楞伽阿跋多羅寶經 卷二 · 自覺聖智一乘·煩惱障

A single piece of driftwood upon the sea, drifting this way and that with the waves — it does not sink, yet neither does it reach the shore. It is not that it cannot move; it is that the wind pushes it along, and it cannot be its own master. The scripture says: the śrāvaka is just such a piece of driftwood, buffeted about by the wind of "marks."

Mahāmati asks the Buddha: since in the end there is only the one vehicle, why not say it outright, and instead speak of three? The Buddha's answer is not that the Buddha is hiding the one vehicle and will not give it — it is that there is one who, at this moment, cannot take it up. Three things are unfinished: the affliction's present activity is cut off, but the lingering scent of the habit-energy is still there; the "self" is broken on the side of persons, but on the side of dharmas it still stands there; the birth-and-death of this life and the next is escaped, but that deeper layer of shifting and changing is not so much as touched.

You and I, at this moment, are for the most part just that piece of driftwood. We take ourselves for safe and sound, when in truth we are pushed along by the wind of the objective realm; we take ourselves for arrived at the shore, when in truth only half of it is emptied.

Yet the scripture paints a second picture too: the man drunk to the ground — the wine has, at the last, its day of wearing away; and one waking is no return to where he stood before, but a going toward the Buddha's supreme body. The driftwood tells you where you are trapped; the drunken man points to where you wake.

Now enter this passage, and look at those three things left unfinished — the awakening of the one vehicle is, when all is said, "self-realization"; it is a thing another cannot do in your stead. To wake, you must wake of yourself.

Technical terms of this division (the mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization, the one vehicle, the three vehicles, the śrāvaka, the pratyekabuddha, the afflictive obstruction, the karmic habit-energy, the no-self of dharmas, the death of birth-and-death by segments, the uncontaminated realm, the Tathāgata's inconceivable sovereign dharma-body) are kept as they stand.

〔Question〕Mahāmati asks the Buddha to teach the mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization and the one vehicle

At that time the bodhisattva-mahāsattva Mahāmati again said to the Buddha: "World-Honored One! I pray you, expound for us the mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization and the one vehicle. If the mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization and the one vehicle can be expounded, then I, together with the other bodhisattvas, well able to penetrate this mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization and the one vehicle, shall have no need to lean upon another, but shall be able of ourselves to penetrate the Buddha-dharma."

The Buddha told Mahāmati: "Listen closely, listen closely! and reflect well upon it, for I shall expound it for you."

Mahāmati said to the Buddha: "So be it. I receive your teaching wholeheartedly."

〔Answer〕The mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization · the mark of the one vehicle · none but the Tathāgata attains it

The Buddha told Mahāmati: "What the sages of old knew, handing it down and passing it on each to each, was the teaching that 'false imagining has no intrinsic nature of its own.' A bodhisattva-mahāsattva, alone in a quiet place, contemplating in awakened awareness of himself, leaning upon no other, apart from 'views' and from 'false imagining,' rising higher step by step, enters into the ground of the Tathāgata — and this is called the mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization.

"Mahāmati! And what is the mark of the one vehicle? It is this: to have won the awakening to the one-vehicle path, which I then call the one vehicle. And what is it to have won the awakening to the one-vehicle path? It is this: concerning the false imagining of 'the grasper and the grasped,' to raise no more false imagining in the place of things-as-they-truly-are — and this is called the awakening of the one vehicle. Mahāmati! this awakening of the one vehicle is not something the other outsiders, or the śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, or the great Brahmā kings, are able to win — none but the Tathāgata alone can win it. It is for this very reason that it is named the one vehicle."

Mahāmati said to the Buddha: "World-Honored One! why is it that you speak of three vehicles, and do not speak of the one vehicle?"

The Buddha told Mahāmati: "Because the śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas cannot of their own power enter into the dharma of parinirvāṇa, I do not speak of the one vehicle to any śrāvaka or pratyekabuddha. Understand: all śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas are subdued by the Tathāgata, are given the skillful means of tranquillity by the Tathāgata, and only thereby win deliverance — it is not by their own power. For this reason I do not speak the one vehicle to them.

