Pāli RootsThe Āgama ViewAbhidharma and the Path of PurificationThe Mahāyāna TurnPrajñā and ConcentrationThe ŚūraṅgamaChanLotus and HuayanThe Modern Return
58
Part 8 · Lotus and Huayan
Stillness · 2 papers
Chan gathered concentration down to the very small—small as a single thought, thin as a breath lying close against daily life. Part Eight looks in the opposite direction: concentra[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
27The Lotus's Peaceful-Practice SamādhiThe "Chapter on Peaceful Practices" of the Lotus Sūtra reconstructs "concentration" into something that runs through walking, standing, sitting, and lying, through speech and silence, motion and rest — a samādhi practiced as a mode of conduct, which this paper calls concentration-as-conduct — and not merely a station one enters and leaves while seated. The paper first examines the concentration-face of the scripture itself: it names dhyāna as a source-state ("entering a quiet room … rising from dhyāna") and then spreads the vocabulary of dhyāna across the sphere of intimacy, which belongs to the category of conduct ("ever fond of seated meditation, in a quiet place, gathering and disciplining the mind"; "abiding unmoved as Mount Sumeru … abiding ever in one mark"). It then takes as its keystone Huisi's Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra's Course of Peaceful Practice — "the formless practice just is the peaceful practice … in all four postures the mind is ever in concentration" — and sets against it, as its explicit foil, the practice-with-marks (reciting the sūtra with a scattered mind, "not entering samādhi"); of special note is that Huisi expressly cuts this profound dhyāna off the three-realm ladder ("it does not rest on the desire realm, nor abide in form or formlessness … this is the bodhisattva's pervading practice"), so that it is no higher rung but a different modality. The paper then takes Zhiyi's half-walking, half-sitting Lotus-samādhi, his reading of "gathering and disciplining the mind = the concentration-gate," and his three-action calming-and-contemplation of "governing amid violence, at peace amid alarm," as the Tiantai consolidation of this concentration-as-conduct. Inheriting the preceding paper's living concentration of non-abiding in signs (Chan), this paper discloses that the Lotus holds a separate source for, yet the same conclusion as, the thesis that "concentration is not a seated station": Chan folds concentration inward to the limit of a single thought free of signs; the Lotus spreads concentration outward to fill the four postures. The two meet, from different scriptural lineages, at one place — the starting point of the Lotus-Huayan "totalizing" spine.28The Ocean-Seal Samādhi of the AvataṃsakaThis paper sets out the thesis that the Avataṃsaka's Ocean-Seal samādhi (sāgaramudrā-samādhi, 海印三昧) carries "concentration" to the very limit of its outward reach — a concentration in which the whole dharma-realm (dharmadhātu, 法界) appears at once, and at every point simultaneously: it is the samādhi-form of dharma-realm dependent-origination. Its scriptural archetype lies in the "Samantabhadra's Samādhi" chapter, where Samantabhadra enters "the samādhi of the Tathāgatagarbha-body of all Buddhas Vairocana," such that the swirling sea of the dharma-realm is wholly drawn in, and within every single mote of dust there is a Samantabhadra equally entering this one same samādhi; the "Sage's Crown" chapter ties this concentration directly to manifestation in a single thought-moment — "in a single thought-moment it pervades the ten directions … the spiritual power of the Ocean-Seal samādhi." Fazang then rebuilds the Ocean-Seal from a name within scripture into the ocean-seal's blazing manifestation (海印炳現), the essential body of the teaching (教體) upon which the whole of Huayan rests for its simultaneous total manifestation. This paper argues that the Ocean-Seal's reach outward to the limit, set against Chan's living concentration drawn inward to the limit, forms two poles that mirror each other and jointly bear witness to the one spine of this volume — that concentration is not a station among the four jhānas and eight attainments. Carrying forward the preceding paper's concentration-as-conduct of the Lotus, the present paper completes that spine, and lays a single faint thread toward the volume's closing question of concentration's return to prajñā.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.