俱舍論 心要連讀Abhidharmakośabhāṣya · Continuous Heart-Essence

The gateway to the whole treatise. It pays homage and sets out its thesis, explains for itself the name Treasury of Abhidharma, and then classifies all dharmas at a single stroke by one criterion (increase of the outflows by attachment), establishing the three classifications of aggregates, sense fields, and elements—the underlying map of the seventy-five dharmas, and the seedbed in which the questions later taken up by Yogācāra first stirred.

In one sentence: all dharmas are first divided into those with and those without outflows, then gathered into the three classifications of aggregates, sense fields, and elements—yet classification is not the aim, the discernment of dharmas is: apart from the discernment of dharmas there is certainly no other excellent means for extinguishing the defilements.

Provenance (Set Out First)

Vasubandhu lectured on the Mahāvibhāṣā, composing one stanza for each day’s teaching until six hundred stanzas had accumulated. At the request of Kashmir he wrote a prose self-commentary in which he established the Sarvāstivāda positions and, wherever a point was skewed, broke it with Sautrāntika doctrine—upholding the Sarvāstivādins while breaking them by the Sautrāntika measure. One line of biography states the character of the entire treatise. Students in India named it the Treatise of Intelligence (Yuanhui: like the small opening through which poison enters and then travels everywhere, this treatise opens only a narrow gate of discernment and yet gives entry to the whole; hence the name, the poison-gate of discernment). Two Chinese translations exist: Paramārtha’s Expository Treatise in twenty-two fascicles (the first) and Xuanzang’s in thirty fascicles (Yonghui years two through five, the second). This edition follows Xuanzang and uses Paramārtha for collation.

Three Points to Watch

1. The homage is itself the thesis. The stanza of homage praises the Buddha for the extinction of darkness: the exhaustion of defiled not-knowing is the virtue of abandonment, the exhaustion of undefiled not-knowing is the virtue of wisdom. The Buddha this treatise has before it is the teacher of things as they are, the one who has extinguished everything that was not understood. And in the phrase it is transmitted that the Buddha spoke the Abhidharma, the single word transmitted was read by Saṅghabhadra as an admission, and thrown back at its author: in saying “transmitted,” the Sūtra-master shows that he does not himself believe the Abhidharma to be the Buddha’s word. The Tang commentaries read it the same way (Fabao: by saying “it is transmitted,” he displays his own disbelief). This reading comes from the ancient masters; the treatise itself gives no such explanation. The first lesson in reading the Kośa: attend to the temperature of the author’s wording—it is transmitted, some say, some other masters say.

2. A single criterion classifies all dharmas. The division between with and without outflows rests not on wholesome and unwholesome but on increase by attachment: whatever the afflictions can take root and grow upon is with outflows. The truths of cessation and of the path can be taken as objects by the afflictions, yet the afflictions do not increase by attachment to them, and so they are without outflows. This criterion was itself hammered out over a century (Fasheng’s arising, emended by Dharmatrāta to increase by attachment). Among the three unconditioned dharmas, cessation independent of discernment repays attention most: a never-arising obtained without any act of discernment, simply because a condition was absent—on the map of what exists there is a class of dharmas forever extinguished because they were missed.

3. The three classifications are three ways of cutting, and also a pedagogy. Aggregate means collection, sense field means gate of arising, element means lineage; folly is threefold (about mental factors, about form, about form and mind together), the faculties are threefold (sharp, middling, dull), and preference is threefold (for brief, middling, or extended wording)—hence three gates of teaching. Feeling and perception are set up as separate aggregates because they are the roots of dispute and the causes of birth and death: the diagnosis of an illness is written into the very arrangement of the table of contents. And the sentence that an aggregate, being like a collection, is definitively provisional lays the distant groundwork for the refutation of self in the last chapter.

A Single Point (Appended): The Placement of the Mind Element

Among the eighteen elements, mind is not a seventh consciousness—it is precisely the six bodies of consciousness that, in ceasing without interval, become mind: the thought just ceased is thereby named mind and serves as the support of the sixth consciousness. By this the Sarvāstivādins avoid positing an abiding mental entity; Yogācāra later answered the same question by positing the defiled mind and the storehouse consciousness. One question, two generations of answers—which is why reading Yogācāra sends one back to the Kośa.

Bearing on the Whole Treatise

Because it maintains its own intrinsic mark it is called a dharma—this definition of dharma was carried on unchanged by the later hundred-dharma Yogācāra learning. Three unconditioned dharmas became six; the eleven kinds of form became the eleven forms of the hundred dharmas; six consciousnesses plus the mind element became eight consciousnesses. The Chapter on the Elements is the façade of the seventy-five dharmas, and the place where, before Vasubandhu turned toward Yogācāra, his sense of the problem took shape.

The second half of the Chapter on the Elements: twenty-two gates distinguish the eighteen elements one by one—the showroom of Abhidharma method, and the site of the thousand-year dispute over whether the eye sees or consciousness sees.

In one sentence: twenty-two questions are put to the eighteen elements until they are seen through to the bottom—and on the question of who it is that sees, the author holds his distance with the words it is transmitted and lets the Sautrāntikas say that there are only dharmas as cause and result, with no agent function at all: here the question that breaks attachment has already opened its mouth.

Three Points to Watch

1. Twenty-two gates = putting every dharma through the sieve on every dimension. Visible and resistant, the three ethical qualities and realm affiliation, applied and sustained thought and discrimination, appropriation and the five classes, participating and the three abandonings . . . the questions are put on the elements (which display faculty, object, and consciousness together), and the senses of aggregate and sense field follow along. What is to be learned is not the list of answers but this way of asking. A fine needle-point: applied thought itself is “without applied thought and with sustained thought only,” and the sustained thought of the realm of desire and the first meditative absorption is itself “without sustained thought and with applied thought only” (while the sustained thought of the intermediate absorption goes with the unassociated dharmas as “without applied and without sustained thought”; a taxonomy grants itself no discount). And the element of dharmas is always participating—no dharma is forever unobserved by mind (the noble one’s contemplation of no-self covers everything in two successive thoughts).

2. Whether the eye sees or consciousness sees: from a question about substance to a judgment about usage. Four masters’ positions (the eye sees · consciousness sees · the discernment associated with eye consciousness sees · the assemblage sees) attack and defend by turns, and in the stanza the author marks his distance with the two words it is transmitted in “it is transmitted that it cannot observe”—Saṅghabhadra reads this as “the Sūtra-master’s mind cannot accept that reason,” Puguang judges that “the author inclines to the view that consciousness sees,” Fabao only divides the text, and Yuanhui closes with the Sautrāntikas. One Sautrāntika passage sweeps the whole board: eye and form as conditions give rise to eye consciousness—which of them is the seer, which the seen? “There are only dharmas as cause and result, and in fact no agent function”; that the eye sees and consciousness cognizes are provisional names adopted to accord with worldly feeling, and “the wise should not fasten upon them.” The later Mahāyāna forms of argument that break attachment to self and to dharmas may be read against this.

3. Ultimate atoms do not touch; the name touch is provisionally established upon there being no interval. The Vaibhāṣikas establish the sense of arising without interval (things struck together give out sound yet are not commingled; the wind element holds them so that they do not scatter); and on Dharmatrāta’s phrase about provisionally establishing the name touch the author sets down the comment, “this venerable one’s intent should be found agreeable”—and even this word of praise Saṅghabhadra rose up to interrogate. The whole world of the incidental discussions (two eyes seeing together · objects reached and not reached · the shapes of the faculties’ ultimate atoms · the two times of consciousness’s support · the levels of the four things) is of this kind: press a question to the limit of the physical, and the answer always lies between provisionally established and really existent.

A Single Point (Appended): Consciousness Is Named after the Faculty

Why is consciousness named eye consciousness rather than form consciousness? “As the faculty alters, consciousness differs”—consciousness turns with the clarity or dimness of the faculty and not with changes in the object; and the faculty is not held in common (this eye generates only this consciousness) while the object is held in common (one form may be seen by anyone). Because the support is the more excellent and because it is not held in common, the name follows the faculty.

Bearing on the Whole Treatise

The sense of seeing in “deliberation first, then decisive judgment, is called seeing,” the framework of the three kinds of discrimination (intrinsic · conceptual · recollective), and the sense of participation as a class of elements—all are the original coordinates of the later dharma-characteristics learning. With this the whole Chapter on the Elements is closed: the first half established the entities (the three classifications gathering all dharmas), the second half put them to use (the several gates as a sieve). The next chapter, on the faculties, will open out the twenty-two faculties and the five positions of the seventy-five dharmas in full.

The Chapter on the Elements sets out the entities; the Chapter on the Faculties sets out their functions. This fascicle begins from the question “what is the meaning of ‘faculty’?”, first establishes the twenty-two faculties, then opens three feelings into five, then establishes the three faculties without outflows upon nine faculties, and finally sifts the twenty-two faculties from beginning to end through six doctrinal gates and six miscellaneous analyses—the Abhidharma’s ‘book of function’ opens here.

In one sentence: a faculty is not one of twenty-two organs or ingredients but one of twenty-two positions from which mastery is exercised in some matter—“dominant function means being supreme and sovereign”—and this one thing is all that the whole fascicle measures.

Three Points to Watch

1. ‘Dominance’ is a measuring rod, not an adjective. Form-objects also help bring consciousness about; why are they not established as faculties? The author of the treatise answers, “an object exercises no dominance over consciousness”—one eye serves as the common cause for the many consciousnesses of many forms, and consciousness is sharp or dull according to the eye; the form-object is the reverse on both points. The question is not who was present but who has the say. This rod will serve later in measuring the six causes and four conditions, and the projecting and completing of karma.

2. The same twenty-two admit of three arrangements. The Sarvāstivādins state dominance in terms of four matters and two matters; the alternative masters restate it in terms of discerning one’s own object, setting up two out of the body, and abiding together with defilement and purification; still other masters distribute fourteen and eight by the four senses of cyclic existence and return to cessation. The author of the treatise pronounces no verdict; in the fifth stanza he supplies six measures as the definitional gate—the support of mind, its distinction, its abiding, its defilement, its provision, its purification—and then says, “by this the matter of establishing faculties is fully accounted for.” The same parts; change the question and the diagram changes—and this is the most necessary move in reading Abhidharma.

3. Whether a thing is divided depends on whether discrimination has entered in. Pain and pleasure are established as four faculties across body and mind, while equanimous feeling is combined into a single faculty for body and mind alike—and the reason is a single sentence, “this feeling is without discrimination alike in body and mind,” with a piece of experience appended: pain and pleasure in the mind arise mostly from discrimination, while in the body they follow the force of the object, and it is so in the body of an arhat as well. The criterion lies not in the term but in the way the thing itself arises.

One Further Point (Appended): The Incidental Discussion on Prolonging and Relinquishing the Lifespan

The life faculty is the only one among the twenty-two that is “definitely maturation.” Yet an arhat can prolong the life-formations—of whose karma is the life thus extended the maturation? The author of the treatise records the root treatise’s procedure (giving, vowing, entering the fourth limit-stage meditative absorption), records Ghoṣa’s explanation (drawing in great elements of the form realm that accord with or run counter to the life-formations), and finally offers a solution of his own: the portion of duration belonging to the great elements of the faculties produced by past karma is exchanged, and a portion of duration produced by the power of concentration is drawn in instead.

What matters is what he alters: he alters the portion of duration, not the karma. The power of concentration can exchange a measure of sustained duration, and yet has not cancelled the principle of karmic result. And those able to do this fall within a very narrow range—arhats among the humans of the three continents, faculties not deficient, liberated not dependent on circumstance, and possessed of the limit-stage concentration. At the close of the incidental discussion an old stanza is quoted, saying that when the lifespan is exhausted one rejoices as though laying down a whole body of illness; nowhere else in the fascicle is there a second sentence like it.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The sense of ‘dominance’ is established here, and the enabling cause among the six causes and four conditions descends from it. That the twenty-two faculties are distributed among form, mind, mental factors, and formations not associated with mind is precisely a summary table of the seventy-five dharmas on the side of function; and later, when the five positions of the hundred dharmas are opened and closed and the formations not associated with mind still place the life faculty first, one must come back to this fascicle to see the exact measure of what was added and dropped. The three faculties without outflows are “established as three upon nine”—no new entity is added, only the position shifts three times—and this is the joint that the fascicle leaves for the theory of the path: the fifteen minds of the path of seeing, the nine grades of the path of cultivation, and the knowledge of exhaustion and of non-arising beyond training all use faculties that have first been sifted here.

The Chapter on the Elements stated all dharmas in terms of “entity”; this fascicle looks at them once more in terms of “function.” A single question—‘are there dharmas that must arise together?’—brings out the framework of the five classes, and with it the whole table of the seventy-five dharmas; and mind turns from a mass of feeling into a table that can be counted.

In one sentence: no dharma arises alone—the smallest particle of matter needs eight entities to stand, and the smallest wholesome thought needs twenty-two mental factors to be one; and here “I have” is itself set up as a dharma.

Provenance (Established First)

This fascicle is Fascicle Four of Xuanzang’s version and also the opening of Fascicle Three of Paramārtha’s older translation—the two translations divide their fascicles independently and yet break at the same sentence, both taking the stanza on the minute aggregate as the first root stanza of the fascicle. The four ancient commentaries speak here with one voice as well: Puguang, Fabao, Yuanhui, and Shentai all mark it as the second major section of the Chapter on the Faculties. What is especially to be noted is Shentai’s commentary—his surviving text lacks precisely Fascicle Three, the fascicle preceding this one in the Chapter on the Faculties, whereas for this fascicle he numbers each passage, has the finest outline, and from time to time takes Mahāyāna terminology for comparison. This is a fascicle for which all four commentaries are present.

Three Points to Watch

1. The criterion of classification is scope, not value. Mental factors fall into five classes, and the pivot is the single word “ground”—a ground is a place of activity. The factors of the great ground pervade every mind; the factors of the great wholesome ground both pervade wholesome minds and belong to them alone; the factors of the great defiled ground both pervade defiled minds and belong to them alone; the factors of the great unwholesome ground must both pervade the unwholesome and belong to it alone; the factors of the small defiled ground are associated only with a small portion of defiled minds. So a class holding only two dharmas (non-conscience and shamelessness) is set up all the same—not to make up numbers, but as the result of two conditions clamping down at once. The masters of old divided the five classes by five senses, by eight, by nine; this treatise divides them cleanly by one sense alone, and Puguang set down a sentence for it: this is the treatise’s own capacity, and not a matter of anyone’s interpretation.

2. Mind is a cluster of lamps lit at the same moment. Mind and mental factors necessarily arise together, and if one is lacking the rest do not arise; association has five senses—support, object, mode of apprehension, time, and entity—and only when all five are even is there association. The three names mind, thought, and consciousness convey different senses and are one in entity: because it gathers and gives rise it is called mind, because it deliberates it is called thought, because it discerns it is called consciousness. A single thought can therefore be counted: a wholesome mind of the desire realm has twenty-two, an unwholesome mind of the independent class twenty, an obscured-indeterminate mind eighteen, an unobscured-indeterminate mind twelve, and sleep adds one to whichever class it is in. ‘How many mental factors are in this thought’ is here a question with an answer. Note that “view does not add to the count”—view is not an eleventh dharma but only a difference of operation of discernment.

3. “Having” is set up as a dharma. Afflictions cut off, precepts acquired, cessation realized—behind these ways of speaking the Sarvāstivādins set up an “acquisition” to bear them; and the “not having” of not having obtained the noble dharmas is ordinary-being status. The closing section of the fascicle then opens the longest debate in the whole treatise: the Sautrāntikas say that acquisition has no entity that can be known and no operation that can be known, and that the difference lies in the transformation of the supporting body—whereupon “seed” receives its first definition, as the capability—serially transmitted or immediately proximate—that name and form have with respect to producing their own result, constituted by continuum, transformation, and distinctiveness. The Vaibhāṣikas hold firmly that acquisition is a real separate thing. The author of the treatise closes with a double endorsement—both roads are well stated, because the one does not conflict with reason and the other is what his own school holds. That sentence sets the place of both schools within it, and pronounces no victor.

One Further Point (Appended): The Reduction of Mental Factors in the Upper Realms Is a Topographical Map for Cultivating Absorption

The first meditative absorption removes what is unwholesome alone (hatred, the seven small afflictions, non-conscience, and shamelessness) together with regret and sleep; the intermediate absorption further removes applied thought; from the second absorption upward sustained thought is removed, and flattery and deception with it. And every item that falls away has its reason—the form realm is free of sorrow and so has no regret; the form realm has no food taken in portions and so has no sleep; above the second absorption there is no structure of ruler and subject, higher and lower, and so there is no flattery or deception. The treatise even cites a story for it: the monk Aśvajit asked the Great Brahmā King where the four great elements cease, the Brahmā King did not know and praised himself before the assembly, and afterwards drew the man outside the assembly to apologize and send him back to ask the Buddha. Some afflictions are not cut off; they simply have nowhere to rest once a given level is reached.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The five classes established in this fascicle are the ground plan of the later five positions of the hundred dharmas—the same in number and different in order: mind opens from one into eight, forty-six mental factors against fifty-one, eleven dharmas of form in both, fourteen unassociated against twenty-four, three unconditioned against six. Fabao already drew the comparison for himself under the factors of the great ground, saying that in the Sarvāstivāda ten dharmas are omnipresent while in the Mahāyāna only five are; Shentai under the five senses of association cited the three samenesses of the Yogācārabhūmi for comparison and matched them further with the two aspects, image and perceiving. Their agreements and differences are listed and no verdict of merit is passed—this is the constant measure of the present edition.

Besides this, the fascicle demonstrates in full for the first time the Kośa’s general formula of analysis by five gates—the three times, the three ethical qualities, realm affiliation, the three kinds of training, and the three modes of abandonment. Every dharma one meets thereafter may be put to the same five questions.

Twelve of the fourteen formations not associated with mind are finished in a single fascicle: commonality, the result of non-perception, the absorption without perception, the absorption of cessation, the life faculty, the four marks and the four secondary marks, and the name-, phrase-, and syllable-bodies, together with their placement under realm affiliation, the five classes, and the three ethical qualities. The Sarvāstivādins establish them as separate real things apart from form and mind; the author of the treatise presses each one with the Sautrāntika sense, and at the end judges the Sautrāntikas with his own hand as “not well stated.”

In one sentence: whatever cannot be assigned to form and cannot be assigned to mind, and yet really does work within experience—the ‘reasons why’ of resemblance, of the blank, of continuity, of flowing, and of meaning—are all gathered here; the question is whether they count as real things or only as a way of speaking.

Provenance (Established First)

The preceding fascicle analyzed acquisition and non-acquisition, and this fascicle continues it. The pattern of each item is the same: the Sarvāstivādins establish the thesis, adduce scriptural proof, and open a fourfold analysis; the author of the treatise puts on Sautrāntika eyes and presses; and at the end comes the sentence “this is not well stated, because it contradicts my own school”—having spoken the Sautrāntikas’ words, he declares that he is not a Sautrāntika. Saṅghabhadra’s Treatise Conforming to Correct Principle refutes this passage by passage, calling Vasubandhu “the Sūtra-master”; it is the most densely contested fascicle in the whole treatise. All four commentaries (Puguang’s Record, Fabao’s Commentary, Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary, and Shentai’s Commentary) have a fifth fascicle explaining it, and Shentai’s further cites Paramārtha’s own commentary at second hand, assigning a source to each of the three quoted stanzas within the fascicle.

Three Points to Watch

1. Commonality: what is presupposed behind a noun. Sentient beings without number differ severally, and yet a person can call them all at once “sentient beings”—the Sarvāstivādins say this rests upon a real thing at work. The author of the treatise’s five questions grow sharper one by one: given a commonality of ordinary beings, what need is there for ordinary-being status besides? Grain, wheat, gold, and iron each resemble their own kinds—why not allow a commonality of the insentient? The several commonalities also differ—why not establish a further tier? And the last is the weightiest: does not this establishment amount to the Vaiśeṣikas’ category of sameness-and-difference? The Sarvāstivādins answer only the last and fall back on scripture for the rest. Whether the stability of a noun is the structure of the world or the convenience of speech becomes here, for the first time, a question squarely faced.

2. The two absorptions: shutting off mind in the same way, but with different aspiration the results differ entirely. The absorption without perception and the absorption of cessation are almost identical in appearance, and the divide is a single moment of attention—the one “preceded by an attention with the notion of renunciation,” holding non-perception to be true liberation; the other “preceded by an attention with the notion of stilling,” seeking peaceful abiding. Hence the one is attained by ordinary beings only and brings about five hundred aeons of blankness in the Heaven of Non-Percipient Beings, while the other is attained by noble ones only and makes one liberated in both parts; and the noble ones regard the absorption without perception “as the sight of a deep pit, and take no pleasure in entering it.” As to whether there is any mind at all within the absorption of cessation, three answers are already on the table: the past has entity, mind and the body endowed with faculties are seeds of one another, and there is still a subtle mind. This page is the one most worth being thoroughly familiar with before reading Yogācāra—the question is the same question that the later constant running of the eighth consciousness was set up to answer.

3. The four marks: impermanence stated as a structure. Arising makes a dharma arise, abiding makes it settle, change makes it decay, cessation makes it break up; the sūtra states only three marks, because “abiding is what sentient beings cling to and love,” and to make them weary of it, it is stated together with change. The treatise’s simile is the three enemies in the dense forest—one drags you from the future into the present, one wears down your strength, one cuts off your life. The Sarvāstivādins set the four marks upon the moment and stop the objection of infinite regress by the difference of function between the primary marks upon eight dharmas and the secondary marks upon one; the Sautrāntikas call this “cutting up empty space” and maintain that the four marks have places to stand only upon a continuum, quoting three stanzas in a row to make it firm. What you cling to is precisely that “abiding,” and the sūtra will not even give you that name by itself.

