Equal-AwakeningSublime-Awakening
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Part 2 · Sublime-Awakening

Equal & Sublime Awakening · 1 papers

The remaining one is severed; the last thought has fallen. The place where it settles is named sublime-awakening.[ from the book's part intro ]

論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
03The Ground Where Walking EndsThis paper closes the Equal- and Sublime-Awakening division and is the second cross-axis seam paper between the Realization axis and the Attainment axis: it reads, two-facedly, the same sublime-awakening / buddha-fruit passage that the Attainment axis's "The Ten Epithets as the Ultimate Signature" (TATHAGATA-P01) reads. The prior two papers established equal-awakening as the position "off by one" (P01) and the adamantine concentration's single-instant severance of the last nescience as "the path's self-completion" (P02). This paper asks: where does that last step land? In sublime-awakening; and how is sublime-awakening, as a position, to be read? The thesis: sublime-awakening is not a "higher rung" of realized state above equal-awakening, but the terminus of the path — the ground on which the last step settles, which is to say the place where "walking the stations" itself ends. In the Bodhisattva-keyūra-sūtra, the Cheng weishi lun, and the eighty-fascicle Avataṃsaka, three points confirm one another. First, sublime-awakening is the limit of the fifty-two positions (the Keyūra's forty-second "sublime-awakening ground," the Weishi's "ultimate stage," the Avataṃsaka's "the Tathāgata's full awakening"), above which no fifty-third position can be set — so it is not "a rung on the path" but "the path's end." Second, the "path" ends here because its defining activity — severance and walking — has at this point no object left: the two hindrances forever ended (nothing left to sever), the ultimate reached (nowhere left to walk toward), so walking is exhausted and ceases. Third, the same buddha-fruit the Realization axis reads as "the arrival of the path's last step" (one has walked to it), the Attainment axis reads as "the freedom with no further step" (nowhere to go, hence unobstructed everywhere) — two faces of one fruit, whose order and adjudication is held at the seam by the axes' convention, not settled by one axis alone. Conclusion: the Realization axis discharges its office at sublime-awakening — it writes "how one walks there," and at arrival it stops; the full breadth of sublime-awakening as fruition-virtue (ten epithets, three bodies, four wisdoms, ten powers, ten masteries, four qualities) is what the Attainment axis reads. The ground where walking ends is precisely where the Attainment axis sets out.
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Equal & Sublime Awakening · in the bookcontinuous prose · apparatus removedRead from here →
ArrivedPart 2 · Ch. 1

Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.