---
title: "Samādhi as Mahāyāna Expansion — How Naming Rewrote 'Concentration' into the Bodhisattva's Field of Practice-Gates"
author: "釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing)"
series: "Six Practice Gates, Volume 5 — SAMĀDHI: From the Pāli Jhāna to Silent Illumination and the Huatou · Part IV · The Mahāyāna Turn"
series_short: "SAMĀDHI"
volume: 5
paper_id: "SAMADHI-P15"
paper_number: 15
part: Part IV · The Mahāyāna Turn
part_number: 4
date: 2026-06
version: "1.0"
license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
---

# Samādhi as Mahāyāna Expansion

***How Naming Rewrote "Concentration" into the Bodhisattva's Field of Practice-Gates: The Heroic-March, the Ocean-Seal, the Lion's-Roused-Vigour***

*中文主題：三昧之大乘擴張——命名如何把「定」重寫為菩薩的行門場域*

---

## Abstract

Open a Mahāyāna sūtra or treatise and concentration no longer arrives as the four dhyānas' clean, countable list; it arrives as a crowd of strangely named *samādhis* — the Heroic-March, the Ocean-Seal, the Lion's-Roused-Vigour, the Jewel-Seal, the Pratyutpanna — by the hundred. A reader trained on the tidy ladder of the eight attainments is entitled to ask whether all this naming is mystification, a literature getting more arcane the more it talks, or whether the names are doing real doctrinal work. This paper argues, on the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, the *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra*, and the Larger *Prajñāpāramitā* in Kumārajīva's renderings, that the Mahāyāna's concentration is neither a few higher states stacked above the eighth attainment nor an abandonment of the four dhyānas, but the very same concentration rewritten as a *named, open field of the bodhisattva's gates of practice*. Naming is doctrinal cartography: it gives a boundless thing a finite handle — "pull one corner of the robe and the whole robe comes up" — each name locking down one bodhisattva-function, while the sheer proliferation of names itself encodes inexhaustibility. The paper shows that the treatise's use of the hundred-and-eight samādhis to expound the perfection of dhyāna is the exact complement of its use of the eighteen emptinesses to expound the perfection of prajñā: prajñā opens by subtraction, dhyāna opens by naming. It then sets the Heroic-March as this grammar's summit — the king that *contains* all samādhis rather than *outranking* them, a lateral comprehension and not a higher rung. It closes the arc of Part IV's four papers and hands the named field over to the prajñā of Part V, which will turn back and ask whether the field is itself empty.

**Keywords:** samādhi (三昧), concentration (定), the perfection of dhyāna (禪波羅蜜 / *dhyāna-pāramitā*), the hundred-and-eight samādhis (百八三昧), naming as doctrinal cartography (命名／勘定地圖), the named field of practice-gates (行門場域), the grammar of naming vs. the grammar of negation (命名的語法／否定的語法), the eighteen emptinesses (十八空 / *aṣṭādaśa-śūnyatā*), the Heroic-March samādhi (首楞嚴三昧 / *śūraṅgama-samādhi*), containment not transcendence (含攝義／非超越義), the Ocean-Seal samādhi (海印三昧 / *sāgaramudrā-samādhi*), the lion's-roused-vigour samādhi (師子奮迅三昧), the Great Vehicle (摩訶衍 / *Mahāyāna*), the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* (大智度論), the bodhisattva path (菩薩道)

---

## I. Introduction: When Concentration Is Named

The previous paper closed on a bird. The bodhisattva enters and leaves the absorptions as a bird flies through empty space — riding on nothing, yet building no nest in the air, settling on no single rung of attainment: using concentration without abiding in it, abiding without being bound. That paper handled a question of *posture* — how the bodhisattva uses concentration. But it left a larger question unopened at the close. The Mahāyāna did not merely change a person's *attitude* toward concentration; it changed the *scale* of concentration itself. Open the Mahāyāna sūtras and treatises and what comes at you is not the clean, countable list of the four dhyānas and the four formless attainments but a crowd of strangely named samādhis, by the hundred — the Heroic-March (*śūraṅgama*), the Ocean-Seal (*sāgaramudrā*), the Lion's-Roused-Vigour, the Jewel-Seal, the Pratyutpanna, the Lion's-Play — so many of them, with such exotic names, that a first reader grows suspicious.

That suspicion deserves a straight answer rather than a polite detour around it. A reader who has just walked out of the clear architecture of the four dhyānas and into this crowd will naturally ask: are these hundreds of names doing real doctrinal work, or are they the rhetorical inflation of the commentators, the particular way a religious literature has of sounding more and more arcane the more it talks? The question cannot be waved off, because the answer to it decides whether we read the Mahāyāna's science of concentration as an ever-taller staircase of spiritual powers or as something else entirely.

The thesis of this paper can be cleared first with three denials and then stated positively.

First, the Mahāyāna's concentration is **not** a handful of higher states stacked on top of the eight attainments — it is not that the lesser vehicle climbs as far as the eighth attainment and the Great Vehicle simply scales a few more rungs above it. Second, it is **not** the mystifying accumulation of names for its own sake — the multiplicity of names is not rhetorical swelling. Third, it is **not** the abandonment of the four dhyānas for some fresh start — the Mahāyāna never discards the base map that the four dhyānas draw.

