---
title: "The Vow before Dīpaṃkara: Sumedha's Aspiration"
author: 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)
series: "Six Practice Gates, Volume 6 — PRAṆIDHĀNA: Aspiration and the Vow, from Pāli Roots to Samantabhadra · Part I · Pāli Roots"
series_short: PRAṆIDHĀNA
volume: 6
paper_id: PRANIDHANA-P02
paper_number: 2
part: Part I · Pāli Roots
part_number: 1
date: 2026-06
version: "1.0"
license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
---

# The Vow before Dīpaṃkara

**Sumedha's Aspiration and the Founding of the Bodhisattva Path**

*中文主題：然燈佛前之本願——善慧的本願·願為菩提道之發起*

---

**Author:** 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)
**Date:** June 2026
**License:** CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
**Version:** 1.0
**Series:** PRAṆIDHĀNA — Aspiration and the Vow

---

## Abstract

This paper, the spine-establishing essay of the *Praṇidhāna* (Vow) volume, treats a scene the Mahāyāna tradition places at the very origin of the path to awakening: in a remote past age, an ascetic named Sumedha (also rendered Megha, 善慧/儒童), meeting the Buddha Dīpaṃkara, spreads flowers and then his own hair over the mud, vows to become a Buddha, and at once receives the Buddha's prediction. This single vow is the point of departure for Śākyamuni's entire bodhisattva path. The thesis: the vow is not a life-mission bought through sacrifice or set up to author a self's biography; it is the founding vow that entrusts the whole arc of a life to one orientation — "awakening, and for the sake of beings" — an orientation whose terminus ultimately empties the one who vows. Through the continuous biography of the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects*, the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*'s gloss that to vow is already to be founded as a bodhisattva, and the early vow-language of the *Ekottarāgama*, the paper establishes the vow as the path's point of arousal — the spine's first end — while holding three corrections of the middle way: the vow is not heroic self-sacrifice, not a merit-for-result transaction, and not the kind of self-authored life-narrative the modern self constructs in its own service.

**Keywords:** primal vow (*pūrva-praṇidhāna*); Sumedha; Dīpaṃkara; prediction (*vyākaraṇa*); founding vow; the beginning of the path; constitutive vs acquisitive; three incalculable aeons; non-regression (*avaivartika*)

---

## I. Introduction: When "Mission" Becomes a Project of the Self

In the contemporary vocabulary, *finding your life's mission* has become a phrase so plainly good it scarcely needs defending. We are urged to ask: What am I here to accomplish? Where is my calling? Who is the self I envision myself becoming? Behind this language sits a remarkably stable assumption — that a life is an arc that needs to be authored by a self, invested with meaning, and managed into a coherent story. Alasdair MacIntyre, in *After Virtue*, understands a human life as a *quest*: scattered actions become intelligible only when gathered into the unity of a narrative. Charles Taylor, in *Sources of the Self*, describes how the modern self orients itself through *strong evaluation*, securing thereby the very depth of its identity. These are weighty insights, not to be waved away.

And yet, when we turn our gaze to the vow that stands at the origin of everything in the Buddhist tradition — the vow Sumedha makes before the Buddha Dīpaṃkara — we find that three gulfs lie between it and *setting a life-mission*, gulfs not easily bridged. It is precisely these three gulfs that define what this paper, and the volume after it, mean by the word "vow."

The first gulf is one of scale. Sumedha's vow takes three incalculable aeons to come to fruition; the sheer length of that span is enough, by itself, to shatter any planning horizon a self could conceive. No "self" can persist across such a scale and still figure as the author of the plan. The second gulf concerns what the vow is oriented toward. The terminus of the modern life-narrative is, more often than not, a self consolidated, realized, crowned. The Buddhahood toward which Sumedha's vow is oriented is, on the contrary, a terminus that empties the one who vows — its *telos* dissolves the very person who made the vow. The third gulf is that it is not a transaction. Sumedha's spreading of his hair is not a price paid to purchase the prediction; the vow is not a deal in which "I deliver a direction, you deliver a result."

