The Five Gates of Mindfulness

Before working through the five gates individually, Tanluan sets out his own ten-part map of the entire prose commentary to come: the verse's general intent, the arising of contemplation and faith, the substance of contemplative practice, the purifying entry into the aspiring mind, skillful transformative dedication, the obstructions to bodhi, what accords with bodhi, the correspondence of name and meaning, the accomplishment of the vow, and the completion of beneficial practice. He then glosses "gate" (門) itself as simply meaning entry and exit — "as when a person, having found a door, passes in and out through it without obstruction." On this reading, the first four gates — worship, praise, aspiration, and contemplation — are gates for entering the Pure Land, while the fifth, dedication, is the gate for going back out again into the work of teaching. The structure of the whole practice, in other words, is not a straight line toward an exit from this world, but a door that swings both ways.

On the specific formula "Tathāgata, Worthy One, Perfectly and Fully Awakened One," Tanluan notes this names only three of the traditional ten epithets of a buddha — "since a full account would exceed what pen and paper could hold, the sūtras always select according to their own governing purpose rather than exhausting the list." He glosses each of these three in turn: Tathāgata, because "he comes as all buddhas come, by the peaceful path of reality itself, and does not go on to any further becoming" — the same term this site's other translations render "thus come"; Worthy One, because he has exhausted every affliction and is thereby worthy to receive the offerings of every being in heaven and on earth; and Perfectly and Fully Awakened One, because he knows the true, unbroken mark of every dharma, "where the working of the mind ceases and the path of language is cut off" — a knowing so total it can equally be called a kind of unknowing.

Tanluan devotes an unusually long digression to the gate of praise — specifically, to the question of whether merely holding a name in mind can actually accomplish anything. He distinguishes, with deliberately homespun examples, between cases where "the name is itself identical with the dharma" and cases where "the name differs from the dharma, the way a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself." Ordinary words are of the second kind — but he insists some names are of the first: an old charm against swelling, recited without any direct contact with the affliction, that nonetheless cures it; a nine-character phrase soldiers of his own day recited silently in battle, believed to turn aside weapons; a cramping muscle relieved simply by calling out the name of a quince, with no quince anywhere present — "this is something I have felt the effect of in my own body." If names this ordinary can carry this kind of power, Tanluan argues, how much less should Amitābha's own name, freely and specifically vowed by that buddha himself to save whoever calls upon it, be dismissed as a mere finger pointing at something else.

On śamatha and vipaśyanā, rendered in earlier translations simply as "stopping" and "observing," Tanluan objects that these single-character glosses are too broad to capture what this treatise actually means — "as though calling every kind of tree simply 'wood' were enough to distinguish a pine from a willow." He gives three specific senses in which this practice "stops": first, that single-minded recollection of Amitābha's own name and land already stops every evil, in the same way a fire is stopped before it starts; second, that the Pure Land itself, lying beyond the three realms, naturally stops any evil of body, speech, or mind in whoever is born there; and third, that Amitābha's own sustaining power as a fully awakened buddha naturally stops any lingering wish to settle for the lesser attainment of a śrāvaka or pratyekabuddha. Vipaśyanā, likewise, carries two specific senses beyond generic "observation": contemplating the land's three kinds of adornment so as to actually acquire their corresponding true merit, not merely picture them; and, having been reborn there and beheld Amitābha directly, coming to share, even before full attainment, in the very peace that fully realized bodhisattvas already possess.

The gate of dedication receives the note this page is built around. Tanluan divides dedication into two aspects: "the going aspect" (往相), in which one dedicates one's own accumulated merit to all sentient beings, vowing that all might go together to be reborn in Amitābha's Pure Land; and "the returning aspect" (還相), in which, having been reborn there and having accomplished the power of śamatha and vipaśyanā, one turns back and re-enters the dense thicket of birth and death, to teach and guide every sentient being toward the buddha-path together. "Whether going or returning," he concludes, "both are for the sake of drawing sentient beings across the sea of birth and death" — a single motion, not two separate acts, of leaving this world and then choosing, freely, to come back to it. Centuries later, this exact pairing became one of the load-bearing pillars of Shinran's own systematic theology in Japan, where he would go on to argue that even the "going" aspect of this dedication is itself already a gift of Amitābha's vow-power, rather than something the practitioner accomplishes unaided — a doctrinal move that starts, unmistakably, from this single sentence of Tanluan's.