Pāli RootsThe Āgama ViewAbhidharma and the Path of PurificationThe Mahāyāna TurnPrajñā and ConcentrationThe ŚūraṅgamaChanLotus and HuayanThe Modern Return
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Part 5 · Prajñā and Concentration
Stillness · 3 papers
The transition page has said it: what prajñā severs was never concentration—it is the "obtainable." Part Five is the whole course of that one severing: three chapters, three steps,[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
16Prajñā's Critique of Clinging to Dhyāna-StatesThe previous paper expanded concentration from a psychological operation into a field of named bodhisattva practice-gates — the Heroic-March, the Ocean-Seal, the Lion's-Roused-Vigour, each samādhi with its own name and its own office. This paper asks the question that comes immediately next: prajñā turns back on that whole named field and presses it — its flavor, its dwelling, its mark, can any of these be grasped? The answer is no, and the phrase that carries the answer is the marks of concentration are empty (定相亦空). Reading the inner soteriological logic of the Larger Prajñāpāramitā and the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, this paper shows that clinging to concentration takes two symmetrical forms of failure: the first is craving the flavor of dhyāna, sticking to the pleasure-and-joy of absorption and being reborn through it into the form and formless realms; the second is sinking into emptiness, stagnating in quiescence, sticking to the quiescent and seizing the reality-limit prematurely, and so falling to the ground of the śrāvaka and pratyekabuddha. One is held fast by sweetness, the other by stillness — opposite in direction, identical in root — and both are dissolved by a single move: the samādhi, the one who enters, the entered, and the place of entering are none of them to be obtained. The paper further argues that this critique is no Mahāyāna invention: the early Saṃyukta-Āgama had already marked the pleasure-and-joy of absorption as a "gratification" (assāda) to be escaped, through the triad gratification–danger–escape; Mahāyāna prajñā deepens this judgement rather than creating it. The way out is not to abandon concentration but the non-abiding samādhi — since the mark cannot be obtained, there is no place left to abide or to cling.17Mañjuśrī's SwordThe previous paper (P16) used prajñā to cut away the coarse clinging to concentration — craving the flavor of dhyāna, sinking into emptiness and stagnating in quiescence — and from there reached the verdict that the marks of concentration are empty. This paper takes up what was left unfinished and turns the same blade upon the finest layer of all: the subtle clinging, within and after absorption, that the meditator forms toward "dharmas" themselves. That clinging has three targets. The first is the conceit of attainment — the "I have gained the concentration, I have gained the path" that, at its root, is the conceit of false attainment (abhimāna, 增上慢), the imagining of attainment where there is none. The second is clinging to the dharmas of the absorbed state, ending in dharma-attachment (dharma-rāga, 法愛) — taking samādhi, the meditative state, and even prajñā itself to be a thing that can be obtained, owned, collected. The third is the residue of rule-and-ritual clinging within concentration — the hidden conceit of the precept-pure practitioner, "I am pure, others are defiled," which directly receives the subtle clinging handed forward from the SĪLA volume. This paper argues that this is the second-order blade, the one that comes after precept and concentration: the gross afflictions are first subdued by precept-keeping and merit, and what remains is only the finest residue of craving, view, and conceit, which prajñā alone can sever. The one who wields this blade is Mañjuśrī, carried by two images — "taking up the sword of wisdom, holding the shield of meditative concentration" (the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra) and the episode in the Māyopama-samādhi-sūtra in which Mañjuśrī takes up a sword and advances upon the Buddha. The whole paper turns on its final move — the blade is itself empty: the prajñā that cuts and the dharmas that are cut share one and the same emptiness; cut to the end, the blade severs even the thought that "there is a dharma to be grasped" (and so a Buddha, a prajñā, a sword). The way out is not the abandonment of cultivation, nor a license to indulge, but to cultivate without clinging to one's cultivation.18Vimalakīrti on SittingPrajñā's deconstruction of concentration reaches its end in this paper. The coarse clinging — craving the flavor of dhyāna, sinking into emptiness — was cut in the first paper of this Part (P16); the subtle dharma-attachment within absorption was severed by Mañjuśrī's blade of prajñā in the second (P17); what remains is the last step, in which concentration lets go even of its own mark of sitting and its own speech. This paper turns on the episode, in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa, in which Vimalakīrti rebukes Śāriputra over his meditative sitting — "this sitting is not necessarily what makes sitting-in-meditation; one who sits in meditation does not manifest body or mind within the three realms" — to argue that concentration lies not in the posture, not in the marks of entering and exiting, but in a markless mind. It then draws on the three commentators collected by Sengzhao (Kumārajīva, Sengzhao, Daosheng) to distinguish "the disciple, his mind hidden yet his body still showing" from "the dharma-body, form and spirit alike extinguished"; takes the One-Practice Samādhi of the Mañjuśrī Prajñāpāramitā to show that concentration's object turns from a reified thing into the markless single mark of the dharma-realm; takes the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra's "sees neither the near shore nor the far shore, no marks of entering or exiting" to conclude that concentration is no longer a state one enters and then leaves; and ends at the apex of Vimalakīrti's silence — Mañjuśrī speaks the wordless, Vimalakīrti enacts the wordless in silence, and five thousand bodhisattvas there attain the forbearance of the unborn dharmas. The paper's conclusion: the deepest reach of concentration is prajñā's marklessness, and the consummation of that marklessness is a silence. This seals the three-paper arc of "Prajñā and Concentration" (flavor-and-mark, dharma-attachment, the markless-and-wordless), and hands the baton on to the Śūraṅgama-samādhi.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.