Chapter 7: Leaves in the hand, metaphysical restraint and inevitable leakage¶

In the Sīsapā grove, the Buddha picks up a few leaves and asks the bhikkhus: are there more leaves in my hand or in the forest? They answer: the leaves in your hand are few; those in the forest are many, beyond comparison. The Buddha says: what I have directly known but have not taught you is like the leaves in the forest; what I have taught is like the leaves in my hand. Why have I not taught the rest? Because it is not beneficial, not fundamental to the holy life, and does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, and nibbāna. What have I taught? This is suffering; this is its origin; this is its cessation; this is the path leading to its cessation.¹

The question suspended at the end of Chapter 2 now falls due: how much of this restraint was subsequently maintained, and through what cracks did leakage occur? Each of the first six chapters encountered cracks in its own territory. This chapter brings the cases together to clarify two things: why contact with metaphysics is inevitable, and why restraint itself becomes a mold for leakage.

Contact is inevitable. To teach a path out of the world from within the world, one must requisition tools on the spot. Aggregates, elements, and sense bases are implements for taking stock; fire, lamps, cities, and paths are implements of simile; heavens and hells are stages already in place; "I" and "person" are pronouns that cannot be retired. Every concept is registered as a resident of the world; every borrowing retains the accent of its place of origin. The teaching can prescribe how borrowed words are to be used: aggregates are processes, not components; elements are qualities, not basic constituents; destinations are places to go, not permanent estates. But prescribing usage is easy; canceling residency is impossible. Concepts already have frayed edges. What kind of remainder remains in nibbāna with remainder? What kind of consciousness is "consciousness, nonmanifest, boundless"? What kind of "place" is a place in a realm? What does "Buddha" refer to in "the Buddha after death"? These loose edges do little harm in direct teaching, where a living teacher can trim them at any time. When the teacher is gone, the edges become gaps. Nor does borrowing happen only once. When the texts enter Chinese, words borrow another set of residence papers: the aggregates become yin (阴), elements become jie (界), and destinations become dao (道), each taking on a Chinese accent. When they enter modern languages, another round follows: process, structure, system, and consciousness each carry the accent of the laboratory or lecture hall. The surface of leakage opens anew at every retelling. This book stands on that surface too. This is why the reading guide warns that the texts must come first: this book is likewise a retelling through borrowed words, likewise works with borrowed concepts, and addresses the warning to itself before anyone else. Contact is therefore a cost of teaching, not an error. Metaphysics does not break down the door; it comes in with language.

The shape of silence will be inherited. The teaching's immediate response to frayed edges is restraint: the fourteen questions are set aside, all four alternatives rejected, profundity held back from exposition, and similes stopped when the process ends. As this essay has repeatedly shown, these silences are all right for the occasion. For Vaccha, silence keeps him from falling into either annihilationism or eternalism; for Māluṅkyaputta, extracting the arrow comes before checking residence papers; for Ānanda, stopping the exclamation that dependent arising is so plain prevents him from describing a forest as a bonsai. Silence suited to the occasion is medicine. But the medicine dies with the person, while silence's shape remains: a vacant plot marked "no answer here." To later people, that plot is a vacuum. A vacuum transmits no content; it transmits shape. It tells posterity precisely that a position exists here and waits to be filled. Nor are those who fill it malicious intruders. Most are earnest people forced to speak by actual circumstances: a debating monk confronting an opponent with nowhere left to retreat; a Dhamma teacher facing the bereaved, unable to offer only silence; a commentator whose very duty, when faced with disciples' questions, is to mend the frayed edges. Chapter 5 said that every teaching has a setting. The setting does not disappear; what disappears is the teacher who knows when to stop. Buildings gradually occupy the vacant ground. Doctrines of the Buddha's bodies later rise in the place left by the question of the Tathāgata after death; an abiding consciousness is read out of the rhetoric of the verse on consciousness ceasing; the point where one stops before profundity becomes a system's foundation. This book sees here the common mechanism behind the gaps recorded throughout this essay: restraint leaves not zero but negative space, and negative space makes the best mold.

A catalogue of tools will harden. This essay has counted five cases: four, five, or six elements; two sets of three kinds of craving; twelve, ten, nine, or four links; five or six destinations; and fruits further divided into seven-returners, those who go from family to family, and single-seeders. The lists can expand and contract because they are catalogues of tools. But a catalogue of tools has a fate of its own. Repeated use creates pressure for fixed forms; slots used long enough turn from containers into structures. The labels come from the discourses, the shelving from the treatises. After standing long enough, the shelving finally calls itself a building. Precise divisions across three lives, the systematization of thirty-one places, the rate of the cosmic clock, the genealogy of stages: each chapter has shown finished products of this fixing of forms. Fixing is not wholly bad, still less malicious. It is the engineering of memory: in an oral world, what can be recited survives. There is also a structural necessity. While a living teacher is present, a list can be trimmed as it is taught; without the teacher, the list must explain itself. Commentary then enters, and its job is precisely to mend the edges. Mending means fixing the form. Yet neither the engineering nor the commentary will remember on the user's behalf which step is cataloguing and which is assertion. Only the reader can hold that boundary.

Genres have directions of their own. Leakage enters through the inertia of genres as well as the frayed edges of concepts. Buddha biography is typological: seven Buddhas share one pattern, so episodes can migrate. The four outings move from Vipassī to Gotama, and no one finds the fit awkward. Prediction is a genre of guarantee. There is only one step from a guarantee by inference to a guarantee by a list of names. From a law to a list, a system of appointments replaces a system of inference. Verse is a rhetorical genre: a line of poetry about "consciousness, nonmanifest, boundless" becomes doctrine in a prose reader's hands. A list of miracles is a proliferating genre. The one Ānanda could recite was already long. Later biographies did not copy the Buddha's addition about knowing as things really are; they copied the list. Genre is a means of transport; its own shape does half the work of deciding what it carries. In entrusting its content to these genres, the teaching also entrusted it to their inertia.

The teaching's psychology predicted the teaching's fate. The four points above are only channels; the driving force comes from elsewhere. The circuits drawn in Chapter 4 of this essay do not stop turning when their object becomes the Buddha's teaching. The circuit of proliferation keeps taking orders: a teaching enters perception; perception gives rise to thought; thought gives rise to proliferation; perceptions and categories born of proliferation turn back and assail the person. The production line of sixty-two views does not shut down because its raw material is sacred. Craving conditions clinging, and clinging already includes clinging to views and to doctrines of self. The dispossessed owner's impulse, expelled from the five aggregates in Chapter 3, has not lost its job. It has found new hosts in doctrine: abiding consciousness, the majestic Buddha-body, the true and permanent self. This book's verdict in this chapter is this: leakage is the actual working of dependent arising in doctrinal history; it has nothing to do with invasion from outside. A restrained teaching entrusted itself to an unrestrained process. In this essay's own simile, the final link in the Honeyball circuit is the person being assailed by what they proliferate; the final link in the history of the Buddhist community is the teaching being assailed by its own concepts. Yet the prediction also has a positive half. Within the same Sutta Piṭaka, remedies and sources of illness have always run side by side. The raft and snake similes regulate the hand's way of grasping a teaching; the four imponderables regulate the boundaries of calculation; the mirror of the Dhamma turns the question of rebirth into self-verification. Bhikkhu Bodhi's instruction to treat it as a map takes up that same tradition. The acts of restraint seen throughout this essay are all the same hand taking off the crown: the Buddha stopping Ānanda, the Buddha seeing but initially not speaking, and one item on knowing as things really are added to the end of the miracle list. Leakage and self-cleansing are two concurrent currents. The developments discussed in the following essays and in Volume III are therefore a prolonged tug-of-war between two forces, not a curve of uninterrupted decline.

The gaps brought together. The gaps encountered in the first six chapters form one list. The direct reckoning in the right-hand column lies outside this essay: here the gaps are identified; their reckoning belongs to the respective volumes and essays.

Back to the hand. When the leaves are offered, the forest does not disappear. It stands in silence, a place each generation enters for itself. Some bring back leaves of the same family and genus as those in the hand; others bring leaves from different trees. Both say they found them in the forest, and neither is lying. The entire mechanism of restraint and leakage ultimately comes to this: the untaught Dhamma will not guard itself. It can only be entrusted to the few leaves that were taught, and the wind will move the leaves. The analysis of this essay closes here. With the mechanism explained, one thing remains to be handed over: the author himself. The next chapter leaves analysis behind. The author lays out his own experience as this essay's final exhibit.

References¶

This chapter closes the essay's analysis. The texts and arguments it discusses are documented in the notes to the first six chapters and are not listed again; only one newly cited text is added.