What this paper sets out to do is to follow the scene through its scriptures and make these three gulfs plain, one by one, and so to establish: along this whole road, paved by the six practice gates of recollection, giving, repentance, discipline, concentration, and vow, the *vow* is "vow" precisely as it begins from a point of arousal like this one. This is the first end of the volume's spine — *the arousing*.

---

## II. Before Dīpaṃkara: A Continuous Biographical Scene

To speak of Sumedha's vow, the most complete continuous narrative is preserved in the first fascicle of the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects*.[^1] In a sustained biographical hand, the sūtra records the scene that becomes the origin of everything.

The outline runs as follows. In a remote past aeon, a Buddha appeared in the world named Puguang — that is, Dīpaṃkara (whose name is also transliterated Tihejieluo and rendered "Steady Light" or "Lamp Light," all names for the same Buddha). At that time an ascetic, Sumedha, hearing that the Tathāgata Puguang was coming, wished to make an offering of fresh flowers. But the flowers of the city had all been bought up by the royal house and their private sale forbidden, so Sumedha could find none; after some difficulty he at last met a flower-bearing woman, Gopī, and bought five stalks of blue lotus from her for five hundred silver coins. When the Tathāgata Puguang came walking by, there was mud upon the ground; Sumedha took the hide robe from his body and spread it down, and when it was still not enough to cover the mud, he loosed his own hair and laid it over the rest, asking the Tathāgata to tread across his hair as he passed.

At the heart of this scene is a first-person aspiration. The sūtra records Sumedha's own words at the moment of his offering:[^2]

> "In order to accomplish all-knowledge, and to liberate the immeasurable suffering beings."

This single sentence is the seed of the whole vow. It overturns the motive of the offering entirely — from "seeking blessings for myself" to "for the accomplishing of all-knowledge, for the liberating of the immeasurable beings who suffer." All-knowledge (Sanskrit *sarvajña*, the perfect wisdom of a Buddha) is the wisdom sought; "to liberate the immeasurable suffering beings" is the object toward which the aspiration is turned — and the two together are nothing other than the plainest, least systematized embryo of what a later tradition will call *bodhicitta*. Here, for the first time, the vow appears as a *turning-toward*.

Then comes the spreading of the hair:[^3]

> "He took off the hide robe to spread upon the ground, and when it was not enough to cover the mud, he loosed his hair and laid it over too. The Tathāgata then trod across it and passed."

And then the prediction. The Tathāgata Puguang, having trodden across Sumedha's hair, at once predicted his awakening:[^4]

> "By this act of yours, after immeasurable incalculable aeons, you shall become a Buddha, named Śākyamuni Tathāgata…"

With this, the three moments of the scene — the vow, the offering (the spreading of the hair), the prediction — stand fully before us. What deserves close notice is their *order* and their *causality*: it is not that "the hair-spreading bought the prediction," but that the vow comes first, the offering is the bodily expression of that vow, and the prediction is the Buddha's sealing of it. What the prediction seals is not how much hair Sumedha spread, nor how much he gave up, but the direction and depth of this vow itself.

This order can be found echoed in the earliest *Āgama* stratum as well. The *Chapter on Hearing the Dharma* in the *Ekottarāgama*[^5] records a structurally identical vow-utterance: a practitioner, having seen a Buddha and heard the Dharma,

> "rejoiced and leapt for joy, unable to contain himself, and gave rise to this vow: 'May I in a future age become a Buddha, even as the Buddha of Lamplight.'"

The "Buddha of Lamplight" here is this sūtra's rendering of Dīpaṃkara. It is worth pointing out that the *Āgama* vow is oriented toward "becoming a Buddha, like a certain Buddha" — a vow that takes a presently witnessed Buddha as its exemplar and aspires to attain the same fruit in time to come. It is plainer than the Mahāyāna formulation of the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects*, without the vast unfolding of "liberating immeasurable beings"; but the basic posture of the turning-toward — "may I become a Buddha in time to come" — is already here.

So we have a two-layered witness: the Mahāyāna continuous biography (the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects*) gives the full scene and the "for the sake of beings" orientation, while the early *Āgama* vow-language gives a more ancient stratum of this same vowing posture. That the vow is the path's point of departure is not a fiction read back in by later hands; in different strata of different traditions alike, its root can be verified.

---

## III. The Vow as Identity: To Vow Is Already to Be Founded

If the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects* supplies the *event* — the concrete, narratable scene — then the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* (Taishō vol. 25, No. T1509) supplies the *principle*: a gloss on what, doctrinally, this vow actually *is*. And its gloss points to a forceful claim: the vow is not an aspiration the practitioner *has*; the vow is the *founding* by which the practitioner *becomes* a bodhisattva.

In recounting Sumedha's offering to Dīpaṃkara, the *śāstra* records:[^6]

> "With seven stalks of blue lotus he made offering to the Buddha Dīpaṃkara, spread his deerskin robe, and laid his hair over the mud; and at that the Buddha Dīpaṃkara gave him the prediction: 'In a future age you shall become a Buddha, named Śākyamuni.'"

Here a small philological caution must be cleared up first, lest the reader be tripped by a detail. The number of lotuses differs across texts: the *śāstra* has "seven stalks of blue lotus" here, while the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects* — and another passage of the *śāstra* itself[^7] — has "five stalks." This is not a contradiction but the differing record of differing transmissions; whichever passage we cite, we keep faith with the wording of that passage, neither blending the two numbers into one nor reconciling them. What matters, as ever, is not the number of lotuses but the one vow this offering carries.

To return to the point. The most decisive line of the *śāstra*'s gloss is this verse:[^8]

> "When first the mind is aroused and the vow is made to become a Buddha, one has already passed beyond all the worlds and is worthy to receive the worlds' offerings."

The weight of this line is immense. It says: at the very moment of "the first arousing of the mind," of making "the vow to become a Buddha," this person has "already passed beyond all the worlds" — has already surpassed the stations of the world and is rightly to receive the world's offerings. In other words, a bodhisattva is a bodhisattva not because, after some quantity of altruistic work, the title is conferred in retrospect; rather, in the instant of vowing, the identity is *already founded*. The vow is *constitutive* — that is to say, the vow is not an attribute added to the identity; the vow itself constitutes that identity.

This is stated with still finer precision in the *śāstra*'s division of the "three incalculable aeons." The treatise distinguishes the bodhisattva's stages across the differing aeons, and its decisive turning-point lies in the *manner* in which the vow is expressed:[^9]

> "(In the second incalculable aeon) the mind can know 'I shall surely become a Buddha,' yet the mouth does not declare it; (in the third incalculable aeon) the mouth utters it of itself, without fear or hesitation: 'I, in a future age, shall become a Buddha.'"

Feel the turn carefully. In the second incalculable aeon, the bodhisattva "knows in the heart that he will surely become a Buddha, but does not yet dare to declare it aloud"; only in the third does he "of his own mouth utter the words, without any fear or hesitation: I shall become a Buddha in a future age." This shift from "the heart knows" to "the mouth declares" is treated by the author of the treatise as a major marker of stage.

Why is *saying it aloud* so decisive? It is worth pausing to think this through. A person's inner calculation, a privately held hope, can be withdrawn at any time, denied at any time, revised at any time — it has not yet staked the whole person on it. To know in the heart "I shall surely become a Buddha" still keeps a layer of reserve: it is only an inward conviction, not yet an undertaking that stands between heaven and earth, irrevocable. But once "the mouth utters it of itself," once the vow is spoken openly and without any hesitation, the matter is fundamentally altered. To vow is not a private, psychological calculation; it is a public, self-entrusting act of speech. To say the vow aloud is to hand oneself over entirely, to stand before all, with no way back. It is the difference between a person who privately intends to do some great thing and one who solemnly, before witnesses, swears an oath to do it — two wholly different states of being: the latter has already cut off the retreat, has already entrusted the whole of himself to that orientation. The utterance — that is, the vowing — *is* the path's point of departure: only in the moment it is spoken is the vow truly *aroused*.

