Vow upon Vow without Weariness

I. The Question: Vow and Conduct Are Not Two — So How Does Conduct "Fill" the Vow?

Anyone who has taken the bodhisattva precepts and made the four great vows carries a quiet, hard-to-voice confusion. Is the vow something that has to be made fresh every morning? Does yesterday's vow still count once a night has passed? If it counts, why is it that when I reach for it today my heart has plainly gone cold again, and I have to work up my resolve from scratch? And if it does not count, then making vows becomes a chore that can never be topped off — like bailing water into a bucket with no bottom, scooping one ladleful while another drains away, until the whole effort wears a person out.

This confusion is not weakness on the practitioner's part. It is a structural problem that has not been stated clearly. The previous paper, Vow and Conduct Are Not Two, settled one thing: aspiration (the wishing) and conduct (the doing) are not two events — wish first, action after — but the inner and outer faces of a single act, like the two wings of a bird or the two wheels of a cart, neither able to function alone. But that paper described the structure by which vow and conduct are "not two things." It left a seam unfilled at its close. If the vow is to be filled by conduct, then in what manner does conduct fill it? How must the wing beat, how must the wheel turn, for the vow to be brought down into the actual?

This paper answers exactly that — the how of the filling. The answer is hidden in the fixed passage that repeats after each of the great vows in the Samantabhadra Conduct-Vow chapter:

Moment to moment it continues, without interruption; the deeds of body, speech, and mind never weary.

That short formula is the filling. The reason a vow is not a point that is finished the moment it is aroused, but a line continuing to the end of all future time, is that this line — moment-to-moment continuity, without interruption, without weariness — is what fills it out. A single act of vowing is a point, and a point has no length. That vow and conduct are truly not two becomes visible only along this unwearying line that runs across the whole of future time.

But this immediately forces the real difficulty of the paper into the open. A line that is to extend without interruption to the end of future time — what sustains it? If it is sustained by that "I" who goes cold, who tires, who has to rebuild his resolve the next morning, then the line is certain to break. Human will grows weary; the bucket leaks. So the argument cannot stop at "the vow is a continuous line." It has to chase the question down to its root: where does the line's motive force actually lie? If the force is a self that wearies, then continuity is a doomed feat of endurance. If the force lies elsewhere, then "never wearying" is not a polite word of praise but a claim about practice that can be made good.

One boundary has to be drawn before going further. The "continuity" this paper treats is not the same matter as "how large the vow is — how many beings it can cover, how many aeons it must run." Two distinct questions are folded into the very same refrain: one asks how large the vow is, the other asks how it exists in time. The first is the question of inexhaustible quantity, and this series has already handled it elsewhere, in the volume on confession — how the realm of space, the realm of beings, the deeds of beings, and the afflictions of beings together constitute a measure that cannot be exhausted, and what kind of vow-logic makes a task "never finished yet never a failure." That treatment is not repeated here. This paper claims only the second question: how a vow persists in time. And the dividing line is not one that later readers have forced onto the text. It is cut by the commentator Chengguan himself, in his own analytic division — which is the scriptural ground the next section sets out.

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II. The Canonical Basis: Chengguan Himself Cuts the Refrain into "Inexhaustibility" and "Unbrokenness"

In the Samantabhadra Conduct-Vow chapter, the first great vow — to revere all Buddhas — is followed by a set passage, and the nine vows after it (praising, making offerings, confession, rejoicing, and so on to universal dedication) each reproduce the same format in turn. Taking the vow to revere the Buddhas as the model, the full passage runs:

Good son! As for revering all Buddhas: to all the Buddhas, World-Honored Ones, as many as the finest dust-motes in all the Buddha-fields throughout the whole Dharma-realm and realm of space, in the ten directions and three times, I — by the power of Samantabhadra's conduct-vow — give rise to deep faith and understanding, as though they stood before my eyes, and with pure deeds of body, speech, and mind I constantly practice reverence… When the realm of space is exhausted, my reverence will be exhausted; but because the realm of space cannot be exhausted, this reverence of mine has no end. And so likewise, when the realm of beings, the deeds of beings, and the afflictions of beings are exhausted, my reverence will be exhausted; but because the realm of beings, down to their afflictions, has no exhausting, this reverence of mine has no end — moment to moment it continues, without interruption; the deeds of body, speech, and mind never weary.¹

Read straight through, this is easy to take as a single sweep of praise, saying from start to finish, "my reverence is without end." But in his Commentary on the Conduct-Vow Chapter (the Separate-Practice Commentary), Chengguan plainly divides it into two things:

From "when the realm of space is exhausted" onward, it sums up the inexhaustibility. Within this, two parts: first it shows the inexhaustibility, then it makes manifest the unbrokenness… Second, from "moment to moment it continues" onward, it makes manifest the absence of interruption. "Weary" means fatigue; "satiety" means having had enough. The nine gates below follow this same pattern.²

This division matters greatly. Chengguan says the stretch from "when the realm of space is exhausted" onward "sums up the inexhaustibility," and that this stretch itself falls into two segments: first it shows the inexhaustibility, then it makes manifest the unbrokenness. That is to say —

The segment "when the realm of space is exhausted, my reverence will be exhausted; but because the realm of space cannot be exhausted, this reverence of mine has no end" is the part that shows the inexhaustibility. It answers how large the vow is — the question of quantity.

And the segment that follows immediately upon it — "moment to moment it continues, without interruption; the deeds of body, speech, and mind never weary" — Chengguan separately classes as the part that makes manifest the unbrokenness. It answers how the vow exists in time — the question of continuity.

Two things, not two ways of saying one thing: two structural members the commentator sets apart in his own division. One is the dimension of space and quantity (how widely the vow reaches, how long before it is "done" — and it is never done). The other is the dimension of time and continuity (how the vow links onward, without rupture, in each present moment). What this paper claims is the latter — the "unbrokenness" half. The former, the measure of inexhaustibility, has already been worked through by this series in the confession volume, on the confession-face of this very refrain; here it is cited by reference, following the commentator's own division, and not re-extracted.

Once the "unbrokenness" half is lifted out on its own, two of its features come into view at once. First, it rests on the time-scale of "thought-moment." The point is not the vague largeness of "the vow is very long-lasting," but that the vow leaves no gap between one thought-moment and the next, continuing unbroken. Second, its grammatical subject is "the deeds of body, speech, and mind, never wearying." Chengguan and Zongmi gloss the term the same way — "weary" means fatigue, "satiety" means having had enough³ — so "never wearying" means not only never tiring but never having had enough. And the subject of this tirelessness is not some single mental act but body (the body that bows), speech (the speech that praises), and mind (the mind that contemplates), all three at once. In other words, unbroken continuity is not a matter of holding one thought steady at the level of "mind" alone; it is the unified orientation of the whole sentient being — body, speech, and mind together. The vow's continuity is the whole person pouring, without break, in one direction — not the brain clamping down on a single thought and refusing to let go.

It is worth noting that "moment to moment… without interruption" is the standard form of the refrain; elsewhere the text offers near-synonyms, as in the vow to praise the Tathāgatas:

…continuing unbroken to the end of all future time, pervading the entire Dharma-realm without exception. And so likewise, when the realm of space is exhausted… this praise of mine has no end — moment to moment it continues, without interruption; the deeds of body, speech, and mind never weary.⁴

The phrase "continuing unbroken to the end of all future time" ties "continuity" plainly to the temporal span of "future time": continuity is not repetition circling in place, but a line drawn out toward the end of all future time. This sets up exactly the joint between "thought-moment" and "the end of future time" that the next section takes up.

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III. The Argument: The Measure of Continuity and Its Motive Force

3.1 "Thought-Moment" Is the Smallest Measure of Continuity; "the End of Future Time" Its Full Span

The "moment to moment" of moment-to-moment continuity is the smallest unit of time in which continuity is measured. In the thirty-ninth fascicle of the Conduct-Vow chapter, the perfections of wisdom that the pilgrim Sudhana attains are introduced clause by clause, each led off by "in thought-moment after thought-moment":

[He attains] ten perfections of the wisdom… first, the perfection of the wisdom that in thought-moment after thought-moment makes the body fill all Buddha-fields… seventh, the perfection of the wisdom whose eloquence, in thought-moment after thought-moment, speaks a single line of Dharma to the end of all future time without exhausting… eleventh, the perfection of the wisdom that in thought-moment after thought-moment makes Samantabhadra's wisdom-conduct appear fully present.⁵

One thing has to be noted accurately here: the text labels these "ten" perfections of wisdom yet in fact lists eleven clauses (the last, "Samantabhadra's wisdom-conduct appearing fully present," counted separately). This is the text's own enumeration, quoted here as it stands and not silently corrected to ten.⁶

This same passage has already been read by this series, in the Mindfulness volume, for one of its other senses — its sense of spatial pervasion: "in thought-moment after thought-moment makes the body fill all Buddha-fields" speaks to the spatial meaning of the body pervading the Buddha-fields within Dharma-realm Buddha-recollection, and that face is treated there. This paper takes only its temporal axis: each clause opens with "in thought-moment after thought-moment," which is just what shows that "thought-moment" is the smallest measure at which conduct-vow is made actual. The vow is not a general charter that, once issued, hangs there; it becomes present anew in every single thought-moment — the body pervading Buddha-fields moment to moment, the speech teaching Dharma moment to moment, wisdom appearing moment to moment.

The most telling of these is the seventh clause: "in thought-moment after thought-moment speaks a single line of Dharma to the end of all future time without exhausting." Within one clause, "thought-moment" (the smallest measure) and "the end of all future time" (the largest span) are joined directly. This is not rhetorical exaggeration but the native shape of the continuity-structure: continuity can reach the end of future time precisely because it never breaks within any single thought-moment; and conversely, each thought-moment has its weight precisely because what it links onto is that line running to the end of all future time. The minute and the vast are, within the structure of "continuity," the two ends of one and the same thing.

The verse portion corroborates the prose refrain. The royal verses of Samantabhadra's vow speak of it three times:

To all of them I raise vast offerings, to the end of all future aeons, never wearying.

Drawing near and making offerings to the ocean of Buddhas, practicing without tiring through oceans of aeons.

Fulfilling their whole work without remainder, through future aeons forever untiring.⁷

The "never wearying" of the prose refrain reappears in the verses as "never wearying," "without tiring," "forever untiring" — and each instance is plainly tied to a temporal span such as "the end of future aeons," "oceans of aeons," "future aeons." Prose and verse corroborate each other, and they point to one and the same judgment: the vow's continuity is a temporal structure reaching the end of all future time, and its signature is exactly not tiring, not wearying. A line that wearies cannot reach the end of future time; a line that can reach it must, by that very feature, be unwearying. And so "never wearying" ceases to be an empty compliment and becomes a fact in need of explanation: on what strength does this line not tire?

3.2 The Motive Force of Continuity: Contemplative Power, Not Grinding Effort

This is exactly the point Zongmi drives home in his sub-commentary with a single question. He first takes over Chengguan's division and gloss, then in the sub-commentary adds a question that opens the matter up:

[Commentary] Second, making manifest the absence of interruption. [Sūtra] Moment to moment it continues, without interruption; the deeds of body, speech, and mind never weary. [Commentary] "Weary" means fatigue; "satiety" means having had enough. The nine gates below follow this pattern. [Sub-commentary] Without the power of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice, how could thought-moment after thought-moment go unbroken?… One must not take a reverence done with an arising-and-perishing, sign-grasping mind as reverence; and likewise, through the nine gates below, one must not take praising, offering, or dedication done with an arising-and-perishing, sign-grasping mind as Samantabhadra's conduct-vow.⁸

"Without the power of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice, how could thought-moment after thought-moment go unbroken?" — this one question cuts the line's motive source clean out. Thought-moments can run unbroken, can run untiring, not because the one who vows braces and re-braces himself, but because the line's motive force is, from the start, the power of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice — the vow's own power. Zongmi then seals it from the other side: one must not take reverence done with an "arising-and-perishing, sign-grasping mind" as reverence. That is, if reverence, praise, offering, or dedication is done with that fluctuating, grasping, deluded mind, it does not amount to Samantabhadra's conduct-vow at all.

What is being contrasted here are two utterly different ways of continuing.

One is grinding effort. Grinding effort runs on the arising-and-perishing mind: bow a few more times on a good day, make a little less vow when tired tomorrow. Its capital is the very "I" who goes cold, who tires, who needs his resolve rebuilt the next morning. To sustain a line reaching to the end of future time with the arising-and-perishing mind has only one outcome — the arising-and-perishing mind must run dry, and when the strength gives out, the line breaks. The image of the "bucket with no bottom" from the opening of this paper describes exactly this grinding: because it is always leaking, one must always be bailing, until the arms go slack. Continuity by grinding is a tug-of-war whose opponent is fatigue and whose loss is fixed in advance.

The other is continuity carried by contemplative power. Its motive force is not "I am holding on" but the vow itself in operation. Just because the force does not lie with that self who tires, "never wearying" can be said truthfully — not that the self is so strong it can hold out against fatigue without falling, but that there is no self standing there resisting fatigue at all. Weariness has no place to arise because it has not even a foothold. This is the difference between "the vow's mode of being" and "the grinding of the will": grinding is the will milling itself down, whereas continuity carried by contemplative power is the vow renewing itself, thought-moment by thought-moment.

This joins what an earlier paper in this volume established. That paper argued the case of the unfinishable vow — that in the four great vows, "beings without limit" and "afflictions without end," the "without limit, without end" is not the vow's failure but a member of its structure: the termination condition is designed never to be met, so the vow holds out to the end of all future time (treated in The Unfinishable Vow). That paper described the shape of the vow — why a vow cannot be finished. This paper describes how that same vow-shape persists in time — why it continues without tiring. One asks "why is the vow never finished," the other "why does a never-finished vow not wear a person out." Put together, the two questions make one complete answer: the vow cannot be finished, and so it continues to the end of all future time; and it can continue without weariness because what carries it is not the self that tires but contemplative power.

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IV. Interdisciplinary Bridges: Western Models of Time-Continuity and "Never Wearying"

Set the problem of "continuity" against the background of Western philosophy and an interesting pattern appears. The West's most refined thinking about "how a self holds steady across time" falls broadly into two paths: one assigns continuity to the fidelity of the will (it must be held with effort), the other to the passive structure of consciousness (it flows of itself). Both are full of insight, and both, just at the point of "never wearying," part ways with Samantabhadra's continuity. The three figures below are set alongside not to rank them, but to use them to throw the peculiar position of "never wearying" into sharper light.

First, the ethics of the promise (Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another). Ricoeur distinguishes two layers of personal sameness: sameness of character (idem, answering "what" one is) and selfhood (ipse, answering the responsible "who"). Keeping a promise is the very model of selfhood — even when my likes have changed and my circumstances have changed, I still hold to a word once given, and this self-constancy (maintien de soi) makes me answerable to those who rely on me. The analysis catches this paper's question precisely: how can a finite speech-act (vowing once) govern an open future? And Ricoeur's "constancy plus answerability to the other" echoes the outward face of the bodhisattva vow (vowing to deliver beings without limit).

But the divergence is sharpest right here. Ricoeur's promise is re-willed again and again against the pull of breaking it; its dignity lies precisely in being kept with fatigue, inconstancy, and betrayal as its standing opponents. That is exactly the kind of continuity "never wearying" rules out. Samantabhadra's continuity is not strung taut like that — it does not rely on a self repeatedly pulling itself tight, but on the power of the conduct-vow, an orientation that renews itself thought-moment by thought-moment within a self-giving at the scale of the Dharma-realm. Ricoeur's self is the ground of the promise (the answerable "who" stays present throughout); the vow's continuity, by contrast, gradually empties out the one who vows. Ricoeur diagnoses the condition of "fidelity as taut holding-on" and writes it up as a noble ethic; "never wearying" claims that, in the case of the vow, that condition simply does not arise.

Second, internal time-consciousness (Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time). Husserl asks: why is a melody heard as one flowing whole rather than a string of scattered snapshots? Because each present phase is a "primal impression" (Urimpression), and the instant it sinks into the past it is "retained" (retention — a still-living "just now," not an after-the-fact recollection), while what is about to come is grasped in advance by "protention." The living present is therefore not a knife-edge point but a thick comet's tail dragged out by retention and protention, with new presents continually welling up to form the unbroken stream of inner time. This is about the nearest Western structural diagram to "moment-to-moment continuity" — "moment" being the present point, "continuity" being those present points bound by retention and protention into one stream. Against atomism, Husserl shows that continuity need not be effortfully "re-glued"; it is already given in the very form of time-consciousness — which chimes with "the vow does not hold by repeated acts of will."

But one boundary has to be locked down: what Husserl describes is the time-form of any consciousness — transcendental, neutral, automatic; it is selfless, but it is not liberated. The bodhisattva's continuity is not this passive constitution but a practiced orientation, aimed by the vow and driven by the power of the conduct-vow; it has an end (awakening, the deliverance of beings), and that end is something no phenomenology of the bare time-form can supply. Husserl's analysis, moreover, ultimately refers back to the self that constitutes the time-stream, whereas moment-to-moment continuity is open to the end of all future time precisely because it is not anchored in a self. (One boundary is held strictly here: this paper draws only on Husserl's "internal time-consciousness," not on his account of intentionality and the constitution of objects — that face has been handled separately elsewhere in this series.)

Third, durée (Henri Bergson, la durée). Bergson distinguishes "duration" (lived time) from the spatialized clock-time of the sciences: real time is a continuous, qualitative flow in which past and present interpenetrate and no moment is mere repetition; only the intellect, for practical use, slices this flow into a row of discrete, juxtaposed instants — and so distorts it. This gives the paper a powerful critical tool against one misreading: that "moment-to-moment continuity" means a string of separate efforts, vowing afresh at each tick of clock-time. Duration takes continuity to be one indivisible movement; each "moment" is not a bead threaded on a line but a phase of the same flow. To vow once is "to go on living," not to be re-vowed time after time.

But Bergson's duration is a natural fact of consciousness — it flows whether or not you are awake to it, and it sweeps the entire past (afflictions and habit-energies included) along indiscriminately. The vow's continuity is selective and self-giving: it is not the bare continuation of the mind-stream but a continuity aimed by the vow and turned toward awakening — and pointedly not an accumulation of an unpurified past. Nor does Bergson have anything answering to "never wearying" as an accomplishment of practice. Duration explains how continuity is possible, but it cannot explain why this continuity does not tire, or why it is bound to awakening.

A last comparison by way of contrast. The Western contemplative tradition has its "noonday demon" (acedia, spiritual listlessness), whose remedy is "perseverance" (perseverantia) — a hard fight that must be fought over and over. "Never wearying" is not the winning of that fight but the fight's never breaking out: with the vow rooted in the power of the conduct-vow and the tiring self emptied out, listlessness has nowhere to land.

The three figures' insights can be gathered into one sentence: Western time-continuity is either passive structure (Husserl, Bergson) or willed fidelity (Ricoeur); the vow's continuity is neither — it is a practiced, self-giving orientation whose self is already empty, carried by the power of the conduct-vow, and "never wearying" marks that it is not effortful, precisely because there is no self standing there resisting fatigue.

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V. Corrections of the Middle Way

Following this study's convention, three deviations to be guarded against are flagged here, distinguished by ❌ (a red line, not to be crossed) and ⚠️ (to be handled with care, easily slipped).

❌ "Moment-to-moment continuity" must not be read as "the mechanical chaining of a string of separate efforts." This is the atomizing misreading — as if continuity were the joining end-to-end of countless independent "acts of vowing," so that the success or failure of continuity turned on how densely I can chain them and how long I can go without dropping a link. This fits neither Bergson's "indivisible flow" nor, still less, the meaning of the Dharma: continuity is not my re-gluing the vow once per tick of clock-time, but the vow continuing itself, thought-moment by thought-moment. Read it as mechanical chaining and "never wearying" becomes unintelligible — for any mechanical chaining will drop a link at some tick, and dropping a link is exactly what weariness is.

⚠️ "Contemplative power" must not be slid into "contemplating that the nature of wrongdoing is empty." Zongmi's line — "one must not take a reverence done with an arising-and-perishing, sign-grasping mind as reverence" — is all too easily read off into the path of principle-confession and emptiness-contemplation ("contemplate that the nature of wrongdoing is empty, and revere by the principle of non-arising"). This paper takes only one sense: the motive source of continuity is contemplative power (the vow's own power), not the deluded mind of arising-and-perishing and grasping. This is "the vow's mode of being" against "the grinding of the will" — not "the emptiness of wrongdoing's nature" against "grasping at signs." Vowing while the vow's own nature is empty (vowing, and continuing, with a mind of no-attainment) is indeed a deeper layer, but that layer involves the whole doctrine of how emptiness and vowing do not obstruct each other, and must be treated in a paper of its own. A later paper in this volume takes it up; here only a signpost is set, with nothing unfolded — lest a paper about temporal continuity wander off mid-route onto the separate mountain of contemplating emptiness.

⚠️ "Never wearying" must not be slid into a motivational "willpower" or "manifestation." In a modern register, "persisting tirelessly toward your vision" is easily heard as a slogan of encouragement — as if, given strong enough will and firm enough belief, one could "place an order" with the future and turn vow-power into an engine for hitting one's goals. This is exactly what this paper has been dismantling throughout. "Never wearying" holds only on the condition that there is no "I" straining there to realize its own goals; it is not the triumph of the will but the will's withdrawal. To read it as the self-motivation of willpower is to get the direction exactly backward — the vow is aimed at awakening and at all beings, not at the continuation of a self; its tirelessness comes from the emptiness of the self, not from the self's strength.

Of these three, the first guards against the atomist misreading; the latter two guard against sliding vow-power toward emptiness-contemplation (overstepping a boundary) or toward self-help motivation (vulgarizing it). Hold the axis of "contemplative power vs. grinding effort," and the paper can say its piece clearly without veering off.

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VI. Conclusion

The essential restatement. Since vow and conduct are not two, the manner in which "conduct fills the vow" is moment-to-moment continuity. The vow is not a point finished the instant it is aroused, but a line to the end of all future time, without interruption, the deeds of body, speech, and mind never wearying. This line can extend untiringly to the end of future time not because some self braces itself again and again, but because it is carried by the power of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice — continuity is the vow's own mode of being, not the grinding of the will. The "inexhaustibility / unbrokenness" division is not a later addition but one Chengguan cuts with his own hand in his analysis and Zongmi pierces with a single question; and so "never wearying" is not an empty compliment but a claim that can be made good: because there is no tiring self holding on, weariness has nowhere to arise.

Guidance for practice. This carries one concrete turn for everyday effort. Return to the confusion at the opening — "must the vow be re-made fresh each day?" — and the answer is: you need not "work up your resolve" each morning to prop the vow up, for if it leans on worked-up resolve it surely cannot last; what is really to be done is not to maintain the vow more forcefully, but to let the motive force of practice shift, little by little, from "an arising-and-perishing, sign-grasping I holding on" to "the vow continuing itself." Put otherwise: when bowing, praising, and offering become things that follow on of themselves, thought-moment by thought-moment, rather than chores you must first talk yourself into each time, that is contemplative power taking over the place of grinding effort. There is a plain touchstone for telling which path one is on: if the doing grows more and more tiring, needing more and more pep talk, it is most likely still grinding; if the doing does not feel like "persisting" and weariness has hardly arisen at all, then that line of continuity is already no longer wholly "my" constancy.

The open question. This paper has fixed the motive force of continuity on contemplative power, but it leaves a deeper question untouched: where, in the end, does this continuing vow turn? A line without interruption, running to the end of future time — if it merely continues with no sense of where it is bound, might it not still coil back on itself and pile up into a private ledger of "my merit"? What keeps the vow a vow, rather than letting it degrade into a more refined form of acquisition, is its final turn — the turning of the whole line, the whole store of merit, toward beings and toward awakening. What that turn is, and why it is the office of the tenth great vow, universal dedication, is left for a later paper in this volume to treat in detail. This paper carries the line only as far as "continuing without weariness." As for the deeper layer beyond continuity — vowing while the vow's own nature is empty, vowing with a mind of no-attainment — that involves the whole doctrine of how emptiness and vowing do not obstruct each other, and likewise awaits a later paper. Here it is gathered into a single line: the vow is not a point finished the instant it is aroused, but a line carried by contemplative power, never wearying to the end of all future time. How it continues, this paper has answered; where it finally goes, the next will say.

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References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

• Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra, "Chapter on Entering the Inconceivable Liberation: Samantabhadra's Conduct-Vow," fascicles 39–40, trans. Prajñā (Tang), Taishō vol. 10, No. 293.
• Chengguan (Tang), Commentary on the Conduct-Vow Chapter of the Avataṃsaka-sūtra (Separate-Practice Commentary), Xuzangjing vol. 5, No. 227.
• Chengguan's Separate-Practice Commentary with Zongmi's accompanying Sub-commentary, Sub-commentary on the Separate-Practice Commentary of the Conduct-Vow Chapter, Xuzangjing vol. 5, No. 229.

II. Modern Scholarship

• Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910. (durée; the anti-atomist flow of time.)
• Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Trans. John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991. (Internal time-consciousness; retention and protention.)
• Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. (The promise; self-constancy, maintien de soi.)

III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Short title	Full title	Taishō / Xuzangjing no.	Author / Translator
Conduct-Vow chapter	Avataṃsaka-sūtra, Chapter on Entering the Inconceivable Liberation: Samantabhadra's Conduct-Vow (fasc. 39–40)	T0293《大方廣佛華嚴經》(四十華嚴)Gaṇḍavyūha (40-fascicle, including the Ten Vows)T10, No. 293Prajñā (Tang, 798 CE)Closes with Samantabhadra's Ten Great Vows — the textual locus of NIAN Part VII.View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 10)	trans. Prajñā
Conduct-Vow Commentary	Commentary on the Conduct-Vow Chapter (Separate-Practice Commentary)	X0227 (vol. 5)	Chengguan
Conduct-Vow Sub-commentary	Sub-commentary on the Separate-Practice Commentary of the Conduct-Vow Chapter	X0229 (vol. 5)	Chengguan's commentary; Zongmi's sub-commentary

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Cross-References

This is the second paper of Part VI (Samantabhadra's Vows of Conduct). It takes up the structure of "vow and conduct are not two" established by the part's first paper, Vow and Conduct Are Not Two, and answers the open question left there — given that vow and conduct are not two, in what manner does conduct continuously fill the vow? The answer: by moment-to-moment continuity, without interruption, never wearying. The "inexhaustible-quantity" face of the closing refrain (the four similes of inexhaustibility, the measure that cannot be exhausted) has already been worked through by the confession volume on the confession-face of this same refrain; following Chengguan's division, this paper takes only the "unbroken-time" face, cited by reference and not re-extracted. The refrain as the binding formula of the ten vows, the isomorphism of the ten vows' closings, and the substance–attribute–function correlation have been treated in the Samantabhadra papers of the Mindfulness volume, and are likewise given here by reference rather than restated. The general principle of the "unfinishable vow" (at the level of the four great vows, the general shape of the vow) is set out in this volume's The Unfinishable Vow. The question "where the continuing vow finally turns, toward beings and awakening" follows from this paper's open question and is left for a later paper of this part, on dedication, to treat in detail; and the face of "vowing while the vow's own nature is empty, vowing with a mind of no-attainment" awaits a separate, later paper in this volume.

Footnotes

1. Avataṃsaka-sūtra (Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra), fasc. 40, "Chapter on Entering the Inconceivable Liberation: Samantabhadra's Conduct-Vow," closing refrain of the vow to revere all Buddhas, Taishō vol. 10, No. 293, p. 844c01–c11. This is the first instance of the "refrain" closing the ten great vows; the nine vows that follow (praising, offering, confession, rejoicing, requesting the turning of the Dharma-wheel, requesting the Buddhas to remain, constantly following the Buddhas in study, accord with beings, universal dedication) each reproduce the same format. ↩

2. Chengguan (Tang), Commentary on the Conduct-Vow Chapter of the Avataṃsaka-sūtra (Separate-Practice Commentary), Xuzangjing vol. 5, No. 227, p. 193b06, b11. The Xuzangjing (X) is distinct from the Taishō; citations are given as X05n0227 with page and column. ↩

3. The gloss "weary means fatigue, satiety means having had enough" is based on Chengguan's Separate-Practice Commentary (X05n0227, p. 193b11–12); Zongmi's Sub-commentary takes it over and repeats it (X05n0229, p. 269b20). The gloss is attributed to Chengguan (commentary); the question on contemplative power below is attributed to Zongmi (sub-commentary), the two kept distinct. ↩

4. Avataṃsaka-sūtra, fasc. 40, vow to praise the Tathāgatas, Taishō vol. 10, No. 293, p. 844c18–c23. "Continuing unbroken to the end of all future time" is a near-synonymous variant of the refrain's standard "continues… without interruption," cited here with its own page and column. ↩

5. Avataṃsaka-sūtra, fasc. 39, passage on the ten perfections of wisdom, Taishō vol. 10, No. 293, p. 840b07–b20. ↩

6. The text's heading reads "ten perfections of wisdom" while in fact enumerating eleven clauses, the last — "the perfection of the wisdom that in thought-moment after thought-moment makes Samantabhadra's wisdom-conduct appear fully present" — counted separately. This paper quotes as the text enumerates and does not alter the number. ↩

7. Avataṃsaka-sūtra, fasc. 40, royal verses of Samantabhadra's vow, Taishō vol. 10, No. 293, p. 847b22 ("to the end of all future aeons, never wearying"), p. 847c23 ("practicing without tiring through oceans of aeons"), p. 848a02 ("through future aeons forever untiring"). ↩

8. Chengguan's Separate-Practice Commentary with Zongmi's accompanying Sub-commentary, Sub-commentary on the Separate-Practice Commentary of the Conduct-Vow Chapter, Xuzangjing vol. 5, No. 229, p. 269b18–b24. "[Commentary]" marks Chengguan's separate-practice commentary, "[Sub-commentary]" marks Zongmi's sub-commentary; the question "without the power of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice, how could thought-moment after thought-moment go unbroken?" is Zongmi's own development in the sub-commentary. ↩