〔Turn〕The afflictive obstruction's karmic habit-energy is not cut off · turning the mind toward the Tathāgata's dharma-body

"Furthermore, Mahāmati! because the 'afflictive obstruction's karmic habit-energy' of the śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas is not cut off, I do not speak of the one vehicle to any śrāvaka or pratyekabuddha. They do not awaken to the 'no-self of dharmas,' and cannot escape 'the death of birth-and-death by segments' — and it is for this reason that I speak the three vehicles to them. Mahāmati! if those persons should cut off the whole of the fault of the afflictions now arisen, together with the habit-energy, and should awaken to the no-self of dharmas; then, that whole fault of the afflictions now arisen together with the habit-energy having been cut off, and knowing too that the relishing of and clinging to the joy of samādhi is without intrinsic nature of its own — this is the awakening to the uncontaminated realm. Having awakened, they enter once more into that supramundane, supreme-supramundane uncontaminated realm, perfect and complete in every furnishing of merit, and shall then win the Tathāgata's inconceivable, sovereign dharma-body."

At that time the World-Honored One, wishing to restate this meaning, spoke in verse:

　　The vehicle of the gods and the vehicle of Brahmā,　the śrāvaka-vehicle and the pratyekabuddha-vehicle,
　　and the vehicle of the buddhas, the Tathāgatas —　these manifold vehicles I speak of;
　　but so long as the mind-stream is still turning,　none of these vehicles is ultimate.
　　When that mind-stream is wholly spent,　there is neither vehicle nor one who rides,
　　no 'vehicle' whatever to be set up,　and this I call the one vehicle;
　　only for the sake of guiding sentient beings　do I set forth in distinctions the manifold vehicles.
　　Deliverance is of three kinds,　together with that 'no-self of dharmas';
　　the afflictions and wisdom and the rest, all as one,　are, in the moment of deliverance, all left behind.
　　Just as a piece of driftwood on the sea　is forever turned about by the waves,
　　so too the foolish śrāvaka　is buffeted by the wind of 'marks.'
　　The afflictions now arisen having ceased,　and the folly of the habit-energy of the afflictions being cast off too,
　　he yet relishes the joy of samādhi,　abiding at ease in the uncontaminated realm.
　　With no ultimate resort to go to,　and yet turning back no more,
　　he wins the manifold samādhi-bodies,　and even through long aeons does not awaken.
　　Just as one deeply drunk　awakens only when the wine has worn away,
　　so too is that dharma of his awakening:　awakening, he wins the Buddha's supreme body.

Beginning from a question that presses hard

Mahāmati asks it point-blank: since the World-Honored One is, in the end, only the one vehicle, why does he always speak of three — śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva — and just will not say the one vehicle outright?

The question looks as though it asks only about a "gateway of teaching," but it presses to the root. If in the end there is only the one vehicle, are the three vehicles not then a provisional word, a skillful means? Yet the Buddha's answer does not circle round on "provisional and real." It points, plainly and concretely, to a single fact: it is not that the Buddha is hiding the one vehicle and will not give it — it is that the persons of the two vehicles still carry three things unfinished within them, and so that one vehicle is more than they can, at this moment, take up. These three the passage names in a single breath: the karmic habit-energy of the afflictive obstruction is not cut off; they do not awaken to the no-self of dharmas; they do not escape the birth-and-death of segments. Read on down these three lines, and the whole framework of the Yogācāra lineage — the two obstructions, the twofold no-self, the two kinds of birth-and-death — stands up within this one passage. So this passage is not about the gateway of teaching; it is about "where a practitioner still falls short of the Buddha."

The first thing unfinished: the present activity cut off, the habit-energy still there

Look first at the first line: the karmic habit-energy of the afflictive obstruction is not cut off.

Here two layers must be told apart. It is not that the persons of the two vehicles have cut off nothing of the afflictions — they have cut off the present activity of the afflictions; the coarse delusions of craving and anger that flare up in the moment, these the sages have indeed subdued and cut off. But when the affliction's present activity is cut off, there remains a further layer of "habit-energy": like incense carried out of a room, whose lingering scent yet clings to the walls; like a long-closed jar emptied out, whose smell yet perfumes the air. This residual perfuming is not the affliction itself, but the trace the affliction has perfumed in — so fine that the two vehicles' insight cannot reach to it, nor need it reach; for so long as they are out of the birth-and-death of segments, that is enough for their own individual release.

Hold this line up to the mirror of Yogācāra, and it shows exactly the dividing of the "two obstructions." The afflictive obstruction obstructs release; and there is a subtler one, the cognitive obstruction, that obstructs the wisdom that knows all things. What the two vehicles take as their object of counteraction is the afflictive obstruction alone, and that only to the layer of present activity; the cognitive obstruction, and the karmic habit-energy that lies beneath the afflictive obstruction, they leave wholly untouched. This is the source of that old Yogācāra saying: the two vehicles cut off the afflictive obstruction, but not the cognitive obstruction. This passage's line, "the habit-energy is not cut off," is precisely the scriptural ground for that saying. So long as the habit-energy is not exhausted, the wisdom that knows every kind is a day from full, and the inconceivable sovereignty of the buddha-ground is more than one can take up — and this is the first real reason for "not speaking the one vehicle," and not that the Buddha is stingy with the dharma.

The second and third: only half a "self" broken, only half a death escaped

The second line: they do not awaken to the no-self of dharmas.

The "self" is of two layers. One is the self of persons — taking the body-and-mind that is the coming-together of the five aggregates and clinging to it as a real self; this layer the two vehicles break, realizing the no-self of persons, and so are able to win escape. But there is a further, subtler layer, the self of dharmas — taking those "dharmas" that make up body-mind-and-world, whether form or mind, and clinging to each as having its own real substance; this layer the two vehicles do not break. Zonglei says it flatly: the two vehicles break the clinging to a person, but not the clinging to dharmas, and so it is said of them that "they do not awaken to the no-self of dharmas." They stand within "no-self," but in truth have stepped only halfway in: on the side of persons it is emptied, but on the side of dharmas it still stands there, solid and real. And the reason Yogācāra sets up the three natures and the threefold naturelessness is precisely to empty out this latter half as well — that the imagined nature is utterly without being, that the dependent nature is illusion-like, that the truly-perfected is thereby made manifest: this is what it is to awaken to the no-self of dharmas. Half a no-self will not bear the weight of the one vehicle.

The third line: they do not escape the birth-and-death of segments.

Birth-and-death, too, is of two layers. One is the birth-and-death of segments — a life of a set span and shape, receiving its recompense according to the deed, this life finished and another taken up; and it is just this layer that the two vehicles escape. But there is a further layer, the birth-and-death of transformation — the bodhisattva who turns his mind, casting off the coarse body, by the power of vow and the power of wisdom taking on that subtle support which shifts and changes thought by thought, until buddhahood is reached and it is spent at last; and this layer the two vehicles have not so much as touched the edge of. Zonglei points it out, following on: though they have cut off the body of afflictions that summons the segments, what they dwell in is still the segments, not yet the transformation. So "they do not escape the birth-and-death of segments" does not mean they are still turning in the wheel and suffering; it means the birth-and-death they have finished is only that coarse, segmented layer, and that deeper layer — the birth-and-death of transformation, which can be turned only by the fine counteraction of the clinging to dharmas and the cognitive obstruction — is still far from them. Read the three lines together: the habit-energy unexhausted, the clinging to dharmas unbroken, the transformation untouched — this is exactly that whole stretch of road the Yogācāra marks between "the utmost fruit of the two vehicles" and "the buddha-ground." The Buddha does not speak the one vehicle because to speak the one vehicle to a person standing here is to bid one still on the road to take the halfway mark for the terminus.