This in turn illumines the depth of that scene in the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects*. What Sumedha did before Dīpaṃkara was not merely to let a thought arise in his mind, but to express that vow — openly, irrevocably — through a complete bodily act: scattering flowers, spreading his hair. The offering and the hair-spreading are the bodily version of "the mouth uttering it of itself": they are the visible form of the vow, the gesture by which the inner orientation is wholly externalized, wholly undertaken. This is why the prediction can happen on the spot — because the vow has already been completely and unreservedly aroused; it is already an established fact that can be sealed, no longer a mental act that might still be retracted.

And so the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* lifts that scene from the *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects* into a proposition about identity: the vow gathers under itself everything the bodhisattva will go on to cultivate. The bodhisattva, the treatise says, cultivates giving, cultivates discipline, cultivates concentration, "not seeking the blessings and pleasures of this life or the next… but solely for the sake of *sarvajña*" (Sanskrit, all-knowledge) — every merit oriented not toward present or future reward and pleasure, but wholly toward the goal the first vow points to. The vow, then, is not one item among many practices; it is the *telos* that organizes the entire road. All the other gates — recollection, giving, discipline, concentration — are gathered up and directed beneath this one orientation.

---

## IV. Three Corrections of the Middle Way

Having established the two layers — "the vow is the path's point of departure" and "the vow is the founding of identity" — we must now pass through three corrections, lest this "vow" be misread. These three corrections answer precisely to the three gulfs raised in the introduction, and they are the most important doctrinal line of defense in this paper.

### ❌ First correction: the vow is not heroic self-sacrifice

Spreading the hair over the mud is a scene of intense visual force, easily romanticized. A common reading takes it for an extreme of devotion and sacrifice: Sumedha was willing even to lay his hair in the mud for the Buddha to tread upon — what dedication, what intensity of will! On this reading, the vow gets understood as a kind of heroic resolve: the more one gives, the more utterly one sacrifices, the greater the vow.

This reading has its true side, which must be granted: Sumedha's act is indeed a complete giving-over of the self, and that is not to be lightly denied. Yet it misses the crux. The distinctiveness of the vow lies not in the *intensity* of the sacrifice (how much was given) but in its *object and structure* (what it is oriented toward, what it is bound to). The true meaning of the hair-spreading is not "I sacrificed my precious hair" — that self-centered accounting of devotion — but a *self-emptying*: laying the whole self low and empty, spread in the mud, so that the foot of awakening may tread across from above. To read the scene as a display of heroic will, as a self achieving its own greatness through enormous sacrifice, is to read it exactly backwards: the hair-spreading is the self's *emptying*, not the self's *inflation*. The vow is oriented toward an awakening that empties the one who vows, not toward a heroic monument raised to him.

### ❌ Second correction: the vow is not a merit-for-result transaction

A second reading slips easily in: it takes the relation between offering and prediction for a transaction. Sumedha bought flowers with five hundred silver coins and laid his hair on the ground, and so "purchased" the Buddha's prediction; having paid a sufficient price, he redeemed the guarantee of Buddhahood.

This reading too has its true side to grant: there is indeed a sequential structure between offering and prediction — first the offering and the hair-spreading, then the treading and the prediction. Yet what the prediction is bound to is never a "purchase." Where the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* treats of offerings elsewhere, it stresses again and again that a true offering is bound to "the deep mind," to "non-attachment"; if the mind clings to the threefold division of "I the giver, the Buddha the receiver, the hair the thing given," falling into the calculus of exchange, then it lapses into the structure of a transaction and "cannot reach the Buddha-way" at all. What the prediction seals is the deep mind and the direction of this vow, not its price.

A more general principle attaches here. The vow — especially in the other-power dimension to be treated later — must never be written as the transactional structure of "I deliver a direction, in exchange for a result." To entrust one's direction to a Buddha is not to sign a contract with the Buddha, still less to treat the Buddha as a vending machine that dispenses results once a coin is dropped in. The vow entrusts an orientation across immeasurable aeons; it does not extract a result. What the one who vows does is hand over the whole of his direction, not place an order to be filled by a deadline.

### ⚠️ Third correction: the vow is not a self-authored life-narrative

Finally, back to that modern interlocutor in the introduction — the one who understands a life as a *quest* needing to be authored, an arc of self oriented by strong evaluation. This interlocutor most deserves to be taken seriously, because it stands nearest and is most easily confused with the primal vow.

Its profound side must be granted: Sumedha's vow does indeed make the whole arc of his life thereafter into a quest with direction and unity — and in this sense the vow is genuinely the founding commitment that organizes an entire life-narrative. What MacIntyre and Taylor saw is not false.

The difference lies here. The modern life-narrative is authored by a self and serves that self's identity; the protagonist and the author of the narrative are alike that self which is to be realized, to be crowned. Sumedha's vow, spanning three incalculable aeons, is oriented toward a Buddhahood that empties the one who vows — its *telos* dissolves the seeker himself.

Sharper still: the scale of time alone is enough to shatter any horizon on which a "self-project" could stand. Let us think seriously about what three incalculable aeons mean. *Incalculable* (Sanskrit *asaṃkhyeya*) means, at root, "beyond counting"; three incalculable aeons is a span of time that far exceeds any individual life, and exceeds even any imaginable personal plan. In the modern idiom of "setting a life-mission," the arc we conceive is, at most, the length of a single life — we tacitly assume that the "I" who sets the mission will persist all the way to the day it is fulfilled, will witness it with its own eyes, will receive its fruit in its own person. But the scale Sumedha's vow spans permits no such assumption. No "self" as we understand it could persist, whole and continuous, across three incalculable aeons, still figuring as the author of the plan, still the subject who is to reap the harvest.

This brings out a profound reversal. Precisely *because* the vow's scale of time is so vast, it cannot, from the very start, be a "long-term plan a self lays for itself." It must be an orientation that hands the self over, that exceeds any individual persistence. The vow is not a biography a self writes for itself; it is an orientation whose terminus is exactly the disappearance of the one who writes. The life-arc MacIntyre and Taylor describe — oriented by a self, in service of a self — dissolves of itself before this scale. What remains is not a grander self-project, but an entrusting in which the planner himself is exceeded and emptied.

---

## V. The Prediction: The Beginning of Non-Retreat

Finally, for this paper on "the arousing," we lay a connecting point toward what is to come — but only a signpost, not an unfolding.

In the scene where Sumedha vows, spreads his hair, and receives the prediction, the prediction is not so simple as "the Buddha foretells that you will become a Buddha." Where the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* narrates this prediction, it uses a more precise word:[^7]

> "Scattering five stalks of flower over the Buddha and spreading his hair upon the ground, he received from the Buddha the prediction of *avaivartika*."

The word *avaivartika* (Sanskrit *avinivartanīya*, "non-regression," "non-turning-back") points to the nature of the prediction: what Dīpaṃkara gave was not merely a prophecy of Buddhahood but a sealing of "non-regression" — a sealing of this vow as henceforth a point of departure that will not turn back, will not be taken away.

This is another face of "the vow as the path's point of departure": it is not only a beginning in the sense of time, but a beginning that does not retreat. Once the vow is so aroused and so sealed, it possesses a character that cannot be shaken. Yet how exactly this "non-retreat" is established, how it is doctrinally guaranteed, what gradations distinguish "retreat" from "non-retreat" — none of this is what the present paper sets out to unfold. The paper only plants the signpost here: Sumedha's vow is a point of departure sealed as "non-retreat." How *resolve* — an inner structure that makes the vow unshakable, not to be taken away — takes up this "beginning of non-retreat" is the work that follows immediately after.

---

## VI. Conclusion: A Beginning That Empties the One Who Vows

Let us close this paper where it began.

We set out from a modern question — "find your life's mission" — and walked all the way to that scene of Sumedha before Dīpaṃkara. We have seen that the vow is not setting a goal, not writing a biography for a self, not trading sacrifice for greatness, not purchasing a fruit with an offering. The vow is the founding vow that entrusts the whole arc of a life to one orientation: "awakening, and for the sake of beings."

And this point of departure has a most profound character: the terminus toward which it is oriented will, in the end, empty the very person who vowed. This is no pessimistic saying, nor does it mean the one who vows will "vanish" into some nothingness; it means that this vow, from the very start, was never for the sake of consolidating a self, but for an awakening and a benefiting of others that exceeds any self. The one who vows lays the whole of himself low and empty, spread upon the road, so that awakening may tread across from above — this is the true meaning of spreading the hair, and the true meaning of the whole vow.

From a point of departure like this, what kind of road will be walked? This road, paved by the six practice gates, how will it move — step by step, from the arousing of this one vow — toward its adornment and its fulfillment? These are what the later papers will unfold, slowly. For now, only one sentence need be held: the vow, beginning from a point of arousal like this, will go on to be walked into the whole of the bodhisattva path.

---

## Footnotes

[^1]: *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects* (過去現在因果經), fasc. 1, trans. Guṇabhadra (Liu-Song), Taishō vol. 3, No. 189. In a sustained biographical hand this sūtra preserves the complete scene of Sumedha (Megha, 儒童) vowing, spreading his hair, and receiving the prediction before the Buddha Puguang (Dīpaṃkara); it is the narrative spine of this paper.
[^2]: Same sūtra, p. 622a (T03n0189, p0622a09). Sumedha's first-person vow at the moment of offering: "In order to accomplish all-knowledge, and to liberate the immeasurable suffering beings."
[^3]: Same sūtra, p. 622b (p0622b23). The act of spreading the hair over the mud.
[^4]: Same sūtra, p. 622b (p0622b11). The Tathāgata Puguang's prediction.
[^5]: *Ekottarāgama* (增一阿含經), fasc. 38, *Chapter on Hearing the Dharma* no. 36, trans. Gautama Saṃghadeva (Eastern Jin), Taishō vol. 2, No. 125, p. 758b (p0758b12). "Buddha of Lamplight" (燈光佛) is this sūtra's alternate rendering of Dīpaṃkara; the *Āgama*'s early, structurally identical vow-utterance is taken in §II as witness to the older stratum.
[^6]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* (大智度論), fasc. 4, attrib. Nāgārjuna, trans. Kumārajīva (Later Qin), Taishō vol. 25, No. 1509, p. 87a (p0087a16). The śāstra-layer narration of the hair-spreading and prediction.
[^7]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, fasc. 75, p. 579c (p0579c25): "Scattering five stalks of flower over the Buddha and spreading his hair upon the ground, he received from the Buddha the prediction of *avaivartika*." The prediction = the sealing of *avaivartika* (non-regression). The lotus count here reads "five stalks," differing from fasc. 4's "seven stalks of blue lotus" as the record of differing transmissions; each is kept to its own wording, the two not reconciled.
[^8]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, fasc. 4, p. 86a (p0086b08), verse: "When first the mind is aroused and the vow is made to become a Buddha, one has already passed beyond all the worlds and is worthy to receive the worlds' offerings."
[^9]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, fasc. 4, the passage on the division of the three incalculable aeons. The author marks the turning of the bodhisattva's stage by "the mind knows it will surely become a Buddha but the mouth does not yet declare it" (second incalculable aeon) → "the mouth utters of itself: I shall become a Buddha in a future age" (third incalculable aeon).

## Index of Citations

| No. | Text | Fascicle / Page | Function |
|------|------|--------|------|
| T0189 | Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects | fasc. 1, p0622a09 / b11 / b23 | Continuous biographical spine (vow + hair-spreading + prediction) |
| T1509 | Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra | fasc. 4 p0087a16 · p0086b08 · three-aeon division; fasc. 75 p0579c25 | Doctrinal gloss (vow as identity-founding · prediction = *avaivartika*) |
| T0125 | Ekottarāgama | Chapter on Hearing the Dharma no. 36, p0758b12 | Early *Āgama* vow-language |
| T0152 | Sūtra of the Collection of the Six Perfections | fasc. 8 · *Sūtra of Megha's Prediction* | Jātaka narrative (supporting) |
| T0235 | Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra | Dīpaṃkara prediction passage | Standard prediction formula (supporting) |

---

## References

**I. Primary Buddhist Sources**
- *Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects*, trans. Guṇabhadra, Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō vol. 3, No. 189.
- *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, attrib. Nāgārjuna, trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō vol. 25, No. 1509.
- *Ekottarāgama*, trans. Gautama Saṃghadeva, Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō vol. 2, No. 125.
- *Sūtra of the Collection of the Six Perfections*, trans. Kang Senghui, Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō vol. 3, No. 152.
- *Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra*, trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō vol. 8, No. 235.
- Pāli: *Buddhavaṃsa* IIA (Sumedha-kathā), PTS edition (reference).

**II. Modern Works**
- Alasdair MacIntyre, *After Virtue*.
- Charles Taylor, *Sources of the Self*.

---

## Cross-References to Other Papers in the Series

This paper takes up the distinction of the three terms drawn in P01, carries "the vow" into Sumedha's primal vow, and establishes the spine's arousing-end for the volume. What it carries forward and where it points:

- **From P01 (the distinction of vow, pledge, and transference)**: this paper takes the "vow as the arousing of an orientation toward awakening" established in P01 §2.1 and unfolds it as Sumedha's founding vow before Dīpaṃkara.
- **Signpost to P03 (resolve, *adhiṭṭhāna*)**: this paper's §V, "the prediction = *avaivartika* = the beginning of non-retreat," is the *outer* seal; its *inner* root (the vow's own immovability) is taken up by P03.
- **Signpost to Part III (the vow as a perfection / the power of the primal vow)**: this paper's §III, "the vow gathers all practices under itself (solely for the sake of *sarvajña*)," is systematized there together with the full doctrine of vow-power.
- **Signpost to Part VII (non-regression and emptiness · P17)**: the non-retreat of the prediction in §V, its full typology (the three non-retreats of station, practice, and thought) and its relation to the forbearance of the non-arising of dharmas, awaits that paper.

On the relation to Volume Two, *Giving*: the self-emptying of Sumedha's spreading his hair over the mud shares a root with the *Giving* volume's treatment of *cāga* (relinquishment, the loosening of the sense of "mine") — the hair-spreading is *cāga* carried to its furthest on that last object of all, "oneself."

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*Paper:* PRANIDHANA-P02 · The Vow before Dīpaṃkara · **PRAṆIDHĀNA · Part I · Pāli Roots**
*Author:* 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing) · *Project:* 指月 / Pointing-at-the-Moon · *Series:* The Six Practice Gates （六行門）
*License:* CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
*CBETA collation:* All citations verified against the CBETA edition (Sūtra on Past and Present Causes and Effects T0189; Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra T1509; Ekottarāgama T0125; Ṣaṭpāramitā-saṃgraha T0152; Vajracchedikā T0235). Pāli Bv cited at PTS reference level.
*Repository:* https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates