Preface · Where the Gate Opens
Anyone drawn to the Great Vehicle carries one question, mostly unspoken: am I qualified?
The question wears a thousand faces. My obstructions are heavy—what business have I with the bodhisattva path? I cannot even deliver myself—what talk of delivering beings? Shouldn't I first put myself right—best of all, realize some fruit—and then arouse the mind? Behind every variant stands the same picture: the road to buddhahood as a single long ladder, the śrāvaka's four fruits for its lower rungs, the bodhisattva path beginning only where they end. In that picture, the gate of the Great Vehicle opens on the rooftop of arhatship; and since the rooftop is hopelessly far, the arousing of the mind is stored away, year after year, in an attic marked "later."
Few think to ask the prior question: where does the canon itself set the gate?
This book points to the place where the canon set it, exactly as the texts have it.
One Name, One Long Road
The book is called The Bodhi Path. Bodhi is awakening; the bodhi path is the road to unsurpassed, perfect awakening. The road has fifty stations: the Ten Faiths, the Ten Abodes, the Ten Practices, the Ten Dedications, and the Ten Grounds—from the first thought of faith to the consecration of the Dharma-Cloud Ground; the scriptures say it takes three great incalculable eons.
The road is immensely long; its gate is immensely near. So this book has a single thesis, sayable in one sentence: the gate of the bodhisattva path opens at the arousing of bodhicitta, entered in a single thought; and past the gate runs a long road measured by accumulation. It does not read the card of "how many fetters severed"; it reads the card of "what mind has arisen." It does not measure what you have lost, but what you have amassed and for whom—the aspiration, the provisions, the six perfections, and that one vow of "arriving at the very place of realization, and not taking it." The fifty stations are fifty marks on that ruler of accumulation.
The Relation to the Previous Volume, Said Plainly First
The previous volume in this series is called The Four Fruits of the Path; it treats the śrāvaka way—the subtraction measured by severed fetters. Set the two volumes side by side and one misunderstanding springs up at once: that these are volume one and volume two of a single road—finish the subtraction first, and the accumulation follows; become an arahant first, and then the bodhisattva path opens.
It is exactly the reverse, and dismantling that picture is the first chapter's whole work. The two volumes describe two roads—parallel, separate tracks, not the front and back halves of one: the śrāvaka way measured by severance, exiting through realization; the bodhisattva way entered by aspiration, measured by an accumulation that does not take realization. So you need not read the previous volume first: this one begins at its own gate, and the gate stands at the arousing of the mind. Readers of the previous volume will, in this book's later half, recognize a familiar word—sever. The same knife returns, with another ledger; how the two roads mirror each other at their deepest point, the chapters on the Ten Grounds will tell.
Where This Book Stops
One matter, as ever, is owed at the front of the volume.
This book describes the walking—fifty stations, stretch by stretch, how they are passed. It writes to the end of the tenth ground and no further: the Dharma-Cloud's consecration, the falling within the number of the buddhas, the one subtle obstacle that remains—and there, at that door, the pen stops. The last two stations on the doorstep, equal awakening and sublime awakening, this book does not touch; they belong to another volume of this series.
There is also a twin volume on the axis of "attainment," which writes the bodhisattva's mastery—what the freedom this long accumulation yields actually is. The realization axis writes the walking; the attainment axis writes what is attained. This book keeps to the road; the view from the heights is in that other volume.
This Book Is Written for You
This book is not written for scholars. It does not debate, does not compare schools; it does one plain thing: it takes the gate and the ruler the canon itself established—where the gate stands, how the road is measured, why it is measured so—and tells them to you, stretch by stretch.
It is written above all for this reader: the one who carries the thought of liberating beings, and yet feels perpetually "not yet qualified," postponing the arousing of the mind year upon year. What this book most wants to put in your hands is the location of the gate—to tell you that it was never set at the top of a ladder of qualifications; it opens where that one thought of yours arises. The road past the gate is long—there will be regress, there will be grinding, there will be need of patience, and the book hides none of it—but the entering itself is far nearer than you supposed.
You need no Sanskrit, no memory for canonical numbering. The numbers and the diacritics are gathered in the appendices at the back; the main text keeps itself clean, and simply tells you the road.
Walk Slowly
The book has five parts, like five stretches of one road: find the gate; come to dwell; go out the door; hand the good over; enter the grounds. Best is to walk it from end to end—it is one continuous argument, and every piece laid down early is used again later. The impatient may finish Part One first: the gate is handed over there, and with the gate in hand, the rest of the road can be walked on your own.
At the Last
Entering the gate, in the end, is the exchange of one question for another: from "am I qualified for the bodhisattva path" to "this thought of mine—is it for escaping my own suffering, or for the liberation of all beings?"
However long this book runs, it runs for that one exchange. May you, reading, set down the anxious ruler of qualification and let that one thought arise; and from then on, enter at peace, and walk far.
Homage to our original teacher, Śākyamuni Buddha.