Two pictures: the driftwood and the drunken man

Once the doctrine has been said this far, what is most full of compassion in this passage is that it does not stop at the judging. It paints the person of the two vehicles two portraits — one his mark at this moment, one the road of his turning back hereafter.

First the driftwood. The scripture says: just as a piece of driftwood on the sea is forever turned about by the waves, so too the foolish śrāvaka is buffeted by the wind of "marks." This picture is seen through only when held up together with that ocean of the store-consciousness of the earlier scroll. There, the store-consciousness is the sea, the objective realm is the wind, the consciousnesses are the waves; here, the śrāvaka is just that one piece of driftwood on the sea's face. He too is upon this ocean of consciousness, he too is blown by the wind of the objective realm — only he has not recognized that this sea is his own mind's manifestation, and so he drifts with the wind of marks wherever it carries him, unable to be his own master. Put in the language of Yogācāra: not understanding that the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only, he is turned by marks. One piece of driftwood carries, upon it, just those four words, "not yet awakened to the no-self of dharmas" — it does not sink, yet neither can it go of itself to the far shore; it turns and turns there in the waves.

Then the drunken man. The scripture says: just as one deeply drunk awakens only when the wine has worn away, so too is that dharma of his awakening — awakening, he wins the Buddha's supreme body. This picture paints not a mark but a turning-point. Once the two vehicles are out of the segments, they relish the joy of samādhi, abide at ease in the uncontaminated realm, and can abide so, unawakened, through long aeons — like a man drunk to the ground, sunk in stupor, taking himself for safe and sound. Yet the scripture goes straight on to say: he turns back no more. This line is the crucial one — he is drunk, but he will not drink himself to death there; the wine of that samādhi-joy has, at the last, its day of wearing away. The wine worn off, the man awake, this waking is no return to where he stood before — it is "winning the Buddha's supreme body." Drunk, is to relish the samādhi; awake, is what the scripture-text says: the fault of the arisen afflictions cut off, awakened to the no-self of dharmas, and of the relished joy of samādhi it is known to be without intrinsic nature — the three things unfinished, here one by one finished. So the picture of the drunken man paints the whole arc of turning the mind toward the great vehicle: from the sinking, to the waking, to the going toward the Tathāgata's dharma-body. The first picture, the driftwood, tells where he is trapped at this moment; the second, the drunken man, points to where he wakes toward hereafter.

Onward Transmission

The judgment established in this passage — the two obstructions, the twofold no-self, the two kinds of birth-and-death, ending, by the habit-energy cut off, awakening to the no-self of dharmas, and entering the uncontaminated realm, in the turning toward the Tathāgata's dharma-body — the later Yogācāra treatises take up, one by one, in its meaning. Where the treatises judge that the two vehicles cut off the afflictive obstruction but not the cognitive obstruction, judge the twofold no-self of persons and dharmas, judge the two kinds of birth-and-death of segments and transformation, and judge that the mind-turning bodhisattva subdues and cuts off the habit-energy and turns the basis toward the dharma-body — every line cleaves to this passage's threefold judgment: the passage, upon the scripture, establishes their "what is not yet cut off, not yet awakened to, not yet escaped," and the treatises open this out into the fine judging of the stages of cultivation-and-realization. As for that line, "so too is that dharma of his awakening — he wins the Buddha's supreme body" — the fruit toward which the two vehicles go when drunkenness turns to waking becomes, in the Yogācāra, those two words, the transformation of the basis: turning the basis that is affliction and winning the great nirvāṇa, turning the basis that is the knowable and winning the great awakening. This passage's one stretch of prose and one set of verses says to the full "why the three vehicles are not ultimate, why the one vehicle belongs to the Tathāgata alone," and thereby lays down, upon the scripture, the very root of that whole later doctrine of turning the basis toward buddhahood.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement's noble wisdom of self-realization may be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and this passage cannot be declared the unique ground of Patriarchal Chan.