Pāli RootsThe Vow in the ĀgamasThe Vow as PerfectionThe Four Great VowsThe Original Vows of AmitābhaSamantabhadra's Conduct-VowsThe Vow and EmptinessAttaining Bodhi
68
Part 8 · Attaining Bodhi
Vow · 2 papers
This part is the last of this volume, and the last of the entire Six Practice Gates series.[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
19The Three Periods' Buddhas Attain BodhiThe Heart Sūtra ends in a single sentence carrying two subjects on one unbroken breath: first the bodhisattva who "reaches ultimate nirvāṇa," then the buddhas of the three periods who, "relying on the perfection of wisdom, attain anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi." This paper asks what that openly stated arrival actually is. Is it the same event as the "ultimate nirvāṇa" just named, or a farther consummation? Taking as its interpretive backbone Fazang's reading in his Brief Commentary on the Heart Sūtra—that the bodhisattva attains the cessation-fruit of nirvāṇa while the buddhas attain the wisdom-fruit of bodhi—the paper argues that attaining bodhi belongs to a grammar of plenitude and acquisition, not to one of cessation and the exhaustion of obscuration; the two must not be conflated, and the second consummates rather than repeats the first. Three passages from the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra—"the vow is the charioteer, merit is the ox," transference that gives rise to no dual mind, and not taking up the witness of nirvāṇa—show that what carries the one breath of prajñā across nirvāṇa toward the buddha-station is precisely transference-and-vow. The paper's central finding is that attaining anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi is the terminus on which the whole sequence of the practice gates converges and is completed—not a nihilistic endlessness, and not anyone's possession, but a wisdom-fruit that is full with no one made full, consummation with no one consummated, in non-attainment. The vow is the part of that one breath that, before nirvāṇa, declines to stop.20What the Six Gates Were All AlongThe Six Practice Gates—Recollection, Giving, Repentance, Precepts, Samādhi, Vow—reach here their final page. Looking back over the whole road, this paper offers one closing judgment: from first to last, the six gates were six passages of a single text, and that text is the Heart Sūtra. From "when Avalokiteśvara was practicing the deep prajñā-pāramitā" the sūtra runs—contemplation, crossing-over, emptiness, negation, the ultimate, attaining bodhi—down to "the Buddhas of the three periods, relying on the prajñā-pāramitā, attain anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi"; and this, the paper argues, is precisely the order Recollection, Giving, Repentance, Precepts, Samādhi, Vow. Of the six, five are movements—contemplation, crossing, negation, the ultimate, attaining—each a direction taken; Repentance alone answers to emptiness and is the one subtractive gate, adding nothing, only voiding the grasping the earlier gates may have gathered. The Vow alone lifts the seal on attaining bodhi, and is the road's terminus. A single word—the deep of "practicing the deep prajñā"—already contains the whole: the six are not six parallel things but six depths of one and the same prajñā-practice driven ever deeper. The small arc of giving loses the self, repentance empties karma, precepts are new birth shares its very shape with the great arc of practicing the deep prajñā all the way to attaining bodhi. One disclosure must be made plainly: this reading of the six gates against the Heart Sūtra is an interpretive framework this series takes responsibility for—not the sūtra's explicit words, nor any consensus of its commentators. At the sealing, that honesty is itself the accounting. The circle of the whole sequence closes here, and is handed back to its sister series (on view and wisdom) and to the three trainings (śīla, samādhi, prajñā).Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.