In the classical Sanskrit life of the Buddha, a prince rises in the night. His wife and child are asleep, the palace is silent, and his charioteer saddles a horse named Kanthaka. At the edge of the city he cuts off his hair with his sword and gives away his ornaments. Whatever else this scene says, it says one very simple thing: someone has walked out of a door and does not intend to come back.
A millennium and a half later, in the Himalayas, the Omniscient Longchenpa writes down a song. He draws it from the Tantra of the Union of the Sun and Moon and explains it as a song of dharmatā, the nature of things, which takes up the intent of Samantabhadra in union with Samantabhadrī. Two lines stand near its centre:
རྩ་བ་མེད་ཅིང་རྟེན་མེད་ལ། །
གནས་མེད་ལེན་མེད་ཆོས་ཆེན་པོ། །
rtsa ba med cing rten med la / gnas med len med chos chen po
“Rootless, without support, homeless, ungrasping: the great Dharma.”
The word gnas med is the Tibetan for Sanskrit apratiṣṭhita, anālaya and aniketa, and Tibetan usage itself glosses it as “homeless”. Here it is not said of a monk or a prince. It is said of ultimate reality.
The distance between the prince at the city gate and the Song in the Himalaya is the distance this history has to cross. At the start the word names a deed, leaving a house. At the end it names the nature of everything, and it ends in a place that was never built. In between, the thing that is left behind changes six times, and each time it is closer to the one who is leaving. First it is a household, then a pond, then the builder of the house. Then it is the clinging that is the home of consciousness, then the peace of nirvāṇa itself as a place to rest, and finally the ground. When the last of these has been left, nothing remains to be left, and the departure turns out to have been the nature of the one who departed.
I. The Door
The oldest Buddhist sentence about leaving is a formula, repeated hundreds of times in the Nikāyas and the Vinaya. In Pāli it reads saddhā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajanti: out of faith they go forth from the house into homelessness. In the Sanskrit of the Mūlasarvāstivāda and the Mahāyāna it is agārād anagārikāṃ pravrajati. The Tibetan translators fixed it as khyim nas khyim med par rab tu ‘byung ba. The sentence has the same shape in three languages, and the shape rewards slow reading.
First, the destination is a state, not a place and not a person. Anagāriya is an abstract noun in the same way that agāra is a building. The one who goes forth does not go from a house to a hut or a cave or a forest. He goes from a building to a condition. And the condition is named only by negation, as if the single honest name for where one is going were the denial of where one has been.
Second, the verb is a verb of walking. Pabbajati and pravrajati come from pra-√vraj, “to go forth”, and one who wanders about is a parivrājaka. The act is physical and social: a man leaves his fields, his kin, his hearth fire, his debts and his name. It is in the first place a matter of the road.
The formula belongs to the whole world of the śramaṇas, the wandering seekers of the Gangetic plain, and was not created by Buddhist masters. The Jain canon has it almost word for word, agārāo aṇagāriyaṃ pavvaiyaṃ. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad says that the wanderers (pravrājinaḥ) go forth desiring this world, which is the Self (4.4.22). What Buddhist masters added to the inheritance was a description of what the going forth feels like. The Pabbajjā Sutta of the Sutta Nipāta, which tells of the Buddha’s own departure, gives it in two lines. The prince reflects that household life is a crowded place, a dusty haunt (sambādho’yaṃ gharāvāso rajassāyatanaṃ), and that the going forth is like the open air (abbhokāso va pabbajjā), and having seen this he went forth.
Abbhokāsa means “open to the sky”. It is the oldest answer the tradition gives to the question of what homelessness is, and the answer is an element, not a deprivation. A house is the place that shuts out the sky, and the one who leaves it has not lost a shelter but gained an expanse. The sky comes back at the far end of this history, and it is the same sky.
The Sanskrit word that gives these pages their name belongs to the same family. Niketa is a dwelling, and aniketa is one who has none. The Bhagavadgītā uses it of the devotee dear to Kṛṣṇa, who is even in praise and blame, silent, content with whatever comes, aniketaḥ sthiramatiḥ, homeless and of steady mind (12.19). The two words sit oddly together, since steadiness is exactly what a house is for. The Gītā says that one can be steady without a place to stand.
