A teacher's house, a path to the door, and grass either side of it — kept short by the feet of everyone who walks up:
as my own teacher often said, if he even spoke a few words on this topic then the grass in front of his house would grow ten feet tall. In other words, after hearing the actualities of the commitment involved, no one would want to visit him anymore and so the grass would grow without fear of becoming trampled.1
The topic is the bodhisattva vow, and specifically what taking it actually commits you to. It isn't that the vow is hard to explain. It's that a plain description would empty the room — that the students are there partly because nobody has told them, and that telling them would end the teaching.
Which is a candid thing for a lineage to say about itself. It's also, unusually, followed by enough of the content to see whether it's true.
The clearest statement of what the vow contains is a quotation from Samantabhadra, and the operative part is the exit condition:
I will never abandon, but continue to practice this vast, great and supreme offering without cessation. My effort will be ended if the realm-of-beings and the realm-of-space are ended, or the karmas, sorrows, and passion-desires of beings are ended. But since they are endless, so also will be my offerings, thought succeeding thought without interruption, in bodily, vocal, and mental deeds without weariness.2
Read the middle sentence as the clause it is. The undertaking terminates when one of two things happens: beings and space run out, or every being's karma, sorrow and desire runs out. Then the next sentence closes the door — since they are endless, so also will be my offerings.
So the vow has a stated termination condition, and the same passage states that the condition can't occur. That's not rhetoric. It's the specification: an unbounded commitment, written with the boundary explicitly located at the end of space.
And the rate is given too. Thought succeeding thought without interruption, in bodily, vocal, and mental deeds, and without weariness. Not a practice with sessions. Every thought, all three channels of action, with tiredness ruled out in advance.
That's what a reader is being told they're signing, and it's set out in a single sentence with no hedging anywhere in it.
Then the part that actually does the emptying, and it isn't the infinity:
People cannot comprehend the degree to which the Bodhisattvas will voluntarily suffer in order to help ordinary people, who will only throw mud and dirt on their faces in repayment for their help.1
Voluntary suffering, for people who repay it with mud. Not occasionally, and not as a risk to be managed. As the expected return, forecast in advance.
And the next clause is the one that makes it a standard rather than a complaint:
Yet to make such efforts, while fully knowing this will happen, is the true measure of Bodhisattva behavior, and to still carry out their deeds is exactly the Bodhisattva road of compassion.1
While fully knowing this will happen. So the measure isn't the helping at all. It's the helping while holding an accurate forecast of how it will be received, which is a much narrower thing.
Which rules out the version most people would sign up for, where you help and it's difficult and eventually somebody is grateful. The forecast has no gratitude in it. And a person who needed the gratitude would have been doing something else all along, which is exactly what a plain description would reveal to them.
There's a compensation noted, and it's worth having because it's the only one offered: this is how the Bodhisattvas accumulate the necessary merit for becoming world rulers and leaders of men.1 The mud is what buys the standing.
The fear isn't treated as a failing, and the precedent given is about as senior as precedents get:
Even Buddha's premier student, Mahakashyapa, became a bit fearful when he heard what carrying out vows entailed.2
The Buddha's foremost disciple, hearing the terms, and flinching. If he flinched, the flinch isn't a mark against anybody who does. Which is why the withholding gets defended rather than merely admitted: if I could accurately discuss just the littlest bit of what a true Bodhisattva vow entails, some people would become so afraid of the description that they would run away. Some might actually turn away from the spiritual path in fear of the immense sacrifice this entails.2
Two outcomes, and the second is the worse one. Running away from this teaching is recoverable. Turning away from the path altogether is the loss the withholding is meant to prevent — somebody who would have practised for forty years, stopped by a paragraph in year one.
And the reason it's almost impossible to accurately convey even the tiniest of truths on the topic gets stated too. If I could accurately portray just a little of what it means to be enlightened, or just a little of the efforts made for others after the Bodhisattvas become enlightened, people would be stunned speechless and many would reject my words and turn away in disbelief.2 Disbelief, not just fear — the description would read as false.
There's a response to the fear, and it doesn't soften the terms:
The reaction of fear upon hearing the commitment and responsibilities of the Bodhisattva path only arises because people forget that everything is characterized by emptiness, and so there isn't any actual burden to bear. From the Absolute standpoint, there is no one to accomplish the Bodhisattva vows, no actual being on the receiving end, and nothing to be accomplished at all.1
So the fear is diagnosed as a category error. You're frightened of an infinite burden falling on you. And there's no you for it to fall on, nobody at the other end receiving it, and no task.
Then the clause that stops this becoming an excuse: but from the conventional side of things, these vows are actually accomplished. No matter how difficult they may sound, these vows are actually achieved and all because of a Bodhisattva's patience, merit and wisdom attainments.1 Both halves are held at once, and the practical shape of it is specific. Nothing is being carried, and the work still gets done. Which means the answer to how could anybody sustain this isn't stamina — it's that the thing requiring stamina was a misdescription, and the three named resources are patience, merit and wisdom rather than willpower.
Whether that actually relieves the fear is a separate question, and the passage doesn't claim it does for everybody. Mahākāśyapa presumably knew the emptiness doctrine.
The definition is much wider than the vow's terms suggest, and it's worth having because it changes who the chapter is addressed to:
A Bodhisattva is simply any individual who awakens, and who then works for the salvation of others… When you haven't yet fully awakened but you act in a selfless manner, at that moment you are a Bodhisattva!1
At that moment. So it's a description of an act rather than a rank. The entry requirement is nothing at all, and the qualification lasts exactly as long as the act does.
The grades are named. Everyone is a causal ground Bodhisattva, and after you cultivate all the required conditions of merit, you can become a fruition ground Bodhisattva. The second kind are people who haven't just achieved enlightenment of some stage, but actually put it into use by working for the benefit of others.1 And the social facts attached are bleak and specific. The enlightened teachers of mankind… always know that the masses can never truly understand their methods or goals, and this is one of the reasons why they usually have very few disciples and why they were not accepted during their time. Many knew full well that they would be ridiculed and persecuted when alive, and yet they voluntarily chose to go ahead… knowing that the fruit of their actions would have to manifest much later in time.1
Few disciples, not accepted, ridiculed, persecuted, and the results arriving after death. Which is the grass-and-the-path observation stated as a general condition rather than as one teacher's joke.
There's even a placement claim about when they turn up. They appear at the tops and bottoms of cultural swings — at the tops so that humanity will not fall too low upon the coming decline, and at the bottoms in order to guide the impetus upwards.1
Start with the entry point rather than the vow, because the definition makes them different things. You don't take the vow in order to become one. When you haven't yet fully awakened but you act in a selfless manner, at that moment you are a Bodhisattva. So the available action today is a selfless act, and the qualification is the act itself.
Then, if you're considering anything more formal, read the terms before you agree to them rather than after. The exit condition is the end of space. The rate is every thought, in body, speech and mind, without weariness. And the expected return is mud. Somebody who signs up without those four facts has agreed to something else, and the passage is explicit that the difference is what keeps the path in front of the house worn down.
Then run the forecast test on your own helping, because it's the one that separates the two things. Take something you do for somebody and imagine, concretely, that they'll be ungrateful — not neutral, actively ungrateful, and permanently. Would you still do it? If the honest answer is no, that isn't a failing, and it isn't disqualifying. It just means what you've been doing runs on a return you'd been quietly counting on, and now you know which one.
And keep the two standpoints in the right order, because reversing them is the failure available here. The emptiness answer is a reason the burden isn't real; it isn't a reason the work is optional. From the conventional side of things, these vows are actually accomplished. A person using the Absolute standpoint to conclude there's nothing to do has taken the half that removes the fear and left behind the half that gets anything done.
The remark is a joke and it's also a complete statement of a recruitment problem, made by the recruiter. Follow what it claims. Students come to the house. They come because they want what the teacher has. The teacher believes that a few plain words about what the commitment involves would stop them coming — permanently, and immediately, so that the grass on either side of the path grows to ten feet.
Three things are being asserted at once, and each is uncomfortable. The first is that the students' willingness rests on not knowing. Not on misunderstanding, and not on being deceived — on an absence that the teacher is aware of and maintains.
The second is that the teacher is certain about the effect. Not some might leave but the grass grows ten feet, which is nobody at all.
And the third is that he keeps quiet, and that this is presented as correct rather than as a compromise. The stated reason is the better one available: some might actually turn away from the spiritual path in fear, and losing a practitioner from the path is worse than keeping one under-informed.2
What makes the case sharp rather than merely awkward is that the same chapter then supplies a good deal of the content anyway — the endless offering, the mud on the face, Mahākāśyapa's fear. So the withholding is partial, and the part withheld is described as the accurate version rather than as a different subject. If I could accurately discuss just the littlest bit — the limit is claimed to be on accuracy, not on willingness.
Which leaves a reader in a specific position, and it's worth naming plainly. You've been told there's a description that would make you leave, told roughly what's in it, and told that the version you've got is the tolerable one. Whatever else that is, it's a disclosure about the relationship between a teacher and the people walking up the path — and it's more information than most traditions give about their own recruitment.
The joke is about a lopsidedness that's really there. And the reason it survives as a saying is that everybody who repeats it is on the short-grass side of it.
The strongest thing here is that the vow's terms are actually given, which makes the withholding claim checkable against its own chapter. Samantabhadra's exit condition, the rate, the three channels of action, the mud, and Mahākāśyapa's fear are all on the page.12 A reader can decide for themselves whether that would empty a room.
The forecast clause is the second, and it's the part with practice consequences: to make such efforts, while fully knowing this will happen, is the true measure.1 That's a test somebody can apply to their own helping today, and it doesn't need any of the doctrine. Two tensions stay open. The withholding is justified by the risk of frightening people off the path — in a chapter that supplies enough to frighten them. So either the withheld version is different in kind, or the justification does less work than it appears to. And the emptiness answer says there's no burden and nobody to bear it. The conventional side says the vows are actually accomplished through patience, merit and wisdom. Both are asserted, and a practitioner is left to hold them at once without being told how.
Flags. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY: Samantabhadra's vow and the Aśvaghoṣa passage both arrive through this book, the latter via Yoshito S. Hakeda's translation of The Awakening of Faith, Columbia 1967, p 68.2 ⚠ The teacher's remark about the grass is reported from memory with no date or occasion — [SINGLE SOURCE]. ⚠ Enlightened teachers usually appear at the tops and bottoms of cultural swings is about history with no case named, and the claim that without their influence culture and humanity would quickly fall apart is unfalsifiable in the ordinary way. Everything is [POPULAR SOURCE].
Open question: the definition says an act of selflessness makes you one at that moment, and the vow says the commitment runs until space ends. Those are the two ends of the same word, and nothing in the chapter says what happens between them — whether the moments accumulate into the commitment, or whether the commitment is a separate thing you'd have to take on deliberately.
Two positions on what to tell a beginner run through this chapter, and they'd produce different teachers. On the first, withhold. A plain account of the commitment empties the room, some listeners would leave the path entirely rather than just the house, and the loss of a practitioner is worse than the cost of leaving them under-informed.2 Under that reading the teacher's silence is care, and the grass staying short is evidence the care is working.
On the second, publish. The same chapter prints the endless offering, the mud in the face and Mahākāśyapa's fear — and elsewhere the whole book is justified as supplying frameworks the world needs, on the grounds that a tradition nobody can examine dies.1 Under that reading silence is how the teaching is lost.
Both are held within a few pages, and the resolution offered is that the accurate version is impossible to convey rather than forbidden — which relocates the problem rather than settling it. Read alongside The Withholding Pattern, and Why He Publishes Anyway, the same decision recurs whenever a specific technique comes up, and it lands the same way each time: a warning that this can't properly be said, followed by saying a good deal of it.
Behavioral mechanics — Barnum and Planned Partial Disclosure. That page's subject is the deliberate management of what an audience knows and when: you disclose enough to bring somebody in, hold back what would stop them at the door, and release the rest once they're committed enough that it no longer costs you them. The technique is old, it works, and its defining feature is that nothing said is false.
The grass remark is that structure described from the inside by somebody who isn't selling anything. What the pairing gives is a test that separates the two cases, and it's answerable rather than a matter of motive. Ask who bears the cost of the late disclosure. In the commercial version the audience does — they're committed before they learn the terms, and the commitment is the point of the sequencing. In the version described here, the person walking up the path is told the terms exist, told roughly what they contain, and told that the full version is being withheld. That's a disclosure about the withholding, and it's the difference between managing somebody and warning them.
The pairing also names the condition under which the two collapse into each other. Partial disclosure stays honest only while the withheld part is genuinely unable to be conveyed rather than merely inconvenient — and almost impossible to accurately convey is precisely the claim being made.2 Nobody outside can check that, so the honest version and the managed one look identical to a student, and the only available evidence is whether the teacher tells you a withholding is happening at all.
This one does. Whether that's sufficient is a question a reader has to answer for themselves, and having the question is better than not having it.
One handshake is the section here. A second would restate the same disclosure problem from a neighbouring page rather than open new ground.
Sharpest implication. The measure isn't the helping — it's helping while holding an accurate forecast of how it will be received, and the forecast has mud in it. Which makes the test available today and uncomfortable: take something you do for somebody, assume permanent ingratitude, and see whether you'd still do it. Most helping runs on a return the helper hasn't noticed they're counting on, and the vow's whole content is the removal of that return.
The edge left open. The withholding is justified by the risk of frightening somebody off the path, in a chapter that supplies enough to do exactly that. Either the withheld version is a different thing altogether from the printed one, or the justification is decoration — and no reader can tell which, because the difference is put down to accuracy rather than willingness.
Generative questions: