摩訶止觀 觀禪定境

Body is light and at ease, the mind-ground bright and pure, and joy and happiness unlike anything before. At this very moment, one sentence arises most easily: I have arrived.

Yet the Mohe Zhiguan (Great Calming-and-Contemplation) says that meditative concentration too must become a contemplated object. Without concentration, one loses an aid to the path; with concentration, attachment to its savor binds one through concentration. Jumping into water to escape fire still does not mean danger has been escaped. The real question is not whether the object is good, but whether mind, on encountering a good object, immediately turns it into “my attainment.”

The chapter therefore explains arising signs with extreme precision. The eight contacts are movement, itching, lightness, heaviness, cold, warmth, roughness, and smoothness. Correct contact further possesses ten merits: emptiness, brightness, concentration, wisdom, wholesome mind, softness, joy, happiness, liberation, and correspondence. Yet if emptiness becomes extinction of awareness, brightness pursuit of lights and colors, or concentration rigid immobility, the sign is already excessive. Wind can make rain and can also destroy it. Intensity does not equal correctness.

Past habituation resembles seed in the earth, calming-and-contemplation rain, and buddha-power sunlight. Rain falls at once, yet plum, peach, pear, and persimmon ripen separately. Even people seated together will not experience identical objects of dhyāna. Chapter order is not everyone’s order of arising, and another person’s signs are still less a proof of one’s own realization. Recognize an object when it comes and do not seek it when it does not; only then does practice not become a collection of experiences.

The same applies to impurity, loving-kindness, dependent origination, recollection of the Buddha, and superknowledge. Impurity is not world-rejection; in the end it must still open into loving-kindness and compassion. Loving-kindness does not merely love pure marks; it must also know that the body will disintegrate. If a Buddha’s light is seen while no correct Dharma gate is present in mind, the stronger the light, the more it may be delusion. Superknowledge is only a function of dhyāna, not its root and still less liberation.

Finally, Zhizhe returns every sign of dhyāna to one thought. Dhyāna can produce birth among humans and gods, and can also produce pride, broken moral discipline, and evil karma. It can open the paths of śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas, and can also enter the king samādhi like streams returning to the sea. A snake entering a bamboo tube becomes temporarily straight and curves again upon emerging: the absence of evil while in concentration does not mean afflictions have been severed.

The true turn is seeing that neither concentration nor distraction departs from the Dharma-nature of this one thought. It is not abandoning distraction in order to possess a separate eternal stillness, nor passing an ordinary being’s emotional consciousness off as noble concentration. Sentient beings and the attainment of cessation are neither identical nor separate; the wondrous lies precisely here.

When meditative concentration appears, the path has only just begun. Do not hurry to ask, “What level have I reached?” Ask first: does this happiness make me freer, or more unwilling to let it go?

〔Section §1〕 Why Meditative Concentration Must Also Become an Object of Contemplation

Mohe Zhiguan, Fascicle Nine〔Upper〕.

Taught by Great Master Zhizhe of Tiantai in the Sui and recorded by his disciple Guanding.

Sixth is contemplating the object of meditative concentration. Prolonged illness and distant travel both obstruct meditative concentration. The Lokaprajñaptyabhidharma says: “Constant admonition and dispute, and busily conducting many affairs, also obstruct meditative concentration. Furthermore, excessive reading and recitation likewise obstruct meditative concentration.” The Mañjuśrī Questions on Bodhi Sūtra says: “Meditative concentration has thirty-six defilements.” Defilement here means obstruction.

Practitioners who have already entered the cool pool through the preceding objects and joined the stream need not further contemplate the object of meditative concentration. Yet if demonic affairs have passed but genuine luminous wisdom has not arisen, even without separately cultivating a dhyāna method, continually cultivating calming-and-contemplation in general can stir habits from past lives and cause various meditative signs to appear in profusion. One should then set demonic affairs aside and take the dhyānas that arise as the contemplated object. Why? Meditative joy is exquisite and readily inspires delight and addiction, so defilement deepens day by day. Mistaking a meditative object for the true path causes one to fall into overweening pride. Rebuking and abandoning it indiscriminately makes one wholly lose a preparatory means for cultivating the path. Faults of this kind are too numerous to record individually. One may escape harm from Māra only to be bound by meditative concentration, like avoiding fire and falling into water; this brings no benefit to samādhi. For this reason, the object of meditative concentration must be contemplated.

Yet the factors of dhyāna and the various concentrations genuinely aid cultivation of the path, and Great- and Small-Vehicle scriptures praise them alike. The four dhyānas and eight concentrations are explained in detail in the Abhidharma and the Chengshi Lun; the nine dhyānas of intrinsic nature are clearly explained in the Bodhisattvabhūmi and Ten Grounds. Their arising signs are now also explained briefly under four general headings: first, opening and combining; second, causes and conditions for the arising of dhyāna; third, characteristics of arising; fourth, cultivating calming-and-contemplation.

〔Section §2〕 How the Ten Gates Are Opened and Combined

First is opening and combining. Dhyāna gates are immeasurable; here they are provisionally grouped into ten: first, the four root dhyānas; second, the sixteen special excellences; third, penetrating illumination; fourth, the nine perceptions; fifth, the eight relinquishments; sixth, great impurity; seventh, loving-kindness; eighth, causes and conditions; ninth, recollection of the Buddha; tenth, superknowledge.

How are these ten gates the same as or different from five and fifteen gates? They differ only in the manner of opening and combining.

Opening the five gates into ten means opening the one gate of breath-counting into the two gates of sixteen special excellences and penetrating illumination, and opening the one gate of impurity into the two gates of eight relinquishments and great impurity. Loving-kindness and causes and conditions retain their original names. In the Abhidharma, the gate of recollecting the Buddha is named a preparatory means at the element; in the dhyāna scriptures, recollection of the Buddha. The original name is retained here. Superknowledge arises in dependence upon nine kinds of dhyāna and cannot be assigned exclusively to one meditative method.

When fifteen gates are combined into ten, the three gates of breath-counting and the three of impurity remain uncombined. Loving-kindness originally has three gates; only one is retained here, loving-kindness conditioned by beings. The other two names are hidden because dhyāna methods are entrances and sequences that explain phenomenal dharmas. Loving-kindness conditioned by Dharmas is the Two Vehicles' contemplation entering principle, and unconditioned loving-kindness is the Great Vehicle's contemplation entering principle. The two principial contemplations are therefore hidden and only one phenomenal loving-kindness retained. If the two principial contemplations were listed, they would respectively belong under the objects of the Two Vehicles and bodhisattvas.

Causes and conditions also have three gates. The meaning of cyclic movement through three lives is coarse, while dependent origination of retribution and dependent origination in one thought are subtle. Subtle meanings belong with contemplation of principle and the coarse with phenomena, so the subtle meanings are hidden and the coarse retained, named only the gate of three-life causes and conditions. Recollection of the Buddha also has three gates; only recollection of the response-body Buddha is taken here. Among superknowledges, only the five are taken. Taking only five gates would leave some content unembraced, while taking all fifteen would mix the meaning of phenomenal dhyāna with contemplation of principle. This chapter therefore selects out contemplation of principle and opens phenomenal dhyāna. Although five, ten, and fifteen gates differ in opening and combining, each arrangement has its own intent.

〔Section §3〕 Outflowed, Outflow-Free, and Belonging to Both

Next are the outflowed and outflow-free. According to the Abhidharma classification, all ten dhyānas are named outflowed dhyānas. Only when cultivated through wisdom conditioning the four truths are they named outflow-free. If not cultivated in this way but only by conditioning phenomena, they are outflowed dhyānas. The Chengshi Lun teaches the same: the root dhyānas and the rest are outflowed; only cultivation through minds of emptiness and signlessness is named outflow-free.

The present classification differs slightly. Although the substance and characteristics of the ten dhyānas are all outflowed and belong to phenomenal dhyāna, just as a cucumber can become a condition for the outbreak of a fever, whether the ten phenomenal dhyānas can become conditions for the arising of the outflow-free requires further distinction.

The four dhyānas originally exist in the world and are shared by ordinary people and non-Buddhists. Cultivating the four dhyānas alone produces only outflowed concentration. In self-cultivation there are twelve gates; in transforming others, praising the Dharma and praising practitioners of that Dharma. The Great Sūtra's “so-called forty-eight years” has this meaning.

Even without a buddha appearing in the world, ordinary people of sharp faculties can cultivate the sixteen special excellences and penetrating illumination, but they do not produce the outflow-free. If a tathāgata teaches them, however, these practices can also produce it. Although their power to produce the outflow-free is weaker than that of the remaining contemplative dhyānas, each is superior to the root dhyānas. They are therefore called “both outflowed and outflow-free.”

The nine perceptions and related dharmas are supramundane guest-dharmas. Although phenomenal, they prevent the faults of defilement by desire and can produce the outflow-free without waiting for a separately arisen wisdom of the truths. For example, the five hundred arhats of Kāṭhina each heard the four truths seven times but still could not awaken to the path. As soon as the Buddha taught contemplation of impurity, they produced the outflow-free. Because the force of revulsion toward defilement by desire is strong, these are classified as outflow-free. If they were not outflow-free, they should not be named noble moral discipline, noble concentration, and noble wisdom. “Noble” means correct; what correct Dharma could surpass the outflow-free?

The Great Sūtra says: “The so-called noble practice is the object of buddhas and cannot be understood by the Two Vehicles. Yet the Buddha teaches this Dharma and the Two Vehicles practice it according to the teaching; therefore it is named noble practice.” The Buddha now teaches a noble Dharma and the Two Vehicles practice it—how could it not be outflow-free? The Large Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra further says: “The root dhyānas are a worldly gift of Dharma; impurity and the other methods are supramundane gifts of Dharma.” Since they are called supramundane, how could they not be outflow-free? Scripture also says: “From the nine perceptions, contemplation of impurity unfolds; from contemplation of impurity, the establishment of mindfulness of body; from the establishment of mindfulness of body, the other three establishments; from the other three establishments, the thirty-seven factors of the path; from the thirty-seven factors, nirvāṇa.” As the first condition for nirvāṇa, how could they not be outflow-free?

To say that they must be outflowed because they are phenomenal dhyāna resembles taking two mineral medicines, one of which heats the body and the other cools it. Although both are mineral medicines, their effects differ as hot and cold. Phenomenal dhyānas should likewise differ as outflowed and outflow-free. If the ability to condition the outflow-free were enough to name something outflow-free, then when views are severed at the sixth ground and thought at the seventh, the root dhyānas serving as supports should all be named outflow-free. Yet views and thought cannot be severed at those grounds through root dhyāna alone; the wisdom of the truths must be joined to it, merely arising in reliance upon those grounds. Root dhyāna alone cannot condition the outflow-free. Impurity and related methods differ: contemplation of impurity alone can directly serve as a condition for producing the outflow-free〔and so forth〕.

This chapter does not include the ten perceptions because the first three belong to the path of seeing, the middle four to the path of cultivation, and the final three to the path beyond learning; all belong to contemplation of principle. Nor does it include the eight recollections, because people who have accomplished the nine perceptions are no longer afraid and because recollection of the Buddha among them has already been included under its own gate.

Contemplation of loving-kindness belongs to both outflowed and outflow-free. Loving-kindness arising in dependence upon root dhyāna is outflowed; loving-kindness arising in dependence upon impurity and the other contemplative dhyānas is outflow-free. Loving-kindness itself has no separately established stage, but establishes its level according to the dhyāna ground upon which it relies: when accomplished through root dhyāna it is loving-kindness conditioned by beings; when accomplished through relinquishment, loving-kindness conditioned by Dharmas.

Causes and conditions likewise have no separate meditative stage. Recollection of the Buddha and the five superknowledges must also be judged by the levels of other dhyāna methods upon which they depend, just as loving-kindness belongs to both outflowed and outflow-free〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §4〕 Distinct Rationale, Shallowness and Depth, and Mutual Arising

Next is the difference between the rationale of this chapter and other dhyāna gates. Someone asks: how are the ten gates explained here the same as or different from the Sequential Dharma Gate of Dhyāna and the dhyāna methods previously taught under counteraction as an aid to opening?

Answer: The Sequential Dharma Gate of Dhyāna aims to accomplish dhyāna pāramitā. The meditative wholesome roots it addresses are sharp, so dhyāna arises first and is afterward tested as wholesome or unwholesome. This chapter aims to accomplish prajñā. The meditative wholesome roots it addresses are dull: first obstructed by afflictions, they then encounter the karmic object and the object of Māra, and only afterward produce the meditative object. Dhyāna methods taught under counteraction as an aid to opening aim to break obscurations and cultivate dharmas assisting the path. The dhyānas in this chapter arise naturally without intentional effort and, after arising, must still become objects contemplated through calming-and-contemplation. Although the dhyāna gates spoken of are the same, each has a distinct intent〔and so forth〕.

Next is why the ten gates are arranged in this sequence from shallow to profound. The four dhyānas are root dhyānas, dark realization without contemplative wisdom, dhyānas whose savor inspires craving. They are shared by ordinary and noble people and can be attained through slight cultivation. The sixteen special excellences possess a little contemplative wisdom, do not inspire craving for savor, and are not dark realization. Horizontally they correspond to the four establishments of mindfulness and vertically to the root dhyānas. Savor-dhyāna is therefore listed first, followed by pure dhyāna. Penetrating illumination possesses contemplative wisdom and realizes signs that are deeper and subtler, so it follows the special excellences' general characteristics.

The three gates of root dhyāna, special excellences, and penetrating illumination all belong to root direct contemplation, yet remain weak in treating afflictions. The nine perceptions are the initial gate of constructed-image contemplation and can subdue desire like a vanguard, so they come next. The nine perceptions are revolted only by external objects and do not yet treat inner mind, so the eight relinquishments follow. Although the eight relinquishments can break inner and outer craving, their contemplation still takes general characteristics without discrimination and is not yet free toward its objects. Great impurity therefore follows, breaking attachment to direct and dependent retributions. Although both general and specific characteristics can treat craving, great merit has not yet been cultivated extensively, so loving-kindness follows. Although grave inner craving has been treated and merit cultivated outwardly, without entering causes and conditions through contemplation one still lacks correct worldly views, so causes and conditions follow. Knowing three-life cyclic movement as lacking ruler and self becomes correct worldly view. Yet its objects remain inferior beings at the causal stage and its generated merit weak, so one next conditions the superior fruit of buddhahood and makes merit vast. Although the preceding concentrations have arisen, their power and function of sovereign transformation remain absent, so superknowledge is explained last〔and so forth〕.

Next are differences in mutual arising. The ten gates can mutually arise according to their sequence in eight ways, understood by comparison with the object of aggregates, sense fields, and elements〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §5〕 Inner Causes and External Conditions for the Arising of Meditative Concentration

Second are the causes and conditions through which meditative concentration arises. The Great Sūtra says: “All beings possess the savor-dhyāna of the first ground. Whether they cultivate it or not, they will certainly attain it in the future.” Viewed only from the nearer situation, beings during the kalpa of world-destruction did not cultivate dhyāna; traced into the distant past, they had nevertheless once escaped the five coverings. It resembles memorizing a scripture: if abandoned only briefly, learning it again is easy; if abandoned for a long time, difficult. One can therefore know that if the past cultivation was sequential, the present arising is sequential; and if one formerly cultivated phenomena through phenomena, now phenomena arise through phenomena. The other forms of mutual arising are known in the same way〔and so forth〕.

This resembles the earth fully possessing all kinds of seed. Once moistened by rain, each sprouts and grows. They grow earlier or later and do not fruit simultaneously: plum trees fruit in four months, peach in seven, pear in nine, and persimmon in ten. Although they encounter the same condition of rain, their fruits ripen differently. Past habits are like seeds, present cultivation of calming-and-contemplation like rain, and the various dhyānas that arise like fruits ripening at uneven times. In summary, these are the eight preceding kinds of mutual arising. This is called arising through internal causes and conditions.

Furthermore, although beings possess wholesome roots that should sprout, they must rely upon the Buddha's majestic power before those roots can develop. The earth may contain seeds, but without sunlight they do not sprout. Buddhas have no discrimination of hatred or attachment and benefit beings equally according to conditions. If beings possess causes and conditions for sequential arising, a buddha provides sequential aid; if they possess causes and conditions for cultivating phenomena and producing phenomena, a buddha provides the corresponding phenomenal aid. A great bell allows anyone to strike it, while the loudness depends upon the mallet. Buddha-aid remains constantly equal; the shallowness or depth of what arises depends upon beings' former habituation.

The Great Treatise says: “If lotuses in a pond do not receive sunlight, shade will make them die. If beings' wholesome roots do not receive aid, they sink and cannot manifest.” One passage in the Sūtra on Pure Liberation says: “Beings merely liberate themselves; the Buddha adds nothing to them.” Bodhisattva Pure Liberation also says: “If beings do not hear the Buddha's twelve divisions of scripture, how could they be liberated?” The two teachings appear opposed but together establish one meaning: beings possess wholesome causes within themselves and still require a corresponding buddha-condition. This is called arising through external causes and conditions.

〔Section §6〕 General Heading for the Arising Signs of the Ten Gates

Third are the signs that arise with the various meditative concentrations. Root dhyāna also arises during cultivation of the Pratyutpanna Samādhi, but less often; it arises more frequently during constantly seated samādhi and the other practices. The present explanation begins with seated meditation.

〔Section §6.1〕 Desire-Realm Concentration and Access Concentration

When the body is upright, thoughts gathered, and breath regulated, the paths of mental activity gradually seem to disappear. Mind becomes clear and quiet, stable and continuous as it enters more deeply. Although still conditioning something, it no longer races outward. This is called coarse abiding. Afterward thoughts become still more stable and continuous; this is subtle abiding.

Before, after, and between the minds of coarse and subtle abiding, a power supporting the body necessarily appears. When this power arises, the body naturally sits upright without fatigue or pain, as if something were holding it. If the supporting power is unwholesome, it comes with constriction, rigidity, and pain and departs with looseness and exhaustion; this is a coarse, unwholesome body-supporting dharma. A wholesome body-supporting dharma sustains the body amid coarse and subtle abiding without the faults of excessive tension or looseness.

After one or two double-hours, days, or months, practitioners gradually feel the concentrated object deepen and become subtler. Suddenly a portion of the ground of mind opens into clarity and purity. The body appears like cloud or shadow, bright and pure, corresponding with the dharma of concentration. Mind is gathered and held without movement; turbid defilement within the breast is removed, leaving freshness and coolness. Although one feels emptiness and purity, signs of body and mind remain, and the forestlike merits of the factors of dhyāna have not yet arisen. This is desire-realm concentration.

The Chengshi Lun names it “mind corresponding with the ten wholesome acts” and says it flickers and should not be inhabited for long. Here desire-realm concentration is compared to an unfired clay brick, fragile and unstable, and is therefore called flickering; this does not mean that concentrated mind moves like a lamp flame. Some also call it a lightning flash, but the passage on which they rely actually asks: “Apart from the seven supports, is there a concentration capable of producing the outflow-free?” It answers: “Yes. Desire-realm concentration can produce the outflow-free; its arising is swift and sudden like lightning. If the outflow-free does not arise, desire-realm concentration can remain a long time.” The Bequeathed Teaching Sūtra says: “Like seeing lightning at night, one can temporarily see the path.” When Ānanda urged his thoughts he could not awaken; in the instant he relaxed mind and reached for his pillow, he entered the lightning-flash samādhi. This lightning flash is also vajra samādhi. Vajra samādhi does not arise alone without cause, but enters the outflow-free from desire-realm concentration. Because the outflow-free arises swiftly, it is compared to lightning. Desire-realm concentration itself is not named lightning.

One may abide in desire-realm concentration for months or years. The dharma of concentration gathers and sustains inner mind without indolence or pain; one can remain continuously in concentration for several days. After this mind, there is another silent turn and advance: in open vacuity, the head, body, clothing, and bed previously present in desire-realm concentration are no longer seen. All resembles empty space, bright, pure, and stable. The phenomenal body is an obstruction preventing the future dhyāna from arising. Now that the phenomenal obstruction is removed and the bodily sign empty and quiescent, future dhyāna can arise. This is the sign of the access ground.

People who do not understand this attainment think they have realized patient endurance concerning nonarising. Yet the obstruction of nature remains and the first dhyāna has not been entered. How could they misname it a concentration of nonarising? This resembles fire covered by ash and a fool carelessly stepping upon it because no fire seems present.

According to the Chengshi Lun, no future dhyāna exists, so it asks: “Is the future dhyāna you teach not simply what I call desire-realm concentration?” The Abhidharma says that a future dhyāna exists. Venerable Ghoṣa and the Explanatory Treatise explain it in detail. The Buddha-Dharma contains both positions; each treatise author emphasizes one side. One should now judge according to what actually arises in each practitioner. Some remain for months after attaining desire-realm concentration and enter the first dhyāna shortly after reaching access concentration; thus only desire-realm concentration is named and access concentration not separately discussed. Others remain only briefly in desire-realm concentration but ten days in access concentration; thus only access is discussed and desire-realm concentration not mentioned. Still others remain long in both, so both names are used. One position cannot be grasped exclusively. Following the Great Treatise, both are listed here. The deviant and correct signs at every stage are explained in detail in Cultivation and Realization. Because the first dhyāna lies close to the desire realm like a national frontier where many dangers occur, a brief distinction must still be made.

〔Section §6.2〕 Four Divisions and Eight Contacts

From coarse abiding through the concentration of neither perception nor nonperception, all possess four divisions: retreat, protection, abiding, and advance.

Retreat has two kinds: natural loss and loss triggered by a condition. Triggering conditions are internal or external. Among the twenty-five external preparatory means, improper regulation of exhalation and inhalation is retreat triggered by an external condition. Within quiescent mind, the three obstructions and four Māras arise and produce grief or attachment; this is retreat triggered by an internal condition. After losing an attainment, some can cultivate and regain it, while many cannot despite renewed cultivation.

Protection means skillfully using internal and external preparatory means to guard concentrated mind from loss. Abiding sometimes occurs because skillful protection keeps it stable and sometimes naturally without effort; both are called abiding. Advance sometimes happens naturally and sometimes through diligent urging. Each has horizontal and vertical dimensions, and each dimension has gradual and sudden arising. Advancing gate by gate through the twelve gates is vertical gradual advance; possessing all twelve at once, vertical sudden advance. The successive arising of each grade of the sixteen special excellences and penetrating illumination is horizontal gradual advance; all arising at once is horizontal sudden advance. Each of the four divisions of retreat, protection, abiding, and advance again contains all four divisions, as explained in detail in Cultivation and Realization〔and so forth〕.

The present explanation first takes the vertical division of advance. Within access concentration, body and mind gradually feel empty and quiescent, with no body seen within or object without. This concentrated object may continue for a day, a month, or a year without damaging concentrated mind. Within it, one suddenly feels body and mind moving and vibrating subtly and continuously. Sometimes the eight contacts of movement, itching, lightness, heaviness, cold, warmth, roughness, and smoothness arise.

Some say that because the application of mind has become subtle, the pure form dharmas of the form realm contact the desire-realm body. For example, when the pure form dharmas of the desire realm are present upon the faculties, they can produce seeing and hearing. According to this explanation, contact comes from outside. Another teaching relies on “all beings possess the savor-dhyāna of the first ground” and compares dhyāna to the wealth intrinsically possessed by the blind child of a rich household, or fire intrinsically present in bamboo. Although dhyāna lies within mind, it cannot arise simultaneously with coarse afflictions. When phenomenal obstructions are coarse, dhyāna cannot arise. Now that cultivation of mind gradually sharpens and the obstruction of nature is removed, subtle dharmas arise accordingly. Why must they come from outside?

Why do subtle dharmas arise? Counting breaths transforms mind; mind transforms the fire element; fire transforms wind; wind transforms water; water transforms earth. The four elements progressively become subtle and therefore produce the eight contacts. This resembles wheat becoming ferment, ferment becoming mash, and mash becoming wine. Mash represents desire-realm concentration and wine the first dhyāna; both have wheat as their root and do not come from outside. Grasping that contact arises only from oneself or only from outside falls into the faults of self-nature or other-nature. Following the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the four natures of arising from self, other, both, and no cause are first broken; only afterward does one conventionally distinguish internal emergence and external arrival.

The eight contacts are the substance and function of the four elements. Movement and lightness belong to wind; itching and warmth to fire; cold and smoothness to water; heaviness and roughness to earth. Each of the four elements has substance and function; combining them makes eight contacts.

〔Section §6.3〕 Ten Merits and Distinguishing Deviant from Correct

When the contact of movement arises, it may begin at the head, back, waist, ribs, feet, or elsewhere and gradually fill the whole body. Movement is felt inside while no motion appears externally, like a slight wind arising and moving gently and continuously. Arising from the head generally becomes the division of retreat; from the waist, abiding; from the feet, advance.

The contact of movement bears forestlike merits, summarized in ten: emptiness, brightness, concentration, wisdom, wholesome mind, softness, joy, happiness, liberation, and correspondence with the object.

“Emptiness” means that when the contact of movement arises, inner mind opens into clear vacuity, unlike before when the obstruction of nature remained. “Brightness” means a wondrous lucidity whose clarity admits no simile. “Concentration” means one mind stable and free of scattered movement. “Wisdom” means no longer being obscure or entangled in nets of doubt; mind understands with quiescence and acuity. “Wholesome mind” means shame, conscience, faith, and reverence arise: one is ashamed that this Dharma was never attained before; reflecting that one has only now reached this point, one feels conscience; believing that all worthies and nobles possess still more profound and wondrous dharmas, one reveres them immeasurably. “Softness” means leaving the rigid and coarse mind of the desire realm and becoming like cured cowhide that can be rolled and unrolled at will. “Joy” means delighting in the Dharma attained. “Happiness” means that the dharma of contact pleases inner mind with peaceful wonder. “Liberation” means that the five coverings no longer operate. “Correspondence with the object” means that mind corresponds without confusion to the contact of movement and all the preceding merits; mindfulness can further gather and sustain them, corresponding without forgetting or loss. One may abide stably in this way for a day, month, or year; whenever mind is gathered, the meditative sign appears again.

As repeated cultivation continues, the grades of the movement contact gradually deepen; this is vertical arising. The vertical arising of the remaining seven contacts is known by analogy. If movement has arisen, whether or not it has retreated, and cold next arises; then whether or not cold retreats, another contact arises, interweaving like the eight preceding forms of mutual arising—this is horizontal arising.

Although the eight contacts can arise horizontally or vertically and in different sequences, examination through the eight contacts, ten merits, and five factors prevents confusion. Yet one cannot suppose that all eight contacts are completed simultaneously within one thought. Why? The eight contacts belong to the four elements, and water and fire oppose one another and cannot be accomplished at once. Each of the eight contacts has ten merits, making eighty adornments of merit. Although their names are the same, the delight and happiness they cause differ, like boiling broth, hot meat, mackerel, and chilled plums, each with a different flavor and pleasure. The remaining six contacts likewise differ from one another.

If the eight contacts arise within desire-realm concentration, all are deviant contacts, illness contacts, or affliction contacts, explained in detail in Cultivation and Realization and not discussed here. The present passage concerns only the eight contacts of the first dhyāna and must distinguish deviant from correct. Why? First, the first dhyāna lies at the border of the form realm, close to the desire realm. Second, it still carries desire-realm mind, so deviant dharmas easily exploit an opening and enter, as thieves enter when a gate opens. Ghosts may follow deviant dharmas into dhyāna, but dhyāna itself is not a ghost. Failure to distinguish them destroys correct contact and leaves only deviant, unwholesome contact.

Deviant contact is still distinguished through the eight contacts and ten merits by whether it is excessive or deficient. When movement contact arises, the body should merely move naturally and gently within, neither slowly nor quickly. If it suddenly becomes urgent and rapid, with hands and feet ceaselessly scratching and agitating, it is excessive. If there is no movement at all, as though the body were bound, it is deficient. The remaining seven contacts of cold, warmth, and the rest are distinguished in the same way.

Next, each of the ten merits beginning with emptiness that accompany movement contact is distinguished as excessive or deficient. Correct emptiness is simply open and unobstructed. Quiescence so complete that awareness disappears is excessive; continued rigidity and obstruction are deficient. Correct brightness is clear and luminous like the moon in a mirror. Brightness like full daylight or visions of various lights and colors are excessive; seeing nothing at all is deficient. Correct concentration is simply one mind clear and quiet. Being bound and stuck so one cannot move is excessive; racing and scattering among myriad objects is deficient. The final merit of correspondence and all those between are distinguished in the same way. Thus one movement contact has twenty deviant signs. The remaining seven contacts each have twenty as well, making 160 deviant dharmas.

Strictly speaking, correct dhyāna should have no deviant sign. That deviant signs nevertheless appear resembles taking sweet flag and becoming very angry just as its medicinal power is about to arise, or taking Solomon's seal and becoming lustful just as its power is about to arise. The medicines do not produce anger or desire. Their power drives an existing coarse illness, which momentarily becomes strong as it is expelled. Within desire-realm concentration alone, only deviant contacts arise; they increase illness and the five coverings and possess no correct merit. Once form-realm concentration has been entered, the eight contacts and ten merits beginning with emptiness and brightness exist, yet 160 deviant signs may appear as well and must be distinguished.

The Great Treatise says: “Some winds produce rain and some destroy it.” Clouds gathering in the northeast bring rain; clouds scattering in the southwest destroy it. Dhyāna is the same. The eight contacts and ten merits allow feeling to accomplish correct dhyāna; the 160 deviant signs cause feeling to destroy meditative concentration. If one dharma among them bears deviance, the others are also stained, like one thief among travelers turning the rest into an evil band. If the first contact has no deviant sign, the remaining merits are all wholesome and correct.

〔Section §6.4〕 Five Factors of the First Dhyāna

Correct dhyāna has five factors. The initial contact touches the body and mind conditions it; this is awareness. Fine mental distinction of the eight contacts and their ten attendant merits is examination. Rejoicing that what was formerly unattained is now attained is joy. Peaceful pleasure is happiness. Quiescence without scattering is one-pointed mind.

The Abhidharma says that twenty-three mental factors arise simultaneously, but takes the five with strongest function as the five factors. All five are the substance of dhyāna; preparatory means preceding that substance are as explained above. The Chengshi Lun instead says that the five factors arise sequentially: the first four are preparatory means and only one-pointed mind is the substance of concentration. The Mahāsaṃnipāta Sūtra says that a sixth, silent mind is the substance of concentration. Some locate the five factors in the ninth desire-realm mind and others before desire-realm concentration; neither location is yet the five factors of the first dhyāna.

The present distinction of dhyāna with awareness and examination is properly made from the first dhyāna. How can the five factors be simultaneous yet established sequentially? They arise simultaneously, but their strength and weakness obscure one another, so the five factors are established according to the strong factor accomplished in sequence. It resembles one strike of a bell: within one sound, the beginning is coarse and heavy and the later sound subtle. The five factors are the same. When the object is initially conditioned, awareness is strong. This does not prevent examination and the other three factors from already existing simultaneously, but awareness is strong and examination not yet clear. When awareness ceases, examination becomes manifest. Joy was present from the beginning, but only when examination ceases is the factor of joy accomplished. Happiness was also present from the beginning, but had not yet filled feeling; when joy ceases, the factor of happiness is accomplished. One-pointed mind was also present, but agitated by the preceding four; only when happiness subsides is its factor accomplished.

This resembles first opening a treasury and immediately recognizing that it is filled with valuables and that they are precious. Joy, happiness, and stability are all simultaneously present, but one does not yet know which treasure is which. Next one distinguishes gold and silver; once clearly distinguished, one receives them and joy arises. Through joy one experiences happiness and finally rests in one-pointed mind. It also resembles a person who, having eaten one's fill, has no further need, or someone sleeping deeply before the five desires. Thus the treatise says: “Like a person obtaining a treasury”〔and so forth〕.

If all four dhyānas take one-pointed mind as substance, how do they differ? The first dhyāna is distinguished here as one-pointed mind corresponding with awareness and examination, so the four dhyānas differ. To enter the second, one need only rebuke and abandon awareness and examination; the first dhyāna then ceases and the specific sign of the second becomes manifest. From the general standpoint, all four dhyānas take one-pointed mind as substance. Detailed explanations of the names, meanings, and signs of the five factors appear in Cultivation and Realization〔and so forth〕.

Furthermore, the eight contacts and merits that initially arise are coarse and shallow. Arising repeatedly, they become progressively deeper and sharper. Some say there are three grades, others nine, and one may also say immeasurable grades. Various meditative contacts bring delight to one another, and the many noisy merits instead prevent one-pointedness, like song, dance, and music continuing without pause, or many guests arriving in turn: as soon as one has been received, another appears. They temporarily disappear when one emerges from concentration into scattered mind, but return as soon as thoughts are slightly gathered.

To transcend the first dhyāna, simply rebuke and abandon awareness and examination. After the first dhyāna subsides, a single intermediate concentrated mind arises, also called the mind turning toward quiescence, the ground of receding dhyāna, or the bamboo-shaving mind. Within this solitary quiescent mind, the first dhyāna of the lower ground has been lost while the second dhyāna above has not yet arisen. If grief and regret arise then, this portion of concentration is also lost. Without regret, the factor of inner purity arises. There is no longer reception and discrimination of the eight contacts, so it is named concentration of one consciousness. The forms of the four elements combine into one pure form, the illuminating mind turns pure, and the factor of joy arises with it. Because this is no longer a borderland, no sign of demonic deviance appears. Happiness arises after joy; when happiness subsides, one enters one-pointed mind.

