The Five Approach-Gates
The treatise closes as it began: with a numbered structure of practice. Five gates — near, great-assembly, household, room, and garden-grove — lead a bodhisattva first inward, through four stages of arrival, and then back out through a fifth, into the same world he vowed to leave. The treatise's very last lines explain why this whole path moves faster than any other a bodhisattva could walk.
Five Gates, In and Back Out
如是菩薩智慧心、方便心、無障心、勝真心，能生清淨佛國土應知。是名菩薩摩訶薩隨順五種法門所作隨意自在成就。如向所說，身業、口業、意業、智業、方便智業，隨順法門故。
復有五種門漸次成就五種功德應知。何者五門？一者近門；二者大會眾門；三者宅門；四者屋門；五者園林遊戲地門。此五種門，初四種門成就入功德，第五門成就出功德。
入第一門者，以禮拜阿彌陀佛為生彼國故，得生安樂世界，是名入第一門。
入第二門者，以讚歎阿彌陀佛，隨順名義稱如來名，依如來光明想修行故，得入大會眾數，是名入第二門。
入第三門者，以一心專念作願生彼，修奢摩他寂靜三昧行故，得入蓮華藏世界，是名入第三門。
入第四門者，以專念觀察彼妙莊嚴，修毘婆舍那故，得到彼處受用種種法味樂，是名入第四門。
出第五門，以大慈悲觀察一切苦惱眾生，亦應化身迴入生死園煩惱林中，遊戲神通至教化地，以本願力迴向故，是名出第五門。
菩薩入四種門，自利行成就應知；菩薩出第五門，利益他迴向行成就應知。菩薩如是修五門行自利利他，速得成就阿耨多羅三藐三菩提故。
A bodhisattva who thus possesses the mind of wisdom, the mind of skillful means, the mind free of obstruction, and the mind of supreme truth is thereby able to give rise to a pure buddha-land — this should be understood. This is what is called a bodhisattva-mahāsattva's accomplishment of acting entirely at will, in accordance with the five Dharma-gates — the karma of body, speech, and mind, the karma of wisdom, and the karma of skillful wisdom, as spoken of above, according with these gates.
There are, further, five gates that bring about, by stages, five kinds of merit, which should be understood. What are the five gates? First, the near gate; second, the gate of the great assembly; third, the gate of the household; fourth, the gate of the room; and fifth, the gate of the garden grove, the ground of playful ease. Of these five gates, the first four accomplish the merit of entering, and the fifth accomplishes the merit of going back out.
Entering the first gate: by worshiping Amitābha Buddha for the sake of being born in his land, one attains birth in the world of Peace and Bliss — this is called entering the first gate.
Entering the second gate: by praising Amitābha Buddha, calling upon the Tathāgata's own name in accordance with its meaning, and practicing by contemplating the Tathāgata's own light, one attains entry into the ranks of the great assembly — this is called entering the second gate.
Entering the third gate: by single-mindedly and exclusively holding the vow to be born in that land, cultivating the practice of śamatha, the samādhi of quiescent stillness, one attains entry into the lotus-womb world — this is called entering the third gate.
Entering the fourth gate: by exclusively holding in thought and contemplating that land's own wondrous adornment, cultivating the practice of vipaśyanā, one arrives at that place and enjoys every kind of Dharma-flavored bliss — this is called entering the fourth gate.
Going out through the fifth gate: with great compassion, contemplating every suffering and afflicted sentient being, one manifests a responsive, transformed body, and turns back into the garden of birth and death, the forest of affliction, roaming there with spiritual powers as though at play, arriving at the ground of teaching and transformation, through the dedication of the power of one's own original vow — this is called going out through the fifth gate.
A bodhisattva's entering through the four gates should be understood as the accomplishment of the practice that benefits himself; a bodhisattva's going out through the fifth gate should be understood as the accomplishment of the practice of dedication that benefits others. A bodhisattva who, in this way, cultivates the practice of these five gates, benefiting both himself and others, thereby swiftly attains complete, unsurpassed, perfect awakening.
Tanluan reads these five gates as a single continuous architecture, arrival to departure: "among the entering aspects, first reaching the Pure Land at all is the aspect of the 'near' — that is, entering the definitely-settled company of the Great Vehicle, drawing near to unsurpassed, perfect awakening. Having entered the Pure Land, one then enters the ranks of the Tathāgata's own great assembly. Having entered that assembly, one then reaches the household where one settles and cultivates the mind. Having entered that household, one then reaches the very room where one's own practice is carried out. Practice accomplished, one then reaches the ground of teaching and transformation — and this ground of teaching and transformation is exactly the bodhisattva's own ground of playful ease, which is why the gate of going back out is named the garden-grove, the ground of playful ease." The image is domestic before it is doctrinal: approaching a house, being welcomed into its great hall, shown to a room to settle in, given a private chamber to work in — and only then, once the work is done, stepping back out into the garden to play, which turns out to mean teaching everyone else the same path.
On why this final activity is called "play" (遊戲) at all, given how much labor teaching and liberating beings actually involves, Tanluan gives two distinct senses. First, a sense of ease: "it is like a lion catching a deer — nothing about it is difficult; the bodhisattva liberating sentient beings is exactly the same, as effortless as play." Second, a sense of ultimate emptiness: "the bodhisattva observes that sentient beings are, in the end, without any real existence at all — and though he liberates measureless beings, in truth not a single being is thereby brought to extinction. He shows the liberation of beings the way one shows a game being played." The word does double duty: it names both how little strain the activity costs an accomplished bodhisattva, and how, from the standpoint of ultimate truth, there was never really anyone there to be saved or anyone doing the saving — a claim this treatise never treats as reason to stop acting, only as the correct way to understand what the acting actually is.
Tanluan closes his entire two-fascicle commentary by returning, one final time, to the question that opened it: why does this path move faster than any other? His answer is not a fresh argument but three specific citations from Dharmākara's own forty-eight vows, offered as proof: the vow that ten recollections of his name will secure rebirth; the vow that everyone born in his land will abide in the definitely-settled company, certain to reach extinction; and the vow that bodhisattvas born there will, by his own power, surpass the ordinary sequence of the bodhisattva grounds entirely. "By this reasoning," he concludes, "other-power stands as the predominant condition — how could it be otherwise?" He then offers a final pair of images to distinguish the two kinds of power at stake: self-power is like a person who, fearing the three evil destinies, keeps the precepts, and through the precepts cultivates meditative concentration, and through concentration develops spiritual powers, and through those powers is finally able to roam the four continents — a long chain, each link forged by the practitioner's own unaided effort. Other-power is like "a weak man who cannot even mount a donkey unassisted — yet, following in the train of a wheel-turning king, rides through empty space across all four continents without the slightest obstruction." His very last line reads less like commentary than like a direct address to whoever is reading this eleven centuries and more after he wrote it: "How foolish are the students who come after me! Hearing that there is another's power to ride upon, they ought to give rise to faith in it at once — do not hem yourselves in by your own narrow measure."
Collection Complete
This closes the Rebirth Treatise in full: a twenty-four-stanza verse, a prose commentary working through the five gates of mindfulness, the land's seventeen adornments, the Buddha's eight, the bodhisattvas' four, a single phrase folding all twenty-nine together, and a closing architecture of five gates leading in and back out again — read throughout with Tanluan's sixth-century commentary, the founding text of systematic Pure Land doctrine in China. The base treatise itself closes with one small textual note this site's own Ten Doubts collection makes relevant: a colophon records that Zhiyi, reading this very treatise, judged one character in its thirteenth stanza — "realm" (界), in "a realm of Great Vehicle wholesome roots" — to be a scribal corruption of "male" (男), a reading later commentators preserved without adopting. Whatever the truth of that single character, it is a small, concrete trace of Zhiyi's own direct engagement with this treatise — the same master this site's Ten Doubts treatise is traditionally, if disputedly, attributed to, here caught in the act of reading Vasubandhu's own words as closely as Tanluan did, and as this translation has tried to.
For the full glossary of terms kept consistent across all seven parts, see the translation notes. To start again from the beginning, return to the collection overview.