The physician who bowed to the boy
Who you'll meetA doctor with ten thousand students, and one question he asks before teaching anything
Between Meghaśrī and this session Sudhana meets two more monastics — a teacher who spent twelve years looking at the ocean, and a monk who walks in open space. Then the road brings him to somebody with a job.
Megha is a physician. When Sudhana finds him he is not healing anyone: he is seated in the Hall of True Dharma, on a lion-throne, with ten thousand people around him, teaching a sūtra. By any ordinary measure of who defers to whom, this is the most lopsided meeting so far. An eminent man at the height of his authority; a boy who has walked in off the road.
Sudhana does what he did on the mountain — bows to the man's feet, circles him, stands to one side, and asks. His question this time runs to eleven clauses. And Megha, instead of answering any of them, asks a question back.
What follows is the first genuine shock of the pilgrimage. It is not a miracle, and nothing is transformed. An elder simply gets the direction of respect backwards, in public, in front of ten thousand people, and the text treats it as the most natural thing in the world — so much so that Fazang's commentary has to stop and explain why anybody should find it strange.
- Bodhicitta (菩提心) — "the mind of awakening": the resolve to become a buddha for the sake of every being. In this episode it is not treated as a beginner's preliminary but as the thing the whole path is built out of, and the thing Megha bows to.
- 五體投地 — "five limbs to the ground": the full prostration, forehead, both hands and both knees touching the floor. It is what a monastic does before a buddha. It is what Megha does before the boy.
- The Dharma-gate called Never in Vain (所言不虛法門) — Megha's single attainment, and the strangest one yet: perfect comprehension of every language spoken by every kind of being, throughout three thousand great-thousand worlds.
The episodeOne page, and the longest reading note in the first twenty parts
Read the whole of Part 20, including the reading notes. Fazang's note after the first passage is unusually long because he clearly expects the reader to be troubled, and he answers the trouble three separate ways.
Megha the Physician, and Why the Elder Bows First
Eleven questions, a prostration, thirteen similes for what a bodhisattva is, a cloud of light from the physician's own mouth — and a Dharma-gate that turns out to be about language.
Read it →One detail you will meet in the notes and should not skip: Fazang stops to flag a manuscript problem in the title of the sūtra Megha is teaching, reporting that some editions write 論 ("treatise") where two Sanskrit source texts give 輪 ("wheel"). It is a small thing. It is also a good picture of what reading with a commentary is actually like — a man in seventh-century Chang'an checking his copy against somebody else's, and saying so.
Three moments, read closely
1. He got down off the throne.
Megha does not praise Sudhana from where he is sitting. He leaves the seat, and then keeps going all the way to the floor.
"At that time the physician descended from his lion-throne, prostrated himself with all five limbs touching the ground, and reverently bowed to Sudhana; having bowed, he scattered marvelous golden flowers and every kind of jeweled flower, priceless maṇi jewels, the finest sandalwood powder, and priceless jeweled robes, covering him with them …"
Notice the order of events. Megha asks whether the boy has raised the mind of awakening; Sudhana says he has; the prostration happens immediately, before a word of teaching has passed between them and before Sudhana has demonstrated anything whatsoever. The boy is, at this point, a person who has made a decision. That is the entire basis for the honour.
And there is no audience management. Ten thousand people are watching their teacher lie face-down in front of a stranger who has not said anything yet.
2. Fazang's answer: the first mind is the harder one.
The commentary offers three explanations, escalating. The first is conventional — honouring the Dharma by honouring whoever carries it. The second is Fazang's own: since the mind of awakening is the cause of buddhahood, anyone who honours the fruit is obliged to honour the cause. The third is a verse, and it is the one that actually does the work.
"Raising the mind and reaching its final end are, in the end, not different — but of these two minds, the first is the harder. One who has not yet crossed over, and yet resolves to bring others across first — it is to this that I bow, the very first raising of the mind."
This is a genuine reversal, and it is worth resisting for a moment before accepting it. Ordinarily we rank a completed thing above an intended one; the person who finished the book outranks the person who has decided to write one. The verse says the opposite, and gives a reason: the resolve comes before any of the resolver's own safety. Megha has crossed. Sudhana has not, and has decided to carry other people anyway. On this reading the boy is not being flattered. He is being correctly ranked.
Fazang notices something else, a few paragraphs later, that most readers would pass over: after the teaching begins, Megha returns to his throne. The commentary raises the obvious objection — 前既敬禮，今何故復坐, "having already bowed in reverence earlier, why does he now sit down again?" — and answers that the two moments are doing different things. The bow honoured a raised mind between equals. The seat belongs to a teacher who is about to teach. Nothing has been taken back.
3. And the attainment itself turns out to be language.
Every teacher discloses one gate. Megha's is not a samādhi, not a vision, not a power over the elements. His is called 所言不虛 — Never in Vain — and what it consists of is this:
"Good son, I have already accomplished the Dharma-gate called Never in Vain, discerning and understanding entirely the languages of every deva throughout the great trichiliocosm of three thousand worlds, and the languages of every nāga, yakṣa, gandharva, asura, garuḍa, kiṃnara, mahoraga, human, and non-human being … Good son, I know only this bodhisattva's own Dharma-gate called Never in Vain — how could I possibly explain a bodhisattva's own practices?"
A physician's mastery, in a text with every cosmic option available to it, is that he can be understood by anyone. Fazang glosses the gate's Sanskrit name as "attaining the dhāraṇī of sublime sound," and the episode has already shown it working: the light from Megha's mouth brings devas and Brahmās down to listen, and he expounds "through skillful means according with them" — that is, in whatever each of them speaks.
Then the disclaimer, exactly as in Session 1, and in the same shape. Understanding every language spoken by every being in three thousand worlds is, he says, one gate.
One practice, for this week
Find somebody who has recently decided to do something hard and has not got anywhere with it yet — started learning an instrument, started a degree at forty, started sitting, started again after stopping. You will probably not have to look far, and you almost certainly know already who it is.
Then do the thing Megha does: treat the decision itself as the achievement. Say so out loud, to them, without adding advice, without "if you keep it up," and without any version of the sentence that quietly measures them against you.
There is a second, harder version of this practice, and it is optional. Apply it to your own beginning — the one you have been discounting because you have not got anywhere with it yet.
Five questions
Answer from what you read. One attempt each.
"Good son, to the south of here there is a land called Grove-Dwelling; there is an elder there named Vimukta. Go to him and ask how a bodhisattva turns toward the bodhisattva path, cultivates the bodhisattva path, accomplishes the bodhisattva path, and reflects upon the bodhisattva path."
One question, left open
Whose beginning have you been quietly discounting because it has not produced anything yet?
The honest answers usually come in pairs — somebody else's, and your own. We are trained to respect completed things, and the training is so thorough that a person's resolve registers to us as, at best, a promissory note. Megha is at the top of his profession with ten thousand students in front of him, and he reads the room the other way round: the unfinished thing in the room is the harder thing in the room. You do not have to agree with him. But notice that disagreeing costs you the reason he gives, and the reason is not sentimental — it is that the boy decided to carry other people before securing himself.
Session 3 · Fire and swords
Sudhana is sent to an ascetic standing on a mountain of blades above a pit of fire, who tells him to climb the blades and jump in. For the first time on the road the boy does not obey — he doubts his teacher outright, and the text lets the doubt stand for a while before resolving it. The most uncomfortable episode of the Ten Abodes, and the one that says most about what trusting a teacher is and is not.