---
title: "Adhiṭṭhāna and the Resolve of the Bodhisatta"
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-P03
paper_number: 3
part: Part I · Pāli Roots
part_number: 1
date: 2026-06
version: "1.0"
license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
---

# Adhiṭṭhāna and the Resolve of the Bodhisatta

**On the Immovability Native to the Vow Itself**

*中文主題：決意與願之不退——決意 adhiṭṭhāna 不是意志的鋼鐵化，而是願自身的不可動性*

---

**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 addresses a problem internal to the vow: once aspiration has been raised and turned toward awakening, what makes it irreversible? The common picture equates the vow's endurance with willpower—forging the mind into steel so it neither bends nor breaks across years and setbacks. This paper argues the opposite: the vow's non-retreat is not a self strengthening its will to the limit, but *adhiṭṭhāna* ("resolve") understood as the immovability native to the vow itself. The argument proceeds in three layers. First, an honest accounting of a textual tension: *adhiṭṭhāna* is the eighth of the Theravāda ten perfections, yet classical Chinese translation and the Mahāyāna list of ten perfections contain no such item—Mahāyāna places *praṇidhāna* ("vow") in the eighth position instead. This substitution is not a defect but the very seam of the thesis. Second, working from Chinese-language treatises, the paper establishes "resolve is the vow's non-retreat": the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* constitutes the bodhisattva from three things—great vow, an unshakable mind, unflagging effort—and the *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā* binds raising the great-minded vow to entry into "the assured company" in a single clause. Third, the paper draws boundaries: *adhiṭṭhāna* must not be conflated with the Yogācāra mental factor *adhimokṣa* ("resolved conviction"), nor reduced to modern psychology's grit. The core finding: because the awakening toward which this vow aims empties the one who vows, the vow has no self-serving terminus from which to retreat or by which to be exhausted—its non-retreat rests on the ground of no-self.

**Keywords:** vow, resolve, adhiṭṭhāna, non-retrogression, avaivartika, the assured company, Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā, ten perfections, adhimokṣa, grit, non-self

---

## I. The Problem: Is Non-Retreat the Forging of Will into Steel?

In our ordinary vocabulary, "holding to an aim for years without giving up" falls almost automatically under the heading of willpower. We praise someone for an "iron resolve," meaning a will hard enough to resist the erosions of fatigue, temptation, and failure; we credit the reaching of long-range goals to "grit," meaning passion plus a refusal to quit that carries a person through every moment they might otherwise have walked away. On this picture, whether an aim can be sustained depends on how strong the will is—strong enough to neither bend, nor break, nor rust over the years.

Transferring this picture directly onto the bodhisattva path is natural, and very common. The bodhisattva vows to seek awakening and pledges to liberate all beings; but beings are limitless and buddhahood unsurpassed, and the road is measured in incalculable aeons. What carries someone to the end of a road that long? The readiest answer is: a will strong enough, a resolve hammered into something steel-hard. So "non-retrogression" comes to sound like willpower at its limit—as if the difference between a bodhisattva and an ordinary person were only that the former's will is harder and more wear-resistant.

This paper argues the opposite. The vow's non-retreat is not an achievement in which a self strengthens its will to the limit; it is *adhiṭṭhāna* ("resolve") understood as the immovability native to the vow itself. Put differently: non-retreat is not a coat of willed armor added to the vow from outside, but the unshakable quality the vow already possesses—when it is genuinely turned toward awakening. To forge the will into steel is to seat firmness on the fortress called "I." The non-retreat described here seats firmness on what the vow is *aimed at*; and that object—an awakening that empties the one who vows—leaves no "I" standing in place to grow tired or to flinch.

The difference is not in how hard the will is, but in where the *ground* of non-retreat lies. An iron will is grounded in the rigidity of a self—and rigidity tires, fractures, and, given enough time, wears through. The vow's non-retreat is grounded in the vow's selfless orientation—and a vow with no self-serving terminus has, structurally, no place to retreat to and nothing to be used up. This paper aims to drive that single question—*where does the ground of non-retreat lie?*—down through the Chinese-language treatises, peg by peg.

## II. The Honest Seam: There Is No "Perfection of Resolve" in Chinese

To speak of *adhiṭṭhāna* at all, we must first be honest about a tension in the materials—and that tension is itself the seam of this paper's thesis, not a flaw to be papered over.

In the Theravāda list of ten perfections (giving, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, **resolve**, loving-kindness, equanimity), resolve—*adhiṭṭhāna*—stands eighth. But **classical Chinese translation and the Mahāyāna list of ten perfections contain no item called "resolve."** In the Mahāyāna ten (the ten perfections matched to the ten stages), the eighth slot is occupied by "vow" (*praṇidhāna*, the perfection of vowing). Theravāda places "resolve" eighth; Mahāyāna puts "vow" in its place.

How should this substitution be read? The least honest reading would pretend that the Chinese tradition possesses a lineage of "the perfection of resolve" and then grow an entire doctrine of non-retreat out of it. That is not the case. We can say plainly: **there is no entry for an *adhiṭṭhāna-pāramī* (perfection of resolve) in the classical Chinese Buddhist canon.** The Chinese compound *juéding bōluómì* ("perfection of resolve") appears only in a twentieth-century modern translation (the Chinese rendering of the Pāli canon), a recent translation still under copyright; this paper acknowledges its existence but does not import it into the main text as classical canonical evidence.[^1]

The thinness is not confined to the list of perfections; even the Āgama-layer anchor is slight. If we search the Madhyamāgama and Ekottarāgama for a "resolve / firm aspiration" term pointing clearly toward buddhahood, we find next to nothing—the "concentration of desire" (*chanda-samādhi*) among the four bases of spiritual power speaks of the stability of meditative absorption, not of a cross-life resolve fixed on the fruit of buddhahood. The line that actually clusters at the Āgama layer and points toward buddhahood runs not through "resolve" but through "vow" (*paṇidhāna*)—the very vow of Sumedha before Dīpaṅkara Buddha treated in the previous paper.[^2]

So where does the argument "resolve makes the vow irreversible" really rest? The honest answer must be stated: **it is principally a construction at the treatise (śāstra) layer**, concentrated in the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* and the *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā*, rather than a direct teaching of the Āgamas. This is not a deferral of the question—on the contrary, laying the seam open is what lets us see clearly: the "face of non-retreat" that Theravāda assigns to "resolve" is, in Mahāyāna, carried by "vow" itself. Across these two traditions, resolve and vow are two names for one face—both pointing at the same thing: *why a mind, once aroused, cannot be moved.* The next section's task is to trace, through the Chinese treatises, the Mahāyāna version of that face—the immovability native to the vow—stroke by stroke.

## III. The Vow's Firmness Is Its Non-Retreat: The Three Things and the Assured Company

### 3.1 Three Things Constitute the Bodhisattva: Vow, Immovability, Non-Retreat

The most direct warrant is in the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*. Its author defines what makes a *bodhisattva* a bodhisattva by three things:

> "He has a great vow; his mind cannot be moved; his effort does not retreat. By these three things he is called a bodhisattva."[^3]

Note the ordering. The **great vow** comes first—it is the arousal. The **immovable mind** sits in the middle—it is the non-retreat. **Unflagging effort** comes last—it is the carrying-out. These are not three items laid side by side but a single structure: the vow sets the direction first, the mind's immovability is that vow's inner quality, and effort is that immovability unfolding through time.

This fixes the place of "non-retreat." The mind's immovability is not a separate willed armor added on top of the vow—it is not that one first has a vow and then uses the will to cinch it tight and guard it against slippage. **The mind's immovability is the quality of the vow itself.** A vow genuinely turned toward awakening has an immovability that is intrinsic, not applied from outside. What *adhiṭṭhāna* names is precisely this—not willpower, but the vow's own immovability.

The treatise makes the point even more vividly elsewhere:

> "The resolved vow is called the great adornment."[^4]

"Adornment" here means *armor* (the great armor)—the bodhisattva dons the great armor to enter the sea of birth-and-death, and that armor is nothing other than the *resolvedness* of the vow. The vow's resolve (its being unalterable, unmovable) is itself the armor that shields the bodhisattva across measureless aeons. The armor is not a second weapon; it is the shape of the vow.

### 3.2 To Raise the Vow Is to Enter the Assured: Non-Retreat Is the Vow's Root

The *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā* binds "vow" and "non-retreat" into an even tighter clause:

> "To raise the great-minded vow is to enter the assured company."[^5]

The "assured company" (*niyata-rāśi*) stands in contrast to the "uncertain company" and the "wrongly-fixed company"—it names the class of those already determined never again to fall back, certain to proceed toward awakening. The neighboring term to "assured" is *avaivartika*, meaning "non-retrogressive." The whole weight of the clause rests on the word *is*: raising the great-minded vow (setting the direction) and entering the ranks of the assured (the ranks of non-retreat) are not two successive stages—not "first vow, then practice for a long while, and only then gradually earn non-retreat"—but two faces of one thing, bound in a single clause.

This answers the question of section I. Non-retreat is not a reward won inch by inch through effort, as though, with a strong enough will and long enough practice, one could "upgrade" oneself into the rank of the non-retreating. **Non-retreat is the vow's root**—present already at the moment the great-minded vow is raised, because a vow genuinely turned toward awakening is by its nature already assured, already immovable. Effort does not *manufacture* non-retreat; effort is this already-non-retreating vow unfolding faithfully through time.

### 3.3 Carrying Forward: From the Outer Seal to the Inner Root

Joining this paper back to the previous one completes the arc. The previous paper treated Sumedha's vow before Dīpaṅkara Buddha, and Dīpaṅkara's prediction over him—a prediction that, on the Mahāyāna reading, is the "prediction of non-retrogression," an **external sealing** of "this one will surely not turn back." The prediction is a confirmation arriving from outside: the Buddha's eye sees that this vow will surely be fulfilled, and so he confirms it before the assembly.

But for an external seal to hold, it must have an internal ground. The reason a Buddha can certify that this vow will not retreat is that the vow **itself** possesses an unmovable quality. What this paper supplies is exactly that inner root: what the prediction certifies is the vow's own resolve, the vow's own firmness. So three papers fall into one line—

The first paper distinguished the three terms vow / pledge / dedication, establishing the vow as the arousal turned toward awakening;
The second took Sumedha's original vow, establishing the vow as the founding pledge of an entire life-arc, and read the prediction as the outer seal at the beginning of non-retreat;
The third takes *adhiṭṭhāna*, resolve, establishing the inner root of the vow's non-retreat—what the prediction seals is the immovability native to the vow itself.

As for the full typology of "non-retrogression" (the distinction between non-retreat of station, of practice, and of mindfulness), and its relation to the "patient acceptance of the non-arising of phenomena," those belong to a later dedicated paper; here we only set the signpost and do not unfold it.[^6]

## IV. Interdisciplinary Bridges: Grit, and the Unmoved Will

Set "the vow's non-retreat" against contemporary and Western currents of thought, and three interlocutors most readily invite comparison. Taking each in turn sharpens the outline of this paper's claim.

**First, the psychology of grit.** Angela Duckworth's "grit"—passion plus perseverance toward long-term goals—together with the "ego-depletion" thesis that willpower is consumed by use, is the most influential contemporary account of "the durable resolve." *What can be granted*: resolve is indeed durable, cross-life, non-retreating, not a fragile and scattering wish; on the surface point of "not easily giving up," the two converge. *What must be pressed*: grit is the trait of *a self*, propelling the goals of *a self*, terminating in a measurable attainment; whereas the non-retreat of resolve rests on the **object** toward which the vow aims (awakening—for the sake of beings) and on the root non-retreat of the vow (*avaivartika*), not on anything earned through effort. The sharpest difference: grit can be exhausted—will is a finite resource, and burns out under long load; whereas the vow's non-retreat, because no self-serving terminus waits there to be reached, is structurally **inexhaustible**. ⚠️ The vow's non-retreat is not "a stronger grit than grit"; the two are not measured on the same scale.

**Second, the Stoic *constantia*.** This is the interlocutor most deeply in tune with the present paper. The Stoic immovability of the sage—a will conformed to reason and to nature, unmoved by fortune (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius)—genuinely resonates with resolve: both hold that the way to render the will unmoved is not brute endurance but **correspondence with what is highest**; both refuse to be jerked about by outer circumstance. *What can be granted*: this insight—that immovability is reached by correspondence, not by force—the paper grants entirely. *What must be pressed*: the issue remains the **ground of immovability**. Stoic constancy guards the immovability (*apatheia*) and integrity of the **self**—the self is a fortress, and constancy is what keeps the fortress from being stormed. The immovability of resolve serves a vow that **empties the self** (beings are limitless); its non-retreat is secured by the vow's emptiness / *avaivartika* (a ground of no-self), not by the toughness of a self. One makes the fortress more secure; the other has no fortress to defend at all—the very place of firmness is the place of no-self.

**Third, existential decision (a passing note).** Heidegger's "resoluteness" (*Entschlossenheit*) and Kierkegaard's "purity of heart is to will one thing" both treat the wholehearted willing of a single thing as the founding posture of a life. *What can be granted*: this emphasis on "single-minded willing" accords with the singleness of the bodhisattva vow. *What must be pressed*: existential decision still achieves a self thrown toward its own ownmost possibility; whereas the single-minded willing of resolve aims at a terminus that **dissolves the one who wills**. This shares a root with the first distinction—the crux is always whether the willing subject is, in the end, fulfilled or emptied.

The three exchanges converge on two axes. First, the **ground** of immovability: the toughness of a self, or the selfless root of the vow? Second, **inexhaustibility**: grit can be used up; the vow's non-retreat structurally cannot. See these two axes clearly, and "the vow's non-retreat" no longer looks like "an especially strong willpower" but shows its true face—immovable, on a ground of no-self.

## V. Corrections of the Middle Way

**❌ Correction One: Resolve is not "iron will," and its three senses must not be blurred.**

Reading *adhiṭṭhāna* as "steel-hard willpower" is the misreading this paper has set out to dismantle from the start; but before dismantling it, the three senses the word carries in the texts must be told apart, or the very object of discussion will be misplaced. *Adhiṭṭhāna* has at least three senses that cannot be interchanged: (a) the **perfection sense**—resolve toward buddhahood, the principal arena of this paper; (b) the **four-foundations sense**—the *Discourse on the Analysis of the Six Elements* (corresponding to MN 140) says "a person has four foundations… the foundation of truth, the foundation of wisdom, the foundation of relinquishment, the foundation of peace"[^7]—here *adhiṭṭhāna* means "foundation / standing-place," the four bases of the arahant, a different matter entirely from "resolve"; and (c) the **resolved-conviction sense** (*adhimokṣa*), a Yogācāra mental factor with a wholly different Sanskrit root (see Correction Three). The three senses share a root and near-identical Chinese forms, and slide together easily. Most to be guarded against: **the "four foundations" must not be passed off as the Āgama warrant for "resolve"**—doing so smuggles the foundation-sense ("standing-place") in for the resolve-sense ("resolve toward buddhahood"), and makes the use of materials dishonest.

**⚠️ Correction Two: Resolve (*adhiṭṭhāna*) is not resolved conviction (*adhimokṣa*).**

This is a textbook pair of "false friends." Both carry the Chinese character for "fixed / resolved" and are easily fused, but their Sanskrit differs and their referents more so. The Yogācāra *adhimokṣa* ("resolved conviction") is a mental factor denoting **the holding fast of something already ascertained**—a cognitive certainty that qualifies an **object** (an endorsement of "the matter ascertained," such as the conviction that some principle is true). The "fixedness" of *adhiṭṭhāna*, by contrast, qualifies the **will** (the resolvedness of "the resolved vow"). Put another way: *adhimokṣa* secures the "view" (from belief to certainty); *adhiṭṭhāna* secures the "vow" (from aspiration to non-retreat). One makes your cognition no longer waver; the other makes your vow no longer turn back—and *adhimokṣa* must never be made to stand in for *adhiṭṭhāna*.

**⚠️ Correction Three: There is no "perfection of resolve" in classical Chinese; the naming must be honest.**

Finally, to restate the seam already opened in section II, as a matter of methodological discipline: the Mahāyāna ten perfections replaced Theravāda's "resolve" with "vow," and so **there is no lineage of a "perfection of resolve" in classical Chinese to be inherited.** The "resolve" treated here has its Chinese warrant in the treatise layer's (the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* and *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā*) construction of "the vow's non-retreat," not in some classical "perfection of resolve" source-text. We take Theravāda's *adhiṭṭhāna* as the **conceptual root**—it and the seed of Sumedha's *paṇidhāna* point jointly at the one matter, "why an aroused vow cannot be moved"—and that conceptual root is real; but to claim from this that the Chinese tradition holds a transmitted lineage of a perfection of resolve would be a dishonest naming. To call a root a root and a construction a construction—this very discrimination is part of the paper's method.

## VI. Conclusion (Sealing Part I): From the Point of Arousal to the Immovable Root

What this paper has established can be gathered into three layers.

**The essential layer.** The vow's non-retreat is not an achievement of a self forging its will into steel; resolve (*adhiṭṭhāna*) is the immovability native to the vow itself. The *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* constitutes the bodhisattva from three things—great vow, an unshakable mind, unflagging effort—where the mind's immovability is not a will added onto the vow but the vow's own quality; the *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā* binds raising the vow and non-retreat into a single clause—"to raise the great-minded vow is to enter the assured company"—so that non-retreat is the vow's root, not a reward earned by effort. And the reason this non-retreat is structurally inexhaustible is that the awakening toward which the vow aims empties the one who vows: with no self-serving terminus waiting there, there is no place to retreat to and nothing to be used up.

**The layer of practice guidance.** The guidance here is not to "train your resolve harder." Quite the reverse: when holding to a long-range vow begins to feel unsustainable, the thing to go back and examine is not "is my will strong enough" but "what is this vow actually turned toward—some arrival of my own, or an awakening that will empty me?" The rigidity of will tires and fractures; but a vow whose direction has been genuinely handed over, no longer terminating in "I," does not rely on your gritting through—its immovability is its own affair, not the affair of your will. Calibrate the fire onto the right object, and the rest of the non-retreat is what the vow keeps for you.

**The layer of open questions.** This paper has established only the one face of "the vow's root of non-retreat." The full countenance of "non-retrogression"—the distinctions of non-retreat of station, of practice, and of mindfulness, and its relation to the "patient acceptance of the non-arising of phenomena" (resting in emptiness while the vow stays unmoved)—has not been unfolded; that is the work of a later part of this volume. And beyond "vow" and "resolve," the mechanism of the "wholesome desire" (*chanda*) that drives the vow's moment-to-moment continuity remains untreated; that is the baton the very next paper takes up.

With this, Part I of the volume (the three papers on Pāli roots) comes to a close. A continuous arc has been walked: the first paper distinguished the three terms vow, pledge, and dedication, establishing **the vow as the arousal turned toward awakening**; the second took Sumedha's vow before Dīpaṅkara Buddha, establishing **the vow as the founding pledge of an entire life-arc**, and read the prediction as the outer seal at the beginning of non-retreat; the third took *adhiṭṭhāna*, resolve, establishing **the inner root of the vow's non-retreat**—what the prediction seals is the immovability native to the vow itself. From a "point" of arousal to the "root" by which that point cannot be moved, the ground of the vow now stands firm. How this vow then comes alive in the vocabulary of the Āgamas, in the continuity of each present moment, is the matter of the next part. The vow begins at a point of arousal and, in the end, walks the whole road of awakening; but how that road is walked and where it leads, this paper only signposts, leaving the rest to what follows.

---

## Footnotes

[^1]: That resolve (*adhiṭṭhāna*) is the eighth of the Theravāda ten perfections, and is replaced by "vow" (*praṇidhāna*) in the Mahāyāna ten, is a structural difference between the Theravāda and Mahāyāna lists of perfections. The canonical loci for the Theravāda *adhiṭṭhāna-pāramī* are the *Cariyāpiṭaka* and the commentary on the *Buddhavaṃsa*, cited here at PTS reference-level only. Its sole Chinese-character witness is the modern translation in the Chinese rendering of the Pāli canon (Yuanheng Temple edition), *juéding bōluómì* ("perfection of resolve," N31 / N44); this is a twentieth-century recent translation still under copyright, and, in keeping with this project's source policy (handled by analogy with the `publication_safe: false` status of the GRETIL *Visuddhimagga*), only its existence is acknowledged—it is not entered as a main-text citation.

[^2]: At the Āgama layer, the resolve pointing clearly toward buddhahood clusters along the line of "vow" (*paṇidhāna*) rather than the line of "resolve"; its representative is Sumedha's vow before Dīpaṅkara Buddha, treated in the second paper of this volume (P02). The "concentration of desire" (*chanda-samādhi*) among the four bases of spiritual power refers to the stability of meditative absorption, not to the sense of "resolve." The mechanism by which *chanda* (wholesome desire) drives the vow's moment-to-moment continuity is reserved for a later paper in this volume.

[^3]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, fascicle 4, exposition section 8. (Attributed to Nāgārjuna; translated by Kumārajīva, Later Qin; Taishō vol. 25, No. 1509.)

[^4]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, fascicle 46. "The resolved vow is called the great adornment"—stating that the resolvedness of the vow is the great armor (adornment) the bodhisattva dons.

[^5]: *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā*, fascicle 1. (Attributed to Nāgārjuna; translated by Kumārajīva, Later Qin; Taishō vol. 26, No. 1521.) The "assured company" (*niyata-rāśi*) stands in contrast to the uncertain company and the wrongly-fixed company, and is bound up with *avaivartika* ("non-retrogression").

[^6]: The full typology of "non-retrogression" (non-retreat of station, of practice, and of mindfulness) and its relation to the "patient acceptance of the non-arising of phenomena" belong to a later part of this volume (the dedicated treatment of non-retrogression); here only a signpost is set. The Pure Land "easy path" face of "immediately entering the assured" (as touched in the "Chapter on Easy Practice" of the *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā*, where Amitābha's vow leads to immediate entry into the assured) belongs to the volume's later "other-power" section; here the term "assured" is taken only as a witness to "vow → non-retreat," and the easy-practice path of other-power is not unfolded.

[^7]: *Madhyamāgama, Discourse on the Analysis of the Six Elements*, fascicle 42 (corresponding to *Majjhima Nikāya* 140, *Dhātuvibhaṅga-sutta*). (Translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva, Eastern Jin; Taishō vol. 1, No. 26.) Here the *adhiṭṭhāna* of the "four foundations" carries the sense of "foundation / standing-place," distinct from the "resolve" sense of resolve-as-perfection; the discourse itself does not bridge the two senses, and it is cited here only to mark the distinction, not as a warrant for resolve. The definition of Yogācāra "resolved conviction" (*adhimokṣa*) is found in the *Yogācārabhūmi*, fascicle 3 (spoken by Maitreya; translated by Xuanzang, Tang; Taishō vol. 30, No. 1579).

---

## References

### I. Primary Buddhist Sources

- *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, attributed to Nāgārjuna, translated by Kumārajīva (Later Qin), Taishō vol. 25, No. 1509.
- *Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā*, attributed to Nāgārjuna, translated by Kumārajīva (Later Qin), Taishō vol. 26, No. 1521.
- *Madhyamāgama, Discourse on the Analysis of the Six Elements*, translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva (Eastern Jin), Taishō vol. 1, No. 26.
- *Yogācārabhūmi*, spoken by Maitreya, translated by Xuanzang (Tang), Taishō vol. 30, No. 1579.

Pāli parallels (PTS reference-level only, not entered in the main text): *Cariyāpiṭaka*; *Buddhavaṃsa* and its commentary (the *adhiṭṭhāna-pāramī*). The modern translation in the Chinese rendering of the Pāli canon (Yuanheng Temple edition), *juéding bōluómì* ("perfection of resolve," N31 / N44), is not entered, per source policy.

### II. Modern Scholarship

- Duckworth, A. *Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.* Scribner, 2016.
- Epictetus. *Discourses and Selected Writings.* (On *constantia* / the unmoved will.)
- Marcus Aurelius. *Meditations.*
- Heidegger, M. *Being and Time.* (On *Entschlossenheit*, "resoluteness.")
- Kierkegaard, S. *Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.*

### III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

| Short title | Full title | Taishō no. | Author / Translator |
|------|------|-----------|----------|
| Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra | Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra | T25 No. 1509 | Nāgārjuna / Kumārajīva |
| Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā | Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā | T26 No. 1521 | Nāgārjuna / Kumārajīva |
| Madhyamāgama (Six Elements) | Madhyamāgama, Analysis of the Six Elements | T01 No. 26 | Gautama Saṅghadeva |
| Yogācārabhūmi | Yogācārabhūmi | T30 No. 1579 | Maitreya / Xuanzang |

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## Cross-References to Other Papers in the Series

- **Carrying forward P01** (the three terms vow / pledge / dedication): this paper's discrimination of "resolve" continues the format of P01's discrimination of three terms—P01 established the vow as arousal; this paper establishes the immovability of that arousal.
- **Carrying forward P02** (Sumedha's vow · Dīpaṅkara's prediction): P02's Dīpaṅkara prediction was the outer seal at "the beginning of non-retreat"; this paper supplies its inner root—what the prediction seals is the vow's own resolve / firmness.
- **Signpost to Part II** (the Āgama vow and wholesome desire, *chanda*): the *chanda* mechanism driving the vow's moment-to-moment continuity is signposted here only, with a later paper taking up the baton.
- **Signpost to Part VII** (non-retrogression and emptiness): the full typology of "non-retrogression" (the three non-retreats of station / practice / mindfulness) and its relation to the "patient acceptance of the non-arising of phenomena" is the arena of that paper; here only the "vow's root of non-retreat" face is seeded.
- **Signpost to Part V** (Amitābha's vow · the easy path): the other-power easy-practice face of "immediately entering the assured" is the arena of that section; here "assured" is taken only as a witness to "vow → non-retreat."

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*Paper:* PRANIDHANA-P03 · Adhiṭṭhāna and the Resolve of the Bodhisatta · **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 (Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra T1509; Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā T1521; Madhyamāgama T0026; Yogācārabhūmi T1579). Theravāda adhiṭṭhāna-pāramī cited at PTS reference-level only; the modern Chinese 決定波羅蜜 (N31/N44) is acknowledged but not reproduced (source policy).
*Repository:* https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates