Pāli RootsThe Vow in the ĀgamasThe Vow as PerfectionThe Four Great VowsThe Original Vows of AmitābhaSamantabhadra's Conduct-VowsThe Vow and EmptinessAttaining Bodhi
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Part 6 · Samantabhadra's Conduct-Vows
Vow · 3 papers
This part tells the ten royal vows.[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
13Vow and Conduct Are Not TwoSamantabhadra's ten great vows are commonly read as a checklist of "ten good deeds," on which the vow (praṇidhāna) is set before the act and taken for an inner wish, while conduct (caryā) is the outward action that later cashes the wish out. This paper argues that the very unit the scripture counts is not "conduct" plus "vow" but the single compound "conduct-vow" (caryā-praṇidhāna, Bhadracarī-praṇidhāna): the ten gates enumerate one matter of conduct-vow, lodged in the round number ten and so spoken as ten—the ten being not ten freestanding vows. Following Chengguan's gloss, "aspiration is the vow, undertaking is the conduct, lodged in the round number ten and so spoken as ten," and Zongmi's image, "like the two wings of a bird, the two wheels of a cart," one sees that vow and conduct are not two successive layers but the inner and outer faces of one and the same matter: the vow is that toward which the conduct is oriented; the conduct is that which fills the vow full. Neither stands without the other, just as a bird missing one wing cannot fly and a cart missing one wheel cannot roll. The bodhisattva's vow "is already conduct," unlike the empty pledge of the ordinary person who vows but does not act—and this is precisely the question left at the close of the previous part on Amitābha's primal vows: how, in the end, are vow and conduct not two?14Vow upon Vow without WearinessThis paper takes up a question that looks simple but is not easily answered. The preceding paper, Vow and Conduct Are Not Two, established that the bodhisattva's vow and the bodhisattva's conduct are not two separate things but the inner and outer faces of one act. That left a seam unfilled: if conduct is what "fills" the vow, then in what manner does it fill it? The answer this paper defends is that conduct fills the vow by moment-to-moment continuity — without interruption, the deeds of body, speech, and mind never wearying. A vow is not a point of single arousal, complete the instant it is uttered; it is a line drawn out to the end of all future time. Taking as its scriptural ground the closing refrain repeated after each of the ten great vows of the Samantabhadra Conduct-Vow chapter, and following a division the commentator Chengguan draws with his own hand — "first it shows the inexhaustibility, then it makes manifest the unbrokenness" — the paper shows that the refrain's tail, moment-to-moment continuity, without interruption, the deeds of body, speech, and mind never wearying, is a structural member Chengguan separates out precisely to answer how a vow persists within time. The paper then presses to the harder question: what keeps that line running to the end of future time without breaking? Its claim is that the line holds not because some self braces itself again and again, but because it is carried by the power of Samantabhadra's contemplative practice — the point Zongmi drives home with one question in his sub-commentary: without that power, how could thought-moment follow thought-moment unbroken? Continuity is the vow's own mode of being, not the grinding of the will. The paper closes in conversation with three Western philosophies of time — the ethics of the promise, internal time-consciousness, and durée — to mark the place that "never wearying" occupies that none of them can fill, and concludes that the motive force of the continuing vow is contemplative power. The deeper matter — vowing while the vow's own nature is empty — is left to a later paper in this volume.15TransferenceSamantabhadra's ten great vows open with "paying homage to all Buddhas" and close with "universal transference" (pariṇāmanā). This paper asks why the tenth vow comes last. It is not a tenth good deed standing alongside the first nine, but the act that gathers up all preceding merit and turns it as a whole toward sentient beings and toward awakening—the text itself says "from the first homage down to accordance, all merit is transferred," explicitly looping back over the prior nine. Transference is thus the hinge of the whole, not one item among ten. Building on this volume's first two papers (vow and conduct are not two; moment-to-moment continuity), the paper argues that a vow which is non-dual and continuous, if merely accumulated and never transferred, collapses into a private deposit-account of merit; universal transference is precisely the turn that opens that account and directs it away from the self. Following Chengguan's and Zongmi's gloss—"hui means to turn, xiang means to orient"—and the closing verse's structural reading ("having cited the prior seven, it directly clarifies transference"), the paper establishes transference as a hinge with a double character: it turns an orientation, it does not hand over a thing (a point inherited from this volume's opening paper, not re-argued here), and its limit-case—"I will undergo it in their stead"—shows it to be substantive altruism, not symbolic accounting. The paper closes in dialogue with Western theories of the gift-economy (Mauss, Derrida, Marion), framing transference as a resolution lying beyond Derrida's "impossible pure gift": not by making the gift vanish or go unrecognized, but by relinquishing the self-ward orientation. It also seals the three-paper arc on the "vow" face of Samantabhadra's conduct, and leaves a single signpost toward the series' concluding volume.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.