Part Three · The Four Wisdoms

Part Two handed over the three bodies, and handed this part the "four wisdoms" on which the three bodies rest.

This part has but one chapter, and what it unpacks is the phrase "turning consciousness into wisdom." Part One read the name, Part Two the body; here we read this freedom's cognitive aspect—by what manner of wisdom it beholds all things and raises the three bodies. Scripture's answer is four wisdoms: the great-mirror wisdom, the equality wisdom, the observation wisdom, the accomplishing wisdom.

This part does not, as the prior two did, enter by a dialogue in the sūtras. The whole ordering of the four wisdoms is not the talk of some assembly in a scripture, but a learning set out and cross-confirmed by the later Consciousness-Only masters—Dharmapāla, Bandhuprabha, and the rest. So this chapter is, plainly, a chapter of "treatise": we shall see how the masters define these four wisdoms, and how they fit them one by one onto the eight consciousnesses. This the chapter marks as it goes: which are the words of the sūtra, which the masters' framing.

But this chapter's thesis is still the one thesis the Attainment axis has carried all along. Already broken: the freedom of the exhaustion of the outflows is not a spiritual power gained beyond that exhaustion; the ten epithets are not virtues earned beyond severance; the three bodies are not three Buddhas set up apart. Come to wisdom, the misreading to break is the same: to take a Buddha's four wisdoms for four lofty spiritual cognitions acquired beyond the severing of defilements. This chapter says: no. The four wisdoms are turned out of those very eight consciousnesses—turned, not acquired.

In, then: how this freedom's wisdom is polished out of the eight consciousnesses.