One Further Point (Appended): The Life Faculty

The life faculty is not a lump of vital force, and it is not a soul. Its definition is functional—“able to sustain warmth and consciousness,” the cause that keeps bodily warmth and consciousness upon one and the same continuum. A stanza the World-Honored One himself spoke gives a verification anyone has seen: when the three dharmas leave the body, the body they leave lies stiff and prone, like a piece of wood without thought or feeling. As to whether this “sustaining” should count as a real thing, the author of the treatise presses through eighteen turns: one who establishes a real thing must carry the circle of the three sustaining one another, and one who establishes a portion of duration must carry the objection of having no entity. The cost to both parties lies open on the table, and at the end the author of the treatise still closes for the Sarvāstivādins.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

What this fascicle analyzes is the position of the formations not associated with mind among the seventy-five dharmas, and it is the ground plan of the later twenty-four of the hundred dharmas: non-acquisition is dropped, ordinary-being status is on the contrary taken in, change and cessation among the four marks are renamed aging and impermanence, and the name-, phrase-, and syllable-bodies are carried over unaltered. Paramārtha’s older translation renders this passage “arising, aging, abiding, and impermanence,” on the same track as the wording of the hundred dharmas. And the two difficulties of ‘how continuity is maintained in a mindless station’ and ‘how meaning is carried’ run on from here all the way into Yogācāra—it is by reading the Kośa back that one learns for what questions those answers were devised.

The opening of the third major division of the Chapter on the Faculties. The three preceding fascicles said which dharmas there are; this one says what these dharmas arise by — causes opened out into six, results into five, the taking and the giving of a result fixing their times, and the four classes of dharmas arising from causes closing off the field. Causes end and the fascicle breaks off; the four conditions begin again elsewhere.

In one sentence: “Dharmas arise from causes” is taken apart to its last grain in order to say the one line that comes at the end — a dharma produced by a single cause definitely does not exist.

Provenance (established first)

Three commentators cut at the same place at the head of the fascicle: Puguang writes, “From here begins the third major division of this chapter, explaining causes and conditions”; Fabao writes, “From here begins the third major division of this chapter, explaining cause and also condition”; Yuanhui writes, “From here, the third major division, explaining causes and conditions.” Shentai instead sets up a fivefold outline, yet the boundary does not shift. At the fascicle’s end Yuanhui concludes, “All the distinctions above belong in sum to the first part; the explanation of causes is complete” — a commentator’s closing words falling precisely on the line along which Xuanzang divided the fascicle. Root Stanza 62 straddles cause and condition; the translator gave up the stanza boundary and followed the doctrinal one, and so the end of this fascicle is marked as Root 61 together with the first half of Root 62.

Three eyes

1. Five words — “the Abhidharma masters allow” — set the posture of the whole fascicle. The treatise lists six causes, and the closing sentence reads, “The Abhidharma masters allow that causes are only these six kinds.” What is set down is “allow,” not “the Buddha said.” Yuanhui at once records the Sautrāntika counter-question: the four conditions they allow, because scripture states them; the six causes they do not, because scripture does not. Fabao likewise records that the four conditions have textual warrant while the six causes have none. Saṅghabhadra holds the contrary, adducing scripture item by item and ruling, “These six causes the Buddha stated everywhere.” Whether there is scriptural warrant this treatise does not adjudicate; both parties are recorded. Whether the six causes serve well is a question of whether they can state without remainder what dharmas arise by. The first lesson in reading Abhidharma is to tell apart what the treatise itself says outright and what later hands have decided on its behalf.

2. The enabling cause counts even “not getting in the way” as a cause. The criterion is three words — abiding without obstructing: at the moment a given dharma arises, all other dharmas are there without blocking it, and that is enough. Even nirvāṇa and dharmas that will never arise at all are counted, on the ground of “like a king without power” — he has no capacity to do harm, and the people of the realm still say, “Because of our sovereign we obtain ease.” The lower limit of causation is set this low so that the arising of one dharma may draw in the whole realm of dharmas; yet its result, the dominant result, is restricted to the conditioned — a wide cause with a narrow result, and exactly the foreshadowing of that great dispute further on over “the unconditioned has neither cause nor result.”

3. Simultaneous cause and result, and the vacancy left for the continuum. The coexistent cause holds that cause and result are simultaneous and are moreover each the other’s; the Sautrāntikas counter at once, “No such simultaneous cause and result has ever been seen.” At the other end the maturation cause is stated with complete rigidity — a maturation result is neither simultaneous with the action nor immediately subsequent to it; it can be brought about only when a continuum has transformed. One end asserts simultaneity, the other insists on separation; what carries the stretch of “continuum” in between, the treatise does not answer here. That vacancy is the largest single bequest this fascicle leaves to later ages.

One meaning (appended): Is the unconditioned a thing?

Beneath the stanza “Results are the conditioned and release from bondage; the unconditioned has neither cause nor result” lies the longest dispute in the fascicle. The Sautrāntikas say that no unconditioned dharma is really existent — space is merely the absence of anything tangible, and cessation through discernment is merely the non-recurrence of what is left over, brought about by the force of selection. The Sarvāstivādins say it has a separate real entity, realized inwardly and severally by the noble ones. The author of the treatise records the words of both parties and closes with “The Vaibhāṣikas do not allow this explanation,” passing no overall judgment of his own. Saṅghabhadra is in no way equivocal: he announces outright, “I now refute the Sūtra-master’s slander of causes,” and concludes, “Thus the Sūtra-master’s slander of causes has been refuted, and it is established that nirvāṇa is real in its entity.” The point at issue is not the wording but the entity: both sides grant that scripture calls nirvāṇa foremost; what they contest is whether this foremost is one really existent thing, or is utterly non-existent.

Through the whole treatise

The names of the five results — maturation, homogeneous, release from bondage, human effort, dominant — were taken over intact by later ages without the change of a single word; the enabling cause was afterwards opened out into ten causes and twenty causes; and the place where a continuum must intervene between the maturation cause and its result, while this treatise posits no separate entity to carry it, is exactly the vacancy that the maturation consciousness would later be established to fill. Fabao had already drawn this line out at the end of the section on the six causes, leaving a question behind: from what scriptural text does the sense of the Mahāyāna ten causes, six causes, and four conditions come? The ancient masters did not answer it, nor is it answered here on their behalf; it is recorded only as a coordinate.

The six causes done, the author presses one further question — “And what of conditions?” — and thereupon establishes the four conditions, fixes the position at which each operates, and audits how many conditions each class of dharma arises from; midway he refutes, by three lines of reasoning, the view that the world is produced by a single cause; and at the end he gives eight lines of stanza entirely to mind — how the twelve minds arise from one another, their unfolding into twenty minds, and how many minds are acquired when one is present. The four conditions are the net-cord; a single moment of mind is the field.

In one sentence: The other three conditions govern what a thing arises on the basis of; the immediately antecedent condition alone governs what a thing arises after — and what practice contests is precisely where the next moment of mind will connect.

Placement (established first)

This fascicle begins from the half-stanza at the end of the previous one: that stanza lies exactly across the joint where causes end and conditions begin, and in dividing the fascicles Xuanzang gave up the stanza boundary and followed the doctrinal one, so that this fascicle opens with half a stanza. It is for this reason that Shentai’s Commentary counts the root stanzas of this fascicle as “twelve and a half lines.” Paramārtha’s version, for its part, names this section simply “Analysis of the Sense of the Four Conditions” and closes his fascicle with “the analysis of the sense of the four conditions is complete” — the two versions divide and join differently, yet their closing boundary falls at the same place.

Three eyes

1. The four conditions are four classifications, not four things. Scripture says “the nature of the four conditions,” and the treatise glosses that word “nature”: “nature here means the class of a condition” — merely “this class.” Nor are the four conditions and the six causes two separate lists; they are two ways of cutting one and the same set of operations. Fabao’s Commentary settles it in a phrase: “cause is the name for what is intimate, condition the name for what is remote.” Among the six causes five are intimate and one remote; among the four conditions three are remote and one intimate — which is why the enabling cause is taken out and matched to the dominant condition. And the real sense of “dominant” is not reinforcing but not obstructing — it does nothing whatever, only keeps out of the way, and for that very reason its range is the widest.

2. “Immediately antecedent” is the handing over of a place, not a succession within a kind. Form cannot serve as this condition, because several forms may become present side by side while minds cannot — one moment has one feeling and one perception, and this is the real sense of the word “equal.” And what hands over its place is the whole class of mind, not feeling to feeling: “the dharmas of the preceding class of mind as a whole are the immediately antecedent condition of the following class, and not only what is of their own kind.” The price paid by those who admit only one’s own kind the treatise settles in a sentence — before the very first moment of a mind without outflows there is nothing of the same kind at all, so that this moment would have to arise lacking one of the four conditions. This condition, moreover, concerns only the sequence of minds and not the length of time: when one emerges from the absorption without perception after five hundred aeons, since in the interval “no mind or mental factor intervenes,” it still counts as immediate.

3. What is refuted is “a single cause,” not “having a cause.” Three lines of reasoning: the world arises in sequence, and a single unchanging cause cannot yield results that come earlier and later; great effort is expended with no discernible purpose, and if instruments of suffering are made merely for the maker’s own delight, the very name Īśvara, the Sovereign, contradicts itself; and the position wipes out the causes and conditions of human effort that can be verified before one’s eyes. The author writes his conclusion out plainly — “therefore there is no dharma produced by a single cause alone” — and at once turns back to the enumeration of dharmas with “enough of refuting error; the correct doctrine should now be set out.” This refutation is not made in order to win an argument but to hand the responsibility for cause and result back to those who act: each acts for himself and “undergoes his own maturation result and result of human effort.”

One meaning (appended): That stanza of the non-Buddhist

After the author says, “Enough! What use is such an Īśvara?”, he suddenly quotes a stanza recited by the non-Buddhists themselves, and adds the remark, “This is truly well said.” What is praised is not that god but the accuracy with which the stanza describes him — since you say he makes the hells for his own delight, the descriptions in your own stanza, “constantly oppressing and harming” and “delighting to feed on blood, flesh, and marrow,” fit him exactly. The stanza is not one of this treatise’s own; the ancient masters assign it to the brahmins who serve Īśvara. As to whether “this is truly well said” is irony or straightforward assent, Puguang’s Record reads it as mockery and Shentai’s Commentary as assent; the four commentaries differ, and both readings are recorded without adjudication.

Through the whole fascicle

The twelve minds are an inventory of mind; the arising of the twelve minds from one another is a traffic map of mind; the twenty minds cut the wholesome and the indeterminate finer still; and the number of minds acquired records how far a person has moved on the ladder of the three realms — what was not accomplished before and is accomplished now is what “acquisition” means. A final stanza gathers everything under five gates: taking birth, entering absorption, becoming free from defilement, falling back, and restoring wholesome roots. Counting mind by mind is one axis, gathering gate by gate is another; only when one and the same set of facts is rearranged on a second axis can it be remembered and put to use. This is the reason Abhidharma reckons so finely: progress and regress in practice can be entered in the ledger square by square.

The Chapter on the Elements displays the entities of dharmas, the Chapter on the Faculties their functions, and the Chapter on the World the establishing of sentient beings and of the receptacle that holds them. This fascicle begins from the question “What are the three realms? And within each of them, how many separate places are there?”, and runs its whole course through the three realms, the five destinies, the seven stations of consciousness, the nine abodes of sentient beings, the four stations of consciousness, and the four modes of birth, coming to rest at last on intermediate existence, on proving the real existence of which it spends more than half the strength of the whole fascicle — of the nine items of the world of sentient beings, this fascicle completes the first seven.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not describing heavens and hells; it is assigning a number to every position in which a sentient being can exist — and when the numbering reached the stretch between death and birth and found it unnumbered, the author would sooner establish for it a further body that really exists than let a break appear in the continuum.

Three Points to Watch

1. One and the same set of places yields a different number as soon as a different measure is applied. For the places of the form realm the stanza establishes seventeen while the prose commentary records alongside it the sixteen of Kaśmīra — the difference lying only in whether the Mahābrahmā Heaven is counted a separate level. The seven stations of consciousness and the nine abodes of sentient beings measure the very same set of places: the former asks whether consciousness will be injured there, the latter whether sentient beings are willing to dwell there; and so the summit of existence and the non-percipient sentient beings are struck out of the first table and gathered into the second. When two numbers do not agree, the first question is not which of them is right, but which two measures the two numbers were taken with. This fascicle demonstrates the move three times.

2. “Existing” and “being entered in a given square” are two different things. Intermediate existence really exists, and the whole latter half of this fascicle is the proof of it; yet intermediate existence is not a destiny — “a destiny is what is gone to, and one cannot say that intermediate existence is what is gone to”; nor is intermediate existence named birth — “it has not yet reached the place it should reach, and so intermediate existence is not birth.” Twice in succession it is peeled out of the names already established, and precisely in order to give it a clean place of its own. Here is where Abhidharma’s sense of proportion lies: to grant that a thing exists is not to permit it to borrow the name of the neighboring square.

3. The entity of a destiny can be taken only from the indeterminate portion. The reason is one sentence — “were it otherwise, the destinies would be mixed together”: one and the same person carries in himself the actions and afflictions that lead to all five destinies, and if the wholesome and the defiled were reckoned into the entity of a destiny as well, a single person would be five destinies at once. So the entity of a destiny takes only the unobscured-indeterminate portion. The criterion is not suffering and pleasure but whether mixture can be kept out. This measure is afterwards carried off wholesale and used elsewhere to prove other things.

One Further Point (Appended): Why Intermediate Existence Had to Be Established

The one positive reason the author gives is a single sentence: “We plainly see that dharmas that turn on in continuity in the world must arise in succession moment by moment with their places uninterrupted.” The seed of the grain is here and the sprout is here as well; there is no skipped square in between. The continuity of sentient beings ought to run by the same principle.

The objector brings a reflected image as a counter-example — the substance is here and the image is there, plainly with an interval between, and the successive arising holds all the same. The author takes it apart in three descending layers: your example does not really exist at all (two forms cannot stand together in one place, refuted in four rounds); even granting that it existed, it is not alike (substance and image are not one continuum, and the two are present at the same time); and even the number of conditions for their arising differs (an image arises from two conditions, the substance and the mirror, whereas the existence of birth has “only the existence of death and no further superior support”). Only when the three layers have been taken apart does he turn to the scriptural proof, pressing one collection down after another: the Sūtra of the Seven Existences, the Gandharva Sūtra, the Sūtra of the Horse-Keeping Clan, the Sūtra of the Five Non-Returners — if you do not recite this one, then what of that one?

At the very end of the fascicle a rule is set up that can be used in both directions: “Whenever words are adduced as proof, their principle may have no other tendency; and since this has another tendency, it does not hold as proof.” — words brought in as evidence may not admit of a second direction. When the author himself adduces scripture, he too is bound by this rule.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The establishing of the three realms is the coordinate system for realm affiliation further on, for the increase of the latent tendencies by attachment, and for the projecting and completing actions of the chapter on action; and the criterion set up in the one sentence “what has the greed of the three realms increasing upon it by attachment belongs to the three realms” — that the boundary of a realm lies not in the height of the object but in where the greed falls — is what the chapter on the latent tendencies will use for a whole chapter together. That the five destinies are unobscured-indeterminate alone is the gate defining the word “destiny.” The four modes of birth take as their criterion what a being arises in dependence upon and not its shape, and so the single square of birth by transformation is wide enough to gather in intermediate existence: this is the place reserved in advance by which this fascicle establishes intermediate existence.

Two further loose threads are left by this fascicle for its readers. First, in two places the author expressly records a Sautrāntika position (the continuity of mind and the rest in the formless realm, and the difference of perception among the Ābhāsvara gods), and in both places Saṅghabhadra counter-refutes — what the Life of Master Vasubandhu records of the manner of this treatise’s composition, that he “established the sense of the Sarvāstivādins and, wherever there was a partial position, refuted it with the sense of the Sautrāntikas,” can here be seen in concrete shape. Second, the appearance of intermediate existence, where it goes, and the measure of the time it abides are nowhere touched in this fascicle; that is the business of the next. This fascicle does one thing only: it sets intermediate existence up.

The previous fascicle proved that intermediate existence really exists; this one asks straight out, “To which destiny will it go, and what appearance has the intermediate existence that arises?” — first exhausting the marks of intermediate existence gate by gate, next analyzing the four modes of entry into the womb, turning midway upon a passage that refutes the self, and then writing the embryo from the kalala through to birth and on to “he again arouses the afflictions and accumulates actions,” pressing the whole way round to the intermediate existence of the next term. The circle once closed, the twelve links stand up of themselves. The first half is the state of things as it is, the second half a table of divided stages; one and the same matter, first seen and then reckoned clear.

In one sentence: Intermediate existence is no third party outside death and birth; it is the front stretch of the very body that this term’s action draws forth — and once that is seen, the twelve links are not twelve nouns but twelve stretches of road upon one and the same continuum.

Placement (established first)

This fascicle is Xuanzang’s Fascicle Nine, and it begins from the distinctions through the several gates concerning intermediate existence. This boundary is not attested by any formula of transition; it is attested by the fascicle divisions of the three commentaries — Puguang’s Record, Fabao’s Commentary, and Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary each divide their fascicles independently, and their boundaries agree throughout with Xuanzang’s, a threefold coincidence. The three also mark their outlines here without prior agreement: Puguang’s Record and Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary both count eleven gates, while Fabao’s Commentary takes the stanza for its unit and gives “five stanzas of gates of meaning.” One further thing must be recorded first: Shentai’s Commentary is a fragmentary text, the five fascicles of the Chapter on the World being wholly wanting, and for this fascicle there is not one word of Shentai’s to attach — so the mirror of this fascicle is of three commentaries only.

Three Points to Watch

1. One and the same action draws forth two bodies. Intermediate existence and that coming body are drawn forth by one and the same action, and so it “has the shape of the coming basic existence” — Puguang’s Record puts this layer as a seal and what the seal impresses, the figure and the image not differing. This one sentence is the ground of the whole fascicle: it is just because the action is the same that the cessation of intermediate existence has no death-existence separately established for it, that the destiny of intermediate existence is such that “no power of any kind whatever can turn it,” and that the intermediate existences of the five destinies, dwelling together in one belly, “do not touch and burn one another, being shut off by action.” And its other side matters just as much — intermediate existence is exceedingly subtle, subtle to the point of being such that “as it cannot be seen, neither can it be touched”; yet nonresistance, the swiftest supernormal power of action, and feeding upon fragrance are each established by the treatise as a gate of its own with its own reason given, and they do not all issue from the single word “subtle.”

2. Every link is the five aggregates, and the name is only the representative of whatever is most eminent at that stage. This is the vital point of dependent origination by stages. The treatise says, “if at a given stage ignorance is the most eminent, the five aggregates of that stage are named ignorance as a whole,” and sets up a simile — as when one says the king goes forth, it is not that there are no outriders and retinue; it is only because the king is the most eminent that the whole is called the king’s going forth. Once this is seen, every hard place in the twelve links loosens: consciousness has its boundary fixed by “at the very moment of rebirth-linking, the stage of a single instant”; name-and-form by “after the consciousness of rebirth-linking and before the six sense fields arise”; and the six sense fields only by “from when the eye and the rest have arisen up to the stage where faculty, object, and consciousness have not yet met.” That ‘it ought to say before four sense fields arise, and yet says six’ is a naming on the basis of completeness; and that the later period uses only the two names birth and aging-and-death is because what it holds is precisely a second performance of the four links of the middle period. Yet upon this very stanza the author has set the two words “transmitted and allowed” — throughout the treatise he adjudicates his own school’s sense mostly by plain statement, and here he has left a fissure. Saṅghabhadra’s Treatise Conforming to Correct Principle reads it as “the Sūtra-master does not believe it and so says ‘transmitted and allowed’”; the Treatise Revealing the Doctrine simply alters the stanza to read “the Buddha spoke with reference to stages”; and Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary, coming by an independent road, notes that “dependent origination by stages is refuted by the Sautrāntikas, and the author’s intent is plain, and so he says ‘transmitted and allowed.’” Paramārtha’s old translation, for its part, makes a plain statement here with no modal word whatever. Four lines of material meet at one place, and they are recorded together without adjudication.

3. The twelve links are a dose of medicine, not a map of the universe. Why does scripture speak of sentient beings alone? The stanza answers very shortly: “in the earlier, the later, and the middle period, in order to dispel another’s bewilderment.” Of the ten questions that make up the bewilderment over the three periods, every one has “I” for its subject — what is called bewilderment over the three periods is in truth only three shapes taken by the grasping of self across three stretches of time. The treatise never answers head-on that question ‘what is the self?’; it merely sets out the twelve links and lets the premise of the question fall apart of itself. And so the Treatise on Categories of Dharmas says that dependent origination runs through all that is conditioned while scripture speaks only of sentient beings, and the two do not conflict — “the sūtrānta speaks with a particular intent, while the Abhidharma states things according to the marks of dharmas.” Whenever one reads a numbered set of dharmas, one should first ask for whom it was established and what it counteracts; and this fascicle gives the clearest demonstration of that.

One Further Point (Appended): Is Dependent Origination Conditioned or Unconditioned?

Someone adduces scripture to prove that dependent origination is an unconditioned dharma — “whether a Tathāgata appears in the world or does not appear, such is the abiding constancy of the dharma-nature of dependent origination.” The author does not refute the scripture; he only separates two readings of it. If the intent is to say that the formations and the rest constantly arise with ignorance and the rest for their condition, and not with any other dharma for condition nor with no condition at all, and that it is for this that abiding constancy is spoken of, then on this reading “the principle may be granted.” But if the intent is to establish besides this a limpidly abiding entity of a dharma and call it dependent origination, then on that reading “the principle may not be granted” — because “arising and origination are both marks of the conditioned,” and further because “origination must be established in dependence upon what originates”: a constant dharma with no relation whatever to ignorance and the rest, on what ground is it to be called the dependent origination established in dependence upon them?

One thing here deserves a particular entry: upon this very passage Saṅghabhadra, in the Treatise Conforming to Correct Principle, does not counter-refute but is of one accord and carries the point further — he likewise adjudicates that “said with this intent, the principle may indeed be granted,” likewise says that “if a separate dharma is called dependent origination, congealed and constant like cessation through discernment and the rest, this certainly cannot be granted,” and adds besides a threefold formula that blocks off the opponent’s three possibilities one by one. Debate within the lineage does not amount to opposition at every point, and this item is the best reminder of it.

Through the whole fascicle

This fascicle cuts one and the same set of links five times over: the twelve links are one cut, the three periods a second, the division into earlier and later a third, afflictions-actions-entities a fourth, and cause and result a fifth. Change the cut and what is seen changes with it — the three periods show the segments of a life; afflictions, actions, and entities show the closed ring of ‘the afflictions make action, action produces entities, and entities again arouse the afflictions’; cause and result show the two faces of one and the same link (“the cause-portion of the links is called dependent origination,” “the result-portion of the links is called what has already arisen from conditions” — like the names father and son, differing with what is being regarded). And that last passage of explanation conforming to the sense of the scripture walks the twelve links once more, this time as a process that can be watched.

Abhidharma reckons so finely for just this reason: only when one and the same set of facts is rearranged on a second axis can it be remembered and put to use. As for the starting point and the end point of the turning, the treatise has stated it plainly — birth and death “definitely have no beginning, yet they have a final limit, because the cause is exhausted,” for “as when the seed is destroyed the sprout certainly does not grow.” A whole Chapter on the World that talks through the three realms and the five destinies comes to rest on just this one sentence.

The general character of the twelve links being finished, the author turns back and takes apart four links only — ignorance, name, contact, and feeling; of the remaining eight he says expressly that they “have been stated or will be stated,” each returning to its own chapter. The four links taken apart, he gathers the twelve into the three kinds of affliction, action, and the matter of results by means of eight external similes; next he distinguishes the defiled from the undefiled among the four existences; then he asks one question, “upon what do these sentient beings depend to abide?”, and out of it opens the longest passage of the fascicle, on the four nutriments; and at the end he analyzes which consciousness and which feeling belong to death and birth, closing with the three classes. The first half distinguishes names, the second half distinguishes things.

In one sentence: This fascicle takes the question “why is a sentient being still here?” apart into two — what holds it up (the four nutriments) and what carries it on (the four existences and the mind at death and birth); and once holding up and carrying on have been made plain, where the break falls is plain as well.

Placement (established first)

This fascicle is the whole of Fascicle Ten of the Chapter on the World, beginning at “what is the sense of ignorance?” and stopping at the three classes. It opens with no transitional formula whatever, setting its question directly by the name of a link — a rare thing in the whole treatise, and precisely because what it takes up is work the preceding fascicle left unfinished. At this boundary the three commentaries mark the division each in its own words while pointing at one and the same passage: Puguang’s Record marks it as the separate explanation of names and senses, Fabao’s Commentary as the explanation of the names and senses of the twelve links with the four links expressly listed, Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary as the separate explanation of four dharmas together with the separate reference to the remaining text. The three divide their fascicles independently and yet their boundary is wholly the same as Xuanzang’s; Paramārtha’s version, on the other hand, begins a fascicle of its own midway through this passage, and the fascicle divisions of the two translations do not correspond at all.

Three Points to Watch

1. “Ignorance” is not an empty gap. As the fascicle opens the author sets three objections in a row, pressing both roads — “its entity is not clear knowing” and “the absence of clear knowing” — to their dead ends, and then settles the matter in ten characters: “ignorance is what clear knowing counteracts, as with ‘not a kinsman,’ ‘not true,’ and the rest.” An enemy is “not a friend and kinsman” not because he falls outside the list of friends and kinsmen but because he stands opposed to them; deceitful speech is “not true” not because it is any speech whatever besides true speech but because it is the kind that true speech counteracts. What this discrimination of a single word guards is one hard line: whatever can act as a condition must be a dharma possessed of an entity, and otherwise the first ring of the twelve links hangs in the air. Immediately under the second stanza the party of the divergent reckoning brings out the most memorable of similes to blunt that line — “a bad wife or child is called having no wife or child”: a bad wife, lacking the virtues a wife should have, gets the name “no wife,” and so bad discernment, lacking the virtue of clear knowing, “ought likewise to be named ignorance.” The author does not accept the simile and cuts it off with a single sentence: “that is not ignorance, because there is view in it.”

2. Every number must have all three criteria complete. The eighteen mental proximate-activities look like three times six, yet the author first strikes out one by one the three ways of counting taken singly: by intrinsic nature alone one gets three, by association alone one gets one, by object alone one gets six. “These come to eighteen, complete by three” — let one of the three criteria be missing and the number does not stand. This is the general rule by which Abhidharma establishes numbers, and it is the habit a reader most ought to form: when a number is met with, first ask by how many criteria crossing one another it was made. And immediately after the list of what is accomplished, the author suddenly declares of himself, “yet the sense of the sūtras as I see it is otherwise,” holding that only what is defiled is named a proximate activity — and that one sentence draws out the largest case in the whole fascicle.

3. The definition of “nutriment” is not what goes in at the mouth but what can make a sentient being abide. The sūtra says that the World-Honored One “awakened of himself to one dharma and rightly awakened to it and rightly stated it,” namely that no sentient being whatever does not abide by nutriment; and nutriment is of four kinds — morsel, contact, volition, and consciousness. The entity of morsel nutriment is the three sense objects of odor, taste, and the tangible and not that lump of food, and it is bound to the desire realm alone. Form is not counted as nutriment because it “cannot benefit the faculty it faces,” and because one who is liberated sees fine food and takes no benefit from it. The division of labor among the four nutriments is exceedingly neat: the first two nourish the body and the mind of this present life, the latter two draw forth and raise up the existence that is to come, and the author closes with a ready-made simile — “the first two are like the mother who rears, since they rear what has been born; the latter two are like the mother who bears, since they bring to birth what has not been born.” Birth and death continue because four supply lines feed them; the one who is liberated lets go of the first line first.

One Further Point (Appended): A Debate That Reaches No Verdict, and a Case in Which Four Authorities Each Chose Differently

Two passages of prose commentary in this fascicle run far beyond the stanzas to which they are attached. The first is the debate on whether contact and feeling are simultaneous, over nine hundred characters, in the course of which one extremely sharp sentence is forced out — “we take the sūtras alone as our measure; the root treatise is not a measure” — so that what is at issue is no longer whether contact precedes feeling but whether the Abhidharma root treatise has any standing as a measure at all. The treatise records the whole scene and closes it with the conclusion of the Sarvāstivāda side alone, saying at the end that “the incidental discussion is over; the proper sense should be analyzed” — and it declares no victory or defeat.

The second is Vasubandhu’s own declaration of a divergent account at the eighteen mental proximate-activities. In the Treatise Conforming to Correct Principle Saṅghabhadra marks it as “provisionally putting forward a divergent account” and refutes it, ruling at the end that what the Mahāvibhāṣā says is the better; the Treatise Revealing the Doctrine omits the whole passage. Paramārtha’s older translation alone carries the corresponding text of this passage, which proves it to be text the original treatise had. And among the three Han commentaries only Fabao’s Commentary records it and draws Saṅghabhadra’s refutation into the commentary as well, expressly marking it “third, the author provisionally puts forward a divergent account in order to refute the Sarvāstivādins,” while Puguang’s Record and Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary each explain the divergent account without touching Saṅghabhadra’s refutation. One and the same case, and four authorities each with a choice of his own — this collection records them together and does not adjudicate between them.

Through the whole fascicle

The eight external similes are the part of this fascicle easiest to remember and also the most useful: the dragon that holds down the water of the pool for the persistence of afflictions, the grass root cut and growing again for how hard afflictions are to pull up, the husk wrapping the rice for the affliction as the action’s helper, the medicinal herb whose fruit is ripe for the finishing of an action, cooked food for the result of maturation that produces no further result of maturation. The last simile is not rhetoric but the logical guarantee that liberation is possible — if a result of maturation could call forth a further result of maturation, the chain would have no break in it.

The whole fascicle closes with the three classes, and the three classes are not a grading of good and evil but a division by whether one’s direction is already fixed: the noble are fixed in rightness, those who commit the deeds of immediate retribution are fixed in wrongness, and all the rest are indeterminate — “what is other than fixed in rightness and fixed in wrongness is named of indeterminate nature, since these await two conditions and may become either of the two.” Most people are standing in that position of “awaiting two conditions.” A chapter that speaks of the world ends by drawing the whole world up once more in ranks according to whether it can still be changed, and then lays down the pen — this is the way out that it leaves its readers.

The world of sentient beings being finished, the author turns with a single sentence — “Thus has the world of sentient beings been stated; the receptacle world is now to be stated” — and speaks of the outer receptacle. From the bottom upward: the three-tiered base of wind circle, water circle, and golden circle; the nine mountains and the eight seas; the four great continents and the eight intermediate continents; the black mountains and the Lake Without Heat; then downward to the eight hot and the eight cold hells and the sixteen Increases; then upward along the sun and moon, the four terraces of the Sublime and Lofty Mountain, the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, and so on to the gods possessed of form; at the end the three-thousandfold great thousand gathers up its breadth, and bodily measure, lifespan, and untimely death gather up its length. Eight headings make one map; two tables make one close.

In one sentence: This fascicle sets a world in order from its lowest tier to its highest and from the shortest span of ten years to eighty thousand aeons — and through the whole of it there is no architect, only one sentence recurring again and again, “the dominant force of the actions of sentient beings.”

Placement (established first)

The boundary of this fascicle is the strongest outline boundary in the whole chapter: the text marks itself with “the receptacle world is now to be stated,” and the three ancient masters each divide their fascicles here with boundaries exactly alike, Puguang’s Record, Fabao’s Commentary, and Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary all judging it the second major division of the chapter on the world as a whole. Beneath the receptacle world there are three parts — the receptacle dwelt in, the measure of those who can dwell, and the divisions of the least measures; this fascicle occupies the first two, and the third belongs to the next. The receptacle dwelt in divides further into eight headings (the three circles, the nine mountains, the eight seas, the four continents, the black mountains and the rest, the hells, the sun and moon, and the receptacles of the gods), and here too the three masters mark them alike. Paramārtha’s older translation writes this passage as “the receptacle world-sphere” and not “the receptacle world,” and his chapter on the world is divided into four fascicles only, so that the passage answering to this one straddles the boundary between two of his.

Three Points to Watch

1. The world is not made by anyone; it is called forth by shared action. The wind circle arises out of space by “the dominant force of the actions of sentient beings”; gold congealing upon the water, the several gems coming into being, the sun and moon not falling but circling the mountain — all of it is that same force. Even the correspondence between the shapes of the four continents and the faces of the people who live upon them — “as the continent has its shape, so likewise the faces of its people” — is evidence on this same line: the receptacle and sentient beings issue from one and the same shared action and are not two separate sets of things. So the first step in reading this fascicle is to put “whose action called it forth” in place of “who made it”; and once that is done, the numbers that fill the fascicle fall onto the ledger of practice. It is for just this reason that the fascicle refutes in passing the Sāṃkhya sense of “transmutation”: the Sarvāstivādins say that the cause ceases and the result arises and their entities do not exist together, while the Sāṃkhya say that the entity is permanent and its characteristics change; and the author settles it in one sentence — “that it should be this very thing and yet not be thus: such a statement I have never heard.”

2. The skeleton of the tables is a change of unit, not a heap of numbers. The bodily measure of the people of the four continents doubles from the eastern continent onward; the gods of desire increase by a constant difference reckoned in krośas, while the gods of form increase first by a constant difference and then by a constant ratio, with “only the Anabhraka subtracting three yojanas” in the middle — for which the treatise gives no reason and Puguang’s Record keeps several explanations side by side. For lifespan, the day and night of the heavens are established first (fifty human years being one day and night of the lowest heaven), and then the lifespan of a heaven is made one day and night of a hell. One and the same device is used three times. The measures of distance between the places of the gods are more economical still — “as is a heaven’s measure of distance downward, so likewise is its number upward” — one sentence in place of twenty-two figures. And when a number grows too great to be felt, the treatise turns to simile instead: the lifespan of the cold hells is shown to be “hard to exhaust” by taking away one sesame seed every hundred years, with no fixed value given. Whenever an exception suddenly appears in a run of regular values, verify the two ends first; and whenever a simile takes the place of a number, that is exactly where the count has passed beyond what can be felt.

3. The abundance of divergent accounts is precisely the mark of honesty. Why the water does not flow away: two accounts. How the hells are arranged: three. The measure of the summit of the Heaven of the Thirty-Three: eighty thousand and twenty thousand stand side by side. The measure of the supports of the heavenly palaces: four accounts listed together. For most of the details of the receptacle world the scriptures have no express text, and the treatise records divergent accounts for the most part without adjudicating them; yet one must recognize, passage by passage, such verdict-words as “in truth of principle” and “this sense is not settled” — so that reading this fascicle begins with learning to tell which sentence is the treatise’s own position and which is a separate account that it merely records. What is fixed beyond change is not the map but the correspondence, at every single point, of “which action calls forth which result.” And where the author writes “it should be pondered,” “this sense is not settled,” and “the preceptors allow both gates without fault,” those are places he has himself marked as not yet brought to a close, and are not gaps.

One Further Point (Appended): The Opposed Pair of Numbers at the Summit of the Heaven of the Thirty-Three

Xuanzang’s stanza text holds that each side of the summit is eighty thousand and gives “each of the four sides is only twenty thousand” as the account of other masters; Paramārtha’s verse text, on the contrary, holds that each side is twenty thousand and gives eighty thousand as the account of other masters. With one and the same pair of figures, what is the position and what is the account of other masters are exactly interchanged between the two versions — this is not a difference of rendering but a difference in the variant readings of the stanza text that each version received, each translator being faithful to the base text before him. Puguang’s Record even supplies, on behalf of the account holding twenty thousand, the reckoning that lies behind it, saying that the four terraces are formed “by cutting successively inward into the body of the mountain,” drawing in tier by tier, so that at the summit only twenty thousand a side is left. Both are recorded without adjudication.

Through the whole fascicle

The last passage of this fascicle deserves a second reading. After the numbers that fill it have been set out to their utmost, the treatise says that “in every place the lifespan admits of untimely death,” and at once adds a further layer: “this is said with respect to place and not with respect to particular sentient beings, for there are particular sentient beings who do not die untimely” — what holds of a place is one thing, what holds of a person another. Who are the several classes that do not die untimely? The bodhisattva bound to one more birth who awaits buddhahood, one in his last existence, one to whom the Buddha has given prediction, one whom the Buddha has sent, one who follows through faith, one who follows the dharma, and the mothers who carry a bodhisattva in the womb and who carry a wheel-turning monarch in the womb. What they have in common is that each carries about him a matter not yet finished.

So this map of the world is given an exit: the lifespan of every place can be entered in the ledger square by square, and yet one who bears a matter that must be brought to completion is not governed by that table. From the wind circle lowest down to the Akaniṣṭha highest up, from ten years to eighty thousand aeons, what the whole fascicle measures is the receptacle and the body; what its last sentence points to lies outside the table of measures.

The last fascicle of the Chapter on the World no longer asks “what is there” but “by what is it measured.” The four preceding fascicles measured space by the yojana and time by the year; both rules had been used, and yet the smallest graduation of either was never stated. This fascicle sets out from the three least measures (the ultimate atom · the letter · the moment) and runs on through the table of lengths increasing sevenfold at every step, the table of times from the moment to the year, the four aeons, the great aeon, the three asaṃkhyeya aeons, and then further to the window of time in which buddhas and pratyekabuddhas appear, the wheel-turning monarch, the fall of the sentient beings at the beginning of an aeon, and the three lesser and the three great catastrophes — the book of measures of an Abhidharma treatise.

In one sentence: From the ultimate atom that cannot be divided further to the great aeon made up of eighty intermediate aeons, one and the same thing is being measured — “What is the nature of an aeon? It is the five aggregates alone”; however far the rule is extended, what it measures is always the dharmas of body and mind, and nothing else.

Three Points to Watch

1. The two ends of a single rule. The ultimate atom is the lower limit reached by analyzing downward until nothing can be analyzed further; the great aeon is the upper limit reached by accumulating upward to eighty intermediate aeons. Between them the sevenfold increase joins the crevice-roaming dust that the eye can see all the way down to the ultimate atom that it cannot, and the numbers one hundred twenty, sixty, and thirty join the moment all the way up to the year. The lower end is won by analysis and the upper end by accumulation, and both ends are hung upon what can be experienced — the lower upon the floating dust in a window’s crevice, the upper upon the increase and decrease of human life (“in every aeon the increase goes no higher than eighty thousand, and the decrease of every aeon reaches only ten years at the least”). This move is the general rule for reading an Abhidharma table of numbers: every set of numbers must have one end resting upon experience, or it is no more than numbers. And at the close of this fascicle the rule is itself withdrawn — the force of the three catastrophes leaves “not so much as an ultimate atom remaining,” so that the lower limit of what is measured is itself among the things destroyed.

2. Time is not a container. The whole fascicle lays time out at the greatest length and in the closest detail; and yet, once the four aeons have been reckoned, the author inserts only one question: “What is the nature of an aeon? It is the five aggregates alone.” An aeon is not a vessel that holds dharmas; it is only a stretch of the five aggregates continuing in time. This one question is the pivot of the whole fascicle — without it the eighty intermediate aeons become a cosmological frame; with it the entire timetable is an unfolding of the enumerated dharmas. The same gathering-in appears again at the end: the three catastrophes do not reach the fourth meditative absorption, and “for this the Buddha named it Immovable”; yet as soon as someone asks whether it is not then permanent, the treatise answers at once, “It is not so, because it arises together with sentient beings and ceases together with them.” Not even upon the topmost level is a single permanent exception left standing, and this line matters more than any number.

3. How far a catastrophe reaches is measured by one’s own agitation. Why do the three catastrophes have their summits only at the second, the third, and the fourth meditative absorption? The treatise’s answer lies not outside but within: the first absorption has applied and sustained thought for its inward catastrophe, and so meets fire without; the second has the feeling of joy for its inward catastrophe, moistening the body as water does, and so meets water without; the third has the movement of the breath for its inward catastrophe, and breath is precisely wind, and so meets wind without; the fourth has left all three behind, and so no outward catastrophe can reach it. This is the same principle as that stated in the section on the aeon of dissolution, that “a catastrophe of another level cannot destroy that other level” — a catastrophe destroys a level by drawing what is of its own kind, not by spreading. Brought down to practice it comes to a single sentence: the grade to which the outward world is secure answers exactly to the grade to which the inward mind is stilled; and as for the upward migration when catastrophe comes, for three of the continents and for the heavens meditative absorption is the gate — the northern continent alone excepted, where beings are born among the gods of desire when their lifespan is exhausted, and not by absorption; at the aeon of dissolution sentient beings for the most part migrate upward level by level by meditative absorption.

One Further Point (Appended): That One Mouthful of the Savor of the Earth

The people at the beginning of the aeon had bodies that gave off light and fed upon joy. One of them was by nature greedy for savor; he took a taste and ate it, and the rest followed his example — “only then was it named the first taking of morsel food.” From there the chain never breaks: the body grew hard and heavy and its light sank away, and only then were there sun and moon; greed for savor increased by degrees, and the savor of the earth, the earth-cake, the forest creeper, and the fragrant rice withdrew one grade at a time; the food was coarse and left refuse in the body, so that the two passages appeared, and with them the male and female faculties and improper attention; someone was by nature indolent and took more at once and stored it, and thence arose the thought “mine,” the dividing of the fields, grudging guardianship, and encroachment, and from these theft arose; to guard against thieves a man was hired to watch the fields and was invested as lord of the fields, and thence the names of king and of kṣatriya were established; others, wearying of household life and delighting in the open quiet, cultivated the observance of the precepts, and thence gained the name brahmin; a later king could not provide his land equally, inflicted punishments, and killing arose; and the guilty, hiding their faults, gave rise to false speech.

At the section on the three lesser catastrophes the treatise turns back and gathers this long chain into eight words — “these calamities have two dharmas for their root: first, greed for fine food; second, an indolent nature.” The ruin of a world does not come from outside; its first cause lies far back in that one mouthful of the savor of the earth and that one taking of more than was needed. The remedies are slight in the same measure: keeping the precept against killing for one day and one night, or offering the community a single medicinal fruit or a single ball of food with an earnest and pure mind — cause and result are alike in the mind, and so the place to lay hold is in the mind as well.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The “ultimate atom” is here established as the lower limit of form, and the later discussions of whether form is provisional or real, and of aggregation and assemblage, must all come back to the definition given in this fascicle; while the long passage at the end of this fascicle refuting the non-Buddhists’ permanent atom takes the single route of “taking what has not been granted as one’s proof,” and is one of the few stretches of defense of the doctrine in the whole treatise. The “three asaṃkhyeya aeons” are here explained as a fixed place in a series of numbers and not as a flourish — “the word innumerable does not display that it cannot be numbered” — and the treatise honestly records that “within this series of numbers the remaining eight have been lost.” The four questions and answers that follow place upon compassion the reason a bodhisattva is willing to spend that number — “a bodhisattva relieves beings and thereby fulfills his own compassion, and so relieving others is itself his own benefit” — the one passage in the Chapter on the World that measures mind rather than world. The name “Immovable” is established here, and when the chapter on absorption later states the differences among the four meditative absorptions and why the fourth is most fit to be relied upon, its root is in this place. And the law of symmetry between formation and dissolution, “by the nature of things what is destroyed last must be formed first,” is the base text of every later reckoning of aeons — the fascicle closes by taking the sixty-four aeons of the lifespan of the Śubhakṛtsna gods in the Treatise of Designations as a single verification, which is the score this whole system of reckoning hands in for itself.

The Chapter on the World finished drawing what the world looks like; the Chapter on Action goes on to ask where that picture came from. This fascicle begins from the one question “by what are differences such as these produced?”, answers first “by action,” and then takes action apart into volition and what volition does, into the three actions of body, speech, and mind, and into the manifest and the nonmanifest; whereupon it plunges headlong into two great disputes — what the entity of bodily manifest action is, and whether nonmanifest action really exists at all. The two disputes take up more than half of the whole fascicle — on the Sāṃmitīya account that “motion is bodily manifest action” the author refutes and concludes expressly (“since by this principle motion is definitely nonexistent, that bodily manifest action is shape is established in principle”), while on the contest between the Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika parties he closes with “let these many disputes rest here for now,” and passes no final sentence.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not proving one school right; it is demonstrating how two things that are equally invisible ought to be compared — the Sarvāstivādins say a really existing nonmanifest form continues on, the Sautrāntikas say only a seed perfumed by volition continues on; and the author himself says “this and that are alike hard to know, and here I bear no grudge against either,” and then records the reasons of both parties without omitting a sentence.

Three Points to Watch

1. The world has no maker, only beings who do actions. The very first sentence of the fascicle strikes out the creator — “they do not arise from a single lord who first conceived them, but arise from the differences in the actions of sentient beings.” The author then makes the sentence good with a pair of contrasts: from one and the same mixed actions, the inner body obtained “constantly runs impurity from the nine sores,” while the outer goods obtained are “in color, scent, taste, and touch most lovely and delightful”; and “the hosts of gods do wholly pure actions, and so the two things they draw to themselves are both excellent.” The beauty and ugliness of inner and outer are not apportioned by anyone; they are settled by whether the action is pure or mixed. This is the real ground floor beneath every number and every classification in the whole treatise.

2. One and the same set of dharmas may be established separately by different measures. Why are the three actions established as three? The author walks each of the three roads himself and finds none of them passable; the answer lies in one sentence of the Vaibhāṣikas — “the Vaibhāṣika masters say that the three actions are established, in that same order, by the three causes above”: bodily action is established from its support, verbal action from its own nature, mental action from what raises it. Three measures, not one. The fascicle uses the move three times: in establishing the three actions, in the four causes of the four kinds of wholesome and the four kinds of unwholesome (ultimate · intrinsic · associated · raised), and in the fact that the dharmas with outflows are unwholesome in the ultimate sense and yet may be called wholesome, unwholesome, or indeterminate as reckoned by maturation. Whenever the numbers do not agree, the first question is not who is wrong but which measure each of these items was taken with.

3. What is argued is “whether an entity is needed,” not “whether the thing happens.” The Sautrāntikas never denied that discipline holds off wrongdoing, that merit grows, that a path of action can be completed; they deny only that these functions need an entity called “nonmanifest form” to carry them — “shape is established as bodily manifest action, but as a convention and not as a real thing.” The skeleton of the Sarvāstivādins’ eight proofs is likewise a single sentence: there is a slot standing empty in the sūtras, and only the nonmanifest will fit it. So there is only one way to refute them too — find one more thing that fits the slot just as well (form in the object-field of absorption; the continuum of seeds perfumed by volition). This measure is the most serviceable tool the fascicle leaves to the treatise as a whole.

One Further Point (Appended): Why Cessation Awaits No Cause

The hardest stretch of reasoning in the whole fascicle is a single sentence: “that is, the cessation of conditioned dharmas awaits no cause. Why so? What awaits a cause is a result; cessation is a nonexistence, and a nonexistence is not a result, and so it awaits no cause” — what needs a cause is a result, cessation is a nonexistence and a nonexistence is not a result, so cessation needs no cause; and needing no cause, there is nothing holding it back, and so it ceases as soon as it arises.

The opponent brings up direct perception: when firewood meets fire, is it not plainly extinguished? The author questions back with one line, “how do you know that firewood and the rest cease because of their conjunction with fire?”, and then gives the pivot-distinction of the whole passage: not seeing a thing admits of two explanations — either the fire extinguished it, or it ceased of itself and what follows no longer arises. The treatise offers as instance “the conjunction of wind with a lamp flame and of a hand with a bell’s sound”: wind blows on the lamp, a hand stops the bell, and nobody would say that the wind and the hand “extinguished” the flame and the sound. Hence “therefore this sense must be made out by inference.”

He presses once more: if conjunction with fire were the cause of cessation, then in cooking-change there are the three grades of low, middle, and high, and one and the same conjunction with fire would be producing on one side and extinguishing on the other, so that “the entity of a productive cause would become an extinguishing cause.” The opponent asks at last what the fire does when boiling water dwindles away, and the author answers that fire only makes “the mass of water arise ever more slightly in each successive stage” — what fire performs is the work of producing, not the work of extinguishing. And so the passage closes: “therefore there is no cause that makes dharmas cease; dharmas cease of themselves, since it is their nature to perish,” “since they have moments, motion is definitely nonexistent,” “that bodily manifest action is shape is established in principle.”

The value of this passage lies not in its conclusion but in its teaching the reader to tell “what I saw” apart from “my interpretation of what I saw.”

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The opening out of action (volition / having-willed; body, speech, mind; manifest and nonmanifest) is the coordinate system for the six fascicles that follow: obtaining and relinquishing discipline and non-discipline, the completion of the ten paths of action, the adjudication of the five deeds of immediate retribution — all of it hangs on the entities established in this fascicle. The raising and the concurrent raising established in the stanza “what raises them is of two kinds” are the key by which the wholesome or unwholesome nature of an action is judged — and the next fascicle uses that key throughout, in treating how the three disciplines turn along with the mind and how the manifest and nonmanifest are achieved.

Two loose threads are left for what follows. First, the Sautrāntikas gather action up into volition and turn the nonmanifest into a continuum of the seeds of volition; once out of this treatise, that thread is taken up whole and becomes the home position of another lineage — what is here “one of two parties recorded” is there the correct account. Second, the author leaves two express blanks in this fascicle: how obtainment and the rest raised by a mind of a different class become wholesome, “this sense should be pondered”; and how the nonmanifest that turns along with the mind in absorption becomes wholesome, “on a sense such as this one should expend some labor.” That the ancient masters mark their doubts at the hard places is itself part of the form.

One last thing is worth remembering. The closing sentence of the fascicle — that the sūtra “speaks only with regard to the causal raising that is interrupted by other minds” — demonstrates the most typical move in all of Abhidharma: not to cancel the point at issue, but only to add a qualifier to it. Four words are added, and both horns of the dilemma dissolve at once. In the six fascicles that follow, the move will be used many times more.

The previous fascicle of the Chapter on Action made out the entity of action; this fascicle makes out the discipline of action. Beginning from “the nonmanifest is of three kinds,” it establishes the three disciplines, opens the eight names of individual liberation and gathers their entities back into four, sets up the lay follower, the one-day observance, the novice, and the bhikṣu, glosses the names śīla, excellent conduct, and the rest, ranges the past, present, and future of what is possessed, settles the conditions by which discipline is obtained and the term for which it is undertaken, sets out in detail the eight limbs of the one-day observance and the entity of the three refuges, and closes with the two questions of why sexual misconduct is the most reproachable and why among the prohibited offences liquor alone is abstained from — the section on the discipline of an Abhidharma treatise is all of it here.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not arguing whether one ought to keep the discipline; it is finding a place where “discipline” can be kept — and the place it finds is called the nonmanifest: not displayed outwardly, not turning along with the mind, continuing on of itself, so that keeping the discipline need not be propped up by the thought of the present moment.

Three Points to Watch

1. Discipline is lodged in the square called “the nonmanifest,” and so it is still there while you sleep. The naming of discipline is a single sentence — it can block and can extinguish the continuum of evil discipline. Blocking holds off what is to come, extinguishing cuts off what has already come; and neither of those two things is done by the thought of the present moment, but by that portion of the entity which does not follow the mind. Hence the discipline of individual liberation does not turn along with the mind, and the reason the treatise gives is that it turns constantly even when the mind is other or when there is no mind at all. The point of undertaking the discipline lies therefore not in the vow itself but in the thing that the vow raises in that one instant. The long stretch of the fascicle on the stages of possession — one who abides in discipline, one who abides in non-discipline, one who abides in the middle, one who has obtained absorption, the noble one, and which portion of past, present, and future each of them possesses — is measuring that one entity throughout, and not measuring your resolve.

2. The number of the names and the number of the entities must be reckoned separately. The eight kinds of individual liberation have only four entities, the reason being that apart from the one for the men there is no further one for the women; and the proof is the turning of the faculty — the shape changes while the entity is neither relinquished nor obtained, and only the name differs. The same measure is used elsewhere: śīla, excellent conduct, action, discipline, individual liberation, and path of action are six names for one and the same portion of wholesome discipline; evil conduct, evil discipline, action, path of action, and non-discipline are five names for one and the same portion of evil discipline; and on both sides “path of action” refers to the first thought-instant alone, while the remaining names extend to the first and to what follows. Whenever the numbers do not agree, the first question is not who is wrong but whether the two numbers are counting names or counting entities. The measure for judging sameness and difference of entity is one only: whether there is relinquishing and obtaining — not how many articles there are.

3. The term has only two natural bounds, and the grade has only one thing that settles it. The bounds of time for discipline are two only — the bound of the life span and the bound of a day and a night; a half-month and the rest are only the day and night said over again, and there is no third bound to be had, and so there is no such thing as “undertaking the five precepts for three years.” And for the low, middle, and high grades of discipline the criterion is a single word: the mind with which it is undertaken. From this principle a startling result follows — an arhat may possess a discipline of the low grade, while an ordinary being may possess one of the high. Time is bounded by the natural world outside; quality is settled by the thought at the moment of undertaking; and neither of them is conferred retroactively by the fruit you later attain.

One Further Point (Appended): The Dispute over the Four Statements of “One Part” and the Rest

The sūtra says there are four lay followers, able to train in one part, in a small part, in a large part, and in the full part; the Sarvāstivādins say a lay follower must be complete in the five precepts. The two are in conflict, and this is the largest dispute in the fascicle.

The Sarvāstivādins’ way of construing the sūtra is a single sentence: it is said with regard to what can be kept — all five articles have been undertaken, and the difference lies only in how many can be held; were it otherwise, the sūtra ought to have said “undertakes one part” and not “trains in one part.” The Sautrāntikas press the point sentence by sentence: no sūtra says that the self-declaration itself raises the five precepts; that line about renouncing life and turning to the pure is one who has seen the truths staking his life upon his own oath, and is not said in order to set out the marks of a lay follower; and if “one part” and the rest were said with regard to keeping and transgressing, the man undertaking the discipline would have had no need to ask the Buddha at all. The Sarvāstivādins refute by parallel instance in return: if one may be called a lay follower while lacking the discipline, then a bhikṣu and a novice who lack it ought to be established as such too. The Sautrāntikas retort by asking why the measure of limbs is fixed as it is; the Sarvāstivādins answer that it is instituted by the force of the Buddha’s teaching; and the Sautrāntikas answer back in the same coin — then it should equally be allowed that by the force of the Buddha’s teaching one may be called a lay follower though lacking the discipline.

After seven exchanges the author hands down no verdict, and writes only one sentence closing back upon his own school: the Vaibhāṣika masters of Kaśmīra do not allow that one who lacks the discipline can become a lay follower. This is one demonstration of the form of the treatise — one meaning and two schools recorded together, the sentence marking on its face whose school it is, and not judging the winner for the reader. The second such recording in this fascicle is whether the drinking of liquor is an intrinsic offence or a prohibited one; what the two parties dispute is only on what ground one is not to drink, and on the matter of not drinking there is no second account.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The establishing of the nonmanifest is the ground floor of this fascicle and also the coordinate system for the later chapters on the obtaining and relinquishing of discipline, on whether the ten paths of action are completed, and on the weight of the obstruction of action. The three refuges are established here as the gateway of means at every place where a discipline is undertaken — without undertaking the three refuges there is no one-day observance, and that one sentence lifts the three refuges from an entrance ceremony into the gate itself. The line between intrinsic offences and prohibited ones is drawn here as well: among the prohibited offences liquor alone is written into the limbs of the discipline, and the reason lies not in the gravity of liquor itself but in its making a man unable to hold the remaining disciplines; and the same reason makes false speech the one article instituted in common in every discipline — once the door of lying is open, disclosure is gone, and the other articles slacken along with it.

Two loose threads are left for the reader. First, what the entity of the three refuges takes refuge in is the dharmas that can make a Buddha and can make a Saṅgha, together with cessation through discernment; and in the same passage the treatise itself blocks the misreading “the dharmas beyond learning alone are the Buddha” — it says expressly that this treatise never said “alone,” but only “can make.” The place where a reading of the three refuges most easily goes astray is just that word “alone.” Second, this fascicle adjudges discipline to be really existent form, while the Yogācāra lineage, upon the very same term, adjudges it straightway to be conventionally established; one and the same “nonmanifest,” two ages and two answers — this is the most rewarding place in the fascicle for parallel reading.

The last fascicle set up the three disciplines; this one asks where they are obtained from, how much of them is obtained, and by what conditions they go away. When the sense of relinquishing has been said out to the end, the brush of the treatise turns: “since the natures and marks of the several actions have been made out to differ, the actions set forth in the sūtras should now be explained” — from wholesome, unwholesome, and indeterminate it works its way straight down to the crooked, the foul, and the turbid, giving one by one, for every name of action that has occurred in the sūtras, an entity that can be checked. Within a single fascicle, the first half is the mechanics of the discipline and the second half the taxonomy of action.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not expounding the rules of the discipline; it is expounding what it is that holds the entity of the discipline up — the things that hold it up break down one by one, and the discipline is relinquished one by one; and so, immediately after listing the five conditions, the treatise adds the sentence “because a manifest action arises that contradicts what was undertaken, because the support is relinquished, because the support is altered, because what it rests upon is cut off, because the term of time is passed,” restoring the five stipulations to five ways of breaking down.

Three Points to Watch

1. The range of the discipline is the range of the mind, not the range of behavior. At the very front the treatise settles the matter dead: “there is no one who obtains discipline without its extending to all sentient beings, since it is only by abiding in a wholesome disposition toward all sentient beings that discipline is obtained; otherwise not, since the unwholesome disposition has not wholly ceased.” Hence, if before taking up the discipline any one of the five stipulations (of sentient beings, of limbs, of places, of times, of circumstances) is still kept in the mind, what is obtained is not discipline but “an excellent conduct resembling discipline.” The treatise does not say that this is spurious; it says only that it is not discipline. The same measure is applied once more later: when egg-born nāgas come to ask for the eight-limbed one-day observance, the treatise likewise adjudges that “this obtains excellent conduct, it does not obtain discipline” — one and the same establishing, demonstrated in two places.

2. To relinquish one entity, another entity must dispossess it. Evil discipline does not break down of itself by “not doing it any more” — “one who abides in evil discipline, though he may at times give rise to the volition of not doing and lay aside knife and net, yet if he does not take on the wholesome disciplines, there is no way for the non-disciplines to be cast off,” and the simile is set up: “as when, though one avoids the causes and conditions of falling ill, yet without taking good medicine the illness is in the end hard to cure.” What dispossesses it is the wholesome discipline, and the reason is that “since the natures of the wholesome and the evil discipline contradict each other, the wholesome discipline is the stronger in force among them.” To avoid the circumstances is only to stop adding weight; to take on the discipline is to be released. For the entity of an affliction, on the other hand, there is another dispossessor — “all the defiled dharmas that are not form, in all three realms, are relinquished by one condition alone, namely that their counteracting path arises,” and it is said expressly “by no other means.” Read the two places together and the position of this treatise is perfectly clear: what can dispossess evil discipline is wholesome discipline, and what can dispossess an affliction is the counteracting path alone.

3. Whether an action is settled or unsettled hangs upon the extremes of mind and of field, not upon the size of the deed. The places where the treatise lists settled action are just five — a weighty affliction, a purely pure mind, what is constantly done, a field of merit, and one’s father and mother; the first three are extremes of mind, the last two extremes of field (the one by way of virtue, the other by way of kindness). And so a man who says a single sentence within the assembly is turned about bodily within this very life by the excellence of the field, and a man who once saves oxen is turned about bodily within this very life by the excellence of his intent; the treatise itself adduces both as instances. This road runs both ways: the treatise says of the five fields of merit that “if there be an action of harm or of benefit toward them, this action must necessarily draw its result at once” — harm and benefit stand side by side, and before the most excellent of fields the result of an unwholesome action is likewise the swiftest.

One Further Point (Appended): The One Express Adjudication of This Fascicle, and the Two Refusals to Adjudicate

The form of this fascicle is still that where divergent accounts are met and the sūtras have no express text, both parties are recorded — the non-discipline with a limb wanting (the Vibhāṣā masters: “there can be no man with a limb wanting or with only a part remaining who may be called one abiding in non-discipline” / the Sautrāntikas: “according to the term he has set, whether the limbs be complete or incomplete, whether the whole or a part, in every case non-discipline is obtained”), and whether a grave transgression relinquishes the discipline (three accounts written together in the stanza); in neither does the treatise adjudicate. Even in that most tightly packed exchange of all, over the near kinsman and the sheep, the treatise records only as far as the Sautrāntikas’ counter-reproach, “in matters equal such as these another principle should be sought,” recording as they stand the places where the two schools’ reasoning is not settled and not forcing an adjudication.

In one place only does the author hand down a verdict: whether the lower levels have a third kind of action conducive to neither. The prose commentary records three accounts in a row, and the author gathers them up directly with “both accounts contradict the root treatise,” adducing two questions from the root treatise as his proof. The dividing line lies exactly in whether there is an express text to rely upon — where there is an express text of the root treatise, he adjudicates; where there is none, he does not. This one point is the most labor-saving key there is for reading this fascicle, and indeed for reading the whole treatise.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

What this fascicle makes out is the full compass of that one dharma, the “nonmanifest,” on its two sides of obtaining and relinquishing; its real existence is here a premise, and that premise is expressly cancelled once one comes to the Yogācāra lineage — one and the same name, which the one lineage establishes as a really existent form and discusses in fine detail as to the conditions of its obtaining and relinquishing, while the other adjudges it a conventional establishment upon the delimitations of volition and aspiration. The two lineages part ways, and here the edge shows most.

The eleven gates of action in the second half of this fascicle are the master table for the chapters to come on the four actions black and white, on the ten paths of action, and on the three obstructions; while the four alternatives of settled and unsettled action read together with the twenty-two actions of intermediate existence are the very heart of the teaching on action and result. The criteria for the actions of the three times are here fixed as the two layers of ‘settledness or unsettledness of time’ and ‘settledness or unsettledness of maturation’; the Yogācāra lineage, for actions of the same names, changes the criterion to ‘doing and increasing’ — one and the same set of names, two sets of criteria, and they may be looked at side by side.

Two more loose threads are left by this fascicle for the reader. First, at the end of the passage on falling back from a fruit the treatise adds “those who have fallen back from a fruit certainly do not then meet their end, as will be made out later,” leaving the relation of falling back to the end of life for the text that follows; second, of the one stanza Root 60 only the first half (the crooked, the foul, the turbid) is treated here, while the four actions black and white in its second half begin another fascicle — this fascicle closes upon the sentence “if the bodily, verbal, and mental actions arise in dependence upon greed they are called turbid action, since they are of the class of the turbidity of greed,” which is exactly where the explanation of the names of the actions in the sūtras has reached the sixth item and no further.

The first three units expounded the entity of action, expounded the manifest and the nonmanifest, and expounded from what the three disciplines are obtained. This unit turns upon a single sentence, “again the sūtra says that action is of four kinds,” and explains item by item the several actions spoken of in the sūtras: the four actions black and white, those few thought-moments of volition without outflows that can exhaust the actions, the three munis and the three purities, the three kinds of evil conduct and the three kinds of good conduct; and then, from “again the sūtra says: there are ten paths of action,” it opens the most finely worked stretch on conduct in the whole treatise — what the paths of action gather in, the division of the manifest and the nonmanifest, the three stages of the preparatory, the root, and the consequent, the arising from the three roots and the completion by them, the four places upon which they depend, and so on down to killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, divisive, harsh, and frivolous speech, and greed, hatred, and wrong view, each of them made out as to what does and does not constitute it.

In one sentence: This fascicle takes “an evil deed was done” apart into a line that has a starting point, a joining point, and a residual momentum, and then asks item by item: at which point does it truly become a path of action?

Placement (established first)

The boundary of this unit is the fourth fascicle-boundary of this chapter, and the three ancient masters, dividing their fascicles independently, set the line at exactly the same place — Puguang’s Record and Yuanhui’s Verse Commentary both mark it as the seventh, explaining the black-and-black and the rest, while Fabao’s Commentary marks it as the eighth, explaining the four actions black and black and the rest spoken of in the sūtras; and the three subsections they open (the names and entities of the four actions, the distinctions in what the actions without outflows cut off, and the recording of divergent accounts) agree among all three in the sense of the threefold division, differing only in the wording of the outline names. Within the fascicle, the sentence “again the sūtra says: there are ten paths of action” is a second and weightier outline boundary, which all three mark alike as the beginning of the chapter on the ten paths of action, and the six subsections they open there are likewise one and the same. At each of the two ends a half stanza straddles the boundary: at the opening only the second half of Root 60 is used, and at the close only the first half of Root 79 — Xuanzang’s fascicle division takes the boundary of the sense, not the boundary of the stanzas. In Paramārtha’s earlier translation this whole passage falls within a single fascicle of his, his fascicle division being unlike Xuanzang’s, so that comparison across the two translations can only be made by the structure of the scene.

Three Points to Watch

1. A path of action is completed only at one determinate moment. From the moment the butcher of sheep first raises the thought, goes to the market, pays the price, leads the beast home, and takes up the knife, down to the point where the sheep’s life is not yet ended, the whole of that stretch is preparatory only; the manifest and nonmanifest action of the single moment in which, following upon that manifest act, the sheep just then ends its life — that alone is the root path of action; and thereafter the continuing of the nonmanifest, on through the flaying, the cutting, the selling, and the praising of the flavor, is all the consequent stage. The treatise further points out the two conditions by which the root is completed — first by the preparation, second by the fullness of the result. So what this fascicle is asking everywhere is really one and the same thing: of the three stages, which one is the present item speaking of? That dying together with the victim, or dying before him, does not complete the root is precisely because the body depended upon has perished and the offense has nothing to rest on; that in an army acting as one all alike are completed is precisely because that one thought of “consenting together to one undertaking” has already joined every man of them to the same line.

2. The root of the preparation and the root of the completion are two different measures. The preparation arises from the three unwholesome roots one by one — one and the same act of killing may arise from greed (to get wealth), from hatred (to be rid of an enemy), or from delusion (taking it for what is lawful, what is legal, what is filial, what is meritorious); whereas the completion has its own several attachments: killing, harsh speech, and hatred are completed by hatred, requiring the presence of the extremely coarse and evil mind that spares nothing; stealing, sexual misconduct, and greed are completed by greed, requiring the presence of the extremely defiled mind that clings to something; wrong view is completed by delusion, and the remaining three of speech are granted completion by all three roots. Looking back at an evil deed already done, the reason given when the thought was raised is often presentable, but the mind at the moment the deed was brought off cannot hide itself — this distinction is the most serviceable of all. And the instances of “arising from delusion” that the treatise adduces deserve especially slow reading: that is not muddle-headedness, it is a wrong train of reasoning propped up by sacrifice, by law, and by scripture.

3. The ten paths of action are a coarse net, and one must first know how wide the mesh is. The treatise says expressly that it takes from evil conduct and good conduct only the portion that is “coarse, evident, and easily known”: drinking liquor, beating and binding, kindly speech, and wholesome volitions are not among them, nor is any preparatory or consequent stage. Not to enter the paths of action is not the same as being free of offense — those things are still wholesome or unwholesome actions and still draw their results; they are simply not on this list, which was set up in order “to make men keep away.” In the same way, the single item “not by mistake” runs through all four gates of killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, and false speech: killing by mistake, taking by mistake, acting by mistake, speaking by mistake do not complete a path of action — and that is not a back door opened for them, it is a condition of this list’s own constitution.

One Further Point (Appended): The Difficulty Left Blank

After false speech, the treatise quotes a set of questions and answers of its own: he who is touched by the offense of killing without moving his body is one who utters speech; he who is touched by the offense of false speech without uttering speech is one who moves his body; and those touched by both offenses while neither moving the body nor uttering speech are the seer in a fit of mental wrath and one at the time of the poṣadha. Thereupon the author raises a difficulty against himself: if there is neither movement of body nor utterance of speech, and the desire realm besides has no nonmanifest that arises apart from the manifest, how do these two come to be paths of action? Here the author gives no answer, saying only, “upon a difficulty such as this one should expend some labor.” Fine-meshed as the whole fascicle is, it leaves before its close one plain gap — and that is no oversight, it is a place left unclosed by the author’s own marking. Saṅghabhadra, at the very same difficulty, sets up another explanation, holding that at the preparatory stage there must be a manifest action continuing on; both parties are recorded and neither is adjudicated.

Through the whole fascicle

This fascicle reads like the fine print of the discipline, and its numbers and conditions are startlingly dense; but what bears the weight is not the items, it is the recurring form of the question — at which stage is the mind, upon what object is it turned, and by which root is it completed. The three stages fix its line, the four places fix its object, the three roots fix its completion; and the point where the three intersect is where the offense rests.

And just for that reason, the weightiest precept in the whole fascicle turns out to be the shortest. The first nine paths of action travel the long road of raising the thought, setting the hand to it, bringing it off, and trailing away; but when it comes to the three mental paths of action — greed, hatred, and wrong view — they are the root as soon as they are present, with no preparatory or consequent stage to be divided off. The presence of a single thought and the completion of a whole slaughter stand at the same rank on this table — and that is the sentence which shows itself only when the fascicle has been read to its end.

The ten paths of action have been gone through one by one in the fascicle before; this fascicle sets out from a single question, “the marks of the ten paths of action have now been made out. In what sense are they named paths of action?” First the name is established; then, as the sense conveniently allows, it enters the long prose passage on wrong view cutting off the wholesome roots; then, in order, it takes the measure of the number of paths of action that turn together with volition, of the destinies and the places, of the three results, and of wrong livelihood. From the sentence “as was said above, results are of five kinds” a new chapter begins, and the six gates by which the five results are assigned to action are stated cell by cell; thereafter what ought and ought not to be done, the two actions of projecting and completing, and the two absorptions without mind; and at the last the three obstructions are established and the question is asked in which destinies they are found. One fascicle straddling the boundary of two chapters — this is the most densely outlined fascicle in the whole chapter.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not drawing up a list of evils; it is laying a graduated scale against every line that the one word ‘action’ sets moving — measuring what it can cut off, where it can arise, what it can summon, and how many cells it can match against a result; and at the end of the measuring, three things emerge that block the noble path.

Three Points to Watch

1. Cutting off and restoring turn upon the same hinge. The conditions for cutting off the wholesome roots narrow layer by layer: the wrong view must be “of the high grade and complete,” must decisively deny cause and result, must be in the three continents of the human destiny, must be in the body of a man or a woman, must be in a person who walks by views — let one item be wanting and nothing can be cut off. Whereas for the restoring only one thing is needed: “once the wholesome roots have been cut off, by what are they restored? By doubt and by right view.” On the one side it takes that many ‘decisions’ to shut the door; on the other a single question mark pushes it open. Hence the entity of the cutting off of the wholesome is ‘non-acquisition’ and nothing else — “it should be known that the cutting off of the wholesome has non-acquisition for its entity”: the acquisition of the wholesome does not arise, and non-acquisition arises in its stead; the lamp was not carried away, it simply stopped shining. The measure is not how much of the wholesome there is, but whether that ‘decision’ is loose or tight. And the restoring, too, is all at once and only thereafter manifests by degrees; the simile the treatise gives is “as when illness is removed all at once and strength returns by degrees” — the sickness ends in a moment, the strength comes back slowly.

2. One and the same set of dharmas gets a new set of numbers when the gate is changed. The latter half of this fascicle has six gates of result (the path that cuts off, the wholesome and the rest, the three times, the same and a different level, the learner and the rest, the three abandonings); the cells are as many as a table, yet what is asked is one and the same three-part question: such an action has such a dharma for its result — how many of the five results can it match? The answer differs at each gate because what is changed is not the dharmas but the way of asking. The move was already demonstrated once in the first half: the passage on the destinies and the places uses two rules, ‘possession’ and ‘being in act’, and one and the same path of action may be possessed without being in act. Whenever the numbers do not agree, the first question is not who is right but which two rules these two numbers were taken with.

3. Projecting and completing are two divisions of labor, and their thresholds differ too. “One action projects one birth, and many actions can complete it” — what settles that you are born a human is one action; what settles what sort of human you grow into is a countless number of actions; “though it is only one action that projects one commonality, yet the completing of that commonality is allowed to be by many actions.” And the threshold for projecting is far higher than that for completing: having a maturation is only the ticket of entry; the thing must also be coexistent with action and share one result with action, and so the two absorptions without mind and ‘acquisition,’ though they have maturation, cannot project, and only “all the rest extend alike to projecting and completing.” That one cell, the birth you take, is already fixed; every cell within that life is still being filled in.

One Further Point (Appended): What Kind of Affliction Counts as an Obstruction

Of the three obstructions the most worth pondering is the obstruction of the afflictions. Afflictions are of two classes — those of frequent occurrence (arising constantly) and those that are fierce (of the high grade); and the treatise says that “it should be known that here only those of frequent occurrence are named the obstruction of the afflictions.” Why should the fierce ones not count? “The afflictions of the high grade, though fierce, are easily subdued and removed because they do not arise constantly”; whereas “among those of the low grade, the afflictions of frequent occurrence, though not fierce, are hard to subdue and remove,” the reason being “because their constant occurrence makes an opening hard to come by” — they are there all the time, and so all the time you can find no gap in which to take hold; and then the low grade produces the middle, and the middle the high, so that the path able to subdue and remove them has no chance to arise.

This one point turns over the commonest illusion in practice: what is fierce but occasional is easy to deal with; what is feeble but constant is the real obstruction.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The name ‘path of action’ (the last three being path alone, the first seven both action and path) is a rule that goes on being used ever after — whenever it is asked whether a thing counts as a path of action, one measures it by the standard the treatise gives: has it really made the things within and without decrease or increase? The six gates assigning the five results to action are a working exercise upon the doctrine of the five results established in the previous chapter; learn those five questions, and thereafter, meeting any question of the form ‘how many results has such an action with respect to such a dharma,’ one can work it out for oneself. The establishing of the three obstructions is a general heading, and the entity of the five deeds of immediate retribution, the splitting of the Saṅgha, and all the matters of the conditions for such crimes are unfolded in the next fascicle.

There is one further loose thread this fascicle deliberately leaves. Of the passage on cutting off the wholesome roots the author himself says, “having taken the sense as it conveniently allowed and made out the cutting off of the wholesome roots, now the sense of the paths of action proper should be made clear again” — that was an incidental discussion. Yet the conditions established in that incidental discussion (the three continents, man and woman, walking by views, kindness weighty enough) are brought out again word for word at the end of the fascicle, where it treats who can commit the deeds of immediate retribution: “just that which was said before, that they have no cause of cutting off the wholesome roots and of taking on non-discipline, is here the reason why they commit no deed of immediate retribution.” The conditions for committing the gravest evil turn out to be the very same set of conditions as those for cutting off the deepest wholesome. The head of the fascicle and the end of the fascicle are buckled together just so.

The six fascicles of the Chapter on Action are gathered to their close here. This fascicle takes up the three obstructions and singles out from them the entity of the obstruction of action, beginning from the sentence “among the three obstructions adjudged above, it was said that the five deeds of immediate retribution are the entity of the obstruction of action.” The first half spends the force of eight stanzas upon the splitting of the Saṅgha alone (its entity; the person able to split; the place, the number, and the term of time; the six occasions on which no splitting can occur); it then makes clear the conditions by which killing one’s mother and the rest become deeds of immediate retribution, and the class that is like the five. The latter half turns of a sudden to the opposite end and speaks of the bodhisattva’s action producing the excellent marks and of the three incalculable aeons, and then of the three bases of meritorious action, giving, discipline, and cultivation, closing at last with the divergent names of dharmas in the stanza “the wholesome without outflows is called excellent.”

In one sentence: This fascicle is the two extreme ends of the treatment of action — the deepest notch is that one lying sentence that splits the Saṅgha, the highest notch is the fulfillment of the six pāramitās amassed through three incalculable aeons; and the one thing the author proves over and over is this alone: the weight at either end lies not in the size of the deed, but in the field, in the mind, and in the thing that is destroyed or brought to fullness.

Three Points to Watch

1. The heaviest of offenses, and yet its entity is indeterminate. The split in the Saṅgha is itself such that “the entity of the split in the Saṅgha is the nature of non-concord; it is gathered under the aggregate of formations, unobscured-indeterminate and not associated with mind” — it is neither wholesome nor unwholesome; and further, “it is not the one who splits that possesses this split in the Saṅgha; it is possessed only by the Saṅgha that is split” — the dharma lies on the side of the Saṅgha that is split, the offense on the side of the one who splits. What the splitter accomplishes is only a single lie, and it draws down an intermediate aeon in the hell without interval. An indeterminate dharma becomes, through one sentence, the result of the heaviest of offenses — this is the most extreme demonstration in the whole treatise of parting “the thing” from “the offense.” The same move appears again later in the division between the merit of the class of relinquishing and the merit of the class of enjoyment.

2. Every “most” must first be asked, “most within which range?” Splitting the Saṅgha is the heaviest, the punishment of mind is the greatest, wrong view is the heaviest — three sentences of scripture that look as though they were fighting one another, and the author settles them in a single line: with regard to the five deeds of immediate retribution, splitting the Saṅgha is the heaviest; with regard to the three punitive actions, the offense of mind is the greatest; with regard to the five deviant views, wrong view is the heaviest. It is the same at the wholesome end — the volition that draws down the foremost existence is the greatest in result among worldly wholesome things, but that is said with regard to the result of maturation; if the result of release from bondage is in question, the greatest is the volition associated with the vajra-like concentration, and so the stanza must add the two words “worldly wholesome” to mark the distinction. The measure comes before the conclusion — this is the key to every comparison in this fascicle.

3. The pivot of merit is invariably gathered into a single moment of mind. The entity of giving is not the thing given but rather “the equipment of relinquishing is called giving; that is, it is by this equipment that the act of relinquishing is accomplished, and so that by which one relinquishes is the true entity of giving,” whose root is fastened to the sentence “it is what, together with non-greed, is able to raise this collection”; where one relinquishes out of fear, out of hope, out of greed, the goods go out just the same and yet do not enter the square of giving. Whether a bad field can yield a good result is likewise settled by the mind and not by the field — “it is not by the power of the field that seed and fruit are inverted”; a fault in the field only reduces the harvest, it does not alter the nature of the result. Even in the action producing the excellent marks, a cultivation of the very longest span of time, the pivot is only that one thought of volition that is “only in the direct presence of a Buddha, the volition arisen with a Buddha for its object, formed through reflection and not of the classes formed through hearing or through cultivation.”

One Further Point (Appended): Whether Action Can Still Be Headed Off

This fascicle gives two lines running in opposite directions, and only taken together are they complete.

One says that it cannot be headed off: “if the preparation for a deed of immediate retribution is bound to be accomplished, then in the interval there is definitely no freeing from defilement and no gaining of a fruit.” With the other paths of unwholesome action, if the noble path arises in the midst of the preparation, the path of action is not completed; only with the preparation for a deed of immediate retribution, once it is bound to be accomplished, can even the noble path not be inserted. The two words “immediate retribution” point not only to a retribution that follows without interval but to a causal stage that admits of no interval either.

The other says that it can be headed off: the difference between action that is done and action that is increased is adjudged by five causes, and one of those causes is the absence of regret and of counteraction — one act of remorse, one counteragent, and the action stops at “done” and does not become “increased”; “so long as it is not complete it is called only done and is not called increased.” Remorse and counteraction are here not psychological consolation; they are an actual gap in one of the five causes.

The stretch marked out by these two lines is precisely the ground of possible action that the treatise offers to one who practices: before the preparation is bound to be accomplished, interception is possible; once it is bound to be accomplished, only the bearing of it remains. All the fine-grained adjudication of the Chapter on Action is in the end for the sake of letting the reader recognize which stretch he is standing in at this moment.

Three Places Recorded without Adjudication

Three times in this fascicle the author sets out divergent accounts and passes not one sentence of judgment — the three accounts of the measure of a single merit, the two divergent accounts of purity of discipline, and the two accounts of the measure of the merit of Brahmā, the last of them closed with “the word ‘and the rest’ is to display divergent accounts such as these.” What is at issue in the three places is not of one kind: at the measure of merit and the measure of the merit of Brahmā what is disputed is a quantity, while at purity of discipline what is disputed is the cause of purity of discipline and the kinds of discipline. This is not vagueness but form: where a divergent account has warrant and the author passes no judgment, both are recorded and no judgment is forced upon them. In reading this treatise, when one meets a place where no judgment is passed, what is to be looked at is whether the author did or did not, in that very place, pass a judgment.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The five deeds of immediate retribution and the class that is like them are the limiting graduation of “heavy”; the action producing the excellent marks and the six pāramitās in their four stages are the limiting graduation of “excellent”; and the six causes of the lightness or heaviness of an action, together with the five causes of action done and action increased, are the rules by which that ruler is graduated — the Chapter on the Latent Tendencies, when it treats the increase and decrease of the afflictions, and the Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble, when it treats the turning of the obstruction of action at the three stages, both use this same set.

The three occasions “when one is about to gain receptivity, about to gain non-return, about to gain the state beyond learning,” at which action is the greatest obstruction, are three passes announced in advance upon the map of practice, and the Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble will walk up to each of them in turn. The three wholesome things conducive to merit, to liberation, and to penetration join on even more directly — what is conducive to penetration is just the four stages of warmth and the rest, of which the treatise says expressly here that they “will be explained at length later on,” and that is the next stretch of the road. And the sign by which the wholesome conducive to liberation may be verified in oneself — that on hearing that birth and death have fault, that dharmas are without self, that nirvāṇa has virtue, the hairs of the body stand up and one weeps and sheds tears — is the most personal sentence this fascicle leaves to its reader: “once this wholesome has arisen, it makes that sentient being one who is said to have the dharma of nirvāṇa within his body.”

Last of all, the six pāramitās receive their name here — “because they are able to reach the far shore of the fullness of virtue toward which they go, these six are called pāramitā”; and the whole chapter closes with “since there is no single dharma that can surpass nirvāṇa, it being wholesome and permanent and passing beyond the host of dharmas” and “that the remaining dharmas have something above them is established by inference from the sense.” At one end is that one night in which the wheel of Dharma was broken, at the other that one dharma which passes beyond the host of dharmas; and all the measuring of the six fascicles of the Chapter on Action comes to rest at last upon this one pairing.

The Chapter on Action finished speaking of action, yet did not close upon action. The first sentence of this fascicle follows word for word upon the end of the chapter before it — the differences of the world arise from action, and action grows only when the latent tendencies sustain it; parted from the latent tendencies, action has no power to call forth a coming existence. From there the whole fascicle proceeds from one question: how many are the latent tendencies? The answer walks four steps — six, seven, ten, ninety-eight; then it analyzes what is abandoned through seeing and through cultivation, the entities of the five views, the four inversions, the seven prides and the nine classes of pride; then it turns into the distinctions through the several gates, of which this fascicle walks the first five, appends a section on the four gates of determination, and the fascicle closes.

In one sentence: this fascicle is not counting afflictions; it is demonstrating how one and the same set of afflictions changes its number because the measuring rod has been changed — six becomes seven by changing the rod of greed, seven becomes ten by changing the rod of view, ten becomes ninety-eight by changing three rods at once (mode, category, realm). Whenever the numbers do not tally, the first question is not who has erred, but which rod each of these items has used.

Three Points to Watch

1. “There is” and “is active” are two different things. The densest dispute of the whole fascicle — whether the latent tendencies are associated with mind or not associated with it — comes at last to rest upon a distinction of stages made by the Sautrāntikas: an affliction in the stage of sleep is called a latent tendency, and in the stage of waking it is called an entanglement; sleep is “a seed following along without being active,” waking is “the afflictions arisen and entangling the mind.” Hence when the sūtra says that upon a pleasant feeling “there is” a latent tendency of greed, that does not mean that greed is at that moment at work — “the sūtra says only that there is one; it does not say that there is a latent tendency at that very moment.” This distinction is used twice more further on: in the noble one there “are” the entanglement of killing and the rest, and yet they are definitely not active; and a latent tendency may reach an object and still be unable to increase by attachment upon that object. To grant that a thing exists is not to grant that it is at work.

2. In adjudging an affliction, what one looks at is where it arises from, not what topic it talks about. Adherence to observances and vows holds what is not a cause to be a cause; the topic is plainly “cause,” and yet it is not classed as abandoned by seeing origination — because before one holds a thing to be a cause one must first “deliberate that its entity is eternal, one, a self, and an agent,” and when at the seeing of suffering the holding to eternity and to self is cut off, the holding to a cause falls away with it. The same move recurs in the section on “the noble one has them and yet they do not arise”: those afflictions cannot arise not because they were directly counteracted, but because “they are increased by view and doubt” — what fed them was cut off first. To cut off an affliction, one need not always strike it head-on.

3. For an affliction to grow fat, there must first be a layer of “mine.” The gate of increase by attachment gives an excellent pair of similes: a dharma appropriated as its own by the view of self and the craving of this level is one upon which an affliction taking it as object can increase, “as when a garment is damp the dust follows and stays upon it”; the dharmas without outflows and those of an upper level are not appropriated as one’s own and are moreover contrary to it, so that an affliction taking them as object cannot cling, “as upon a burning stone the foot does not stay.” Hence the six that take the dharmas without outflows as object and the nine that take an upper realm as object have, upon their object-fields, “no sense of increase by attachment”; and of the mind that aspires to an upper level the treatise expressly clears the ground with one sentence — “that is the desire for wholesome dharmas, and is not called a latent tendency.” The criterion is not the height of the object, but whether that object has been taken to be “mine.”

One Further Point (Appended): Why the Author Passes a Verdict Here

In many disputed places this treatise records the two parties only and does not adjudge which prevails; in this fascicle there is one exception — in the dispute over whether the latent tendencies are associated with mind, after all three parties have said out their reasons, the author lays down one sentence directly: “yet what the Sautrāntika masters say is the best.”

The account he takes has in truth only one main point: a latent tendency is not another thing. It is neither associated with mind nor dissociated from mind, because “there is no separate thing” — it is one and the same affliction in two stages. What holds this account up is two similes: the seed of memory arises from having once known and can produce a later act of recollection, and no one would say that it is a separate real thing; a sprout arises from a former fruit and can produce a later fruit, and it is the same. Whereupon the Sautrāntikas ask in return: if the seed of memory is a mere capability, why must the seed of an affliction have a further dissociated entity set up for it? “Because the causal ground of a difference between them cannot be found.”

The weight of this verdict is worth noting. It does not put the other two parties in the wrong — the Vaibhāṣikas’ proof from three functions, and the objector’s move of dismantling that proof (deny the premise and the proof falls of itself), are both set down in this fascicle without the omission of a single word. That the author takes one account, and that the author records both parties in full, are two things that can go together.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The four numbers six, seven, ten, and ninety-eight, together with that table of the five categories and the three realms, are the ground from which the two fascicles that follow (how the afflictions bind, increase by attachment, sequence) and the whole main division on “the extinction of the afflictions” will draw their numbers again and again. The eleven all-pervading are the set most often carried off; the six that take the dharmas without outflows as object and the nine that take an upper realm as object are put back to work at once in the gate of increase by attachment.

Two further things this fascicle leaves the reader as loose threads. First, the author takes the Sautrāntika account, and the counter-refutation within the lineage falls most fiercely upon that very sentence — the manner of composition recorded of him, “to set up the Sarvāstivāda sense and, wherever there is a bias, to refute it by the Sautrāntika sense,” can here be seen for what it looks like, and so can the response it drew. Second, in the section on what abandons adherence to observances and vows, the author poses six questions in a row and ends with “therefore the sense here held should be further examined,” passing no conclusion; nor did the ancient masters close it on his behalf. Where the treatise itself marks a place as unsettled, the reader need not close the case for it.

The author opens the fascicle with a single definition — a latent tendency increasing by attachment upon this thing is just what is named binding this thing — and at once asks which latent tendencies among the three times can bind which things. The question touching past and future, it forces out an incidental discussion: are the dharmas of the three times really existent? The Sarvāstivādins establish their tenet, four masters within the school establish the three times, the author refutes at length line by line, the Sautrāntikas answer comprehensively by “having once been and being to be,” and it closes with 「此法性甚深」 tr. “the nature of this dharma is profound.” The incidental discussion finished, it returns to the main argument: abandoned and yet not released from bondage, the sixteen dharmas as object-fields of the sixteen consciousnesses, the two kinds of mind possessed of latent tendencies, the order of the ten latent tendencies, the three causes and conditions of an affliction’s arising; and it closes the fascicle with the number of items under the outflows, torrents, yokes, and appropriations and the glosses on the names of the latent tendencies and the rest.

In one sentence: This fascicle packs into one fascicle the greatest dispute between the schools in the whole treatise and the finest set of numerical tables in the whole treatise — what is disputed is “whether there is,” what is counted is “how many there are”; and on the disputing side the author passes no verdict, while on the counting side not one square is blurred.

Placement (established first)

This fascicle is the whole of Xuanzang’s Fascicle Twenty. The three ancient masters each divide their fascicles here, their boundaries wholly the same as Xuanzang’s, and all adjudge this fascicle to be the sixth main division of this chapter — Puguang marks 「此下第六明惑」 tr. “below, the sixth, explaining the afflictions,” Fabao marks 「已下大文第六明世縛事通局」 tr. “from here below, the sixth of the main text, explaining the general and particular extent of the binding of things across the times,” Yuanhui marks 「從此第六，明惑能繫」 tr. “from here the sixth, explaining that the afflictions can bind.” Beneath the main division the number of divisions runs in two patterns: Puguang and Yuanhui each divide it into two (explaining binding with reference to the times, and with reference to abandonment), while Fabao alone opens four (the extent of binding across the times, proving that the three times exist, establishing the three times, refuting the existence of the three times), his latter three answering exactly to the three passages of the establishing of the tenet, the four masters, and the refutation at length. This fascicle opens without any transitional formula, and closes at the end of the glosses, followed immediately by the end-title of the fascicle; the gloss on “entanglement” falls not in this fascicle but in the next, Puguang marking of himself 「纏後別明，故此不問」 tr. “the entanglements are explained separately later, and so are not asked after here” — the boundary of the ancient masters’ outline and the boundary of the translations coinciding here on three sides. Paramārtha’s earlier translation gives this chapter not as “latent tendency” but as “affliction,” and divides it into two fascicles only, so that the stretch answering to this fascicle straddles a boundary between two of his; the division into fascicles is a matter of the translation bureau and not evidence of doctrinal sections.

Three Points to Watch

1. One question forces out one dispute, and the author does not conclude for either party. To ask “what things can a past latent tendency bind” is to presuppose that the past has things to be bound; and so one must first make out whether past and future exist. The Sarvāstivādins give two proofs from teaching (the Buddha teaching men to strive to cultivate disgust with and abandonment of past form; a consciousness arising from two conditions) and two from principle (a consciousness when it arises must have its object-field; an action already perished has a coming result), and within the school four masters establish the three times — Dharmatrāta by class, Ghoṣa by mark, Vasumitra by position, Buddhadeva by relation — and the author assesses and takes the third, on the ground that 「彼謂諸法作用未有名為未來，有作用時名為現在，作用已滅名為過去，非體有殊」 tr. “his meaning is that when the function of dharmas is not yet present they are called future, at the time when there is function they are called present, and when the function has ceased they are called past, the entity not being distinct.” And then he uses a whole stanza to refute that third master line by line: what obstructs the function, what time the function is, no distinction, time collapses, who is unarisen or ceased. Refuting to the utmost, the treatise passes no verdict, and merely lets the Sarvāstivādins say one sentence, 「此法性甚深」 tr. “the nature of this dharma is profound,” and the party breaks up. The three commentaries agree completely in their attribution of question and answer through this passage (the refuting party uniformly marked the Sautrāntikas, the defending party uniformly the Sarvāstivādins), and Yuanhui moreover passes a general adjudication at the head of the stanza, 「前三句經部破，第四句有宗答」 tr. “the first three lines are the Sautrāntikas refuting, the fourth line the answer of the school that holds existence” — even the two characters “profound” in the last line being expressly marked a Sarvāstivādin defense and not the author’s conclusion. To carry on the posture of his closing without carrying his conclusion for him is the measure for reading this fascicle.

2. The dispute over “whether there is” done, the counting of “how many there are” begins — and the skeleton of the counting is opening and gathering, not heaping up. For the table of sixteen dharmas and sixteen consciousnesses the rule is one only: what can take them as object is limited to the same realm or a higher one, plus one without outflows; and so the desire realm has five, the form realm eight, the formless ten, with one consciousness taking its own category as object added for what is abandoned through the seeing of cessation and of the path. The four gates of outflow, torrent, yoke, and appropriation are plainer still — they are not four batches of things but one heap of afflictions regrouped under four senses of the term, their entity being such that 「應知四軛與瀑流同，四取應知體同四軛」 tr. “it should be known that the four yokes are the same as the torrents, and the four appropriations should be known to be the same in entity as the four yokes”; and the reason the numbers forty-one, fifty-two, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, thirty-six, fifteen, thirty-four, and thirty-eight differ lies wholly in the opening and gathering of the two items “view” and “ignorance.” Wherever the reckoning will not come out, it is most often because one has overlooked the phrase “delusion excepted” or “view drawn out.” And the author himself knows that a table will frighten readers off, and so he first composes a “brief Vibhāṣā” and states it plainly: 「而能越渡大大問流」 tr. “and one is able to cross the very great flood of questions” — little labor spent, and a great question crossed.

3. The technical terms of this fascicle are all teaching one and the same thing: a latent tendency is a potency, not an activity. It opens by dividing the afflictions of individual and of common characteristic, the criterion lying not in the object taken but in whether they arise; of the greed and hatred associated with the five consciousnesses in the future, those that may arise bind one time alone while those settled not to arise bind all three times throughout — because they have no place to fall, and bind universally simply as a potency. In the middle it makes out that “possessed of latent tendencies” and “increase by attachment” are two different senses: accompanying does not necessarily mean increasing. And at the end the four glosses state that sense to the bottom — 「行相難知故名微細」 tr. “because its mode of apprehension is hard to be aware of it is called subtle”; because it can increase torpor and clogging upon what is taken as object and upon what it is associated with it is called twofold increase by attachment; because it constantly follows after a sentient being it is called following after; because it appears again and again though one spends strength to block it it is called binding along. Undetectable, unceasing in its increase, not to be shaken off, not to be pressed down: this is why the latent tendencies must be abandoned and not merely suppressed.

One Further Point (Appended): Whose Sentence “Profound” Really Is

At the end of the incidental discussion this treatise records the Vaibhāṣika masters’ closing, that past and future are really existent as the present is, and that wherever within this something cannot be explained through, one who cherishes himself ought to know that 「法性甚深非尋思境」 tr. “the nature of dharmas is profound and is not the object-field that pondering can reach.” Yuanhui expressly marks this a Sarvāstivādin defense. And Saṅghabhadra’s Treatise Conforming to Correct Principle, reading this place, reacts with the greatest heat, adjudging the author’s sentence outright “a slanderous saying craftily set up” — meaning that this closing phrase is not one the Sarvāstivādins could have uttered of themselves but one the author fastened upon them. One and the same sentence: in this treatise the Sarvāstivādins’ defense, in Yuanhui a Sarvāstivādin defense, and in Saṅghabhadra the author’s own contrivance. The three sides see it differently, and they are recorded together without adjudication; but the reader may know from this that the attribution of that last sentence of the fascicle is itself a point at issue with a history behind it.

Through the Whole Fascicle

There are two small places in this fascicle worth returning to. One is the two blocks that are “not root stanzas” — one a stanza the author adduces in order to refute the Sarvāstivādins (「許法體恒有，而說性非常」 tr. “to grant that the entity of a dharma exists constantly and yet to say that its nature is not permanent”), and one a summary stanza gathering the sixteen dharmas and sixteen consciousnesses again (Puguang marking it 「說頌重攝。總結」 tr. “a stanza is spoken to gather it again; a general conclusion,” Fabao marking it 「此兩行頌重述前義」 tr. “these two lines of stanza restate the preceding sense”). To adjudge them not root stanzas rests upon the warrant in the preceding text and not upon guesses from doctrine; and this distinction, trivial as it looks, is the first barrier against taking another’s words for the treatise’s own.

The other is the simile at the fascicle’s close. Having glossed the word “outflow,” the author sets out a better explanation and adduces a sūtra in proof: to draw a boat against the current is hard even with great strength expended, while to let it go with the current is not hard even with strength given up — and the arising of a wholesome mind and of a defiled mind is just so. Whether the three times exist may be disputed, and the opening and gathering of the number of items may be disputed; but that going with the current is easy and going against it hard is a thing neither party will dispute. After so long a dispute within one fascicle, that it should come down at the end upon one sentence anyone may verify is no accident.

The entity of the latent tendencies having been adjudged, this fascicle adds not a single dharma; it merely changes six names and looks again at the same set of afflictions — fetter, bond, latent tendency, secondary affliction, entanglement, and grime of affliction; then it analyzes them through the five gates of the two abandonments, the three ethical qualities, the three realms, the six consciousnesses, and the five feelings, and at the end establishes the five hindrances. At the sentence “now this should be considered,” the whole chapter turns on its heel: from “explaining the entity of the afflictions” it passes into “explaining the cessation of the afflictions” — the four causes of abandoning the afflictions, the four kinds of counteragent, abandonment from the side of the object, the four kinds of distance, and the repeated obtaining of release from bondage; and it closes the chapter by settling accounts with the six-tiered mechanism of the nine full comprehensions.

In one sentence: This fascicle does two things — first it measures one and the same set of afflictions six times over with six different rules, and then it teaches you how to keep the ledger of “abandoning”; and the most exacting verification in the whole treatise occurs in the passage that fixes the number of the nine full comprehensions.

Three Points to Watch

1. Change the rule and the number changes; and when the numbers come out equal, that is precisely the reason for keeping the items apart. Fetter, bond, entanglement, and grime measure different functions of the same set of afflictions, and so the numbers of the six gates may not be added together. What matters more is that this fascicle demonstrates the qualifications for “opening out” and for “gathering together” each in its own right: the three views and the two graspings are set up as two separate fetters “because they are equal in things and equal in grasping” — an equal count of entities plus a difference between what grasps and what is grasped is exactly the reason for dividing them; torpor-and-sleep and restlessness-and-regret are gathered into one hindrance each “because their food, their counteragent, and their function are the same”; and the abandonments of the non-returner and the arhat qualify to be “gathered together” into one full comprehension only because the two conditions of crossing a realm and obtaining a fruit are both present. This treatise never gathers for convenience and never divides for show; at every joining and dividing it must first produce the rule it is measuring with.

2. Once a reason has been established, the author will take it apart himself. For raising envy and avarice to the rank of fetters the treatise first gives “because these two alone are unwholesome and arise of themselves”; and then it states of its own accord that this passes under a scheme of eight entanglements but that “if one grants that there are ten entanglements this explanation is unreasonable” — since rage and concealment equally possess those two senses; whereupon it establishes instead “their faults are especially grave, since these two occur again and again” and adds three further sets of reasons. In the same way, the four kinds of counteragent are first listed in the order of their names, and the treatise at once says “if one would speak well of it, in principle the order ought to be as follows” and rearranges them according to the real order of practice. In reading this treatise one must see clearly the premise under which a reason holds; change the premise and the reason must change with it.

3. Abandoning an affliction is not digging the affliction out; it is cutting the road between the affliction and its object. The treatise says it with the utmost clarity: “it cannot be made to leave the dharmas associated with it, but it can be made to depart from its object” — the associated dharmas cannot be pried apart, and what can be abandoned is the acquisition and the object. It is from this that two of the four causes come in pairs — abandon what takes it as object and it is abandoned along with that; abandon its object and what takes that as object is abandoned along with it; and it is from this that the sentence “it is not necessary that they be abandoned through fully comprehending their object” comes, which reduces “only by seeing clearly can one abandon” to one quarter of the model. The criterion is not how thoroughly it has been abandoned, but whether it can still arise toward that object.

One Further Point (Appended): To Abandon the Five Hindrances, First Cut Off Their Board and Keep

The five hindrances are in the desire realm alone, the reason being that they are purely unwholesome while the upper realms have nothing unwholesome; and only five are established, the reason being that these alone can obstruct the three aggregates of discipline, discernment, and concentration, and, concentration and discernment being gone, doubt arises with regard to the four truths, obstructing the way through to liberation and to the knowledge and vision of liberation. What is really serviceable is the passage in the middle: torpor-and-sleep and restlessness-and-regret are two dharmas apiece, and yet each pair is gathered into one hindrance, because they are the same in “food, counteragent, and function.”

The treatise glosses the three words one by one — food is what is eaten, also called provision; counteragent is what counteracts, also called non-food; function is the activity performed, also called capability. It then gives the list: the food of the hindrance of torpor-and-sleep is the five dharmas of murkiness, dissatisfaction, yawning and stretching, unevenness of diet, and dullness and inferiority of mind, while its non-food is the ideation of light; the food of the hindrance of restlessness-and-regret is the four dharmas of thought of kinsfolk, thought of one’s native land, thought of not dying, and recollection of former sport, mirth, and merrymaking, while its non-food is calm abiding. ⇒ To counteract an affliction one does not lay hold of the affliction itself; one first finds out what is feeding it. This is the passage in the whole fascicle that can be taken up and put to use most directly.

As for how the order of the five hindrances ought to be arranged — the author first refutes the old explanation (restlessness-and-regret obstructs concentration, and in principle ought to be spoken of before torpor-and-sleep), then adduces one explanation that exchanges the assignments (torpor-and-sleep obstructing concentration, restlessness-and-regret discernment), then adduces another explanation that rearranges them along the axis of the stage of moving about, the stage of dwelling, the stage of entering absorption, and the stage of emerging from absorption. The three passages are one continuous line and not three answers set side by side; and as to which is right and which is wrong, the treatise passes no judgment, nor do the ancient masters hand down a verdict.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The setting up of the six gates joins the latent tendencies adjudged in the two foregoing fascicles back onto the general table of the afflictions for the treatise as a whole; the names and marks of the ten entanglements and six grimes, and their assignment by homogeneous outflow, were recompiled by the later Yogācāra lineage as the twenty secondary afflictions with a changed rule of classification — the extent of what they pervade taking the place of the homogeneous stream from which they arise, while the one sense of “not a root affliction, arising along with mind” was left unchanged.

The chapter on the cessation of the afflictions in the second half is the antechamber of the Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble: the four kinds of counteragent answer exactly to the four paths of preparation, of no interval, of liberation, and of distinguished progress; the six occasions of the repeated obtaining of release from bondage (the arising of the counteracting path, the obtaining of the four fruits, the sharpening of the faculties) and the increase and decrease of the possession of the nine full comprehensions must all be cashed out on the table of stages in the Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble. This fascicle amounts to fixing the format of the ledger beforehand; only in the next chapter does the filling in of the figures stage by stage begin.

There is one more loose thread this fascicle leaves behind: in the passage on the four kinds of distance the author begins with the two words “it is transmitted,” and closes at the end with “if one goes by correct principle, one should say that the past and the future are called distant because they are apart from the intrinsic mark of a dharma” — that sentence is the author setting out another house’s explanation and not his own school; the ancient masters mark this plainly and yet hand down no verdict, whereas the same sentence, in the treatise of disputation within the lineage, is cited word for word and adjudged to be at variance with correct principle. One and the same passage of text: one house choosing not to judge, the other choosing to judge it at variance — this is the mirror that this fascicle leaves for the reader.

The Chapter on the Latent Tendencies said all it had to say about abandoning; this fascicle asks what abandoning depends upon — “yet abandoning must be obtained by the force of the path; what is the mark of this path by which it comes about?” From that one sentence it first establishes the entity of the path (the path of seeing without outflows alone · the path of cultivation extending to both), next sets out the four truths and the two truths that the path realizes, and then turns into the preparatory practices of the noble path (abiding in discipline · the three discernments · the three causes of a purified bodily vessel · the four noble lineages · the two gates for entering cultivation). The three ancient masters alike adjudge the main text of this chapter to be threefold; this fascicle walks through the first two and steps into the opening section of the third.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not treating the attaining of fruits; it is laying a road — laying it as far as the two gates of the contemplation of impurity and mindfulness that holds the breath; and whether the road can be laid at all hangs upon the dispute over foundations set in the middle of it, whether pleasant feeling really exists.

Three Points to Watch

1. “Without outflows alone” is a conclusion, not a status. The reason the path of seeing is without outflows alone is written out in the treatise — “because the path of seeing can quickly counteract the three realms,” “because it cuts off the nine grades of what is abandoned by seeing all at once, and no mundane path has such capacity.” It is because it can do this that it is so adjudged; and because the path of cultivation cannot do the like, what has outflows is let in. Whenever a dharma is adjudged to be without outflows alone, or with outflows alone, first find the capacity or the restriction that forced the conclusion out. The contemplation of impurity is adjudged “this contemplation should in principle be with outflows alone,” and what forces it is the six words “associated with attention through resolve alone” — the same move, used in the reverse direction.

2. The order of the four truths is the order of a practice-gate, not the order of cause and effect. The treatise says it plainly: “they are spoken of according to the priority and posteriority of the stages of direct realization.” By cause and effect, origin should be spoken of before suffering; by direct realization, one observes first that dharma which is most oppressive, most clung to, and is besides the reason one seeks release — hence suffering first. Two similes nail it down: seeing the sickness, seeking its cause, considering its cure, seeking the good medicine; and the four qualities of the king of physicians. This can be carried straight over into one’s own practice — first recognize the suffering, then track down its cause, then trust that it can be brought to cessation, and only last ask after the method.

3. The measure of the two truths is a pair of procedures, not a pair of values. Break the thing once, and see whether the cognition of it is still there; analyze out the remaining components with discernment, and see whether the cognition of it is still there. What is gone once broken or analyzed is conventional; what remains is ultimate. And this is what matters: the conventional truth is still a truth — “to say in dependence upon conventional principle that there is a pot and the like is real and not false.” To grant that a thing is conventionally established is not to adjudge it delusive. This nice measure is the same nice measure as the one in the Chapter on the World: that to grant a thing exists is not to permit it to borrow the name of the neighboring category.

One Further Point (Appended): Why the Dispute over the Nonexistence of Real Pleasure Is the Foundation

If the truth of suffering is to stand, it stands by the three kinds of suffering taking in everything with outflows; and what truly pervades all of them is the suffering of the formations — “in truth all formations are suffering because of suffering, and this only the noble ones are able to observe and see.” The simile of the eyelash on the palm and on the eyeball is telling just this layer, why the ordinary man does not see it.

Whereupon one school presses a step further: that being so, let it simply be said that “there is definitely no real pleasure; feeling is suffering alone,” with three sūtras for its proof from teaching and the indeterminacy of the causes of pleasure for its proof from principle, and then two further sections opened, that the sense of pleasure arises only when suffering is counteracted and only when suffering shifts. Here the author does not follow them — he stands openly on the side of the Sarvāstivādins: “the masters of Abhidharma say that pleasure really exists, and this saying is reasonable.” First he presses back in three rounds (having struck out pleasure, what will you call suffering?), then he takes their defense apart in the two layers of intrinsic mark and other gate, then explains through their three sūtras one by one (the Buddha explained it through himself: he spoke with the implicit sense of impermanence and of alterability), and last refutes their proof from principle (a cause of pleasure must be observed together with the stage of its support, as fire must be observed together with what is cooked).

What must be seen clearly is that he refutes one thing only — that pleasure has no real entity at all; on the three kinds of suffering taking in everything with outflows he has not yielded a step. To grant that there is real pleasure, and at the same time to say that everything with outflows is suffering — these two sentences do not obstruct each other, because they are using two different measuring rods (intrinsic mark / the suffering of the formations). The most important lesson to be had from reading the whole fascicle lies just here.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The twofold division of the entity of the path (the path of seeing without outflows alone · the path of cultivation extending to both) is the master coordinate for the three fascicles that follow in this chapter, where the four foundations of mindfulness, the four wholesome roots, the sixteen minds of the path of seeing, and the grade-by-grade abandoning of the nine grades of the afflictions abandoned by cultivation are established. The measure by which the order of the four truths is fixed (following direct realization) directly prescribes the manner of contemplation in the preparatory stage treated in the next fascicle. The adjudication of the two truths is the general rod by which the whole treatise handles “conventional dharma / real dharma,” and the conventional earth and water of the Chapter on the Elements evidence it in return. The three discernments and the four noble lineages are the checklist of provisions before entering the path; and the two gates for entering cultivation are the interface this fascicle hands to the next — the mind obtains concentration through these two gates, and “the mind having obtained concentration, what further is to be cultivated” is precisely the opening sentence of the next fascicle.

Two loose threads are left for the reader. First, this fascicle has three places of ancient dispute recorded together — whether pleasure really exists, the objection that the discernment formed through reflection cannot be established, and the glosses of discontent and great desire; in all three Saṅghabhadra has a refutation, and in the one on the three discernments he says outright that the author “failed to reach the sense of the Vibhāṣā,” the bluntest verdict in the fascicle. Second, the six marks of mindfulness that holds the breath (counting, following, settling, observing, turning, purifying) are here given only in name and mark; the real ascent (the highest worldly dharma and the path of seeing, at which the marks of turning and purifying point) is not opened out until two fascicles later. This fascicle only opens the gate.

This fascicle begins from the question “the mind having gained concentration, what further is to be cultivated?”, walks the whole length of the four foundations of mindfulness and the four wholesome roots, leaps at a bound into the sixteen minds of the path of seeing, and comes to rest upon the stream-enterer who returns at most seven times. The end of the stage of preparatory practice and the beginning of the path of seeing are both of them within this one fascicle. At the head of the fascicle the three houses of ancient masters let the knife of the outline fall in one and the same place, and the divisions they make agree word for word — this is the strongest single witness of the ancient masters anywhere in this chapter.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not ranking the stages of practice in order of dignity; it is fixing the station of every single moment along the way ‘from observing the body to seeing the truths’ — the stations once fixed, one need never again guess when there is only the foundation of mindfulness directed to dharmas, when there is left but the single mode of apprehension of the suffering of the desire realm, and which moment still counts as the path of seeing.

Three Points to Watch

1. Hidden within the names is the adjudication of the stations. Heat is “the forerunner of the fire of the noble path, which can burn the firewood of the afflictions” — the forerunner of the fire, and not yet the fire. Summit takes two glosses, “as with the crown of a man” and “as with the summit of a mountain” — the highest place is also the very brink between advance and retreat. Receptivity takes “since there is no falling back.” The highest worldly dharma takes “since this is with outflows it is called worldly, and since it is the most excellent it is called highest” — and the most excellent is still with outflows. The four names taken together say one and the same thing: this whole stretch is still worldly, still liable to retreat, and has not yet seen the truths. In reading the technical terms of this treatise, first ask which sense of the thing compared has been taken; the answer is almost always in the sentence of gloss that immediately follows.

2. The higher one goes, the fewer the objects and the shorter the time. Heat and summit observe the four truths in full and cultivate the sixteen modes of apprehension in full; the low and middling grades of receptivity are the same as summit, while its highest grade “observes only the suffering of the desire realm, in one mode of apprehension and one moment,” and the highest worldly dharma likewise. The terminus of the whole preparatory practice with outflows is a cause, one moment long, with nothing intervening after it. This gathering-in is no step backwards — the fewer the objects, the more the strength is massed, and only so can it join to the receptivity to the cognition of dharma concerning suffering in the next moment. The same line of reasoning appears once more at the path of cultivation: “the path of the lowest of the low grades has the force to cut off the obstruction of the highest of the high grades,” the coarse grime removed first and the fine grime exhausted afterwards.

3. The measure is always fastened to what has already arisen, never to what may yet be had. The first fifteen minds are the path of seeing “because what is seen has not been seen before”; the sixteenth mind belongs to the path of cultivation, and the measure is a single one — whether any truth is left unseen, and it has nothing to do with whether the faculties are dull or keen. One who abides in a fruit is not called an approacher to the next, because he “has not yet obtained the path of the higher fruit” — not that he cannot go forward, but that the name at this moment is established upon the path actually in course. Here lies the general rule by which this treatise establishes names: the name is fastened to what has arisen, not to what is possible.

One Further Point (Appended): Those Sixteen Moments of the Path of Seeing

There is but one rule, and it is walked four times over: upon one truth, first, taking the desire realm as object, receptivity to the cognition of dharma arises, and with nothing intervening after the receptivity there arises the cognition of dharma; then, taking the two higher realms together as object, subsequent receptivity arises, and with nothing intervening after it the subsequent cognition. Four to each of the four truths, sixteen in all. The cognition of dharma is the first realization; the subsequent cognition gets the name “subsequent” “because it realizes its object following after the former.”

The division of labor between receptivity and cognition is that “receptivity is the uninterrupted path” and “cognition is the path of liberation” — first the thief is driven out, then the door is shut. Someone objects: if the afflictions are cut off by receptivity alone, does this not contradict the nine clusters of fetters in the treatise itself? The author answers, “because all the receptivities are the retinue of cognition, as the business done by a king’s retinue is called the doing of the king.”

As for the simultaneous direct realization maintained by another school, the treatise is in no haste to pronounce it wrong; it first divides the sense of the word: direct realization is of three kinds, that of seeing, that of taking as object, and that of the matter done. Said of the direct realization that is seeing, simultaneity does not stand, “since the modes of apprehension differ among the truths”; said of the direct realization that is the matter done, then “in principle there is no fault either.” The point at issue is not simultaneity or gradualness, but what is being referred to. This is the cleanest demonstration in the treatise of how a contradiction is to be handled.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The three entities of a foundation of mindfulness (intrinsic nature, conjoined, and object) are the model of this treatise’s form of ‘one name with three entities’; the several gates of the factors conducive to penetration (what they are formed by, level, body, male and female, relinquishing and retreat) are the model of analysis through the several gates; while the nine grades of fault and virtue take over directly the measure of the nine grades of afflictions to be abandoned by cultivation established in the Chapter on the Latent Tendencies, this fascicle saying only “as was already analyzed before” and not establishing it afresh.

Two loose threads besides are left by this fascicle to its reader. First, by what exactly ordinary-being status is relinquished: the treatise gives its own correct sense and yet records two further accounts alongside, with the objection and the sentence that explains it through following hard upon each other — to hang every sentence back upon its own master is the basic exercise of reading this treatise where accounts are recorded side by side. Second, this fascicle closes on “those in the other stations also have at most seven returning births, yet not with certainty, and so it is not spoken of” — the blank left by that sentence is precisely where the next fascicle begins, in cutting off the afflictions abandoned by cultivation and establishing the once-returner and the non-returner.

The stream-enterer settled in his fruit, the author turns upon a single sentence — “now it must next be made out who among the noble ones stand in the stage of abandoning” — and takes up that stage. From below upward: the three conditions of family-to-family, the fruit of once-returning, one-interval, the fruit of non-returning; the seven kinds of non-returner opened out into nine and gathered into the seven destinies of good men; the noble ones who have undergone birth, who go to no other realm, sharpen no faculties, and fall back not at all; the mixed cultivation of the meditative absorptions completed in five grades and drawing the five Pure Abodes, and one who obtains the absorption of cessation renamed the bodily witness; higher still, the approach to arhatship, the vajra-like concentration, the knowledge of exhaustion; with an incidental discussion set in between upon the path that frees from defilement, the acquisitions of release from bondage, liberation at the neighboring stage, and the modes of apprehension of the mundane path; and at the end a chapter establishing the nature of the ascetic life — bringing out the eighty-nine entities of the fruit, the five causes by which four fruits are established, the brahmin and the wheel of Brahmā and the wheel of Dharma, and in dependence upon which realm each is obtained. Twenty-two stanzas: one graduated scale, and the ruler itself.

In one sentence: This fascicle graduates practice from the abandoning of the third grade of defilement all the way to the abandoning of the ninth grade at the summit of existence, and gives every notch a name — and only at the very end does it tell you that all those names hang upon one and the same thing: the path without outflows.

Placement (established first)

The boundary of this fascicle is among the strongest fascicle-boundaries in the chapter: the treatise opens with the paired formula “it has already been made out . . . now it must next be made out,” carrying over what precedes and opening what follows, while the three ancient masters each divide their fascicles here, their boundary agreeing throughout with Xuanzang’s and the ordinal they mark being one and the same — Puguang, Fabao, and Yuanhui all adjudge it “the second, explaining the approach to and the fruit of once-returning.” What this fascicle governs is the middle stretch of the third main division of the chapter, “analyzing persons with respect to the noble path.” Shentai’s commentary is wholly absent here: of the seven fascicles surviving in his fragmentary text only one belongs to this chapter, and that one expounds the following fascicle, so that this fascicle has no Shentai to hang upon, and the want is marked as it stands. Paramārtha’s earlier translation titles this chapter “Analysis of the Persons of the Path and Fruit of the Noble Ones,” dividing the whole chapter into three fascicles where Xuanzang divides it into four, so that the passage matched to this fascicle straddles the boundary of two of his.

Three Points to Watch

1. What draws the line is not the number of grades of defilement but the edge of a realm. The nine grades of defilement abandoned by cultivation in the desire realm yield two fruits and two approaches, while the seventy-two grades of the two upper realms yield only one approach and one fruit — the density of the notches does not follow the quantity of the defilements. The treatise itself states the reason plainly: one grade of defilement cannot obstruct the obtaining of the fruit of once-returning, because it does not cross a realm; whereas the ninth grade can obstruct the fruit of non-returning, “because when it is abandoned one thereupon crosses out of the realm.” One and the same phrase, “one grade of defilement,” means two flatly different things at the sixth grade and at the ninth. The whole fascicle’s graduated scale is built upon this one point: wherever a realm is crossed a stage must be established, and however fine the divisions within a realm no further stage is set up. So when, in reading this fascicle, you meet “why is no stage established here?”, first ask whether that step crosses a realm.

2. One and the same set of dharmas takes a new number whenever the denominator is changed. The non-returner is said in sum to be of seven kinds (five that proceed to the form realm, the four that proceed to the formless taken as one class, and attaining parinirvāṇa in the present life); reckoned finely by action, defilement, and faculty, the five that proceed to the form realm open into nine (three kinds each divided into three, according to swift, not swift, and long in coming); and named by “doing only what is good and not what is evil, going and not returning,” the nine gather back into the seven destinies of good men. Seven, nine, and seven stand together without obstructing one another, because their denominators differ. The dividing can be pressed to the extreme — reckoned by the four gates of place, lineage, freedom from defilement, and faculty, one kind of non-returner comes to two thousand five hundred ninety-two, and the five kinds together to twelve thousand nine hundred sixty. The treatise gives the occasion of the passage as “such is the coarse aspect; analyzed finely, the number comes to many thousands,” and what it means is just this: the stages can be divided without end, and yet the reality of realization does not lie in the numbers. Whenever the numbers of a set of dharmas will not agree, first ask what this particular number was made for.

3. In recording and in refuting, the author uses two different hands. As to why the Pure Abodes are only five, the treatise records “some other masters say: by the five, confidence and the rest,” and adds not a word; as to the account that attaining parinirvāṇa in the interval extends also to the nirvāṇa without remainder, the treatise records it and at once adjudges “this is unreasonable”; as to the account that the difference between attaining parinirvāṇa with exertion and without lies in taking the conditioned or the unconditioned noble path as object, the treatise records it and at once adjudges “this account is unreasonable, for the fault is too sweeping.” Judging and not judging are marked quite clearly — look for the sentence “unreasonable,” “this is not reasonable”. If in reading this fascicle you do not first tell the two hands apart, you will take for the author’s own position an account he has plainly refuted, and you will read as settled the places where he has deliberately let two accounts stand.

One Further Point (Appended): That One Qualifier on the Vajra-like Concentration

The uninterrupted path that abandons the ninth grade of defilement at the summit of existence is named the vajra-like concentration, on the ground that “it is able to break every latent tendency, and has already broken them before.” The treatise adds at once the one qualifier that matters most: “it does not break every really existent thing; it is able to break every capability.” — It is not that in that single moment it broke every defilement at once (the earlier defilements had long since been broken one grade at a time); it is that it possesses the capability of breaking every one of them. Let this sentence slip, and the whole graduated abandoning of the foregoing fascicle is overturned.

A simile always has its own portion that is taken. What is taken of the vajra is “able to break,” not “has broken.” The point is honored again at the end of the fascicle, in the five marks of the wheel of Dharma: what is taken of the wheel there is its four functions — swift proceeding, letting go and taking up, subduing, and turning about; while another master takes its three parts — the spokes, the hub, and the rim. One and the same simile, one taking its function and one its body, and the stanza takes both accounts in with a single word “or” — the portion taken differing, the two accounts may stand together.

Through the whole fascicle

The last chapter of this fascicle is worth going back and reading again. The twenty-odd sections before it have all been counting off notches; and only at the question “the four fruits spoken of above — whose fruits are they?” does the treatise hand over the ruler itself: “the paths without outflows are the nature of the ascetic life; one who bears this path is called an ascetic, because he is able to strive and to still the defilements.” The four fruits are not four social conditions; they are four stages upon the path without outflows — and the path without outflows is just that thing which strives and stills the defilements. The eighty-nine entities of the fruit, said plainly, are no more than eighty-nine paths of liberation together with their corresponding cessations through discernment — the uninterrupted path abandoning, the path of liberation realizing; one abandonment and one realization, and thus the nature and the fruit are parted and joined again.

The last question is “which fruit of the ascetic life is obtained in dependence upon which realm.” The answer is that the first three fruits can be obtained in the desire realm alone, because the path of seeing is in the desire realm alone — in the upper realms there is no right hearing, no taking a lower level as object, and no suffering feeling and therefore no disgust. Read forward, the three reasons are lacks; read backward, they are the conditions: to see the path one must be able to hear, able to take what is below as object, and able to be disgusted.

And so this graduated scale is given an exit. All the fascicle’s stages, numbers of births, grades, and counts of modes of apprehension measure only how far one has abandoned; while what that last sentence points at is the three things that make it possible to begin abandoning at all — and they are not in the pleasure of absorption of the upper realms, but here, in this world’s suffering and hearing.

The preceding fascicle carried the four approaches and four fruits as far as the arhat; this fascicle turns upon the one sentence “an arhat of the unshakable lineage, after the first knowledge of exhaustion, gives rise to the knowledge of non-arising,” and asks something one would not have expected: whether arhats still differ among themselves. They do — six kinds of lineage; liberation dependent on circumstance and liberation not dependent on it; the lineage had from the first and the lineage got afterward; falling back and not falling back; the refining of the faculties; the nine kinds of those beyond training; the seven noble persons; the fullness of the one in training and of the one beyond training. Then the closing passage opens a division of its own — the four paths, the four modes of penetrating progress, the thirty-seven factors of awakening, the four purities of realization, right liberation and right knowledge, the three elements, and the four alternatives of disgust and dispassion — and here the whole chapter is brought to its close.

In one sentence: The afflictions an arhat has cut off are one and the same portion; what differs is only the faculties and the supports — this fascicle does not rank them high and low, it only sets out how they differ.

Placement (established first)

The boundary of this fascicle is the strongest outline boundary in the whole chapter: the fascicle boundary, Xuanzang’s own division into fascicles, and the main outline boundary of the three ancient commentators all fall together, and the numbering the three of them mark is word for word the same, all reading “the fifth, explaining the six kinds of lineage.” Within the fascicle there are three further second-level outline boundaries — explaining the seven kinds of noble person, explaining the fullness of the one in training and the one beyond training, and the great division opened from “the differences among the paths, spoken of at large, are measureless.” This fascicle is besides the first unit in the whole book for which all four houses are present: of the seven fascicles of Shentai’s commentary that survive, only Fascicle Seventeen belongs to the Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble, and it happens to cover this fascicle entire, and it leaves an independent piece of evidence for the stanza count (marking of itself seven and a half lines of stanza). Paramārtha’s earlier translation agrees passage by passage with Xuanzang over this stretch of text, and is the most evenly matched of all the fascicles yet collated.

Three Points to Watch

1. The difference does not lie in the cutting off of confusion but in the faculties and in absorption. The six kinds of lineage are divided by the keenness or dullness of the faculties and by the presence or absence of two kinds of preparation; the nine kinds of those beyond training are divided by the nine grades of faculty; the seven kinds of noble person are opened out by four gates — preparation, faculty, the absorption of cessation, and liberation; the fullness of the one in training and the one beyond training is adjudged by the combination of three things, faculty, fruit, and absorption; and among the four modes of penetrating progress the pleasant and the painful are settled by the level upon which one depends, and the slow and the swift by the keenness or dullness of the faculties. One and the same set of variables is used over and over, five times. So although this fascicle bristles with names, its frame really has only two beams — the faculties one is born with, and the force of absorption. In reading, whenever a new set of numbered dharmas appears, first ask by which gate it has been divided, and the numbers will settle themselves.

2. The names are many and the entities few. The entities of the thirty-seven factors of awakening are only ten; the real items among the seven kinds of noble person are only six; and the three elements of abandoning, dispassion, and cessation are only three portions of one unconditioned liberation. Three times over, this fascicle demonstrates one and the same way of establishing a name: by the one portion that predominates (the four foundations of mindfulness named for discernment, the four right abandonings named for diligence, the four bases of supernormal power named for absorption); by the stage in the sequence (on the path of seeing, one who follows through faith; on the path of cultivation, one resolute through faith; beyond training, liberation dependent on circumstance); and by what is counteracted (dispassion said with regard to craving, abandoning said with regard to the remaining fetters, cessation said with regard to the things in which the latent tendencies increase by attachment). Whenever one reads the numbered dharmas of Abhidharma, first ask whether this is a name or an entity — names may be established gate by gate, but of entities there are only so many.

3. One long exchange, with four houses standing together. The longest single stretch of prose in this fascicle is not about numbered dharmas at all but about whether the fruit of the arhat can in the end be fallen back from: the author records the account of the Sautrāntikas and sets down the four words “what they say accords with principle,” which the ancient commentators unanimously mark as the author’s open declaration of where he stands; and yet, the wide dispute once finished, the treatise still concludes by returning to its own school with “the Vaibhāṣika masters state it as settled: the fruit of the arhat too admits of falling back.” Within the debate inside the lineage there are two further houses, the Elder and the Masters of Distinction, who likewise maintain that there is no falling back but along unlike lines of reasoning, and whom Saṅghabhadra refutes one by one and so returns to the Sarvāstivādins. Four houses stand together, each with its own grounds — and the knack of reading this stretch is to keep asking, “who is speaking now?”, rather than hurrying to take a side for the ancients.

One Further Point (Appended): What It Is That Is Fallen Back From

The true pivot of this dispute is a distinction that looks like a triviality — is what is fallen back from the entity of the fruit, or absorption, or the present enjoyment of it? The Sautrāntika answer is not to deny the scriptural testimony but first to ask, “which portion is it that is fallen back from?” What is fallen back from in the liberation that is cherished and dependent on circumstance is the concentration of the fundamental meditative absorptions, not the fruit-nature without outflows; what Godhika fell back from was the savor of absorption at the stage of training, not the fruit of the arhat; and the losing of mindfulness and the arising of thoughts spoken of in the Sūtra of the Simile of the Charcoal are an affair of the stage of training, before he had penetrated it well. The treatise then divides the word “falling back” itself into three — from what has been obtained, from what has not been obtained, and from present enjoyment — whereupon even the World-Honored One has a falling back of one kind, that of enjoyment, and only because his merits are too many to be brought forward all at once. Divide the word finely enough, and the contradiction dissolves.

Through the whole fascicle

The whole chapter closes with the four alternatives of disgust and dispassion: disgust takes only suffering and origin as its object, whereas dispassion extends to all four truths and is measured by the ability to cut off confusion; the two are wider and narrower than one another at different points, and so they make four alternatives. This way of closing is much like a miniature of the whole fascicle — each of two criteria is established clearly on its own, and where they cross a table forms of itself, with no need to adjudge which is the better.

And the receptivities and knowledges that the four alternatives employ are exactly what the next chapter will take up as its own subject. The last sentence of this fascicle says of one who becomes free of the defilement of desire first and sees the truths afterward that among the receptivities and knowledges he has, those comprised in the path of preparation, the path of liberation, and the path of further advance do not cause confusion to be cut off, because the confusion has already been cut off and because they are not the counteragent that cuts off — and by the time this is said, the reader’s eye has already been drawn away to the gate of knowledge.

The Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble walked the stairway of the noble stages to its end; this fascicle turns back and asks what that mind is upon which one walks that road. Beginning from the single question “is there anything that is receptivity and not knowledge? is there anything that is knowledge and not view?”, it first draws the boundary lines among the three, receptivity, knowledge, and view; next it establishes the system of the ten knowledges (the opening out and gathering in of two, three, and ten · the three limits upon the knowledge of others’ minds · the seven grounds on which the ten are established); next it makes out the modes of apprehension of the ten knowledges (the names and the entities of the sixteen modes · the dispute over whether the pure exceeds the sixteen); and at the last it analyzes them through some twenty gates, one gate at a time, as far as “cultivation is of four kinds.” The three ancient masters alike adjudge the main text of this chapter to divide in two, and this fascicle walks the whole of the first of those two divisions.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not counting how many kinds of knowledge there are; it is doing one and the same thing over and over — adjudging whether a name deserves to stand on its own. It opens by asking whether receptivity ought to count as knowledge, and closes by asking whether guarding and contemplating ought to be established separately as kinds of cultivation; and the twenty-odd gates in between are all asking that one question.

Three Points to Watch

1. The sense of a technical term is given by its boundaries, not by its definition. The treatise does not first say what knowledge is; it first asks whether receptivity is knowledge, and whether the knowledge of exhaustion and of non-arising are view. Receptivity is not knowledge because the doubt it is to sever has not yet been severed — what makes a decision a decision is that the matter to be decided is already settled; the knowledge of exhaustion and of non-arising are not view because the seeking mind has come to rest and no longer weighs and considers. One and the same noble discernment changes its name when the time-phase changes. Wherever two technical terms stand next to each other, ask first whether they are two time-phases of one and the same thing.

2. One and the same set of dharmas takes a different number when a different measure is laid against it. The ten knowledges gathered into two (with outflows and without outflows), opened into three (conventional, dharma, subsequent), then opened again into ten — these are not three coordinate classifications but three degrees of fineness upon one and the same set of dharmas; and the grounds on which the ten are established are seven, each aimed at something different — the knowledges of suffering and of origination, since their objects have no difference, can be divided only by mode of apprehension, whereas the knowledges of cessation and of the path differ in mode of apprehension and in object alike, and so take a ground of their own. The treatise refuses to cover ten names with a single reason. This is also why the table of mutual inclusion matters: the ten names overlap one another, and the entities are in fact fewer than ten.

3. Beneath every ledger there are rules; draw the rules out and the list turns into a derivation. The three thousand characters on “the cultivation of the knowledges at the several stages” in the second half look like a thicket of numbers, and are in fact only a few rules combined again and again — where the summit of existence is counteracted the conventional is not cultivated; a path able to sever obstruction does not cultivate the knowledge of others’ minds; one not yet free of desire does not obtain the knowledge of others’ minds; the dull of faculty leave out the knowledge of non-arising; the indeterminate is not called cultivation; the factors conducive to penetration do not cultivate the knowledge of others’ minds. The closing sentence of the fascicle, “all this should be pondered as is fitting,” is precisely the handing back to the reader of the cells that were not set out. Meeting a table of numbers in this treatise, look first for the line of derivation; if you cannot remember it, it is the line you have not found.

One Further Point (Appended): A Solitary Instance Proves Nothing

Whether modes of apprehension without outflows can exceed the sixteen is the densest dispute of this fascicle. The evidence of the masters abroad is one sentence of the treatise itself — where it speaks of an unaffiliated mind discerning dharmas affiliated to the desire realm, it lists eight modes of apprehension and then appends “there is such a case, there is such a fact,” and from those two phrases they take it that there are further modes of apprehension outside the sixteen.

The author does not contend on grounds of principle; he checks instead against the usage of the text: if that treatise were speaking with this sense in view, then the same treatise, where it speaks of a mind abandoned through seeing discerning dharmas affiliated to the desire realm, ought to append the same words; yet that passage lists twenty-one items and does not have the two phrases. ⇒ Where one and the same book has a formula of the same type here and lacks it there, it is evident that these two phrases are not names of modes of apprehension.

It must be seen clearly that what the author denies is only this one textual proof, not a declaration that there is absolutely no further mode outside the sixteen; while what the stanza establishes is the tenet of the one house of Kaśmīra. Both parties are recorded together, and the choice between them belongs to the adjudication of doctrine. And the method may be borrowed away directly: before citing a sentence as proof, look whether the sentences of the same type in that same book say the same thing.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The division between receptivity and knowledge (the uninterrupted path in the severing, the path of liberation with the severing done) is the general reading for every place in the whole treatise where the uninterrupted and the liberated are set side by side. That dharma knowledge and subsequent knowledge are established separately by the desire realm and the upper realms is the baseline for the three great ledgers of the second half of this fascicle — mutual objects, objects taken, and the cultivation at the several stages. The threefold gloss of the sixteen modes of apprehension is the model for how the whole treatise handles the gate of “one name with several senses”; and the breadth and narrowness of the three gates in “discernment extends to mode of apprehension, to that which apprehends, and to that which is apprehended” is this treatise’s standard model for the threefold division of entity, function, and object.

Two junctures are to be remembered. The conventional knowledge at the border of direct realization is cultivated in addition only at the three subsequent knowledges of suffering, origination, and cessation, and these three moments fall upon the sixteen minds of the path of seeing in the Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble; the two tables must be read together. The intermixed cultivation of the meditative absorptions enters here only into the ledger of cultivating the knowledges, while its result (the cause of the five Pure Abodes) is not opened out until the Chapter on Absorption — this fascicle establishes only its number, not its result.

There is one further loose thread left to the reader. The conventional knowledge at the border of direct realization cultivated in the path of seeing is a dharma that will not arise; it has no occasion ever to become present. Since it cannot arise, upon what does its “acquisition” rest? The treatise cites the answer of the ancient master — by the force of the noble path this conventional knowledge is cultivated, and after emerging from the contemplation a superior conventional knowledge taking the truths as its object becomes present; because the support of its arising has been obtained, it is called obtaining that knowledge, as obtaining a gold ore is called obtaining gold. To obtain the ore is not to have gold in hand, but the ore is that upon which the gold depends. Many a merit “already obtained but not yet used” in practice stands beneath this simile.

The preceding fascicle made out the entity of knowledge; this fascicle makes out the merits that knowledge accomplishes. It opens with “thus the differences of the several knowledges have been made out; the merits that knowledge accomplishes are now to be shown,” and then arranges three sections by who can obtain them, from narrow to wide — the eighteen dharmas exclusive to a Buddha, the non-contention, knowledge of aspiration, and unobstructed knowledges held in common with the noble ones, and the six supernormal knowledges held in common with ordinary beings. The whole chapter also ends with this fascicle.

In one sentence: This fascicle is not compiling a catalogue of marvels; it is opening an account for every merit — what knowledge is its entity, upon what level does it depend, upon what body does it depend, how is it obtained; only when these four questions are answered does a merit stand, and whatever cannot answer them is not given the name “supernormal knowledge” at all.

Three Points to Watch

1. “Not held in common” does not mean that others have none of it; it means that others do not reach the end of it. The section on the three foundations of mindfulness settles the matter outright — the great śrāvakas too can be free of delight and dejection amid the favorable, the adverse, and the mixed, and yet it is still called a dharma not held in common, and the reason is four words only: “because in the Buddha alone the residual habits are cut off as well.” Puguang, glossing the word “power,” travels the same road: it is not that the two vehicles have no knowledge, but that their knowledge is “obstructed with regard to its object,” and so it does not earn the name of power. When the two words “the Buddha alone” are met with in this treatise, the first question is not whether others have the thing, but whether others reach the bottom of it. This fascicle demonstrates the move three times.

2. One question about the object determines at once the entity, the level of dependence, and the count of knowledges. Why is great compassion conventional knowledge alone — because it must take all sentient beings for its object and must form the mode of apprehension of the three sufferings, and knowledge without outflows cannot reach them. Why does the unobstructed knowledge of speech depend upon the desire realm and the first meditative absorption alone — because the higher levels have neither applied nor sustained thought, and so no working machinery of language. Why does the unobstructed knowledge of meaning include sixteen knowledges — because the word “meaning” admits of two routes, one wide and one narrow. The word “or” in the power of the paths leading everywhere and in the power of the exhaustion of the outflows is the very same matter. To ask after the object is to have asked at one stroke after the entity and the level.

3. What can be counterfeited by spell-craft is not enough to serve as a criterion. Among the three guiding demonstrations the demonstration by instruction is the most honored, and the first reason the treatise gives is not that it is the most mysterious but that the former two can be done by spell-craft as well — Gandhārī can make one soar into the sky, Īkṣaṇī can make one know the minds of others; the demonstration by instruction alone has nothing that can replace it save the supernormal knowledge of the exhaustion of the outflows. The second reason is that the former two only turn a person’s mind for a while, whereas instruction assuredly draws forth benefit and ease to come. To judge whether a thing is high or low, first ask whether it can be counterfeited, and then ask whether what it draws forth is temporary or ultimate.

One Further Point (Appended): A Supernormal Knowledge Is Discernment, Not a Marvel

The one section on the six supernormal knowledges, eight hundred eighty characters long, is the sole extended prose passage of this fascicle, and also the place where the four-question format is used most completely. From beginning to end the treatise does not have one sentence describing the effects of supernormal power; it opens with the fixed pole-star — “these six supernormal knowledges are included in the path of liberation and have discernment for their own nature, like the fruits of the ascetic life” — and glosses it, “the words ‘path of liberation’ show the sense of issuing forth from obstruction.” A supernormal knowledge is discernment, and it is that portion of discernment which issues forth from obstruction.

Every question thereafter therefore falls upon discernment: what knowledges are included (four of them conventional knowledge, that of the minds of others five knowledges, that of the exhaustion of the outflows as with the power), the level of dependence (the first five depend upon the four meditative absorptions and not upon the formless, since in the formless observation decreases and stillness increases while a supernormal knowledge requires a level where stillness and observation are equal), the object (one’s own level and the levels below alone), how they are obtained (what has never been obtained by preparatory effort, what has been practiced through separation from defilement), inclusion in the foundations of mindfulness (the first three in the foundation of mindfulness of the body, that of the minds of others in three, those of former abodes and of the exhaustion of the outflows in four), and the three ethical qualities (the divine eye and the divine ear indeterminate, the other four wholesome alone).

At the end, Roots 60 and 61 draw the line tight once more: although the five supernormal knowledges beginning with that of the divine object-field have five sources — cultivation, birth, spell, drug, and action — still “apart from what is obtained by cultivation, all extend to the wholesome and the rest,” and “since they are not the result of absorption they do not obtain the name of supernormal knowledge” — what is not a result produced by absorption ought not, strictly speaking, to be given the name “supernormal knowledge” at all. This sentence is the coolest boundary this fascicle draws around the marvelous.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The counts of knowledges assigned to the ten powers and the four fearlessnesses (ten, nine, eight, six) can all be read only by going back to the ten knowledges of the preceding fascicle; the one sentence that the six supernormal knowledges “depend upon the four meditative absorptions” is completed only when the next chapter makes out absorption; and the folly regarding the three periods that the three clear knowings counteract, together with the restriction “in the stage beyond training alone,” are carried over from the chapter on the worthy and the noble. This fascicle seems to be speaking of merits, but is in fact putting to a single general use every technical term established in the preceding six chapters — wherever the reading is obscure, go back to the place where that term was first established.

Two further loose threads are left to the reader by this fascicle. First, the two firmest pieces of debate in this fascicle (whether the supernormal knowledges of former abodes and of the exhaustion of the outflows are included in the four foundations of mindfulness, and whether the divine eye and ear are of indeterminate nature) are both concentrated in the section on the six supernormal knowledges, and the refuter there, cross-evidenced word for word on three sides, is Saṅghabhadra; but the two places where Puguang marks “a rescuing objection says” do not name who is rescuing — recorded without adjudication, and not adjudicated on his behalf. Second, Paramārtha’s earlier translation gives this section as the “Chapter Analyzing Discernment” and not the “Chapter Analyzing Knowledge,” and sets up for the ten powers a further outline of seven senses of the gloss, one layer finer than Xuanzang’s; the two versions do not conflict in doctrine and differ only in how they divide and gather.

The whole fascicle begins from the ten powers of the Buddha and closes upon that one point of knowledge, obtained by birth, of the minds of others and of former abodes which beings in hell have when they first take birth — “once the feeling of suffering has pressed upon them, there is no further sense in which they know.” It is one and the same word “know,” and the distance between the two is the whole measure of the merits this fascicle makes out.

The end of the first eight chapters. The Chapter on the Worthy and the Noble explained the result, the Chapter on Knowledge the cause, and this chapter the condition — that absorption upon which the knowledge that realizes the result depends. The chapter has four sections: the absorptions relied upon (the four meditative absorptions · the four formless absorptions · the several gates of the eight attainments · the three concentrations), the merits that rely upon them (the four immeasurables · the eight liberations · the eight bases of mastery · the ten totalities · by what they are obtained and upon what body they arise · the conditions for arousing absorption), the abiding of the true Dharma in the world, and the purport of the treatise’s composition. With four last stanzas in seven-character lines, the author closes the whole book.

In one sentence: This chapter is not laying out a stairway of absorption-states; it is reckoning up, item by item, out of what real dharmas the fact that “the mind has been settled” is composed — and on the last page the author lays the dharma-numbers down and says that the one who could adjudicate the dharma is no longer here, and that you should therefore go and practice.

Three Points to Watch

1. The four stories of meditative absorption are not four things; they are one and the same thing from which three factors have been withdrawn. The entity is only one, “one-pointedness of mind upon a single object,” and the boundaries come from the adding and subtracting of factors — what possesses sustained thought, joy, and pleasure is established as the first, and thereafter “by degrees the preceding factors are left behind and the second, third, and fourth are established.” Once this reading is set up, every table that follows becomes a set of graduations on one and the same axis. The motion of advancing is always subtraction, never addition.

2. Eighteen names of factors, and only eleven real entities. The most laborious passage in the chapter is the one that counts this number. The “pleasure” of the first two meditative absorptions and the “pleasure” of the third are the same in name and different in entity — the former is pliancy, only the latter is the feeling of pleasure; “inner evenness and purity” sounds like a new dharma and is in fact just the faculty of confidence. When one and the same name turns up in two places, ask first whether in the two places it is one and the same thing — that is how an Abhidharma register of real entities gets counted out, one pass at a time.

3. That the deeper the absorption the better it can cut off the afflictions does not hold. “What is without outflows can cut off the afflictions, and so can the preliminary stages that are pure” — the basic pure absorptions are blocked on three sides: they cannot cut off the level below (its defilement is already left behind), cannot cut off their own level (they are bound by it), cannot cut off the level above (it surpasses them). What can cut off is what is without outflows, or what stands in the preliminary stage, at that position of “being just about to take one step upward.” The one sitting at ease deep within an absorption is precisely the one who is not cutting off the afflictions.

One Further Point (Appended): Why the Attainment of Savoring Has to Be Set Up in a Column of Its Own

Of the eight attainments the first seven have three kinds each — savoring, pure, and without outflows. What is the attainment of savoring? “That is, the one associated with craving; craving is able to savor, and hence the name savoring.” What it is greedy for is very particular: it is nothing else than that portion of the pure absorption which has just ceased. “The very object savored by what is associated with savoring — when this ceases with nothing intervening, that absorption of savoring arises” — so that in one and the same moment, spoken of as emerging, one has emerged from the pure absorption; spoken of as entering, one has entered the absorption of savoring.

This column is the presupposition of every gate that follows in the chapter. Below, in treating first obtaining, mutual production, the objects taken, and the cutting off of the afflictions, each gate must first ask once, “are you speaking of the savoring, the pure, or the one without outflows?”; the answers differ and the conclusions differ altogether. The better the absorption is cultivated, the more easily one falls into this column — and that is the very reason it is given a name of its own.

Among the several gates the treatise also leaves two clues that are the reverse of each other: the wholesome formless absorptions of the basic levels “do not take as object the dharmas with outflows of the levels below,” while the preliminary stages of the formless must take the level below as object, “since their uninterrupted path must take what is below as object.” To cut off the afflictions of the level below, one must look back at the level below. The one going upward does not look down; the one about to cut off has no choice but to look.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The two passages at the end of the chapter weigh far more than the number of their characters. Of the sentence “the various dharma-gates analyzed above are all for the sake of spreading and upholding the true Dharma of the World-Honored One,” the ancient masters have two explanations: one reckons the section of the main doctrine as far as the Chapter on Refuting the Self; the other stops the main doctrine at the Chapter on Absorption and takes everything from this sentence on as the section of dissemination. By the second explanation, this sentence is the starting point of the section of dissemination of the whole treatise. The two explanations stand together in the ancient transmission, and the ancient masters themselves record both without adjudicating.

The answer to how long the true Dharma abides is not a number of years but a condition — “there are those able to uphold it and to expound it rightly,” “there are those able to practice rightly according to the teaching,” and “hence, according to the measure of time that those three persons abide in the world, it should be known that the true Dharma abides just so long.” The account of a thousand years is a divergent account cited from elsewhere, and Puguang expressly marks it “setting out a divergent account.” How long the Dharma abides hangs upon whether those three kinds of person are still there.

Last, the four stanzas in seven-character lines. The first states the purport for himself — “I mostly follow them in explaining the Abhidharma; where there is any small disparagement, it is my own fault; the right principle for adjudicating the dharma rests in the Sage”: knowing full well that there are places in his book divergent from the Vaibhāṣikas, he does not say “I am right and they are wrong” but says that the fault is his, and leaves the seat of adjudication to the World-Honored One. The last three speak of the state of the world — the eye is closed, those who realize are scattered, no one can adjudicate, and mean speculation throws the holy teaching into confusion; the afflictions are like a maddened elephant, and “there is no hook to check delusion”; the lifespan of the Tathāgata’s true Dharma “sinks away by degrees, as though it had reached the throat.”

Read the two together, and the intent of the whole treatise’s closing appears: the one who could adjudicate is no longer here, and so you should all the more go and practice yourself, rather than wait for an adjudicator to appear. The last line, “one should seek liberation and not be heedless,” is not a formula of exhortation; it is the conclusion of this whole stretch of reasoning. At the end of thirty fascicles of dharma-numbers, the author with his own hand pushes the reader out of the book.

The eight chapters of the whole treatise expound “which dharmas there are,” expounding them down to the finest grain; this last chapter does one thing only — it points out, within that whole great mass of dharmas, that there is no self. There are no root stanzas; from beginning to end it is disputation, refuting the Vātsīputrīyas and going on to the Sāṃkhya and the Vaiśeṣika, and at the last three stanzas exhorting to study, with which the whole book ends.

In one sentence: This chapter is not proving that “a self does not exist”; it is taking away, one by one, every piece of ground on which a “self” could stand — direct perception has no place for it, inference finds no difference by which it can be attested, the scriptural teaching gives it no standing, and neither memory nor the fruit of action needs it as guarantor.

Three Points to Watch

1. Refuting the self begins by refuting cognition, not by refuting a definition. The chapter opens not by asking “what is the self” but only “on what ground do you know that there is one” — direct perception cannot reach it, and inference finds in it no difference to be attested of the sort “if it is there, so; if it is not there, otherwise.” What matters is that the treatise does not maintain that whatever is invisible is nonexistent: the five form-faculties are equally invisible, and yet the treatise grants that they exist, because when a condition is lacking the result does not arise and when it is not lacking it does, and this difference is an attestation. What the treatise blocks is not the invisible but the unattestable. This measure can be used all the way down.

2. A simile must be taken apart, and the first question is “in what respect is it alike?” The Vātsīputrīyas build their whole tenet upon “establishing fire in dependence on firewood,” and the author accordingly takes this one simile apart passage by passage — not denying that it is alike, but requiring first that it be settled which is the fire and which the firewood; and once the naming is fixed, six layers fall in order: since fire arises in dependence on firewood, fire differs from firewood; if the warm touch is the fire, they are simultaneous and of different entities; if “dependence” means co-arising, then difference of entity is admitted outright; where there is no firewood there is no fire, and yet you do not allow this… Each layer first accepts the explanation the opponent has just given, and then looks to see where that explanation carries itself. This is the densest stretch of argument from simile in the whole treatise.

3. Not declaring is the outcome of analysis, not an attitude. That the life-principle is or is not the same as the body is not declared; the four declarations about the world being permanent and the rest are not declared; whether the Tathāgata exists after death and the rest is not declared — and the reason is one and the same: the question presupposes a subject that cannot stand, and any answer whatever amounts to endorsing it. The Venerable Nāgasena’s answer to King Pilinda makes just this point with “there never was a mango tree in the palace, so how could the taste of its fruit be answered for.” And that he does not say “there is no life-principle at all” is a further nicety of measure: “there is no self” and “not even a conventional self” are two different sentences, and where the hearers differ, the teaching differs.

One Further Point (Appended): After No-Self, Who Remembers and Who Undergoes the Fruit of Action

Once the refutation is done, the treatise must answer the two most concrete questions. Who remembers? — it is not one mind remembering what a different mind saw; it is that within one and the same continuum a past mind that took that object as its object gives rise to the present consciousness that remembers; and as for “the owner of the recollection,” that is simply the cause that produces the recollection, and the cause is what is called the owner — why set up a self besides? Who undergoes the fruit of action? — the fruit is not produced from an action already perished, but from the transforming and differentiating of the continuum of action, as a fruit is produced from a seed: that it joins up is called continuum, that before and after differ is called transformation, that the last moment has a special force is called differentiation.

What is to be seen clearly is this: neither answer cancels the phenomenon; each only replaces the guarantor. Memory remains, the fruit of action remains; only what guarantees them is no longer a permanent self but a stretch of continuum possessed of causality. The positive doctrine of the whole chapter lies just here; all the rest is clearing away.

Bearing on the Treatise as a Whole

The sentence at the head of the chapter, “because they are deluded by the false grasping of a self,” reaches back to the adjudication of the with-outflows and the without-outflows that the whole treatise has carried on since “without outflows means the noble path” in the Chapter on the Elements — the root of the afflictions lying in the grasping of a self, all the marks of dharmas distinguished in the preceding eight chapters must in the end come down to this one sentence. The measure of real existence and conventional existence used in refuting the Vātsīputrīyas — that to have a separate thing is real, that to be merely an aggregation is conventional — is the measure the whole treatise uses in handling conventional and real dharmas; and the passage on the continuum, transformation, and differentiation of action and its fruit is the final gathering-up of the principle of action and fruit established in the Chapter on Action — that chapter says how many kinds of action there are, and this passage says how action can produce a fruit across a lifetime.

The last three stanzas are where the whole book comes to rest. “This is the one broad road to the palace of nirvāṇa, the nature of no-self on which a thousand noble ones travel” — no-self is not a conclusion but a road. And the author says of himself that what he has spoken is only “a corner,” whose use is “to open for the wise the poison-gate of discernment”: as poison entering the body spreads from one place through the whole of it, so does discernment, entering by one gate and pervading all dharmas. The last word of the whole treatise is “work,” yet it is no longer the work of transmigration but the surpassing work of comprehending all that is knowable. Thirty fascicles of book come here to their end.