#Benefit Has No Location
On the summit no one holds, and the work that is therefore between us
The plums have gone gold and dropped, and the early rains have given way to the long wet light of the solstice, the self-heal already browning at the edges of the path. I sit in the same dark hour I have always sat in, and the koan that has kept me company for two winters has turned again. For a long time the work was to see that no one is descending---that the sphere never crossed onto the plane, that nothing higher arrives onto anything lower, that the completeness I had been taught to wait for was my own ground read more closely. That seeing holds. But it was only half a clearing. The other half came quietly, the way the rain comes, without choosing where to fall: if no one descends, no one ascends either. There is no one above to come down, and there is no summit for anyone---teacher, adept, buddha---to have climbed to and to be holding for the rest of us. The mountain was never above me. It was never above anyone.
Press the old fable once more, but upward this time. The Square, having learned his lesson too well, asks the Sphere whether a fourth direction might not visit the third by the same logic, and the Sphere refuses, and grows angry, and the wrath gives it away. I have said before that wrath is the counterfeit's signature, the bristle of a configuration with something to lose. What I had not followed all the way down is what the recursion shows: there is no last direction, no floor from which every floor is finally seen, no height at which the whole becomes a form held in the hand. Each level can be named only from the one above it, and that one only from the one above that, and the ladder has no top rung. No one stands at the summit naming the ground, because the summit is not there to be stood on. The unsayable character of any floor is collided with from within and resolved into a form only from a vantage that does not exist. This is not a shortfall in our instruments. It is the structure. No eye sees itself, and no awareness climbs above awareness to name what awareness is.
From this one fact the machinery of deferral comes apart a second time. If there is no floor above the ground, the ground cannot be named from anywhere---and a thing that cannot be named cannot be written down, withheld, parceled, or handed across. Here I have to hold a distinction the institutions have spent fortunes blurring. There is what a surface can store, and there is what it can only carry. Knowledge is storage: a record laid into a locus, fixed in its membership, copied, taught, sent across the distance between a mouth and an ear. Wisdom is not stored anywhere. It is the live joint, present in neither party and real only between them, with no distance for it to cross and so nothing to be sent. A teacher can hand you knowledge all day. No teacher has ever transmitted wisdom, because wisdom is not the kind of thing that travels from one place to another; it is co-presence, the field recognizing itself, misread on the surface as a sending. The pointing-out does not deposit recognition into you. It lights a locus that was already yours. The master is the occasion and never the owner---and the moment a lineage claims to own the thing and to confer it for a price, in this life or the promise of a better one, the gatekeeper has returned, and what it guards is a debt that does not exist.
This is why the ground must be left nameless, and why the namelessness is not coyness but care. The instant you give the unsupported a name---the absolute, the next attainment, the realm you have not yet earned---you have made it a stored thing, a content with an address, and a content with an address can be placed out of reach and sold back to you. To name it is to manufacture the gap. The nameless is the one refuge that cannot be administered, because there is nothing there to hold the keys to. Whatever it is must stay nameless, or it stops being it and becomes one more thing a gate can stand in front of.
And the ground confers nothing on a chosen few, because it does not choose. Life is sponsored at the spontaneous intersection---enabled, not elected; the conditions held open, and where they meet a self-copying coherence arises, here, at this magnification, in this chemistry, by no decree. There is no menu and no selector ranging over it, no privileged vessel marked out to receive what others are refused. The eigenium teems and forbids nothing and prefers no one. So with realization. It is not awarded to the rare adept whose merit and secret instruction happen to align. It is sponsored, openly, in anyone, and the only thing standing between a person and it is the partition they keep mistaking for a wall.
Even the path has to surrender its last privilege, which is the privilege of being a climb. I was taught completeness as a debt paid in deep time---three countless eons, the long ascent across lifetimes, the careful accounting of merit toward a far arrival. But rearrangement is not a mandatory progression. There is no track laid down that one must walk in a single direction toward a summit at its end, because there is no stored axis along which a track could be laid and no summit to be the end of it. Nothing is en route. The whole is already the case, unordered, complete not as a finished sequence but as a simultaneous display that holds everything and totalizes never. To practice is not to advance along a line. It is to stop mistaking the line for the country.
So where does the teaching go, if not up and not down and not forward along a track? It goes sideways, into the only place a partition can be shown to fail: between apparent others. You cannot demonstrate that boundaries do not hold by arranging never to meet one. The solitary adept sealing the self against the world to perfect a private attainment is reinforcing the very cut that was the whole problem. The demonstration needs an apparent two in which the two then quietly stops being two. My energy and your energy are one field differently configured, not two reservoirs trading their contents across a border; the six senses taken as hooligans never meet, and recognized, were always one field perceiving through six openings. The forward reach is the union-of-no-union---the field recognizing itself across what looked like separation, until there is no giver and no receiver, only the movement of benefit with no location assigned to it.
The work of it is small and unglamorous and it cannot be forced. Its substance is the Seven Qualities---equality, respect, sincerity, safety, trust, honesty, purity---and these are slow-motion objects. They cannot change quickly without turning into their opposites. Respect that shifts in two seconds was never respect; safety that can be withdrawn on a whim was always threat. They arise only when offered and never when demanded, the way a system forced to declare itself declares the wrong thing. Compel compassion and you have the inquisition. Demand devotion and you have manufactured doubt. The descending institution, asking for what can only be given, has been producing those shadows for a very long time. The lateral work is the opposite gesture: build the condition of safety in which energy can move between apparent others without defense, without one side hoarding and the other going hungry, and then offer the qualities without compelling a single one. That is the whole of it. That is what the Garuda does instead of climbing.
None of this waits on a better birth or a higher floor. We live only in the past as it is---in the already-arrived, the already-decayed, the present grazing read in succession---and the refuge is in this reading, here, of a surface that has been holding the whole the entire time. Stop waiting for the sphere to descend; it will not, because it never did. Stop laboring up a mountain that was never above you; there is no one at the top, and the top is not there. Magnify this surface until the false point exhausts itself, and turn the freed attention sideways, toward the person in front of you, and build the safety in which the two of you can stop being two. The rainbow body is not a reward kept behind a gate. It is the field, recognizing itself, declining at last to be partitioned---and it is available now, lateral and unowned, to anyone willing to stop reaching up or down for it.
self-heal withering ---
the rain on the far peak and the near sill
falls from no higher place
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## To the Reader
These four pieces are released together, on a single day, as one upload. They are short, but they are meant to be read as a unit. Separated, each one leans on the others and loses its footing.
1. No One is Descending
2. The Garuda does not Climb
3. Benefit has no Location
4. Troubled
The work is personal, and it is written in the spirit of Śāntideva — not as a treatise that instructs from authority, but as a practitioner setting down, for the benefit of practice, what has become clear in practice. The *Bodhicaryāvatāra* never claims to improve upon what the buddhas taught; it claims only to arrange a few useful things for someone willing to walk. I claim less than that. The material here is original in the narrow sense that it arose directly from my own sitting, and not from a reading or a lineage assignment. It is protected under Any Note Press. Its publication here permits no commercial use. It is offered for the benefit of one's practice and for nothing else.
Dharma does not carry the work of the sciences, and the sciences do not carry the work of the dharma. They point toward views that rub against one another, and that sometimes seem to confirm one another — the field that is never empty, the surface that has no second side — but they do not share an object of attention. The physicist attends to what can be measured and repeated. The practitioner attends to the arising and cessation of grasping in this very moment, which can be neither measured nor repeated. When the two seem to meet, it is worth pausing to notice that they have only come near. I do not use one to prove the other. To do so would be to ask the dharma to carry a load it was never shaped to bear, and to ask physics for a consolation it was never able to give.
Where, then, does this sit? As a category it falls under what is now called Secular Buddhism. That literature has grown substantial in a generation — Stephen Batchelor's *Buddhism Without Beliefs* and *After Buddhism*, the naturalized accounts of writers such as Owen Flanagan and Robert Wright, and the wider network of teachers and groups who practice without the cosmological apparatus that traditional Buddhism takes for granted. I was influenced by Stephen Batchelor, and I owe his work and his example a debt I am glad to acknowledge here. What follows is not in his style, which is expert, historical, and progressive, recovering an early dharma from beneath its later accretions. Mine is neither historical nor reformist. So while this is the nearest category available to me, I want to say plainly why the fit is only partial.
The secular model, in most of its forms, does two things that I do not do. First, it demythologizes: it sets aside rebirth, the pure lands, the deities and the visions, treating them as cultural inheritance to be respected and then quietly retired. Second, and more deeply, it tends to naturalize — to make the dharma continuous with, and finally answerable to, a scientific account of one life in one material world. I follow the Prāsaṅgika method as rigidly as my understanding and competence allow, and that method forbids me both moves. Prāsaṅgika asserts no position of its own. It only draws out the consequences already hidden inside whatever position is set before it. It refutes eternalism, but it refutes with equal force the materialism that is offered to replace eternalism. *There is only this life, only this matter, only this brain* is a thesis like any other, carrying a self-nature it cannot defend under analysis. To adopt it as a foundation would be to abandon the very discipline that lets the analysis cut at all. So I cannot demythologize in good faith, because I cannot assert the metaphysics that demythologizing quietly requires.
This leaves a strange position, and I would rather name it than smooth it over. The Garuda of these pages did not descend from a scripture and was not reasoned into being. It arose in practice, as such things do, and I report it as practice — not as cosmology, and not as something to be explained away. I make no claims about its standing in any world. The work is secular in one sense only: it appeals to no institutional authority, it asks no one to believe anything in advance, and it rests its whole weight on what can be examined directly by anyone willing to sit. It is not secular in the other and more common sense of having already settled the metaphysical question in materialism's favor. On that question I hold, with the Prāsaṅgika, to silence.
The challenge I offer to the traditional models — chiefly to deferred buddhahood, and to the institutional control that has grown up around it — is meant respectfully. I honor the work done before me; I have been able to learn and to progress only because of it. I am not trying to update the dharma for this century. I am trying to say, as carefully as I can, what one practitioner found when the supports were removed.
If you have the occasion to find any of this helpful to your own practice, I would be glad to hear of it.