Opening, and Giving Without Dwelling

Taixu reads the opening line's six short elements — 如是 (this very teaching), 我聞 (heard directly, by Ānanda), 一時 (a time), 佛 (the teacher), the named place, and the assembly of 1,250 — as the "six certainties" that authenticate every sūtra: what was heard, who heard it, when, by whom it was taught, where, and before whom. Even 我聞 gets a caveat: strictly speaking there is no fixed self doing the hearing, only causes and conditions coming together — "hearing that does not really hear, a hearing with nothing heard" — but the word is kept for everyday, workable speech.

What Taixu draws attention to, though, is what this sūtra's occasion is not. Other Mahāyāna sūtras open with the earth shaking or light streaming from the Buddha's brow. This one opens with him getting dressed, taking his bowl, walking door to door without favoring the rich over the poor, eating, washing his feet, and sitting down. "Ordinary daily conduct is itself the Buddha-dharma," he writes — walking, standing, sitting, lying down, the ordinary mind itself, none of it separate from the teaching. Before Subhūti asks a single question, the sūtra has already shown its answer once, silently, in the shape of an unremarkable morning.

Subhūti's own name, Taixu notes, already carries the theme: his family's storehouse was found mysteriously empty the day he was born, so he was named "Born Into Emptiness" — and he grew up to be the disciple most at home in emptiness of all. His question borrows a mother's and a father's two ways of caring for a child: 護念, "watching over," is like a mother who keeps her child in mind — think of the child and it thrives, forget it and it withers; 付囑, "entrusting," is like a father handing over the family estate to a grown son, charging him to carry it well. Both describe how the Buddha holds his bodhisattvas: minding their inner growth, and handing them the outer work.

Taixu's sharpest observation is about the answer the Buddha promises but has not yet given: "abide like this, subdue the mind like this" points forward to what the next two sections will actually say — there is no separate technique for subduing the mind on top of learning how to abide; grasping after one more method to control the mind is itself the disturbance. He compares it to Bodhidharma and his student Huike: Huike begged him, "my mind is not at peace — pacify it for me." Bodhidharma answered, "bring me this mind, and I will pacify it." Huike searched, and said, "I have looked for it, and it cannot be found." "Then," said Bodhidharma, "I have already pacified it for you." The Buddha's promised answer works the same way — not a new mind laid over the old one, but seeing that there was never a fixed thing there to subdue.

Taixu walks through the nine categories one by one — egg-born, womb-born, moisture-born, transformation-born; possessing form or formless; possessing perception, without perception, or neither — as the tradition's complete inventory of every possible kind of being in the three realms, leaving nothing outside the bodhisattva's vow. He pauses on the beings "without perception" to tell a cautionary story: a meditator, deep in the highest formless absorption, found the cries of birds and the splashing of fish unbearably distracting and privately resolved that he would one day eat every last one of them. He held that meditative state — the very summit of what samsaric concentration can reach — for tens of thousands of aeons, and still, on emerging, fell back into the round of rebirth: first as a wildcat that ate fish and birds, then into hell. "The three realms are one great prison," Taixu writes; "the world is one great sea of suffering." No depth of concentration alone gets a being out, only wisdom does.

The turn in the passage — liberating countless beings, and yet "in truth no being at all has been liberated" — is where that wisdom gets named directly. Taixu explains that clinging to just one of the four notions pulls in all four at once: call yourself "I," and there is already a self; grant that self a human shape among others, and there is a person; place it among the nine kinds of beings, and there is a being; grant it a lifespan, and there is a lifespan. A bodhisattva who privately thinks "I am the one liberating them" has, in that very thought, reintroduced a fixed self, a fixed other, and every affliction that follows from the split between the two — falling, Taixu says pointedly, short of even the emptiness of self an arhat already sees, let alone the emptiness of both self and things a true bodhisattva must see.

Taixu takes this section as the Buddha's first concrete answer to Subhūti's question — not a further explanation, but an instruction to actually do something. Giving, he notes, traditionally comes in three kinds: material giving, giving of the teaching, and giving of fearlessness or protection — and because giving heads the list of the six pāramitās, practicing it fully is said to already contain the other five within it. The six objects named here — form, sound, smell, taste, touch, mental object — stand in for the six senses and the six kinds of consciousness built on them; to give "without dwelling" on any of the six is simply to give without the mind fastening onto anything at all: not the giver, not the gift, not the receiver, not even the merit accumulating from the act.

His gloss on the space-in-ten-directions comparison is direct: giving that still dwells on a mark nets only the finite, countable rewards of gods and humans — a return that can, in principle, be measured. Giving that dwells on nothing is unmeasurable for the plainest of reasons — it was never gathered up as a possession belonging to anyone in the first place, so there is nothing there to add up. This is, Taixu says, exactly how a bodhisattva "abides": not by fixing the mind on some higher object, but by giving in a way that leaves the mind nowhere to land.