The classical commentators sense the strangeness, and they gloss aniketa in two ways. Some read it as “without a fixed residence”, a fact about where a person sleeps. Some add that it can also mean “free from delusion about a home” (niketa-moha), a fact about the mind. The commentators are reading the word in two registers at once, as a description of a life and as a description of a freedom, and the history that follows is the story of the second reading slowly swallowing the first.
II. The Deer and the Swan, the Fish and the Pond
The earliest Buddhist verse gives homelessness a set of images, and the images already contain an argument.
In the Rhinoceros Sutta of the Sutta Nipāta, a refrain closes every stanza: eko care khaggavisāṇakappo, wander alone like the horn of a rhinoceros. Among the stanzas is one about a deer: migo araññamhi yathā abaddho yenicchakaṃ gacchati gocarāya, as a deer in the forest, unbound, goes wherever it wishes to graze, so a wise man, looking to his own freedom, should wander alone. The word to notice is abaddho, unbound. The deer is not homeless because it lacks a house. It is homeless because nothing holds it. Its freedom is the absence of a tether, and the forest is only the place where that absence can be seen.
The Dhammapada offers two companion images, and they look at first like opposites. In verse 91 the mindful ones strive on and take no delight in a dwelling (na nikete ramanti te), and like swans leaving a pond they leave home after home (okam okaṃ jahanti te). The noun here is niketa, the very root of the Sanskrit aniketa. The swan leaves the pond without a pang, because its element is the sky and the pond was only a place to stop.
In verse 34 the same departure looks like a calamity. This mind, the verse says, quivers like a fish drawn from its watery home (okamokata ubbhato) and thrown on dry land, for it is trying to escape the realm of Māra. Oka means a dwelling, and in this verse it also means water. A mind that has not yet learnt to live without its home thrashes like a fish on the shore.
It is the same event told twice. For the fish, leaving the water is death. For the swan, leaving the pond is flight. The difference lies not in the departure but in what the one departing is, and the two verses together make the point that homelessness is a freedom only for those who are not fish. This is why the tradition pairs the going forth with practice. It is not enough to remove a being from its element. The being must become the kind of being whose element is the sky.
Verse 87 states the destination in three words: okā anokaṃ āgamma, having come from the home to the homeless. The Pāli word for the homeless state, anoka, is the negation of oka, the dwelling the fish loses and the swan leaves.
III. Two Kinds of Homelessness
Verse 404 of the Dhammapada makes a distinction that is easy to miss and that matters more than anything else in the first stratum of the story. It says that one who is aloof both from householders and from the homeless (asaṃsaṭṭhaṃ gahaṭṭhehi anāgārehi cūbhayaṃ), a wanderer without a dwelling (anokasārī), with few wishes, is the one it calls a brahmin.
The verse separates two words. Anāgāra is the institutional homeless, the monk who has gone forth from the household and joined the community of the homeless. Anokasārī is the one who wanders without any dwelling at all. The verse praises someone who does not even mix with the homeless. The true wanderer holds himself apart from the order of wanderers.
The point is not unfriendliness. The point is that homelessness as a status can itself become a home. A man can go forth, be given a robe and a bowl and a place in the community, and build inside that status a perfectly comfortable house of belonging, with its own habits, its own pride and its own small walls. The word anagāriya names a legal and social change. It can be achieved on a single afternoon, with a razor and a few formulas. The word anoka names an inner condition that no ceremony can confer, and it can be lost inside the very state that is supposed to guarantee it.
So by the time the earliest verse collections were formed, the word had already doubled. One homelessness is a fact, and the other is a freedom. The first can be organised, taught and handed down. The second is what the first exists to serve, and it is always in danger of being replaced by it. The rest of this history is the story of the second kind of homelessness being pursued ever deeper, past one dwelling after another, as each in turn proves to be a house.
