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 7 · The Vow and Emptiness
Vow · 3 papers
In this part, the vow and emptiness meet face to face.[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
16Vowing without a VowerWhen prajñā sees all things as ultimately empty, does the act of vowing collapse along with everything else? This paper addresses the deepest point at which vow and emptiness meet: if even the "I" is seen to be unattainable, who is left to make the vow? Drawing primarily on the bodhisattva's vow to liberate beings in the Vajracchedikā and on Nāgārjuna's self-posed question-and-answer in fascicle 61 of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, it argues that the deepest vow is precisely one made in non-attainment: the bodhisattva vows the supreme vow to liberate all beings, yet there is no liberator, no being really liberated, and no graspable act of "vowing" itself. Just as the three spheres of giving—giver, receiver, gift—are each unattainable, the vow too may be contemplated as a threefold sphere: vower, vowed-for, and vow. This contemplation does not hollow out the vow's force; it dismantles the self that, behind the vow, was quietly presupposed as the one who would secure a result. Nāgārjuna had already blocked the path "since all is empty, no need to vow": if ultimate emptiness could obstruct the arising of bodhicitta, emptiness would itself become a kind of own-being, contradicting itself. The paper's central claim is therefore that seeing the emptiness of the vow's nature does not negate its power—just as seeing the emptiness of sin's nature does not negate the workings of karma. Non-attainment is not a subtraction from vowing but the condition under which the vow becomes inexhaustible and ceases to be a means of self-acquisition. The paper closes by setting a signpost toward a later question: if the vow without a vower is inexhaustible, why does it not turn back?17The Patience of Non-Arising and the Vow That Does Not Turn BackTaking up the previous paper's conclusion — that a vow without a vower still does not run dry — this paper asks the next question: if there is no self who vows and yet the vow is inexhaustible, then how is it that the vow does not regress? The thesis is that the irreversibility of the bodhisattva's vow (avaivartika) is secured not by the white-knuckled persistence of the will but by the patience of non-arising (anutpattika-dharma-kṣānti). The vow is irreversible not because the bodhisattva grips it most tightly and guards it against loss, but because, seeing that all things are unarisen and the vow itself is without own-being, no thing has arisen that could be lost, and so no thing can make it turn back. Drawing on the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra — where the patience of non-arising simply is abiding in the stage of non-regression — and on the Eighth Ground of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra — where attaining that patience is, in the same instant, entry into the Immovable Ground and the obtaining of the dharma of non-regression — the paper argues that the true mechanism of non-regression is non-arising: a vow that could turn back is itself unfindable, so non-regression is not the achievement of holding fast but the natural consequence of non-arising. Two Western mirrors are engaged: Bernard Williams's "ground projects" and Gabriel Marcel's "creative fidelity." Both root irreversibility in a bond with personal identity or in the persistence of a present subject; the patience of non-arising sees through even that disintegrable self and that faithful subject. Immovability rests on the absence of ground, not on the firmest grip. Its very rootlessness is its unsnatchability. The paper closes by setting a signpost — where, then, does a vow that can no longer turn back finally go? — for the closing paper of the volume.18The Bodhisattva Does Not Enter Final NirvāṇaThe bodhisattva's path contains one turn harder to read than any other. When the deep insight of prajñā has already made it possible for the practitioner to enter nirvāṇa—to still, once and for all, the whole turning round of suffering—the bodhisattva turns back at the very gate, declining a cessation that lies right there to be had. This paper does not approach that non-abiding from the side of meditative posture (the "not actualizing the real" of deep samādhi, treated elsewhere in this project) but from the side of the vow itself: what is it that makes an attainable rest be set aside? Reading the Cheng weishi lun's definition of the nirvāṇa of no-abode through the joint working of compassion and wisdom—by prajñā, not abiding in saṃsāra; by great compassion, not abiding in nirvāṇa—together with the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra's thesis that "though knowing all dharmas to be unconditioned and actionless, yet by the original vow and great compassion he acts within the actionless to liberate all," and the Vimalakīrti's twofold refusal, "not exhausting the conditioned, not abiding in the unconditioned," the paper argues that the vow is precisely the power unwilling to make cessation the end. The bodhisattva's non-abiding in nirvāṇa is neither because nirvāṇa is unreachable (it is fully reachable) nor a restless inability to stop, but a freedom of no-abode sustained by vow and great compassion: rest is declined not because it is impossible, but because of the vow.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.