What, then, is it? The Mahāyāna's concentration is the very same concentration rewritten as a **named, open field of the bodhisattva's gates of practice**. Naming here is not mystification but a doctrinal surveying and map-making: it gives a thing that is in itself boundless, in itself inexhaustible, a finite handle one can actually take hold of. Each samādhi's name locks down one bodhisattva-function; and the very fact that the names can proliferate without end is itself the encoding of a doctrine — that concentration's usefulness has no floor and no ceiling. To put it another way, what naming does is exactly the piece that the first three papers of Part IV could not supply. Those papers asked how concentration is transformed by prajñā into a perfection, how calm-and-insight is modeled by the Yogācāra into the nine stages of mental abiding, and how the bodhisattva refuses to settle into the taste of absorption. Naming answers a different question: not "what is concentration's nature," not "how is concentration modeled," not "how does a person use concentration," but "what shape has the Mahāyāna expanded concentration itself into?"

What follows returns first to the bounded list of early concentration, to see clearly what the expansion is an expansion *of* (Section II); then opens the internal mechanism of this grammar of naming (Section III); sets the Heroic-March samādhi as the grammar's summit (Section IV); takes in the Ocean-Seal and the Lion's-Roused-Vigour as the field's two far ends (Section V); and finally closes Part IV and hands the named field over to prajñā (Section VI).

---

## II. A Bounded Field: The Countable List of Early Concentration

To see what the Mahāyāna expanded concentration into, one has to see clearly what concentration looked like before it. The field of early concentration has a sharp signature: it is bounded, it is countable, and each concentration answers to a definite function and a definite fruit — one name, one fruit, clean and exact.

The four dhyānas are themselves just such a list: the first dhyāna up to the fourth, plus the four formless attainments, make a strictly structured, clearly graded staircase, each step defined by the falling-away of the dhyāna-factors that the one below still carries — enumerable, comparable, verifiable. Set beside the four dhyānas, the other core set is the three samādhis: emptiness, signlessness, nothingness. The *Saṃyukta-Āgama*'s "Sūtra of the Noble Dharma-Seal," in its third fascicle, arranges the three as an ordered approach:

> Having attained nothing in the samādhi of emptiness, one gives rise to signlessness, to nothingness, and to the knowledge-and-vision that abandons conceit.[^1]

Here it is worth stopping for one philological correction. ⚠️ Later Buddhist systematization habitually calls these three "the three gates of liberation" (三解脫門). But that label is a later doxographic term of art; it is not the wording of the *Saṃyukta-Āgama* itself. In this Āgama the text speaks directly of "the three samādhis," or of the "mind-samādhi" of emptiness, signlessness, and nothingness. When we write the baseline of early concentration we should use "the three samādhis," and not retroject the later name "three gates of liberation" into the mouth of the Āgama.

A second discrepancy, this one between the Chinese and the Pāli, must be flagged in the same breath. ⚠️ The third member of the Chinese three reads "nothingness" (無所有), whereas the corresponding third gate in the Pāli tradition is usually "wishlessness" (*appaṇihita*, 無願／無作). The two are not the same word on the face of it — the Chinese "nothingness" and the Pāli "wishlessness" are two different terms, and they should not be read as a transparent translation of one another simply because they sit in the same slot. The mismatch is instructive: even in the earliest stratum of concentration practice, the words have already drifted faintly between the transmissions. Names were never panes of clear glass.

But whether the four dhyānas, the formless attainments, or the three samādhis, early concentration shares one form: concentration is a **list**. Its items are determinate, its number is countable, and each item can say plainly what it counters and what it accomplishes. What the samādhi of emptiness counters, what the samādhi of signlessness opens up — all of it has a fixed measure. It is the *boundary* of this list that the Mahāyāna expansion takes aim at. The Mahāyāna did not negate the list — the four dhyānas remain, the three samādhis remain — what it did was take down the boundary of the list, turning concentration from a closed catalogue into an open field that can be named, and named again, without end. To understand how that turn happens, one has to step into the grammar of naming.

---

## III. The Grammar of Naming: How the Expansion Happens

Expansion is not inflation out of nowhere; it has an internal grammar that can be opened up. The clearest specimen of that grammar is the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, attributed to Nāgārjuna and translated by Kumārajīva.

### 3.1 Two Complementary Exegetical Grammars: The Eighteen Emptinesses and the Hundred-and-Eight Samādhis

In expounding the perfection of prajñā and the perfection of dhyāna, the treatise uses a strikingly symmetrical structure, and describes its own method in a single line:

> Above, the eighteen emptinesses [were used] to explain the perfection of prajñā … the hundred-and-eight samādhis to explain the perfection of dhyāna. The hundred-and-eight samādhis the Buddha himself expounded.[^2]

This sentence carries the paper's central claim. It locks the fact of "expansion" into the treatise's own exegetical architecture. The perfection of prajñā the treatise opens by way of the eighteen emptinesses — a string of *negations*, approaching the real by sweeping away, by clearing, by "emptiness." The perfection of dhyāna it opens by way of the hundred-and-eight samādhis — a string of *namings*, unfolding concentration's endless functions by multiplying, by listing, by "setting up names." On the one side a grammar of negation, on the other a grammar of naming; the two are the two hands of one Mahāyāna exegetical tradition. Prajñā opens by subtraction; dhyāna opens by addition. Naming is not an incidental decoration on the science of concentration; it is the structural mode of disclosure that stands opposite prajñā's.

One common misreading has to be pinned down here at once. ❌ The figure "hundred-and-eight" should not be read as "exactly one hundred and eight mutually distinct concentrations that can be counted off one by one." In Buddhist literature "hundred-and-eight" is a round number, a figure of "completeness-through-multitude" (as in the hundred-and-eight afflictions, the hundred-and-eight prayer-beads); it marks "so many as to form a complete whole," not a catalogue precise to the last digit. To read "the hundred-and-eight samādhis" as "a 108-item inventory of spiritual powers" demotes the doctrinal work of naming into a kind of bookkeeping — and so misses precisely what naming is doing.

### 3.2 The Expansion Happens in the Widest Word: Samādhi, Concentration, Dhyāna

Why do the Mahāyāna's new states almost all take "samādhi" for their name, and not "dhyāna"? This is not a chance habit of usage; it has a doctrinal basis. The twenty-eighth fascicle of the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* fixes the range of the three terms — concentration, samādhi, dhyāna:

> All meditative concentration is also called *concentration*, also called *samādhi*; the four dhyānas are also called *dhyāna* …[^3]

The three are not a flat synonymy; they nest. All meditative concentration may be called "concentration" and called "samādhi"; but "dhyāna" specifically names the root concentrations of the four dhyānas, with their definite factor-structure. This difference of range is what structurally explains why the Mahāyāna expansion happens in the word "samādhi" — because of the three terms, samādhi is the one with the widest reach and the loosest boundary. To open endless new names within the science of concentration you need the container that was widest to begin with; "dhyāna" is too narrow, locked shut by the factor-structure of the four dhyānas, whereas "samādhi" is roomy enough to hold the hundred-and-eight. The Mahāyāna's naming-expansion happens exactly in the word that the language had left the most room in: **samādhi ⊃ concentration ⊃ dhyāna**.

### 3.3 The Finitude of the Śrāvaka and the Measurelessness of the Great Vehicle

Expansion itself is taken by the treatise as a mark dividing the Great Vehicle from the vehicle of the disciples. In the same twenty-eighth fascicle it contrasts the samādhis of the two:

> The samādhis of the śrāvaka, or of the pratyekabuddha …[^4]

The samādhis of the disciple and the solitary buddha are finite and countable, just like the list of Section II; the samādhis of the bodhisattva, the treatise says, are "measureless, incalculable" (*asaṃkhyeya*) — so many they cannot be numbered, so many that "cannot be numbered" becomes their very definition. This is the crucial point: in the Mahāyāna's own self-understanding the multiplicity of samādhis is not literary clutter but a marker of the vehicle. The endless proliferation of concentration is one concrete face of what makes the "Great Vehicle" *great*. The disciple's concentration is a catalogue one can finish reading; the bodhisattva's concentration is a field one cannot read to the end — and that "cannot be read to the end" is exactly the doctrine it is built to convey.

### 3.4 The Self-Glossing Template: "What Is Called the X Samādhi … This Is Called the X Samādhi"

How, then, are these hundreds of names set up, and how do they mesh with one another? The Mahāyāna sūtras supply a highly regular template. The Larger *Prajñāpāramitā*, in the fifth fascicle, the "Inquiry on the Vehicles" chapter, listing the bodhisattva's samādhis, uses a recursive self-glossing formula again and again:

> There are named the jewel-seal samādhi, the lion's-play samādhi … this samādhi can seal all samādhis; this is called the jewel-seal samādhi.[^5]

Notice the structure of the formula: first the name (the jewel-seal samādhi), then, in the form "this samādhi can [some function], this is called the X samādhi," it welds name to function directly. The jewel-seal is called the jewel-seal because it "can seal all samādhis" — the name is not an arbitrary label but a *defined function-unit*. Every samādhi's name, through this "what is called X? … this is called X" template, locks down one specific capacity of the bodhisattva. The system of names is therefore not a heap of loosely floating titles but a functional map on which each node carries a definite functional definition. The grammar of naming is, at bottom, a cartography that partitions the measureless powers of concentration one by one, names them one by one, defines them one by one.

### 3.5 The Load-Bearing Image: Pull One Corner of the Robe and the Whole Robe Comes Up

But here a danger surfaces at once. If naming partitions concentration into hundreds of function-units, has it not dismembered a thing that was originally seamless into hundreds of fragments? The Mahāyāna has a clear-eyed answer to this danger, and the twenty-eighth fascicle of the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* gives this paper its single most important image:

> Like pulling one corner of a robe, and the whole robe comes up; or like tasting honey …[^6]

This simile dissolves the worry of "dismemberment in a stroke." Naming is not the cutting of one robe into a hundred scraps; naming marks, on this measureless "robe of concentration" that one could otherwise find no purchase on, a corner one can lift. Take hold of any one corner and the whole robe rises with it — because all the samādhis are of one piece, and to grasp any one named entrance is to grasp the thread that leads to every other concentration. The second image, "tasting honey," runs the same way: taste a single drop and you know the flavor of the whole jar; realize one named samādhi and through it you reach the single savor of concentration entire.

This is what naming does, and it is the very thing the first three papers of Part IV could not supply: it gives the measureless a **finite handle**. The measureless as such cannot be operated — you cannot "cultivate a measureless"; but you can cultivate the Heroic-March, cultivate the Ocean-Seal, cultivate the Pratyutpanna, and each named entrance is the corner that draws up the whole robe of concentration. The doctrinal function of naming, then, is not dismemberment but the conferral of operability: it turns the inexhaustible into gates one can actually walk through, one at a time.

---

## IV. The Heroic-March: The King Among Samādhis That Contains Them All

If the grammar of naming partitions the measureless into graspable function-units, then the grammar must force a question: above all the named samādhis, is there one whose function is precisely to *hold all the rest together*? The Mahāyāna answers yes, and that samādhi is the Heroic-March — this section is the summit of the naming-grammar.

The root text of the Heroic-March samādhi is the *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* in Kumārajīva's rendering. A textual distinction has to be made here at once. ⚠️ The *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* on which this section rests is not the same scripture as the *Śūraṅgama-sūtra* (大佛頂首楞嚴經) prized by the later Chan and Tantric traditions; the two carry different numbers in the canon, different provenances, and different contents. This volume's treatment of the *Śūraṅgama-sūtra* (the great heroic-march absorption, the fifty skandha-māras, the twenty-five perfect penetrations) is reserved for the dedicated paper of Part VI; this section establishes only the doctrinal function of "Heroic-March" as the *name of a samādhi*, on the basis of Kumārajīva's *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra*.

### 4.1 It Cannot Be Known by One Thing, One Object, One Meaning

The Heroic-March samādhi differs in a root way from every concentration that has a fixed number and a fixed defining mark. The sūtra says:

> The Heroic-March samādhi cannot be known by one thing, one object, or one meaning.[^7]

This line is the pivot of the whole conception. An ordinary samādhi can be grasped by one thing, one object, one meaning — the samādhi of emptiness takes emptiness for its object, the contemplation of the unlovely takes the unlovely, the samādhi of loving-kindness takes the happiness of beings. The Heroic-March cannot. It is not a concentration settled on some one particular object, because its range is precisely "all." The sūtra goes on to set it out by a hundred aspects — its interlinear gloss runs them from the first to the hundredth — and this "hundred aspects," like the "hundred-and-eight" of Section III, is a round number signifying complete multitude, marking the breadth of what the Heroic-March contains, not an exact inventory of a hundred powers. The first of these hundred aspects the sūtra gives is:

> Cultivating the mind to be like space.[^8]

Taking "the mind like space" as the head of the list already tells the temper of the Heroic-March: it is not some one bounded state of concentration but, like space, a comprehension that contains all and is limited by no single mark.

### 4.2 Named from Leadership: The Name Arises from Containing-and-Commanding

On what ground, then, is the name "Heroic-March" set up? The sūtra gives its own gloss:

> All factors aiding bodhi follow in its train; therefore this samādhi is named the Heroic-March.[^9]

Look at the logic of the naming. The Heroic-March is called the Heroic-March because "all the factors that aid awakening follow in its train" — its name comes from its **position of leadership**, from its containing and commanding the whole body of the factors of the path. This is a crucial discrimination. ❌ It is tempting to take the name "Heroic-March" as a question of etymology, and to ask what the Sanskrit *śūraṅgama* means on the face of it. In the Chinese tradition the word does carry etymological glosses — "heroic-going," "valiant," "utterly final," and the like — but that etymological work belongs to the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*'s exposition of the Heroic-March, a different layer altogether. The *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* itself does not name from etymology; the ground of its self-gloss is *leadership*: because all the factors aiding bodhi follow in its train, it is named the Heroic-March. The name arises from function, not from a root-word. To run "named from leadership" together with "the etymology of valiant-going" — worse, to hang the etymological gloss on the *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* — is exactly the thing to avoid.

### 4.3 Containment, Not Transcendence

From "named from leadership" follows the single distinction this section, and indeed this whole paper, most needs to hold. ❌ The Heroic-March is the "king among samādhis," but its kingship is a matter of **containment**, not of **transcendence**. By containment is meant that all concentrations, liberations, and samādhis are gathered up within it; it commands the host of concentrations as a king commands his ministers. By transcendence would be meant that it stands one rung higher than the four dhyānas and the eight attainments, a further tier added at the top of the ladder. The Heroic-March is the former, not the latter.

This distinction speaks directly to the misreading cleared away in Section I — reading the Mahāyāna's science of concentration as an ever-taller staircase of spiritual powers. The Heroic-March is not "one rung higher" than the four dhyānas and the eight attainments; it is not on that vertical staircase measured by the shedding of dhyāna-factors at all. It is a lateral comprehension: the bodhisattva's command and holding-together of the entire field of concentration. The sūtra says this samādhi can be attained only by bodhisattvas of the tenth ground, and not by disciples, solitary buddhas, or bodhisattvas of the lower grounds — but this "attainable only on the tenth ground" marks the depth of the bodhisattva *station* it requires, not its height on the dhyāna-ladder. The function of the name is the mature mastery by which the bodhisattva *holds all samādhis together*, not a newly discovered, higher state of concentration.

Hold that, and the Heroic-March is restored from "the highest of spiritual powers" to what it really is: the summit the grammar of naming can reach. When you have named concentration one by one, partitioned it to the limit, you must finally have a name that points to "the holding-together of this whole named field" — and that name is the Heroic-March. The dedicated Part VI paper will re-enter "the great heroic-march absorption" from another text and another angle; this section only fixes the doctrinal function of the *name* "Heroic-March," as the joint that leads to that paper.

---

## V. The Two Ends of the Field: The Ocean-Seal and the Lion's-Roused-Vigour

The named field now stands, with the Heroic-March at its holding-together summit. This section takes in two further named nodes of the field, to see its breadth at the two far ends — one reaching toward the dharma-realm manifesting all at once (the Ocean-Seal), the other reaching toward the bodhisattva's free, unhindered movement in and out of the concentrations (the Lion's-Roused-Vigour).

### 5.1 The Ocean-Seal Samādhi: The Field Reaching Toward the Dharma-Realm

Within this named field of samādhis, one name pushes concentration's capacity-to-hold out to the whole dharma-realm — the Ocean-Seal. The fourteenth fascicle of the *Avataṃsaka-sūtra*, the "Worthy Leader" chapter, says:

> All these it can manifest — by the spiritual power of the Ocean-Seal samādhi.[^10]

The name "Ocean-Seal" takes its image from a windless, waveless sea that can seal-print the myriad images of the sky all at once: in this concentration the dharma-realm's every differentiated mark is reflected as the sea-surface mirrors the sky, manifesting simultaneously, with no before and no after. This is the widest reach the named field can imagine — concentration is no longer dwelling settled on one object but the whole dharma-realm appearing at once within the concentration.

A line has to be held here. This section takes from the Ocean-Seal only its name, and cites only this one verse of the "Worthy Leader" chapter, in order to show how far the named field reaches, and to plant it as a seed pointing forward. How the Ocean-Seal serves as the dharma-realm capstone of Huayan concentration, how it was developed by the Huayan masters into the integrated system of "the ocean-seal blazing forth," is the main stage of the dedicated Huayan paper in Part VIII, and this section does not unfold it. The reader need only keep one thing in mind here: in this named field of concentration there is a name, the Ocean-Seal, and it marks that concentration's capacity-to-hold can be as vast as the whole dharma-realm.

### 5.2 The Lion's-Roused-Vigour and the Transcendent Samādhi: The Field Reaching Toward Mastery

The field's other end is a cluster of named samādhis whose function is the bodhisattva's free, unhindered movement in and out of the concentrations. The eighty-first fascicle of the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, listing the bodhisattva's samādhis, mentions:

> The transcendent samādhi, the lion's-roused-vigour samādhi, and measureless other bodhisattva samādhis …[^11]

The lion's-roused-vigour takes its image from the way a lion rouses its body, that effortless surge of unobstructed power; the transcendent samādhi (*vyutkrāntaka*) means the capacity to enter and leave the concentrations out of order, skipping rungs at will. Here too the treatise draws a line between the lesser and Great Vehicles: the adepts of the two vehicles, entering the transcendent attainment, are limited in how they move in and out of the concentrations and cannot skip freely; the bodhisattva's transcending can skip at will, entering and leaving with full mastery — the same named state, the bodhisattva's version exceeding the disciple's.

A boundary must be guarded with special care here. In the paper of this volume that handled "the bodhisattva's relationship to concentration," the lion's-roused-vigour and the transcendent were used to demonstrate the *principle* of "mastery in entering and leaving" — invoked there as living examples of the bodhisattva's posture of "using without abiding." **This section does not repeat that work.** In this paper the lion's-roused-vigour and the transcendent figure only as two *named members* of this expansion field — they are the field's two names reaching toward the "mastery" end, function-nodes that the grammar of naming posits, and not a second occasion to argue the principle of "entering and leaving freely." The previous paper asked *how the bodhisattva uses such concentration*; this paper asks *which names the field holds and what each one locks down*. The same cluster of words carries different doctrinal work in the two papers.

One may add, as a relative of the lion's-roused-vigour, the "lion's-play samādhi" — the lion roaming and sporting, fearless, freely at ease, also among the named samādhis of the Larger *Prajñāpāramitā* (as listed in the "Inquiry on the Vehicles" chapter cited at 3.4 above). It shares the same family of images with the lion's-roused-vigour (the lion's unobstructed majesty), and is likewise one named node in the field pointing toward "free and unhindered ease."

So, from the Ocean-Seal to the lion's-roused-vigour, the two ends of this named field both come into view: at one end concentration's capacity-to-hold widening to the whole dharma-realm, at the other the bodhisattva's free movement in and out of the concentrations. And what holds these two ends together, what commands this whole field, is the Heroic-March set up in Section IV. The grammar of naming has unfolded, at last, into a complete doctrinal map.

---

## VI. Conclusion: After Naming, Prajñā Turns Back

### 6.1 Closing the Arc of Part IV's Four Papers

This is the closing paper of Part IV, "The Mahāyāna Turn," and the four papers can be gathered here into a single arc. What Part IV did was take up a different tradition each time and look again at concentration. The first paper, from the side of prajñā, watched how concentration is transformed by the operator of prajñā into a "perfection of dhyāna" — this is concentration's *nature*: in the Mahāyāna concentration is reclassified as a kind of perfection. The second, from the side of the Yogācāra, watched how calm-and-insight is modeled into the precise gradation of the nine stages of mental abiding — this is concentration's *modeling*. The third watched the bodhisattva's relationship to concentration, how he enters and leaves the absorptions without abiding in their taste, without realizing the reality-limit — this is concentration's *non-abiding*. And this paper watches what the Mahāyāna expanded concentration itself into — this is concentration's *expansion*: a named, open field of the bodhisattva's gates of practice.

The four are four faces of one "Mahāyāna turn" spine: nature, modeling, non-abiding, expansion. The first three handle "concentration's nature," "concentration's gradation," "the person's relationship to concentration"; only this one handles what the *scale and shape* of the thing called concentration has itself been rewritten into. What naming does — turning the measureless concentration into a graspable finite handle, each name locking one function, the proliferation of names encoding inexhaustibility — is precisely the piece that the first three papers, each from its own angle, could not reach.

### 6.2 A Dialogue with Three Scholars

Contemporary Western scholarship has produced important work on the Mahāyāna's named samādhis, but there is a telling shape to the field that this paper should state honestly: to date there is no Western monograph whose central question is "the Mahāyāna's naming-expansion of samādhi as such." The three existing landmarks each work one corner.

First, Étienne Lamotte's translation and study of the *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* authoritatively established that the Heroic-March samādhi is the bodhisattva's commanding capacity to "hold all samādhis together," a doctrinal vehicle and not some one state of concentration — a point this paper accepts entirely, and takes as the ground of Section IV. Where one may press further is that Lamotte's work is the close philology of a single text, whereas this paper reads the *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* together with the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* and argues for the map-making work that "naming" does across the whole genre, which exceeds the range of any single text.

Second, Paul Harrison's study of the Pratyutpanna samādhi (the samādhi of direct encounter with the buddhas of the present) takes an entire sūtra organized around one named samādhi and presents concentration as a technique of "standing face to face with the buddhas," forcefully demonstrating that one named samādhi can constitute an independent doctrinal unit — a point this paper also accepts. Where one may carry it forward is that Harrison's approach leans toward the sociological and the history of textual formation (revelation, legitimation), whereas this paper would rather read the Pratyutpanna as a structure of *meshing gates* — how concentration meshes with buddha-recollection, how buddha-recollection meshes with the buddha's appearing — that is, read it back as a function-node posited by the grammar of naming.

Third, Luis Gómez, writing on metaphor in Mahāyāna terminology, points out that the names of concentrations often carry soteriological metaphors (such as the figures of effort and intuition) rather than flat technical terms — an insight this paper prizes. What may be added is that Gómez's attention rests on that one tension of "effort and intuition," whereas this paper would argue a more basic layer: that *multiplicity is itself doctrine* — the names proliferate without end precisely because each name locks down one bodhisattva-function, and the proliferation as such encodes the doctrine that "concentration's usefulness has no end."

Set the three landmarks together and a seam appears exactly between them: Lamotte works one sūtra, Harrison another, Gómez the metaphors, and the comparative question — *why does the Mahāyāna's concentration have so many names* — falls in the gap that none of the three takes up head-on. This paper fills that seam with a direct reading of the Chinese treatise-commentaries (above all the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*) — which is not this paper's weakness but the very place it means to stand.

(It should be noted that this paper stays throughout at the level of doctrinal and philological synthesis, and offers no cross-disciplinary analogy to modern psychology or neuroscience. The reason is that its core work is to make out a grammar of naming internal to a body of Chinese sūtras and treatises; the doctrinal tension of that grammar is self-sufficient, and forcing a scientific analogy onto it would only dilute it. The meeting of the science of concentration with the modern disciplines has its proper place elsewhere in this volume.)

### 6.3 The Robe-Image Revisited and a Cross-Tradition Comparison

Back to that load-bearing image. Naming did not cut concentration into a hundred unrelated scraps; it marked, on a robe one could otherwise find no purchase on, the corners one could lift — pull one corner, the whole robe comes up. This is the real sense of the Mahāyāna expansion: it did not make concentration higher, more arcane, harder; it made the measureless **enterable**.

And if one sets this teeming named field beside the countable list of early concentration from Section II, what one sees is not a higher and a lower but two different doctrinal postures. Early concentration sought clarity through the close precision of "one name, one fruit"; Mahāyāna concentration sought vastness through the openness of "measureless naming." The former is like a catalogue one can finish reading; the latter is like a field one cannot walk to the edge of. These are two choices, each self-consistent within its own exegetical tradition; this paper sets them side by side as they are, and passes no verdict on which is the better.

### 6.4 Handed Over to Prajñā

And yet this paper's work has been only descriptive — it has described how the Mahāyāna expanded concentration into a named field, but has not yet asked after the field's own reality. A reader steeped in prajñā, reaching this point, will at once feel a suspicion: these hundreds of named samādhis, this vast field with the Heroic-March for its king — does the field itself, in the end, also have to be let go? When concentration has been named one by one, given function one by one, built up into this stately map, will prajñā not turn back and ask: is this "mark of concentration" itself, too, empty?

That is exactly the question the main stage of Part V, on Mañjuśrī and prajñā, is there to take up. This paper builds the named field, contained by the Heroic-March, fully into place, and then hands it whole into the hands of prajñā — to let prajñā turn back and ask after its reality. Naming established the field; prajñā will test it; this setting-up and this taking-down are the deepest tension in the Mahāyāna science of concentration. And when this field of concentration must at last return into prajñā, when even the mark of concentration is found ungraspable — that is the thing the final paper of this volume is set to redeem.

**The myriad samādhis gather home into the Heroic-March. And the Heroic-March, in turn, must at last be handed back to prajñā.**

---

## Notes

[^1]: *Saṃyukta-Āgama* (雜阿含經), the "Sūtra of the Noble Dharma-Seal," fasc. 3, trans. Guṇabhadra, Taishō vol. 2, no. T0099. "Having attained nothing in the samādhi of emptiness, one gives rise to signlessness, nothingness, and the knowledge-and-vision that abandons conceit" — the three samādhis arranged as an ordered approach, with emptiness foundational. The Āgama says "the three samādhis," not "the three gates of liberation"; that later doxographic label is not retrojected here.

[^2]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* (大智度論), attrib. Nāgārjuna, trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō vol. 25, no. T1509, fasc. 47. "Above, the eighteen emptinesses to explain the perfection of prajñā … the hundred-and-eight samādhis to explain the perfection of dhyāna; the hundred-and-eight samādhis the Buddha himself expounded." The ellipsis marks an elision and is kept honest. This is the load-bearing datum for the negation-grammar / naming-grammar complementarity.

[^3]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, Taishō vol. 25, no. T1509, fasc. 28. "All meditative concentration is also called concentration, also called samādhi; the four dhyānas are also called dhyāna" — the nested range of the three terms (samādhi ⊃ concentration ⊃ dhyāna).

[^4]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, Taishō vol. 25, no. T1509, fasc. 28. The samādhis of the śrāvaka and the pratyekabuddha set against the bodhisattva's samādhis, which the treatise calls "measureless, incalculable" (*asaṃkhyeya*) — proliferation as the marker of the vehicle, part of the same passage.

[^5]: Larger *Prajñāpāramitā* / *Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā* (摩訶般若波羅蜜經), the "Inquiry on the Vehicles" chapter, fasc. 5, trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō vol. 8, no. T0223. "There are named the jewel-seal samādhi, the lion's-play samādhi … this samādhi can seal all samādhis; this is called the jewel-seal samādhi." The ellipsis marks the gap between the name-list and the self-gloss and is kept; the recursive template welds name to function.

[^6]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, Taishō vol. 25, no. T1509, fasc. 28. The robe-image: "like pulling one corner of a robe, and the whole robe comes up; or like tasting honey" — naming gives the boundless a graspable handle rather than dismembering it. The image recurs in §6.3.

[^7]: *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* (佛說首楞嚴三昧經), upper fasc., trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō vol. 15, no. T0642. "The Heroic-March samādhi cannot be known by one thing, one object, or one meaning" — the pivot of the whole conception. This sūtra is distinct from the *Śūraṅgama-sūtra* (大佛頂首楞嚴經), treated in Part VI.

[^8]: *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra*, upper fasc., Taishō vol. 15, no. T0642. "Cultivating the mind to be like space" — the first of the hundred aspects (a round number, marking complete multitude, not an exact inventory of a hundred items).

[^9]: *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra*, upper fasc., Taishō vol. 15, no. T0642. "All factors aiding bodhi follow in its train; therefore this samādhi is named the Heroic-March" — the name arises from leadership, not etymology. The etymological glosses (heroic-going / valiant / utterly final) come from the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*'s exposition of the Heroic-March, a different layer from this sūtra's self-naming by leadership; the two are not to be conflated, nor the etymology attributed to this sūtra.

[^10]: *Avataṃsaka-sūtra* (大方廣佛華嚴經, 80-fascicle), the "Worthy Leader" chapter, fasc. 14, trans. Śikṣānanda, Taishō vol. 10, no. T0279. "All these it can manifest — by the spiritual power of the Ocean-Seal samādhi." (Name and this one verse only; the full dharma-realm treatment is reserved for Part VIII.) Note that this verse is in Śikṣānanda's Huayan translation, not Kumārajīva's.

[^11]: *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, Taishō vol. 25, no. T1509, fasc. 81. "The transcendent samādhi, the lion's-roused-vigour samādhi, and measureless other bodhisattva samādhis" — with the two-vehicle / bodhisattva distinction in the transcendent: the two vehicles skip one but not at will, the bodhisattva skips at will.

---

## References

### I. Primary Buddhist Sources

- *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* (大智度論), attrib. Nāgārjuna, trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō vol. 25, no. T1509.
- *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* (佛說首楞嚴三昧經), trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō vol. 15, no. T0642.
- *Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā* / the Larger *Prajñāpāramitā* (摩訶般若波羅蜜經), trans. Kumārajīva, Taishō vol. 8, no. T0223.
- *Avataṃsaka-sūtra* (大方廣佛華嚴經, 80-fascicle), trans. Śikṣānanda, Taishō vol. 10, no. T0279.
- *Saṃyukta-Āgama* (雜阿含經), trans. Guṇabhadra, Taishō vol. 2, no. T0099.

### II. Modern Scholarship

- Lamotte, Étienne. *Śūraṅgamasamādhisūtra: The Concentration of Heroic Progress.* Translated by Sara Boin-Webb. Curzon Press / Motilal Banarsidass, 1998/2003.
- Harrison, Paul. *The Samādhi of Direct Encounter with the Buddhas of the Present.* Studia Philologica Buddhica V. Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1990.
- Gómez, Luis O. "Purifying Gold: The Metaphor of Effort and Intuition in Buddhist Thought and Practice." In *Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought*, edited by Peter N. Gregory. Kuroda Institute / University of Hawai'i Press, 1987.
- Williams, Paul. *Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations.* 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2009.

### III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

| Short title | Full title | Taishō no. | Author / Translator |
|------|------|-----------|---------|
| Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra | Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra (大智度論) | T25, no. T1509 | attrib. Nāgārjuna / trans. Kumārajīva |
| Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra | Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra (佛說首楞嚴三昧經) | T15, no. T0642 | trans. Kumārajīva |
| Larger Prajñāpāramitā | Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā (摩訶般若波羅蜜經) | T08, no. T0223 | trans. Kumārajīva |
| Avataṃsaka | Avataṃsaka-sūtra (大方廣佛華嚴經, 80-fasc.) | T10, no. T0279 | trans. Śikṣānanda |
| Saṃyukta-Āgama | Saṃyukta-Āgama (雜阿含經) | T02, no. T0099 | trans. Guṇabhadra |

---

## Cross-Reference

- **P04**　The structure of the four dhyānas and the four formless attainments (the spine of the volume) → the base map whose boundary this paper's "bounded list" (Section II) takes apart.
- **P12**　The *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* on the perfection of dhyāna (the nature of concentration) → this paper's "the hundred-and-eight samādhis to explain the perfection of dhyāna" issues from the same treatise; Part IV's first face.
- **P13**　The nine stages of mental abiding (the modeling of concentration) → Part IV's second face; set, with this paper's "expansion," as two faces of the Mahāyāna-turn spine.
- **P14**　The bodhisattva's non-abiding concentration (the non-abiding of concentration) → Part IV's third face; the lion's-roused-vigour and the transcendent serve there as a demonstration of "entering and leaving freely," and here as named members of the field.
- **P16**　Prajñā's critique of "relishing concentration, abiding in samādhi"; even the mark of concentration is empty (the Mañjuśrī main stage of Part V) → the named field this paper builds is handed there to be turned back and questioned for its reality.
- **P28**　The Huayan Ocean-Seal samādhi as the dharma-realm capstone (Part VIII) → this paper takes only the Ocean-Seal's name as a seed; the full treatment is reserved for that paper.
- **P31**　Concentration's return into prajñā (the closed circuit of the three trainings, the volume's closing paper) → the ultimate landing-place of this paper's "handed over to prajñā."

---

*Paper:* SAMADHI-P15 · *Samādhi as Mahāyāna Expansion* · **SAMĀDHI · Part IV · The Mahāyāna Turn**
*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:* Citations from the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra* (T1509), the *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* (T0642), the *Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā* (T0223), the *Avataṃsaka-sūtra* (T0279), and the *Saṃyukta-Āgama* (T0099) are verified against the CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka. "Hundred-and-eight" is a round number signifying a complete multitude, not an exact count; the etymological glosses of "Heroic-March" derive from the *Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra*, not from the *Śūraṅgama-samādhi-sūtra* (which is distinct from the *Śūraṅgama-sūtra*, T0945). The Pāli term *appaṇihita* is given by paraphrase only; the Visuddhimagga is embedded nowhere verbatim. Lamotte (1998/2003), Harrison (1990), and Gómez (1987) are cited by paraphrase only.
*Repository:* https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates