doors of liberation is the no-seeking pole of that spectrum—opposite in tendency to the vow (praṇidhāna) treated here, though sharing a Sanskrit root, and to be told apart and not conflated. ↩ ↩²

3. Yogācārabhūmi, fascicle 43, spoken by Maitreya, translated by Xuanzang (Tang), Taishō vol. 30, No. 1579, p. 566a. ↩

4. Yogācārabhūmi, fascicle 43, Taishō vol. 30, No. 1579, p. 565c. "The knowledge that lies further and further ahead" denotes knowledge that mounts higher rung after rung; "longing" is wishing for, leaning toward. ↩

5. Cheng weishi lun, fascicle 9, composed by Dharmapāla and others, translated by Xuanzang (Tang), Taishō vol. 31, No. 1585, p. 51b. ↩

6. Cheng weishi lun, fascicle 9, Taishō vol. 31, No. 1585, pp. 51b–c. The "seven excellences" are the seven conditions of embrace by which the Yogācāra masters establish a perfection; the closing phrase "does not cross to the far shore" is the native-gloss warrant for the paper's claim that "pāramitā = crossing to the far shore." ↩

7. Avataṃsaka-sūtra (eighty-fascicle), fascicle 38, chapter on the Ten Grounds, the eighth Immovable Ground, translated by Śikṣānanda (Tang), Taishō vol. 10, No. 279, p. 201a. "Predominant" denotes preeminence, special manifestness, not exclusive solitary practice; the latter clause, "it is not that the remaining perfections are not practiced, but that they are practiced according to capacity and measure," is a guarding clause and must be read together with the first. ↩

8. Yogācārabhūmi, fascicle 75, Taishō vol. 30, No. 1579, p. 731a. This passage states the auxiliary relation of the perfection of vow to the perfection of vigor. ↩

9. Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, fascicle 2, composed by Asaṅga, translated by Xuanzang (Tang), Taishō vol. 31, No. 1594, p. 146a. "To draw in… the excellent conditions to come" states the office of vow in drawing forward the supporting conditions of future practice. ↩