Part II, Chapter Two　The Truths of Cessation and the Path: Taking the Result as the Path

Cessation and the path share this chapter for a reason isomorphic with the preceding chapter's: esoteric Buddhism itself erases their boundary. What makes the Result Vehicle such a vehicle is that the path's content is enactment of the result. Cessation and the path are here not two truths but the noun and verb forms of one thing. Merger is itself the verdict.

I. The truth of cessation: a new timetable and new techniques

The esoteric truth of cessation inherits its goal, with two changes. One is the timetable: three great incalculable eons compressed into one life.1 The other is the list of techniques. The three bodies receive a manufacturing process for the first time: cultivate the illusory body through the subtlest wind-mind, establishing the cause of the enjoyment body; realize the Dharma body through clear light; attain Buddhahood through their union. The preceding three essays showed three fates of the truth of cessation. Madhyamaka deobjectifies and then reobjectifies it; Yogācāra retains its vocabulary and replaces its content; tathāgatagarbha claims it in advance as a premise. Esoteric Buddhism offers a fourth: industrialize cessation. Cessation ceases to be a state, as in the baseline, or a fact, as in tathāgatagarbha, and becomes a product: raw material, wind-mind; procedures, the stages; delivery date, this very body; quality inspection, signs of attainment. Criticism concerns two points. First, both the process's materials and its products lie beneath the line of observability: the vajra body, discussed in the preceding chapter. All industrialization's concreteness is concreteness within a blueprint. Second, shortening the duration depends on announcing a causal channel more efficient by orders of magnitude: the wisdom of entering the central channel far surpasses provisions accumulated over many eons. Yet the system sets this channel's efficiency coefficient itself, with no external calibration possible. Why is one session of deity yoga worth many eons of giving and keeping precepts? The answer lies only in the tantras' own promises. The timetable has changed; the grounds for changing it remain in the changer's hands.

II. The truth of the path: a fourth verb and what bears its weight

Transformation. The Hevajra Root Tantra's famous line is this verb's banner: “The world is bound by passion, and is also liberated through passion.”2 It presupposes that the energy of affliction and of awakening has one source, five poisons and five wisdoms, and becomes enactment in practice. Deity yoga makes fruition's body, speech, and mind daily exercises; buddha-pride establishes “I am the deity” as prescribed contemplative content. Look back at the preceding three systems' verbs. Each fails somewhere: confrontation lacks a construction plan; cultivation is demoted to foundation—in the Yogācāra essay, Part II, Chapter Four, cultivation is the foundation, confrontation the engine; disclosure has no operations. Transformation plus enactment appears to supply everything: object, procedures, daily exercises, assessment. Only one question about bearing weight remains: on what grounds can enactment become actual accomplishment? An actor plays a king every day; when does he become king? Trace the system's answer to its root and it is one sentence: because you were originally a king. The sole guarantee that buddha-pride is no falsehood and visualizing oneself as a deity no autosuggestion is the tathāgatagarbha premise: what is enacted is already present, and enactment merely awakens it. Every new mechanism thus rests its weight on the old guarantee. Esoteric Buddhism supplies construction details—how to visualize, how to breathe, what to practice first and next, things the preceding three systems indeed lacked. It does not supply the supporting structure: why these operations lead to Buddhahood still receives the answer “one is originally a Buddha.” The downstream construction plan is complete; upstream remains the door pushed open. The more intricate the engineering, the easier it is to forget where it hangs.

III. Buddha-pride: the last fetter becomes the first tool

The most startling alteration deserves its own section. On the baseline's road, conceit is one of the five higher fetters, listed with desire for form, desire for the formless, restlessness, and ignorance, eliminated only at the final threshold. Cessation of the sense “I am” is almost another name for liberation. Esoteric Buddhism makes a technically constructed pride the prescribed exercise on the generation stage's first day. Its defense is that buddha-pride takes the deity in emptiness as its object, not the five aggregates, and therefore produces no clinging. By the testing rule established in Essay Three, the old question must be asked: was “buddha-pride produces no clinging” encountered, or written into its definition? No observation precedes it; it is a property stipulated in an operating manual. The manual itself knows the risk, or it would need neither samaya's heavy penalties nor the famous “either up or down” analogy. A system using conceit as a tool knows that the tool injures hands. The baseline leaves the most dangerous affliction until last, laying down years of dispassion before dismantling it. Esoteric Buddhism moves it to the first day, with view as protection. Is that protection enough? The system itself answers that view alone is insufficient: the threefold supervision of teacher, vows, and lineage is also required. The truth of the path's safety is thus pledged once more to the teacher's authority, following the same direction as the preceding chapter's truth of origin pledging its criteria to qualification. Every rope converges on one stake.

IV. Corroboration: enactment is not unique to esoteric Buddhism

Enactment looks like an audacity unique to esoteric Buddhism, yet a Chinese counterpart long existed among its opponents. Chan has always presented itself as actual practice: no reliance on words, special transmission outside the teachings, direct pointing to the human mind, placing itself opposite ritual and doctrinal learning. Recent scholarship, however, questions this self-portrait. Chan realization's characterization as pure, immediate, and free of all mediation is largely a modern rhetorical construction, as Robert Sharf argues concerning modern discourse on “meditative experience.” In actual operation, Chan, from monastic regulations to repartee and kōans, is highly ritualized, and Song encounter dialogue is itself a stylized literary performance, as T. Griffith Foulk argues concerning Chan's ritual character.3 Once “direct and unmediated” ceases to be a settled verdict, a deeper isomorphism between Chan and esoteric Buddhism appears: both take enactment of fruition as the path. Esoteric Buddhism requires buddha-pride and visualization of the body as a deity; Chan requires belief that one is originally a Buddha and just sitting. Dōgen's “oneness of practice and realization” carries this to the limit. Zazen is no means to becoming a Buddha; it is itself Buddha-activity. One sits as a Buddha, rather than practicing toward Buddhahood. In ritual studies' terms, this is ritual's “subjunctive”: first enter a field of “as if already so,” then hope that “as if” solidifies into “is,” as in Seligman and colleagues' account of ritual's as-if structure.4

This corroboration serves the volume in three ways. First, enactment is a broader Mahāyāna structure, not unique to esoteric Buddhism. Chan's advertised “immediate actual practice” is part of it; esoteric Buddhism merely equips it with apparatus to the utmost. Second, it reconnects esoteric Buddhism with its nominal opposite, the Chinese tradition of actual practice. They share an engine and a point of support: whether “enacting” can become “being” finally rests in both cases on tathāgatagarbha's premise that “one is originally a Buddha.” Third, a shared mechanism brings a shared difficulty, the question this volume repeatedly asks: who verifies the equals sign between enacting a Buddha and being a Buddha, and when is it fulfilled? As usual, add a fair word, equally valid for Chan and esoteric Buddhism. Ritual's “as if” does not run idle. It really shapes mind and character, precisely ritual studies' positive argument; both meditation hall and maṇḍala can truly change a person. This volume does not deny that efficacy. It insists only that it belongs in another register: it proves that enactment does work, not that the work is suffering's cessation.

Taking the result as the path: the engine of enactment and what bears its weight

“Vajrayāna” labels esoteric Buddhism here. Its two actions are cultivating buddha-pride and visualizing one’s body as the meditation deity. The Chan box also contains the parenthesis “practice and realization are one,” omitted from the English image. “Performance” and “perform” mean enactment and enacting: the question is whether enacting can become being. The shared load-bearing premise is “a buddha from the outset.” The ritual “as if” means first entering “as if it were already so,” then expecting this to become actual being; it does not answer the question marked by the doubtful equals sign.

V. The circle at the summit, boundary, and conclusion

Nonmeditation at the summit makes the whole truth of the path a circle. Starting point and endpoint are the same sentence, with daily exercises counted in hundreds of thousands between them. The circle has two readings. Traditionally, heavy engineering is scaffolding for middling and lesser capacities; those of sharp capacity enter nonmeditation directly. Structurally, the circle exposes the separation of Result Vehicle claims from Causal Vehicle functions. If enactment truly makes fruition present, the sequence should not be so long; if the sequence is indispensable, “already arrived” is merely a claim. The system mediates between these readings through capacity: the sharp enter suddenly, the dull proceed gradually. Yet capacities cannot be known for oneself and are judged by the teacher: another rope to the stake. Boundary and conclusion: this chapter does not deny the pedagogical wisdom in designing the sequence. Imagination before body, coarse before subtle, makes reasonable training. The verdict concerns structure. The truth of cessation is industrialized, its timetable rewritten on grounds held by the system itself. The path's fourth verb has downstream detail but no upstream support: a complete construction plan still supported by an advance claim. Buddha-pride most compactly exemplifies separation of claims and functions. Every safety mechanism flows back to the teacher's authority. Verification remains for the next chapter.

References

References

  1. Three great incalculable eons measure the whole bodhisattva path; see the Treatise on the Ornament of Mahāyāna Sūtras, fascicle one (T31, no. 1604, p. 591c1–7). Fascicle twelve of the same treatise says the stage of cultivation takes two incalculable eons, the second and third great incalculable eons (pp. 626b16–23). The first runs from initial aspiration to seeing, the first ground; the second from the first to seventh grounds; the third from the eighth ground to Buddhahood. Two great incalculable eons therefore remain after seeing, the number used in the Yogācāra essay, Part II, Chapter Five, while the whole course takes three. What Buddhahood in this very body compresses is the whole course, so comparison with exoteric Buddhism uses three. Tantric claims of “accomplishment in this very life” take this as their background contrast. ↩

  2. “The world is bound by passion, and is also liberated through passion”: the Hevajra Root Tantra (Hevajratantra), II.ii.51 in D. Snellgrove's edition. The Sanskrit reads “rāgeṇa badhyate loko rāgeṇaiva vimucyate”; Snellgrove translates, “By passion the world is bound, by passion too it is released” (The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study, London Oriental Series VI, Oxford; translation at printed p. 93. The Sanskrit–Tibetan volume's running heading itself marks II. ii, so the verse number can be checked directly). The verse's next line, not quoted in the main text, should be read alongside: “viparītabhāvanā hy eṣā na jñātā buddhatīrthikaiḥ,” meaning that this reversed cultivation is unknown to outsiders within the Buddha's Dharma. The Chinese Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Ritual of the Great King of Teachings, the Vajra of Great Compassion and Wisdom of Emptiness (T0892), fascicle three, differs: “Sentient beings are burned by the fire of passion and bound by evil karma. Through skillful means, I teach them the fire of passion and bring liberation. If someone is burned by fire, they are heated again with fire. Through this very passion, the bonds of passion are cut. One who cannot know this reversed visualization is called an outsider within the Buddha's Dharma.” Its final two clauses correspond precisely to the Sanskrit's latter line: reversed visualization is viparītabhāvanā; an outsider within the Buddha's Dharma is buddhatīrthika. The same form already appears at I.ix; T0892, fascicle two, reads, “They are bound by the aggregates and so forth; if worldly delusion and darkness are truly known, liberation is attained through those very bonds.” The general formula of taking desire as the path is widely taught in Highest Yoga tantras. ↩

  3. On the reading of Chan “meditative experience” as pure, immediate, and unmediated being largely a modern construction, see Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience”, Numen 42:3 (1995), and his “Ritual”, in D. S. Lopez Jr. (ed.), Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, University of Chicago Press, 2005. On Chan's ritual character, especially in the Song, and encounter dialogue's literary character, see T. Griffith Foulk, “Myth, Ritual, and Monastic Practice in Sung-Dynasty Ch'an”, in P. B. Ebrey & P. N. Gregory (eds.), Religion and Society in T'ang and Sung China, University of Hawai'i Press, 1993. Dōgen's “oneness of practice and realization,” also expressed as their equality, appears in Bendōwa of the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. For sudden and gradual approaches and seeing one's nature in Chan, see this book, Volume One, Essay Ten. Foulk's article has not been verified against the original publication. Two other books on the same subject can be checked. First, on encounter dialogue as a literary genre, see John R. McRae, “Encounter Dialogue and the Transformation of the Spiritual Path in Chinese Ch'an.” In R. E. Buswell Jr. & R. M. Gimello (eds.), Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought, University of Hawai'i Press, 1992, beginning at printed p. 339. Printed p. 340 states: “The texts of Ch'an encounter dialogue, as they exist today, are not journalistic accounts of actual events, although centuries of Chinese readers and practitioners have assumed that they are. Rather, they are literary re-creations of how the enlightened masters of the past must have spoken and acted.” Printed p. 341 adds that this material “may not have appeared as a genre of Ch'an literature until sometime during the tenth century”. The same volume also has Gimello's essay on learning and writing in Northern Song Chan, beginning at printed p. 371, for comparison. Second, on ritual, see Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism. Princeton University Press, 1991, printed p. 314: “what happens when the incongruency is the ritualization itself, when ritual disguises itself as nonritual, as in the Chan 'encounter dialogues' or in sitting meditation? What goes on when spontaneity itself is ritualized, when immediacy…is mediated by ritual, when ultimate truth is framed by conventional truth?” One limit must be recorded: McRae dates the emergence of encounter dialogue as a genre to the tenth century, after Mazu and his fellow houses but before the early Song. Both books discuss ritual and literary character as results of a long development since the late Tang, not an invention exclusive to Song authors. ↩

  4. For ritual as the establishment of a “subjunctive,” “as-if” world, see Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett & Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity, Oxford University Press, 2008. The introduction, printed pp. 7–8, states the outline; chapter one develops it. ↩