IV. The Housebuilder
The deepest early statement about houses is not about the going forth at all. The tradition places it on the night of the awakening itself, and its two verses are among the most quoted in the whole canon:
gahakāraka diṭṭho ‘si, puna gehaṃ na kāhasi; sabbā te phāsukā bhaggā, gahakūṭaṃ visaṅkhitaṃ
“Housebuilder, you are seen. You shall not build a house again. All your rafters are broken, the ridgepole is shattered” (Dhammapada 154).
The verse before it tells of the long search: through many births he ran on, seeking the builder of this house and not finding him, and being born again and again is painful. Then comes the recognition. The one who has been building every house, birth after birth, is seen at last.
Read slowly, the verse overturns the whole idea of homelessness as an act of leaving. The Buddha does not walk out of a house. He sees who builds houses, and with that seeing the rafters give way and the ridgepole breaks. The house is not abandoned, since there is nothing left to abandon. It is the whole structure of becoming, the body, the self, the habit of dwelling, built by craving and held up by ignorance. When the builder is seen, the building cannot be raised again, and the mind passes to the unconditioned (visaṅkhāragataṃ cittaṃ).
This is the real beginning of homelessness in the Buddhist tradition’s own terms. It is not a state of the one who has no house. It is the state of the one who has seen the builder and so lives in no house of his own making. The prince at the city gate left a palace. The man under the tree demolished the idea that there was ever a place to leave from.
V. The Home of the Heart
The Buddha, according to the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, did not rush to teach. He reflected on what he had found: deep, hard to see, subtle, beyond the reach of reasoning. Then came the reason for his hesitation, in a sentence that carries more weight in the history of Buddhist thought than perhaps any other: ālayārāmā kho panāyaṃ pajā ālayaratā ālayasammuditā, but this generation delights in the ālaya, takes pleasure in the ālaya, rejoices in the ālaya.
Ālaya is a dwelling, a harbour, a place of settling. Its root is the same as that of “to lie down in” or “to cling to”. The commentators explain it as the sensual pleasures and the thoughts of craving that surround them. The Dhamma he has found is hard to see for beings who love their home, and the home here is not a building. It is the whole habit of finding rest in something, a thing to hold and a position to occupy. Another discourse in the Aṅguttara says that such beings listen when the Tathāgata teaches the Dhamma of anālaya, the Dhamma of no-dwelling. And the Pāli lists of names for nirvāṇa include the uprooting of the ālaya (ālayasamugghāta).
This single word became the seed of a whole school. When Asaṅga, in the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, argues that the storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) was no novelty, he points to this very passage. The Śrāvaka scriptures speak of it already, he says, under another name: the generation that delights in the ālaya. The “storehouse” of Yogācāra psychology is therefore the home of the Nikāyas, the mind’s native dwelling and the thing it clings to, seen now as a system. The word the Buddha hesitated over became a theory of how consciousness is housed.
In the Tibetan translation of those texts, ālaya is rendered kun gzhi, “the ground of everything”. Let us keep this in mind, because the word will turn up again, with its sign reversed, in the Great Perfection.
So in the middle period of the early tradition a second homeless is added to the first two. There is the one who has left a house, the one who wanders without a dwelling, and now the one who has uprooted the ālaya, the home of consciousness that no one has to leave because it was never anything but a clinging. Nirvāṇa is the absence of that home, and not a place somewhere else.
VI. Neither Standing Nor Swimming
At the very opening of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the first sutta of the first chapter, a deity comes to the Buddha late at night, lighting up the whole of Jeta’s Grove, and asks how he crossed the flood. The Buddha answers: appatiṭṭhaṃ khvāhaṃ, āvuso, anāyūhaṃ oghamatariṃ, by not standing and by not striving I crossed the flood. The deity is puzzled and asks how that can be. The Buddha explains: when I stood still, I sank; when I struggled, I was swept away. And so, neither standing nor swimming, I crossed.
Here is appatiṭṭha, the Pāli form of the word that will become apratiṣṭhita, in the very first discourse of the collection. Patiṭṭhā is a standing-place, a foothold, a foundation. The flood is the whole current of craving, becoming and ignorance, and any foothold in it is a place to sink. Striving against the current, which is the obvious alternative, is only another way of being carried away by it. The Buddha crossed by not taking a stand and not making an effort, which is to say by not building even a temporary house in the water.
The Sanskrit parallel to this sutta says that the Buddha crossed the flood anālambe ‘pratiṣṭhe, “without support, without a standing-place”. The phrase is worth keeping, because the two words in it, support and standing-place, are the two that the Song of the Vajra will put side by side, in Tibetan, at its centre.
The Udāna carries the idea to its furthest early statement. It describes a sphere where there is neither earth nor water nor fire nor wind, and says of it: there I speak of neither coming nor going nor standing nor passing away nor arising. Appatiṭṭhaṃ appavattaṃ anārammaṇamevetaṃ, it is unestablished, unmoving, without support. This, it says, is the end of suffering. The Sanskrit parallel has apratiṣṭham anālambam. Nirvāṇa is thus described in the Nikāyas as a condition with no standing-place and nothing to lean on, without coming, going, arising or ceasing.
Another discourse turns the point into a drama. A young monk named Godhika has died, and Māra goes about looking for where his consciousness has been established. The Buddha tells him he will not find it: Godhika has passed away with a consciousness that is appatiṭṭhita, unestablished. The one who has gone nowhere cannot be found, because there is no address to look at.
By now the word has travelled a long way from the road. It started as the name of a deed, leaving a house. Within the early texts it has become the description of liberated consciousness itself: not a house abandoned, but a mind that is established nowhere.
VII. The Great Vehicle Refuses the Shelter
When the Mahāyāna sūtras take up this inheritance, the Pāli appatiṭṭha becomes the Sanskrit apratiṣṭhita, “not established”, and what had been an epithet of nirvāṇa becomes a principle of the whole path.
The Vajracchedikā, the Diamond Sūtra, states it as the rule for the arising of the awakening mind: apratiṣṭhitaṃ cittam utpādayitavyam, the mind is to be produced without abiding anywhere. Kumārajīva’s Chinese, ying wu suo zhu er sheng qi xin, is the line that, by the account of the Platform Sūtra, woke Huineng. Even the arising of the good mind, which one might have thought was the one thing worth establishing, must not take a stand.
The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa turns the principle into one of the great exchanges of Buddhist literature. Mañjuśrī asks what the root of the body is, and the answer travels back through desire, through perception that has turned upside down, to the root of that perception, which is non-abiding. And what, he is asked, is the root of non-abiding? Non-abiding has no root, Mañjuśrī answers, and therefore all things are established on the root of non-abiding: apratiṣṭhāna-mūla-pratiṣṭhitāḥ sarvadharmāḥ. All things stand on a foundation that is not a foundation, a standing on non-standing. Only the Sanskrit can say it with full force, because it puts the word for foundation (mūla) and the word for establishment (pratiṣṭhita) in the same breath as the negation that cancels them.
The sūtra makes a second point, about who is homeless. Vimalakīrti is a householder of Vaiśālī. He has wealth, a wife and a city dwelling, and he wears the white clothes of a layman. He is presented as the freest person in the book. He enters taverns and gambling houses and the halls of kings, and nothing holds him. The Mahāyāna refuses to equate the inner condition with the social act. The homeless one may be in a house, and the one who has gone forth may be as housed as anyone.
Other parts of the Mahāyāna see the house in a different light. The Lotus Sūtra compares the three realms to a burning house (ādīptāgāra) in which the children are absorbed in play, and the Buddha is the father who calls them out. What matters here is that he enters the house. The great vehicle does not leave the burning house to its fate. The homeless one, in this version of the story, is the one who walks into houses to bring others out.
The most far-reaching Mahāyāna development of the word is apratiṣṭhita-nirvāṇa, in Tibetan mi gnas pa’i mya ngan las ‘das pa, non-abiding nirvāṇa. In the Yogācāra and related śāstras it names the condition of a buddha, who abides neither in saṃsāra, thanks to wisdom, nor in the peace of nirvāṇa, thanks to compassion. This is the great surprise of the Mahāyāna in the history of our word. The old nirvāṇa had been described as a place without standing, and now even that is not to be made a home. Peace is a dwelling, and the one who takes up residence in it has simply built a better house. The bodhisattva’s compassion is the refusal of every shelter, including the shelter of liberation, while a single being remains outside. Śāntideva’s wish to remain as long as space endures, to dispel the suffering of the world, is the same homelessness as a vow.
The Gaṇḍavyūha shows the whole movement as a journey. The young Sudhana, sent by Mañjuśrī, wanders through more than fifty teachers, a pilgrim with no dwelling who is always at someone else’s door. At the end Maitreya shows him a great tower, a house (kūṭāgāra), and Sudhana enters. The house opens into endless towers, each containing endless others. The homeless one is given a house at last, but it is a house with no outside, one that contains every other house. Keep the tower in mind, because the Song of the Vajra will place one in the same position.
In the language of Yogācāra, the aim of the path is āśraya-parāvṛtti, the turning of the basis. Āśraya means a support, a refuge, a dwelling, and in Tibetan it is gnas, or brten pa. The school that calls its goal “the turning of the dwelling” also names the state it seeks as the absence of a dwelling, and the two names describe one transformation.
VIII. The Cremation Ground
Secret Mantra moves the homeless one to a new place. In the early texts he is in the forest, at the foot of a tree, in the open air. In the Mahāyoga and anuttara traditions he is at the cremation ground, which is the one place that belongs to no household and to which every household finally sends its dead. This relocation is not decoration. The wandering of the yogī is now a wandering among everything that the house was built to keep out.
The Tantra of the Union of the Sun and Moon shows it in the passage that introduces the Vajra Song. The Teacher explains that the purpose of the song is to close the doors to the lower realms, and that any fortunate yogī walking in the cremation grounds should take up the vajra song again and again. The tantra’s list of conduct includes the lion who walks the cremation grounds without fear, the dog and the pig who abandon the ideas of clean and foul, the madman, and the spring, which leaves even the foundation of mindfulness in its own place. The yogī has no home among these roles either, only conduct.
The tantra’s own frame is already stated in the vocabulary of this history. It opens with the Teacher speaking from “the great place of the natural state that does not abide”. The speech is located, and the location is not a location.
Secret Mantra also develops non-abiding as a method. Maitrīpa teaches that mahāmudrā is known as not abiding in anything (apratiṣṭhāna), and he composed a treatise called the Apratiṣṭhānaprakāśa, an elucidation of non-abiding (rab tu mi gnas pa gsal bar ston pa). His disciple Rāmapāla glosses “not abiding in anything” as not reifying and not engaging the mind. Here the doctrine is no longer a description of the end of the path. It is the path itself, a practice of not taking up residence in anything that appears.
There is one more movement in Secret Mantra that deserves to be set beside the Buddha’s verse about the housebuilder, though it is offered as a reading and not as a citation. The generation stage builds a palace. The practitioner envisions the whole maṇḍala, its walls, gates and throne, in complete architectural detail, and then lets it dissolve. The Buddha had said that the builder was seen and that no house would be built again. The yogī of Secret Mantra becomes the builder who knows he is building, who raises a palace out of emptiness with open eyes and lets it fall without grief. The house is not abolished. It becomes a house that is no longer a home, and the builder is no longer deceived by his work.
IX. The Song
Now the Song can be read, and it can be read as the point at which every earlier stage of the history is gathered into a single breath.
The Omniscient Longchenpa gives it in the Treasury of the Supreme Vehicle, after a string of vajra syllables, and introduces it in words that name its source and its intent: as taught in the Union of the Sun and Moon, this is the song of dharmatā, taking up the intent of Samantabhadra and Samantabhadrī, father and mother. The Tibetan stanzas open with a sequence that any reader of this history will recognise.
ma skyes pas na mi ‘gag cing: since it is unborn, it is unceasing.
‘gro dang ‘ong med kun tu khyab: without going or coming, it pervades everywhere.
These two lines set out, in this order, the negations that open the Noble Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: no cessation, no arising, and anāgamam anirgamam, no coming and no going. They also echo the Udāna’s description of the sphere without coming, going, passing away or arising. The same set of negations is being handed down in Pāli, in Sanskrit and in Tibetan, and the Song opens with it in its third language. It is a convergence, not a quotation, and it is all the more striking for that.
Then the Song reaches the lines it is built around:
rtsa ba med cing rten med la / gnas med len med chos chen po
Each phrase has a history behind it, and the history is now visible. Rtsa ba med, “rootless”, is Vimalakīrti’s answer: non-abiding has no root. Rten med, “without support”, answers the Saṃyutta’s and Udāna’s anālamba, and Tibetan usage itself glosses rten med as both unsupported and houseless. Gnas med, “without abode”, is apratiṣṭhita, appatiṭṭha, aniketa, anālaya, all at once. The reason is that gnas is the Tibetan word for every one of them: the standing-place, the abode, the dwelling, the station, the basis. The Indian vocabulary of non-dwelling, which was spread across half a dozen words in Pāli and Sanskrit, was gathered by the Tibetan translators into a single syllable.
The fourth term is the one that goes furthest: len med, ungrasping. Len pa is taking up, and it covers upādāna, clinging, and grahaṇa, grasping. Dhammapada 404 had already insisted that the true wanderer does not mix even with the homeless. The Song completes the thought. After rootless, unsupported and homeless comes a refusal to take up homelessness. A person who has made “the homeless state” into his residence has simply built a house with a better view. If non-abiding is held as a position, it becomes one more standing-place. Vimalakīrti said the same when he said that non-abiding has no root, and Maitrīpa said it in his own way when he called mahāmudrā abiding in nothing. The Song says that the great Dharma, chos chen po, is homeless, and that it does not grasp even its own homelessness.
If the Song stopped here it would be a fine negation. But the Song goes on, and what it does next is the most surprising thing in the whole history of the word. It brings the house back.
ye grol lhun mnyam yangs pa che: primordially free, evenly whole, vast.
khyab gdal khang bzang ye yod nyid: the pervading, open, excellent house, existing from the very beginning.
The words khang bzang, a fine house or mansion, come immediately after the homeless line. The rootless, supportless, abodeless Dharma is a house. It is the tower of the Gaṇḍavyūha, the great house that holds every house, a house with no outside. And it is the converse of Vimalakīrti’s principle. If all things are established on the root of non-abiding, then the world is the dwelling that non-abiding provides, and the homeless one is the one who has no home because every place is his home.
The word lhun in lhun mnyam, “evenly whole”, is the lhun of the mountain, the mass that is complete in one piece, and the Song uses it again a few lines later in lhun gyis grub, naturally present. There is a reason for the whole to appear at this point. A being that has no house has no outside, and what has no outside is not partial.
The Song ends in a place. After a series of lines on the sun and moon, on the lion’s song and the unequalled play of sound, on the buddhas equal in all things and Samantabhadra at the summit of the Dharma, it comes to rest here:
mkha’ dbyings bzang mo’i dbyings rum du: in the womb of the expanse of Samantabhadrī, the expanse of space.
Rum names the inner chamber, the womb. The one who has no home, after the demolition of the builder’s house, arrives in a womb. It is not the house of a household. It is the Mother. The ground of the Great Perfection is Samantabhadrī, the sky-like space in which everything arises, and one comes home to her by having no home.
The last line is an instruction. One is to sing this song while remaining “in the state of mind-nature, pervasive, open and vast” (sems nyid khyab gdal yangs pa’i ngang nas). The word ngang is the Tibetan for a state or natural condition, a mode of resting, and it is the word that Tibetan has for a place that is not a location. The singer does not stand on a ground. He sings from a condition.
X. The Ground That Has No Ground
The Great Perfection applied the negation to the one thing the earlier tradition had never dared to unground, the ground itself.
Gzhi, “ground, base, foundation”, is the central term of the Great Perfection. The whole architecture of the Omniscient Longchenpa’s systematic works is built on a ground, a path and a fruition. And yet in the Great Perfection’s own vocabulary the ground is gzhi med rtsa bral, without ground and without root. Do-Ngak Chökyi Gyatso says that appearances manifest according to the fabrications of mind while the mind itself is beyond arising and ceasing and without basis or origin. The Omniscient Longchenpa’s own introduction to the unaltered ground, in the Zabmo Yangtik, speaks of the genuine mind as without ground or source and freed by itself. The Tibetan word gzhi also means a place, and the dictionaries give it in compounds such as khyim gzhi, the site of a house. So the ground of the Great Perfection is a place that has no place. It is Vimalakīrti’s root of non-abiding made into the name of ultimate reality.
Here the history closes a circle. The ālaya that the Buddha hesitated over, the home of consciousness, was rendered in Tibetan as kun gzhi, “the ground of everything”. The Great Perfection takes the second syllable and reverses its value. Its gzhi is expressly distinguished from the kun gzhi. The all-ground is the aspect of mind that gathers habitual traces, the house that the beings of the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta delight in. The ground of the Great Perfection is the nature that has gathered nothing and never had a dwelling. The same syllable names the home that is clung to and the ground that is not a home. The Buddha’s difficulty and the Great Perfection’s central term turn out to be the same word with the sign reversed.
The Omniscient Longchenpa’s title for the natural state carries the paradox inside the word gnas. It is the Treasury of the Way of Abiding (Gnas lugs mdzod), and gnas lugs, “the way of abiding” or “the manner of dwelling”, is the Great Perfection’s name for how things are. The Song says that how things are is gnas med. These two statements do not contradict each other. The natural state abides the way the sky abides, as the dwelling-place of everything while being itself a dwelling nowhere. The Array of Jewels says that the Buddha does not abide in dharma and is therefore free of the fault of conceptual stain, and that in the expanse there is no outer, no inner and no place. The Union of the Sun and Moon opens with the Teacher speaking from the place that does not abide. These are not separate claims. They are one claim at three heights.
The Great Perfection’s own anatomy of the heart carries the same note. The literature of the Lamps places awareness in a sanctuary in the heart, and one of the images it uses for it is a tent. The detail is not accidental. A tent is the dwelling of someone who will move on. Even where the Great Perfection locates awareness in the body, it chooses the one architectural figure that belongs to nomads. And at the end of the path, the tradition of the rainbow body describes the last house, the body itself, not as collapsing but as opening into the space it never left. The rafters are broken and the ridgepole is shattered, as in the Buddha’s verse, and what remains is not a ruin but the sky.
XI. What the Word Learned
A word that began as the description of a deed has become the name of the Great Dharma. It could do this because at each stage the tradition asked a deeper question about what exactly is being left.
The household was the first answer, and it gave the formula and the image of the open air. The pond was the second, the element in which the mind lives and thrashes when removed, and the swan showed that it can be left without a pang. The builder of the house was the third, and with his seeing the whole structure came down. The ālaya was the fourth, the clinging that is the home of consciousness. The shelter of peaceful nirvāṇa was the fifth, and the Mahāyāna would not let even liberation be a dwelling. The ground was the sixth, and the Great Perfection called it groundless. At each step the thing left became more intimate and harder to see, until what is left is the very idea of a place to stand.
The history also corrects the English word. In English “homeless” names a misfortune, a lack of something every person needs. The Buddhist word names a freedom, and the swan of Dhammapada 91 is the proof that it is not the fish’s catastrophe. But the Buddhist word is not a romance of the road either. Dhammapada 404 will not let the wanderer rest in the status of wandering, the Mahāyāna will not let nirvāṇa be a place of peace, and the Song will not let the great Dharma take hold of its own homelessness. Each stage guards against the one before it, because the mind is a skilled builder and will raise a house out of any material, including the material of its own freedom.
The oldest word in this story is a door, and the latest is a womb. The prince who left his palace at night and the song sung in the expanse of Samantabhadrī are separated by a thousand years and a mountain range, and they are doing the same thing. The first walked out of a house so that someone might one day see who had built it. The second sings from a place that was never built, and in that place everything is at home.