The joy of the second dhyāna makes mind float, and this happiness remains unstable, so joy should be rebuked and abandoned. When joy subsides, one enters access concentration for the third dhyāna. The third dhyāna suddenly arises together with happiness. Form dharmas have become still subtler and happiness no longer depends on joy. The genuine happiness of the third dhyāna fills the entire body; noble ones can relinquish it, while ordinary people find this difficult. The third dhyāna has five factors: equanimity, mindfulness, wisdom, happiness, and one-pointed mind. Although scriptures and treatises list them in slightly different orders, these are only minor differences in cultivation.

The happiness of the third dhyāna stands opposite suffering. Rebuking and abandoning happiness makes the third dhyāna subside, and one passes through access concentration for the fourth. When that access concentration subsides, immovable concentration arises; form dharmas have again become subtler. Because suffering and happiness do not move it, it is named immovable concentration. The dharma of concentration is stable, exhalation and inhalation cease, and it possesses neither-suffering-nor-happiness, equanimity, purity of mindfulness, and one-pointed mind.

Even at the fourth dhyāna, form dharmas ultimately remain. Rebuking and abandoning the three kinds of form makes them cease. Turning to condition empty space, one attains concentration, no longer sees form, and mind escapes form dharmas like a bird flying from a cage. This is the concentration of the sphere of boundless space. When it subsides, one first enters access concentration, then conditions consciousness and produces concentration, called the sphere of boundless consciousness. When that subsides, one turns to condition nothing whatsoever, corresponds with the dharma of nothingness, and enters the sphere of nothingness. An older explanation interprets it as conditioning a little consciousness. Yet if even a little consciousness remains, there is still an object and still a mental function. How could it be called nonuse or nothing whatsoever?

When the sphere of nothingness has passed, the concentration of neither perception nor nonperception suddenly arises. Because it does not condition the sphere of consciousness it is called nonperception; because it does not condition the sphere of nothingness, non-nonperception. No dharma remains above it to be conditioned; it is the highest meditative concentration in the three realms. Worldly people consider it supremely subtle, and non-Buddhists take it for nirvāṇa, yet it remains dark realization without contemplative wisdom and fully possesses the truths of suffering and accumulation. Even when the three existences are almost exhausted, once its power of concentration is lost, one still falls into the three evil paths. Details of the root dhyānas can be sought in Cultivation and Realization.

〔Section §7〕 Sixteen Special Excellences

Next are the arising signs of the sixteen special excellences. According to the teaching sequence recorded in the Vinaya, the special excellences should follow contemplation of impurity; according to the actual sequence of practice, they precede it. The Vinaya says that when the Buddha taught monks contemplation of impurity, they developed such powerful revulsion that they could no longer dwell with this foul body. Some even gave their robes and bowls to non-Buddhist followers of Deer-Staff and asked to be killed. The Buddha therefore instructed the monks to set aside contemplation of impurity and cultivate the sixteen special excellences instead.

Rhubarb and croton purge so forcefully that people of weak bodily strength are harmed by the medicine, so other medicines must be combined with them, purging and nourishing at once. Nourishing represents caring for body and mind; purging, urging liberation. The sixteen special excellences urge more strongly than root dhyāna while accommodating body and mind better than contemplation of impurity. Because they possess contemplative wisdom they are called also outflow-free; because their counteractive power is weaker, also outflowed. Someone who loves meat may still force oneself to eat pig intestine after recognizing it as a vile vessel for feces. Yet on seeing the putrid corpse of a pig in the sixth month, covered in maggots and flies, one can no longer eat. The sixteen special excellences are contemplation as things truly are and still allow relaxed abiding. Contemplation of impurity is constructed-image contemplation, severe in force, and need not be bearable〔and so forth〕.

When the sixteen special excellences arise, practitioners suddenly see exhalation and inhalation as long or short. They know breath comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; inhalation does not accumulate within the body and exhalation does not disperse outside it. Correlated with root dhyāna, this stage is coarse and subtle abiding. Seeing breath come and go throughout the whole body corresponds to the access ground of root dhyāna. Root dhyāna, however, is dark realization: practitioners suppose body, bed, and the rest have wholly disappeared, although in reality they have not. This resembles ash covering fire and a fool stepping upon it; eating in darkness; or a blind man touching a woman—none clearly understands the encountered object. The sixteen special excellences now possess contemplative wisdom and see breath fill the whole body, while concentrated mind is bright, pure, and stable. They therefore differ from dark realization.

Practitioners further see the body's thirty-six substances, like opening a granary and seeing rice, millet, hemp, beans, and other grains. Correlated with root dhyāna, this is the stage of the first dhyāna. Although the eight contacts previously touched the granary of the body, the mind-eye had not opened and could not see its contents. Because the sixteen special excellences possess contemplative wisdom, once contact opens the bodily granary, the mind-eye sees its thirty-six substances: liver like green beans, heart like red beans, kidneys like black beans, spleen like millet; channels of large and small intestines connected together, with blood vessels pouring through like rivers. The inner layer has twelve substances including liver, heart, phlegm, and retained fluids; the middle twelve include membranes, skin, fat, and grease; the outer twelve, hair of the head, body hair, and the rest. Exhalation and inhalation embrace and penetrate them. Practitioners see the body as impure, impermanent, suffering, empty, and nonself. All bodily activities then cease and one ultimately no longer creates evil karma for the body's sake. This is called removing all bodily activities.

Correlated with the factors of the path, this is the establishment of mindfulness of body; with root dhyāna, the factors of awareness and examination. The initial opening of the mind-eye is awareness; accurately distinguishing the thirty-six substances is examination.

Mind experiences joy, corresponding to the joy factor of the first dhyāna. The joy of root dhyāna is hidden, defiled, and attached to savor; the joy of the sixteen special excellences is unhidden, undefiled, and able to know savor. It is Dharma-joy rather than ordinary felt joy. Mind experiencing happiness is likewise not happiness attached to pleasant feeling. Knowing that the three feelings of suffering, happiness, and neither-suffering-nor-happiness within a pleasant object lack genuine happiness is the factor of happiness. Receiving various mental activities is the factor of one-pointed mind. One knows that various different mental signs are all one mind but does not, like root dhyāna, conceive one mind as truly existent. Correlated with the factors of the path, all these belong to the establishment of mindfulness of feeling.

Making mind joyful and making mind gathered: the preceding joy arose from contemplating the thirty-six substances, but now joy is made directly in relation to mind, so this corresponds to the second dhyāna. The Mahāsaṃnipāta Sūtra says that the second dhyāna has only three factors and does not separately establish inner purity; the present making of mind joyful is close in intent. “Making gathered” means that when joy moves, mind readily scatters; gathering it enables entry into one-pointed mind. Root dhyāna merely receives joy within inner purity; the sixteen special excellences possess contemplative wisdom and can constantly gather the joyful mind.

Making mind liberated corresponds to the third dhyāna. The happiness of root dhyāna depends upon joy and fills the whole body, making it difficult for ordinary people to relinquish. The sixteen special excellences possess contemplative wisdom and do not attach to the savor of happiness; hence mind is made liberated. From making mind joyful through making it liberated all belong to the establishment of mindfulness of mind.

Beginning with contemplating impermanence corresponds to the fourth dhyāna. Impermanence is contemplated at other meditative stages too, but not as a specific counteraction. At immovable concentration, practitioners readily crave its savor and take it as permanent. Contemplative wisdom now knows that although suffering and happiness have been left, this ultimately remains a form dharma and remains impermanent. It should not be defiled by attachment, so contemplating impermanence is named separately.

Contemplating departure and contemplating dispersal correspond to the sphere of space. The three kinds of form cease like a bird flying from a cage, hence departure; one turns to condition empty space, hence dispersal. Although empty space is conditioned, contemplative wisdom remains. Contemplating freedom from desire corresponds to the sphere of consciousness. Excessively conditioning space makes mind diffuse, and this diffuseness is named desire. The contemplative wisdom of the special excellences leaves scattered mind, hence freedom from desire. Contemplating cessation corresponds to the sphere of nothingness. The contemplative wisdom of the special excellences sees both abundant and slight consciousness return to nothing, hence contemplating cessation. Contemplating relinquishment corresponds to the sphere of neither perception nor nonperception. After relinquishing the spheres of consciousness and nothingness, another subtle concentration is named neither perception nor nonperception. Ordinary people mistakenly consider it nirvāṇa; Buddhist disciples know that although it has no coarse afflictions, subtle ones remain, so they do not crave its savor and it is named pure dhyāna. From contemplating impermanence through contemplating relinquishment, all belong to the establishment of mindfulness of dharmas.

These sixteen dharmas differ in their horizontal and vertical counteractions, each section distinct. Root dhyāna is dark realization with thin merits, like food without salt. The sixteen special excellences possess abundant merits, like food with salt. Their arising signs are explained in detail in Cultivation and Realization〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §8〕 Penetrating Illumination

Next are the arising signs of the dhyāna of penetrating illumination. While cultivating the sixteen special excellences, contemplative wisdom remains general and abbreviated, and the realized signs seen among the thirty-six substances remain general. In penetrating illumination, contemplative illumination is finer and more wondrous, and on realization each sign is more distinct. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra also uses the name penetrating illumination. The Jewel-Torch Dhāraṇī taught in the Mahāsaṃnipāta Sūtra is precisely this class of dhyāna, and the Invocation of Avalokiteśvara has the same intent. During cultivation, the three affairs of body, breath, and mind are practiced as mutually penetrating and can produce the three knowledges and six superknowledges. Cultivation of the Jewel Torch can even enter the attainment of cessation of feeling and perception. This gate therefore fully possesses the eight liberations, three knowledges, and six superknowledges and is named penetrating illumination.

The Mahāsaṃnipāta Sūtra gives the names of the five factors of this dhyāna. Awareness like mind, great awareness, reflection, great reflection, and contemplation of mind-nature are together called the factor of awareness. Contemplating mental activity, great activity, and pervasive activity form the factor of examination. Knowing as things truly are, great knowing, and the movement of mind through its joy form the factor of joy. Bodily ease, mental ease, and reception of pleasant contact form the factor of ease. Abiding of mind, great abiding, and nondistraction from the conditioned object form the factor of concentration.

At the beginning of cultivated contemplation, body, breath, and mind mutually penetrate. Upon realization, all three return to one characteristic; hence awareness like mind. Practitioners awaken to and illuminate the true truth: form, breath, and mind silently become one without difference. They also discern the conventional truth, seeing ninety-nine layers each of skin, flesh, bone, and the rest; knowing the five viscera produce five kinds of qi; and seeing the entrances where insects dwell within the body. Nothing about the insects' movement, sounds, or other details is too subtle to know.

Practitioners can further know the aggregate-body at its initial implantation in the womb. Past karma of ignorance resembles wax and the parents' present reproductive fluids clay. Because past karma does not remain, the seal is said to break; because consciousness is implanted in the present life and name and form become complete, the impression is said to form. The fetus dwells below the mother's receptacle for undigested food and above that for digested food, within the womb. Its form is exceedingly subtle, with only one thought of delusive conception; form and mind depend upon one another as if existent, as if nonexistent, as in a dream.

Through the force of karmic activity, one thought of volitional mind naturally arises and summons the mother. The mother consequently thinks of blue color, shouting sound, rank odor, and sour flavor. The force of this thought produces one thread of qi; qi becomes water, water blood, and blood flesh. The mother's inhalation and exhalation nourish and moisten it, forming the liver; above, the eye; below, the thumbs and big toes. If the mother thinks of white color, crying sound, raw odor, and pungent flavor, the lungs form; above, the nose; below, the second fingers and toes. Thinking of red color, speaking sound, scorched odor, and bitter flavor forms the heart; above, the mouth; below, the third fingers and toes. Thinking of yellow color, singing sound, fragrant odor, and sweet flavor forms the spleen; above, the tongue; below, the fourth fingers and toes. Thinking of black color, chanting sound, foul odor, and salty flavor forms the kidneys; above, the ears; below, the fifth fingers and toes. The subtle formation of every bodily part can be understood by analogy.

Reflection and great reflection mean distinct reflection upon the true and conventional truths. Contemplating mind-nature means contemplating all as empty. True and conventional alike enter mind-nature. The Invocation of Avalokiteśvara says: “Each enters the limit of suchness.” Compared with the preceding dhyāna methods, such a factor of awareness is doubly excellent.

Mental activity and great activity: the preceding factor of awareness belongs to understanding. Beginning with mental activity, one turns into contemplative practice. Mind acts within the conventional truth and is therefore called activity; it acts within the true truth and is called great activity; body, breath, and mind act together and are therefore called pervasive activity.

Abiding of mind means attaining one-pointed mind in the conventional truth. Great abiding means attaining one-pointed mind in the true truth. Nondistraction from objects means that although one sees the immeasurable objects of true and conventional truths, inner mind makes no error. Detailed explanations of every sign appear in the extensive account of contemplating penetrating illumination.

When this concentration arises, one sees body, breath, and mind alike as plantain trunks without solidity; this is the sign of the access ground. Seeing all three as foam is the first dhyāna; as floating clouds, the second; as shadows, the third; as images in a mirror, the fourth. Next, one extinguishes the three affairs and wholly enters space; extinguishes space and conditions consciousness; extinguishes consciousness and conditions nothingness; extinguishes nothingness and conditions neither perception nor nonperception; finally extinguishes the three kinds of feeling and perception in neither perception nor nonperception, personally realizing the dharma of cessation of feeling and accomplishing liberation.

Because penetrating illumination has contemplation of the conventional truth, it is also called outflowed; because it has contemplation of the true truth, also outflow-free. This dhyāna is complete in phenomena and principial contemplation, and its stages are complete. Followers of the Chengshi Lun could originally use it conveniently to explain concentration of the path and entry into the eight liberations, yet refuse to adopt it. Abhidharma treats the eight relinquishments as complete in phenomena and principle and wholly different from non-Buddhist dhyāna; it can therefore establish a person liberated in both respects. The Chengshi Lun takes only principle without phenomena and cannot establish such a person. If non-Buddhist dhyāna is counted as phenomenal dhyāna, one should likewise count the ten wholesome acts as moral discipline and worldly intelligence as wisdom. Since moral discipline and wisdom differ from those of non-Buddhists, why should concentration alone be identical? If it were, the visiting physician would have no visiting concentration and the eight medical arts could not be established. Detailed signs appear in Cultivation and Realization〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §9〕 Nine Perceptions

Next are the arising signs of the dhyāna of impurity. The nine perceptions come first and have two classes: practitioners who destroy the Dharma-support and those who preserve it.

Practitioners who destroy the Dharma-support cultivate the nine perceptions: first, swollen; second, ruptured; third, blood-smeared; fourth, festering; fifth, livid; sixth, devoured; seventh, scattered; eighth, bones; ninth, burned. They seek only to end suffering and finally burn away the contemplated skeleton, urgently attaining the fruit beyond learning without aspiring to the various merits of phenomenal contemplation. Once the skeleton has been burned away, no skeleton remains to contemplate and therefore no meditative concentration, transformations through superknowledge, vow-knowledge, or summit dhyāna. Although the skeleton is said to be burned away, the fleshly body actually remains, just as one enters cessation of feeling and perception and personally realizes it with the body〔and so forth〕.

Such practitioners readily retreat. The Abhidharma says that all four fruits have signs of retreat, like sand settled at the bottom of a well. An Āgama tells of a noble person at the third fruit who retreated from the precepts and returned home, destroying the discipline of individual liberation but not the moral discipline shared with the path. Laypeople consequently slandered him, saying noble Dharma did not exist at all. The Buddha said: “Once his desires have been satisfied, he will again become disenchanted. Before long he will return and request ordination.” The monks refused to ordain him, so the Buddha personally did so, and he immediately realized arhatship. Ānanda asked: “Venerable One, was this a learner's retreat or one beyond learning?” The answer was: “A learner's retreat.” According to this account, it was a person liberated through wisdom who severed delusion with worldly wisdom and could therefore retreat; it was not a case of using outflow-free wisdom to sever one grade of delusion, advance one grade of understanding, and then retreat. Producing the nine perceptions without the merits of the various meditative concentrations is being a practitioner who destroys the Dharma-support.

Practitioners who preserve the Dharma-support cultivate the nine perceptions from swollen through bones and stop there without entering the perception of burning. They can therefore possess streaming light, relinquishments, spheres of mastery, and the merits of contemplation, training, cultivation by infusion, higher cultivation, transformations through superknowledge, vow-knowledge, and summit dhyāna. Possessing every merit, they become persons liberated in both respects. In actual cultivation, those with abundant craving contemplate an external corpse; those with abundant attachment to views contemplate their own body; those in whom views and craving are equal contemplate both internally and externally. Arising signs can be classified in the same way.

While seated in meditation, practitioners suddenly see a corpse lying on the ground. This person was speaking only a moment ago—how has the person suddenly departed? Breath is exhausted, body cold, consciousness gone, complexion changed. When transferred by impermanence, noble and base, old and young, beautiful and ugly alike find no escape. A loving father and filial child cannot die in one another's place. The corpse lies rank and foul, exposed to wind and sun, utterly unlike the living person.

Sometimes one corpse is seen and sometimes many, which is a sign of great contemplation of impurity. Sometimes corpses fill a settlement or country. Sometimes one corpse changes color; sometimes many change together. Although a corpse is not numbered among the nine perceptions, it is their root and is therefore explained first. These corpses are dark, rigid, with hands and feet swollen and spread open. The whole body expands like a leather bag filled with wind, while filth flows from its nine openings, exceedingly foul and repulsive. Practitioners think: “My body will also become like this; I have not escaped or been liberated. The people I love will become the same.” When this sign arises, they attain a portion of concentrated mind, secluded, profound, peaceful, and pleasant.

In an instant, they see the swollen corpse exposed to wind and sun: skin and flesh decay, the body splits, and form and color change beyond recognition. This is the ruptured perception. Blood flows from the ruptures, disperses and spills, smears every place in mottled patches, pours onto the ground, and sends up a surging stench. This is the blood-smeared perception. Next they see putrid pus flow without cease like wax melting before fire. This is the festering perception. Next they see remnants of skin and flesh dried and scorched by wind and sun, putrid, dark, half blue and half bruised, shriveled and cracked beyond endurance. This is the livid perception. Next they see foxes, wolves, owls, and vultures contesting to devour the corpse, chaotically seizing, tearing, and pulling it. This is the devoured perception. Next they see head and hands scattered in different places and the five viscera split apart, impossible to reassemble. This is the scattered perception. Next they see two kinds of bones: one still covered with pus and grease, the other pure white. Sometimes they see one skeleton and sometimes skeletons filling a settlement.

As these signs transform in sequence, concentrated mind deepens with them, secluded, quiescent, sunk in stillness, peaceful, pleasant, and wondrous, its happiness beyond measure. Practitioners who preserve the Dharma-support stop their contemplation here. Before seeing these signs, defilement by desire was powerful; afterward, desire ceases completely, and even a distant object of desire becomes intolerable. This resembles being able to eat before seeing feces but vomiting immediately upon suddenly smelling the stench. It also resembles a brahmin who maintained pure dharmas being seized and forced to eat a cake smeared with marrow from a sore; after coming to his senses, he strikes his own head and reproaches himself: “I am ruined!”

Once this sign is realized, even someone before one with high brows and emerald eyes, clean white teeth, and crimson lips appears merely like cosmetics spread over a pool of urine or a putrid corpse temporarily dressed in gorgeous silk. One does not wish even to glance again, much less approach the body. Cultivators of impurity may even hire Deer-Staff non-Buddhists to kill them—how could they still seek sexual pleasure through song and embrace? The nine perceptions are a rhubarb decoction treating the grave illness of sexual desire. It also resembles a glutton who knows pig intestine is an organ containing feces but still forces it down. If one personally sees the maggots within and smells its stench, could one continue eating? The preceding sixteen special excellences are weaker and cannot decisively sever desire. The present power of contemplating the nine perceptions is strong and swiftly extinguishes the fire of sexual desire. Hence it is said: “When contemplation of the nine perceptions is accomplished, the six thieves of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind are gradually removed.” Practitioners thereby recognize the deception of attachment and hostility and know that constructed and real characteristics are both empty. Such revulsion not only removes desire; it can produce the outflow-free and also accomplish the Great Vehicle.

After explaining the perception of death and change, the Explanatory Treatise next discusses the six pāramitās and four immeasurable minds. Various masters all say that the text's meaning is disordered. Seen now, a bodhisattva possesses the Great Vehicle while cultivating the very first perception; after extensively explaining the various dharmas, the text immediately says, “The perception of burning is likewise.” How could this passage be a misplaced textual fragment?

〔Section §10〕 Eight Relinquishments

Next are the arising signs of the eight relinquishments. The first three classes—root dhyāna, special excellences, and penetrating illumination—belong in sequence to savor-dhyāna and pure dhyāna. From the nine perceptions through the totalities is named contemplation; the nine sequential concentrations, training; the Lion's Ferocity Samādhi, cultivation by infusion; the Transcending Samādhi, higher cultivation. All four are phenomenal concentrations. The relinquishments are explained first.

Relinquishment has general and specific dimensions. In general it is shared by the Two Vehicles; specifically it belongs to bodhisattvas. Its name is not fixed. Sometimes the result is named within the cause and relinquishment is called liberation; sometimes the cause is named within the result and liberation called relinquishment. To classify them definitively, only when afflictions are exhausted and phenomena and principle complete is it called liberation. When afflictions are not exhausted and meditative concentration incomplete, it is only relinquishment. “Turning one's back” means becoming disenchanted with the pure five desires of a lower ground and one's current meditative ground. “Relinquishing” means abandoning defiled attachment; hence relinquishment. To break abundant defilement by desire, an external sign arises as explained above; to break abundant attachment to views, an internal sign. The internal signs are the eight relinquishments: first, having form internally and contemplating form externally, through the eighth, the relinquishment of cessation of feeling and perception.

Having form internally and contemplating form externally means not destroying or extinguishing the internal form body: internally one contemplates white bones, skin, and flesh; externally corpses and the like. The cultivation method appears in detail in the Dhyāna Gate; only its arising sign is given briefly here. Practitioners suddenly see the skin of their toes resembling water bubbles, gradually spreading through shins and waist and throughout the body to the crown. In an instant the whole body becomes rigid, swollen, and constricted; five fingers spread, legs resemble pillars, waist and abdomen a jar, head a basin, every part swelling together like a leather bag filled with wind.

When this sign arises, it sometimes proceeds from feet to head and sometimes from head to feet. The swollen body fills an entire rope bed. Skin stretches taut and flesh splits, about to burst. After bursting, pus flows out and soaks every place. Then from head to foot, skin and flesh fall away by themselves, leaving only white bones whose joints support one another, firm and unmoving. The fallen skin and flesh gather in one place, foul and ugly like a heap of worms. When this sign arises, one becomes profoundly disenchanted with one's own body and regards it like feces. How much less would one begrudge and cling to spouse or wealth?

The bodhisattva who gave his body and people who hired Deer-Staff to kill them had attained this kind of contemplation. Internally no self is conceived, externally no attachment to what belongs to self; one therefore bows the head in shame and conscience, with disenchantment continuing unbroken〔and so forth〕. The Great Sūtra says: “Remove skin and flesh and carefully contemplate the white bones. Bind mindfulness between every joint, contemplate forward and backward, and make the white bones pure and clean.” This is having form internally.

Contemplating form externally means outwardly seeing corpses swollen and festering, filling a settlement or country, like the impurity contemplated in the preceding nine perceptions; hence contemplating form externally. This stage lies in desire-realm concentration. As the dharma advances, one sees the white bones produce the four colors blue, yellow, white, and dove-gray, their light glittering as if about to arise but not yet fully arisen. Blue produces blue light and so through dove-gray light, flowing like water. Light covers the skeleton like sunlight reflected in a mirror amid dusty haze. If mind conditions the feet, light follows downward; if the head, upward. Blue light illuminates the ten directions and everything seen is blue, as the face of Mount Sumeru takes the color of its direction. Yellow, white, and dove-gray are the same. While these colored lights are about to arise but not yet fully arisen, the stage is access concentration.

After a long time, the light should arise naturally. If it still does not, gather mindfulness, examine the space between the brows carefully, and relax slightly; light then appears. At first it resembles a bamboo opening emitting a thin wisp of smoke, then expands vastly. Four colors revolve and issue from between the brows, illuminating the ten directions with sudden great brightness. Each color also possesses ten merits, eight contacts, five factors, and signs of correct and deviant.

The first arising of one color is awareness; distinguishing eight colors is examination. Formerly one knew there were bones within flesh but not eight colors within bone. Seeing an object never seen before, one both rejoices and feels grief and conscience; this is the factor of joy. When colored light arises, inner mind deeply experiences Dharma-happiness and the ground of mind becomes peacefully pleasant; this is the factor of happiness. Concentrated mind is limpid, abiding without movement, secluded and continuously deepening. Emptiness, brightness, wisdom, concentration, faith, reverence, shame, and conscience arise. One no longer slanders or damages correct Dharma, leaves the five coverings, and corresponds with dhyāna. Even if contacts such as cold and warmth arise in clusters, none becomes confused; hence a forest.

Because the mind-eye is open and bright and the Dharma profound with weighty happiness, the movement, itching, emptiness, brightness, five factors, and other signs here differ from root dhyāna, the sixteen special excellences, and penetrating illumination. Those meditative signs still carry skin and flesh, and tactile feeling cannot penetrate completely. Now contact is directly with the skeleton, so the Dharma is profound and wondrous. If a deviant sign enters the eight colors, blue may appear indistinct, mottled, and ugly; this is a deviant sign, and the remaining seven colors are the same. Dark realization lacks contemplative wisdom, like night in which thieves abound. The present dhyāna possesses contemplative wisdom, like daytime when deception is rarer and easily removed if it appears.

Someone in the Tripiṭaka Teaching says: “The eight colors are form-realm dharmas. Contacting the desire-realm skeleton, they cause various merits to arise.” This is said according to root outflowed dhyāna. The merits of moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom explained in the Great Vehicle cannot be exhausted. Why? After life decays and the form through which one received precepts is lost, the nonmanifest substance of moral discipline still does not cease. Although meditative concentration only subdues delusion, the severance of delusion is no longer distant, like a parasitic worm entering the body and harming the five viscera: although death has not occurred, it will not be long. The path of wisdom never retreats or is lost. Even if one at the first fruit must undergo seven further births and deaths, outflow-free wisdom remains limpid. One should therefore know that Great-Vehicle moral discipline and concentration are outflow-free dharmas. If so, the eight colored lights are dharmas beyond the three realms.

When this sign arises, the first relinquishment is accomplished at the first dhyāna. The Chengshi Lun says: “The first two relinquishments are embraced by the desire realm; pure relinquishment by the form realm; the four formless relinquishments by the formless realm; cessation relinquishment transcends the three realms.” The Abhidharma says: “The first and second relinquishments extend through the desire realm and first two dhyānas; pure relinquishment lies in the four dhyānas. The third dhyāna has too much happiness, so no relinquishment is established there.” Others say: “The third dhyāna has no sphere of mastery, and the fourth no relinquishment.” The three schools differ. The present account follows the Explanatory Treatise: the first relinquishment and first two spheres of mastery are both embraced by the first dhyāna. Possession of its five factors verifies that it belongs there.

Second, having no form internally, contemplate external form with an impure mind. Since the skeleton is produced from reproductive fluids, it should be rebuked, abandoned, and extinguished by analyzing the white bones into the particles of the four elements. Great-Vehicle contemplation embodies dharmas and knows the skeleton arises from mind. Mind is like an illusion and the skeleton false, so the skeleton disappears by itself. It resembles a fine horse following a person's intent, or good people working together whose coming and going never conflict. When the skeleton has departed but a new dharma has not yet arrived, excessive joy easily causes retreat; therefore one contemplates external form only with an impure mind.

External form first means external corpses and the like, and also the eight colors emitted by the skeleton. External form is still contemplated because this stage remains close to the desire realm and must continue contemplating external impurity. Intentionally cultivating destruction of the skeleton has a separate contemplative method; only spontaneous arising signs are discussed now. Practitioners suddenly see the skeleton naturally wear away, leaving only the eight colors and external impurity. Its dissolution occurs in intermediate concentration. Next the eight colors and inner purity arise simultaneously, with blue, yellow, and other lights brightening further. The four factors of inner purity, joy, happiness, and one-pointed mind are all superior to before. This is the second relinquishment, at the second dhyāna.

Third, personally realizing pure relinquishment. The first and second dhyānas do not have happiness filling the body, while the fourth has no happy feeling. Through what, then, is personal realization made? Followers of the Chengshi Lun consider pure relinquishment shared by all four dhyānas; the present account treats it as embraced jointly by the third and fourth. Since the third has happiness filling the body and can be used for personal realization, it is the initial arising of pure relinquishment. Only at the fourth is it fully accomplished and able to possess the spheres of mastery. Pure relinquishment therefore lies in the third dhyāna.

Concerning “pure,” the Explanatory Treatise says it is “named pure because the conditioned object is pure.” The eight colors are already pure dharmas, but have not yet been refined by a pure conditioned object. Pure form is most complete in the fourth dhyāna; when it arises it makes the eight colors more luminous and pure, hence purity through a pure object. “Feeling throughout the body” refers to the third dhyāna as the highest happy feeling. The third and fourth dhyānas are therefore combined as pure relinquishment.

Purity has four meanings. First, impurity within impurity: the desire-realm body is originally impure and is now swollen, hence impure impurity. Second, purity within impurity: removing skin and flesh and carefully contemplating the white bones, free of sinews and blood in the abdomen and white as shell, is impure purity. Third, impurity within purity: the eight colored lights emitted from between the brows are originally pure but not yet refined through counteraction, hence pure impurity. Fourth, purity within purity: the third relinquishment is further refined through a pure object, hence pure purity.

Fourth is the relinquishment of space. Transcend all forms, extinguish resistant forms, and no longer recollect various forms. “All forms” means internal and external desire-realm forms. “Resistant forms” means the forms confronting the five faculties of eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. These two classes were extinguished in the first three relinquishments, leaving only the eight colors that transform with mind, hence various forms. Now rebuke and abandon the eight colors and condition space. No additional dharma is involved; this is simply entering the sphere of space. Ordinary people are deeply defiled by attachment and readily cherish the concentration of space. Noble ones arouse profound mind and possess sharp wisdom, allowing them to advance continuously without turning back; hence relinquishment.

Conditioning space too much makes mind diffuse, and the object of space is false and unreal, so one relinquishes space and conditions consciousness. Correspondence with the dharma of consciousness is the relinquishment of the sphere of consciousness. Next one contemplates consciousness as arising and ceasing, impermanent and false. The external conditioned object no longer exists and only the conditioning mind remains; hence the sphere of nothingness. The sphere of consciousness resembles an abscess and nothingness a sore. Relinquishing both consciousness and nonconsciousness is neither perception nor nonperception. Although no coarse perception remains, subtle afflictions do. Now one further relinquishes the feeling and perception that condition neither perception, and no perception of an agent of cessation remains. The dharma of concentration gathers and sustains the body in silent nonperception, like a fish in water or an insect hibernating in winter.

If the name were established only from the lower ground that is extinguished, how would this differ from ordinary climbing upward and rejecting what is below? The present name is established from what performs cessation: it extinguishes its own ground and other grounds, so it is called the relinquishment of cessation of feeling and perception. Details appear in Cultivation and Realization.

The Abhidharma says that one who attains cessation concentration is liberated in both respects, while one who lacks it is only liberated through wisdom. The Chengshi Lun says that attaining lightning-flash concentration is liberation through wisdom, while possessing every worldly dhyāna is liberation in both respects. It regards the final four relinquishments as having no separate dharma. If it means cultivating the final four through outflow-free mind, that can be established. But why does it also say the first three have no separate dharma while borrowing only non-Buddhist dhyāna?〔and so forth〕

If one attained the eight concentrations in a past life, former habituation can arise in the present. Cessation concentration, however, must be outflow-free; without outflow-free wisdom it cannot be accomplished through cultivation, so spontaneous arising of cessation concentration from former habituation is not discussed. Ordinary people cannot cultivate and attain the nine sequential concentrations, Transcending Samādhi, and related practices according to the Tripiṭaka Teaching, so their arising through former habituation is likewise not discussed. According to the Great Vehicle, such a meaning should exist, but it is not treated here.

〔Section §11〕 Great Impurity and Great Relinquishment

Next are the arising signs of great contemplation of impurity, also called great relinquishment. The preceding contemplation and arising removed the skin and flesh to which desire clings and carefully contemplated the skeleton and corpse as impure. Sometimes one corpse or two was contemplated, sometimes impurity overflowing through a city or settlement, but all concerned only the direct retributions of oneself and other beings; hence small impurity. Disenchantment and relinquishment based upon this are called relinquishment, with general and specific dimensions〔and so forth〕.

Great contemplation of impurity sees not only the overflowing impurity of direct retribution but also dependent retribution: houses, money and wealth, grain and rice, clothing, food and drink, mountains and rivers, gardens and groves, the Yangzi and Huai rivers, pools and marshes—all form dharmas—as impure. Insects are everywhere, pus flows, and stench and rankness abound. Houses resemble tombs, money dead snakes, soup fecal liquid, rice white worms, clothing stinking skin, mountains heaps of flesh, pools rivers of pus, gardens dry bones, and rivers and seas vast expanses of filth. The Great Sūtra says: “On seeing delicious soup, form the perception of putrid liquid.” This is the contemplative method.

While seated in meditation, one suddenly sees these objects and signs and finds nowhere on the whole earth worthy of delight. Neither dependent nor direct retribution merits attachment. This is the arising of great impurity. It resembles first kindling a fire: even while drilling wood forcefully, smoke and flame remain small. Once the fire gains strength it no longer selects its fuel and can burn even rivers dry. At first, contemplation of impurity sees only one corpse or one country and sexual desire still arises and ceases. Now that the power of concentration is established and revulsion strong, every dependent and direct retribution is impure and desire ceases forever.

Furthermore, how could anything have a fixed characteristic? Beings evoke and see things differently according to their retributions. Wholesome karma evokes pure form and unwholesome karma impure form. Devas see jeweled grounds and palaces. Rich and happy human beings can even take tile and stone and make them become gold and silver. All are evoked by the force of wholesome karma, with dependent and direct retribution both pure. The hells taught in the Saṅgharakṣa Sūtra have different signs: some see their own flesh as land plowed by others; some their body as a forest broken by a crowd; some their body as mountain, house, or clothing. There are 120 kinds, all impure forms evoked by unwholesome karma.

If one grasps pure form as truly existent and cherishes it firmly, the great power of contemplation must break great attachment and reverse the great inversion, accomplishing great contemplation of impurity. Why? Illusionists mostly deceive, but dharmas of superknowledge accord with the principle by which things transform; every object can change. Clarified butter, wax, gold, and iron flow like water when heated and solidify like earth when cooled. This contemplative method accords with the principle of transformation and occurs through the power of concentration.

Root dhyāna alone can remove attachment to a lower ground but not one's own ground. Cultivating small and great relinquishment can remove attachment both to lower and current grounds even before becoming outflow-free. When outflow-free contemplation conditions all and penetrates it, attachment to lower, current, and higher grounds can all be removed.

When great impurity arises, the relinquishment entered is also great and is embraced by the first dhyāna. When no skeleton exists within and one outwardly contemplates only the eight colors and the two retributions, dependent and direct, the vastness of the conditioned object makes this the second great relinquishment, embraced by the second dhyāna. Entering pure relinquishment from great impurity makes that attainment great as well, and so through cessation relinquishment.

Great spheres of mastery refine relinquishment further, giving practitioners sovereign transformation of the conditioned object. The Great Treatise says people of dull faculties cultivate the spheres of mastery and totalities only after completing the eight relinquishments; those of middling faculties cultivate spheres of mastery and the rest in the fourth dhyāna after completing the first three relinquishments; those of superior faculties can proceed to cultivate all dharmas after only the first relinquishment. The present explanation follows middling faculties.

“Many” and “few” still concern dependent and direct retribution. One corpse is few and two many, and increasing numbers are understood in sequence. One garment, portion of food, mountain, or river is few; immeasurable garments, foods, mountains, and rivers are many. Initial cultivation proceeds from few to many; spontaneous arising signs should now be the same.

“Beautiful” and “ugly”: upright form obtained through wholesome karma is beautiful; inferior form obtained through unwholesome karma, ugly. Yet in both cases, what accords with my intent and I consider pleasing is beautiful; what opposes it and I consider repellent is ugly. Both are beautiful with wisdom and ugly with delusion; wealth and honor are beautiful, poverty and baseness ugly. Beautiful and ugly alike are impure. Mountains, rivers, countries, clothing, food, and houses, whether beautiful or ugly, are all impure. One may also say both direct and dependent retributions are ugly, while the eight colors emitted by the skeleton are beautiful. Going further, unrefined eight colors are ugly and only refined ones beautiful. Beautiful and ugly remain equally impure. These two spheres of mastery are embraced by the first dhyāna.

When no form exists internally and one contemplates form externally, whether many or few, beautiful or ugly, one knows and sees with mastery. The inner skeleton has disappeared while eight colors remain outside, together with the many and few, beautiful and ugly, direct and dependent retributions, all as explained above〔and so forth〕.

Mohe Zhiguan, Fascicle Nine〔Upper〕.

Mohe Zhiguan, Fascicle Nine〔Lower〕.

Taught by Great Master Zhizhe of Tiantai in the Sui and recorded by his disciple Guanding.

“Knowing with mastery” means this thought of mind masters form dharmas and is not bound by them. Mind can further transform form, hence knowing with mastery. “Seeing with mastery” means that pure and impure objects can be transformed freely within one's own mind; contemplative understanding is accomplished, hence seeing with mastery. These two spheres of mastery are embraced by the second dhyāna.

When the spheres of mastery are accomplished, practitioners do not cherish even their own body, much less wealth and others' bodies. Ancient worthies could yield fame and position, relinquish countries, or wash their ears because someone led an ox to drink from their stream. They had cultivated this contemplation in past lives until it naturally became their nature and defiled attachment no longer remained. Without understanding this principle, a person clings to fame and position until death. How could one suddenly regard glory lightly and abandon a throne?

The final four spheres of mastery are accomplished in the fourth dhyāna. The third has too much happy feeling to transform with sovereignty. This classification belongs to the śrāvaka Dharma. In bodhisattva Dharma, every dhyāna can transform; how could any wholly lack it? The Great Treatise speaks of blue, yellow, red, and white, from the standpoint of real dharmas. The Sūtra of the Original Acts speaks of earth, water, fire, and wind, from provisional names; the two teachings can embrace one another. Within these four spheres of mastery, internal and external form are exhausted and only the eight colors remain. There is transformation of many and few, but no further transformation of beautiful and ugly.

The ten totalities are all accomplished in the fourth dhyāna. The first has much awareness and examination, the second moving joy, and the third moving happiness; none can become vast and pervasive and fill every place. Only the fourth dhyāna's unmoving mindfulness and wisdom can become vast and pervasive. Blue fills the ten directions so everything seen is blue; the remaining colors likewise fill them and are therefore called totalities.

“Entry of totalities” means that when blue fills everything, yellow enters blue and likewise fills every place. The basic characteristics of blue and yellow remain individually intact; they enter one another without confusion. The other colors are the same. This is entry of totalities. Clearly it is colored light released from inner mind that fills every place. How could an external leaf be taken as the conditioned object and then said to fill every place? Without a dharma of transformation inside mind, how could an external leaf be transformed? One must first transform one's own mind before transforming a leaf. The Great Treatise uses a blue lotus as an example because it fears people will not understand, borrowing an outer object to illustrate inner mind. One cannot grasp the simile as the true meaning. Cultivators of penetrating illumination have no skeleton within and emit no eight colors; when cultivating spheres of mastery they may perhaps borrow an external conditioned object. Practitioners who preserve the Dharma-support can release the eight colors from inner mind and need not borrow an external object.

Furthermore, bodhisattvas cultivating spheres of mastery can fully possess the various practices. Without penetrating the true signs of dependent and direct retribution, they develop attachment and stinginess. When this contemplation becomes clear, they wish to relinquish even the body—how much less would they cherish their own wealth or crave another's property? This is the pāramitā of giving.

Having attained this contemplation, they could never break moral discipline for wealth or sex, kill the owner of property and take it, then use a hundred deceptions to preserve themselves. Such a thing is impossible; this is the pāramitā of moral discipline. When this contemplation is attained, even if others trouble and dispossess them, anger never arises; they do not contend over things like feces. This is the pāramitā of patient endurance. Once this contemplation is accomplished, they do not depend upon an impure corpse-body or lose concentrated mind halfway because their country is impure. This is the pāramitā of diligence. This contemplation fully possesses contemplation, training, cultivation by infusion, higher cultivation, transformations through superknowledge, vow-knowledge, summit dhyāna, and the rest. This is dhyāna pāramitā. When this contemplation is attained, neither contemplating agent nor contemplated object of any dharma can be obtained; neither arising nor ceasing, all is ultimately pure. This is prajñā pāramitā.

Every Dharma gate of concentration of the path is accomplished within the spheres of mastery's sovereign transformation. Concentrated mind is sovereign and can turn, send away, and settle the conditioned object, establishing various Dharma gates and accomplishing whatever mind wishes, like a swift horse that can break an enemy formation and stop itself at will. Mind is now bright and pure, with no further demonic affairs. Mind can employ Māra; Māra cannot destroy mind. When cultivators of the four kinds of samādhi produce this Dharma, many turn into the stage of disciples of the five grades. Why? The force assisting the path is great and can quickly bring people near the cool pool. At this point, it is both a sign of the arising of contemplative dhyāna and of Great-Vehicle dhyāna. As for profound concentrations of training, cultivation by infusion, higher cultivation, and the rest, ordinary people cannot even study them, so spontaneous arising from former habituation cannot be discussed. If another scripture or treatise clearly teaches it, nothing more need be said.

〔Section §12〕 Loving-Kindness

Seventh are the arising signs of loving-kindness. Loving-kindness arises before or after root dhyāna〔and so forth〕. Practitioners suddenly condition all beings and apprehend the sign of their attaining happiness. Mind has neither hostility nor harm and is pleased and at ease. Sometimes beings are seen attaining human happiness and sometimes heavenly happiness. Through skillful cultivation one attains understanding; concentrated mind becomes distinct and no being fails to attain happiness. At first thoughts are continuous, fine, and quiet; afterward the power of concentration deepens.

The conditioned beings have three classes. Conditioning loved ones as attaining happiness is named broad; neutral people, great; enemies, immeasurable. Three classes can also be established by direction: conditioning beings in one direction as attaining happiness is broad; in the four intermediate directions, great; in the ten directions, immeasurable.

Loving-kindness concentration can be hidden or unhidden. When mind internally conditions beings and decisively forms the perception that they attain happiness, with mind and object exceedingly clear, but externally one does not see beings actually receiving happiness, it is unhidden within and hidden without. When mind is bright and pure within and one externally sees beings attain happiness, it is unhidden both within and without.

If loving-kindness concentration is attained first and the five factors of the first dhyāna arise afterward: initially knowing all beings attain happiness, mind joins concentration, one is happy inwardly, and skillful cultivation brings understanding—this is the factor of awareness. Clearly distinguishing the happiness beings attain, whether human or heavenly and in immeasurably different classes, is examination. Being equal toward enemies and loved ones, no longer suffering from fear of enemies or worry for loved ones, is joy. When the movement of joy ceases, spirit becomes peacefully pleased, like the sign of happiness attained by conditioned beings; this is happiness. The dharma of concentration deepens and gathers inner mind without movement; this is one-pointed mind.

The five factors of loving-kindness concentration have the same names as root dhyāna, yet their Dharma-flavors always differ, just as syrup and water are both cool but taste different. Root dhyāna alone produces retribution only among Brahmā's Assembly and Ministers; attaining loving-kindness concentration can produce the retribution of a Brahmā king. Since the retribution is superior, the causal ground is also vaster. If root dhyāna is attained first and loving-kindness cultivated afterward, the root dhyāna also becomes more profound.

Within loving-kindness concentration, the second dhyāna may arise and accomplish the four factors beginning with inner purity; then the third, accomplishing five factors led by happiness; then the fourth. Each joins its corresponding dhyāna, possessing a forest of factors and doubling the preceding Dharma-flavor, as in the earlier simile. Yet loving-kindness originally conditions others attaining happiness. Internally receiving pleasant concentration and externally seeing others attain happiness occurs only through the third dhyāna. At the fourth, one merely sees others attain happiness while no happy feeling remains within, because suffering and happiness have been relinquished. This is the Small Vehicle's distinction.

To break attachment to causal relations, the Buddha sometimes says: “Cultivating loving-kindness produces merit through the Heaven of Pervasive Purity; compassion through the sphere of space; appreciative joy through the sphere of consciousness; equanimity through the sphere of nothingness.” Yet bodhisattvas constantly abide with loving-kindness and compassion. On what meditative ground would these be absent? Loving-kindness and compassion infuse every wholesome Dharma; how could they reach only the third dhyāna? The preceding classification is merely an initial explanation through preparatory means. The same applies when root dhyāna arises first and loving-kindness concentration afterward. Both can be dark realization and hidden, or unhidden within and hidden without〔and so forth〕.

When loving-kindness concentration arises in dependence upon the sixteen special excellences or penetrating illumination, the supporting concentration has its own set of merits and the supported loving-kindness attaches and arises without confusion. Since the supporting concentration has contemplative wisdom, loving-kindness concentration is also unhidden and its five-factor Dharma-flavor doubly superior to root dhyāna. Sometimes loving-kindness concentration produces the sixteen special excellences or penetrating illumination; loving-kindness is then likewise unhidden and its meditative flavor profound. Sometimes loving-kindness produces small or great contemplation of impurity.

Someone asks: Contemplation of impurity apprehends the destruction of beings' bodies. Since no being remains to condition, who could attain happiness?

Answer: Although no outflowed happiness attained by a being remains, the happiness of nirvāṇa exists. This produces loving-kindness conditioned by Dharmas.

Another asks: Loving-kindness conditions the pure signs of beings, without anger or harm, apprehending their beautiful characteristics. Contemplation of impurity destroys the signs of beings and apprehends their ugly characteristics. How can these opposed contemplations produce one another?

Answer: There is no obstruction. Although seeing the body as impure, one may simultaneously see a pure person upright and neatly clothed. Although loving-kindness concentration arises, contemplation of impurity may also arise. Loving-kindness can further adorn relinquishment and other contemplations, doubling and deepening their merits beyond impurity alone. The two contemplations can produce one another〔and so forth〕.

The mutual arising of the remaining three immeasurable minds—compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity—can be understood by comparison with loving-kindness concentration.

When the four immeasurable minds arise attached to root dhyāna, they are outflowed. Attached to the sixteen special excellences or penetrating illumination, they are both outflowed and outflow-free. Attached to contemplation of impurity, they are outflow-free. Since causes and conditions differ, loving-kindness concentration and the rest have hundreds of thousands of shallower and deeper differences that cannot all be explained.

This resembles the four elements of form in the desire realm producing various lands distinguished as blue, yellow, red, white, high, and low; various trees, flowers, plants, and fruits distinguished as sweet, bitter, pungent, sour, medicinal, poisonous, fragrant, and foul; various people distinguished as upright, ugly, intelligent, dull, poor, rich, good, and evil; and various birds and beasts, some hairy, some horned, some flying, some running. Their classes are boundless and grades do not mix; each is accomplished according to its intrinsic limits and the extent of its power.

People of thin merit live only upon barnyard millet and cannot believe sugarcane and grapes exist. Pure form-realm dharmas are the same. Merits of the factors of dhyāna transform into various flavors that add to and mingle with one another without confusion. By the four immeasurable minds, objects become still vaster. Why? Beings are immeasurable, so perceptions of beings attaining happiness are immeasurable. Dharmas are immeasurable, so the Dharma-flavors of factors of dhyāna arising in dependence upon different dharmas are likewise incalculable. Beings of thin merit do not believe in meditative concentration. Even if they believe one meditative method, they do not believe it possesses immeasurable merits, like people in a remote mountain region who know no delicacies, or a frog in a well unable to believe what the sea spirit sees. This is truly pitiable. Those able to believe know that the objects of noble ones are inconceivable and do not slander them〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §13〕 Arising of Dependent-Origination Dhyāna

Eighth are the arising signs of dependent-origination dhyāna. When practitioners have great meritorious achievement, the buddhas confer the samādhi of meditative concentration upon them; for others, concentration on dependent origination arises sooner or later because of past habituation〔and so forth〕.

While seated in meditation, practitioners suddenly consider what mind conditions, whether a wholesome mind or an evil mind. The existence of conditioning subject and conditioned object is the link of existence among the twelve links. Existence can contain future retribution. This existence comes from grasping: when mind grasps wholesomeness or evil, existence is formed; without grasping, this existence would not be present. One therefore knows that existence arises from grasping. One further knows that grasping arises from craving, for one grasps only because one craves. For example, one craves the form-body and continues to grasp it until death; without craving, one would not grasp.

Craving arises from feeling. Because one receives wholesome or evil objects, craving arises; without receiving them, craving does not arise. Feeling in turn comes from contact: the six objects of form, sound, fragrance, flavor, touch, and dharmas contact the six faculties of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, and feeling therefore arises; without contact, there is no feeling. A scripture says, “With the six contacts as causes and conditions, various feelings arise.” Feeling therefore arises from contact.

One further knows that contact comes from the six entrances of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. Without the six consciousnesses governing the six faculties, they could not enter among the six objects and produce contact. Contact arises from the sense fields, and the sense fields in turn exist through name-and-form. Form by itself cannot contact, like a corpse; name by itself likewise cannot contact, like someone blind and deaf. Only when form and mind combine is there contact. Form is the form aggregate; mind is the four aggregates of feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness. Discerning this form is the consciousness aggregate; receiving it is the feeling aggregate; greed and anger concerning it belong respectively to the aggregates of perception and formations. Only when all five aggregates are present is there conscious contact. One therefore knows that contact arises from name-and-form.

Name-and-form exists through the consciousness first implanted in the womb. At the initial implantation it is called kalala and already possesses three matters: first, life; second, warmth; and third, consciousness. Retributive wind is present, and “life” is provisionally established in dependence upon this wind. That the reproductive fluids of the parents neither stink nor decay is called warmth. The mental activity within them is called consciousness. Only because consciousness is implanted in the womb do embryonic signs such as coagulated butter and thin curds develop, the six vesicles gradually open, and name and form combine. From this one knows that name-and-form arises precisely from consciousness.

Consciousness comes from karmic formations. Wholesome karma from having upheld the five precepts in the past causes one to receive human name-and-form in the next life. Evil karma from having broken the five precepts in the past causes birth in the three evil destinies. One therefore knows that consciousness comes from karma, and karma is the link of formations. Formations in turn exist through ignorance: delusion, craving, and defilement construct various formations, causing consciousness to flow from the past into the present. Present craving and grasping then condition existence; existence contains retribution and draws forth future birth and death. Causes and conditions thus revolve through three lives, empty within and without a master.

When contemplative wisdom arises through reflection in this way, deviant attachment to a person and self is broken. Concentrated mind becomes stable and continuous, moving from coarse to subtle through desire-realm concentration and access concentration and onward to the root first dhyāna, where the merits of the five factors arise in sequence. Awareness that dependent origination is empty and without a ruler is the factor of awareness. Clearly distinguishing how circulation through the three lives depends upon one link after another without error is examination. Having gained the wisdom of dependent origination and deeply known the three lives, how could one not rejoice and celebrate? This is the factor of joy. The dharma of concentration gathers and sustains inner mind, making it peaceful, pleased, and wondrous; this is happiness. Concentrated mind is lucid, without grasping at objects or delusive thoughts; this is one-pointed mind.

The samādhi of dependent origination is inherently wisdom in character. Because this wisdom is clear, it can bring forth root dhyāna. Sometimes root dhyāna and dependent-origination samādhi join one another, and their Dharma-flavor becomes pure, thick, and intense, unlike the five factors arising alone. This samādhi too can be hidden or unhidden. If inwardly one merely understands the Dharma of dependent origination and no longer produces the inversion of self, yet this understanding only corresponds with root dhyāna and remains implicit within it, this is called hidden. If, when samādhi arises, inner mind is bright and pure and one sees the kalala, the development of the five vesicles, and their place of birth and abiding; sees the wholesome and evil karmic formations made in the past and the beauty or ugliness formed from them; and also sees future matters of birth and death, so that all three lives are distinct, this is an unhidden sign.

Both hidden and unhidden forms fully possess the ten dharmas beginning with emptiness and brightness. This is root dhyāna arising through dependent-origination samādhi. The sixteen special excellences, penetrating illumination, relinquishments, and other dhyānas likewise each have hidden and unhidden forms and can arise through dependent-origination samādhi.

When contemplation of dependent origination arises from root dhyāna, practitioners suddenly consider within concentration: all the root concentrations are accomplished through causes and conditions. The causes and conditions that accomplish them and the dhyāna they accomplish constitute existence. Coarse abiding and fine abiding contain the existences of the Yāma and Tuṣita heavens; where existence is born, death necessarily follows. Desire-realm concentration is also an existence accomplished through causes and conditions. Since existence contains a result, one will in the future receive birth in the Heaven of Enjoying Transformations; where birth exists, death follows. Access concentration is likewise an existence accomplished through causes and conditions. Since it contains a result, one will in the future receive existence in the Heaven of Freely Enjoying Others’ Transformations. Correspondence with the first dhyāna contains existence in the heavens of the first dhyāna; the same applies all the way through the concentration of neither perception nor non-perception.

All these existences come from grasping. Grasping the sign of the first dhyāna resembles the various hopes in mind described among the preceding twenty-five preparatory means: one grasps what the signs of dhyāna are like. One therefore knows that existence arises from grasping. Grasping in turn comes from craving: hearing others describe the merit of the first dhyāna, one craves its flavor. Craving in turn comes from feeling: only after mind receives what it hears about those merits does craving arise. Feeling in turn comes from the sense fields, which are the six faculties; without the six faculties entering their objects, there would be nowhere to receive. Feeling also comes from contact with objects, for only when faculty and object make contact is there entrance. Contact comes from name-and-form, for only when the five aggregates combine is there contact. Name-and-form comes from the three matters of life, warmth, and consciousness when consciousness is first implanted in the womb. These three matters come from karma through which the body is received. Karma in turn arises from ignorance, and thus there is the consciousness that receives birth, continuing through aging-and-death.

From the highest concentration of neither perception nor non-perception down to the lowest coarse abiding, one can clearly see the twelve links within each. The sixteen special excellences, penetrating illumination, and other concentrations that arise through root dhyāna can be understood in the same way〔and so forth〕.

Because contemplation of dependent origination breaks the inversion of self, its intent is the same as the element preparatory means that breaks attachment to self; it is named dependent-origination samādhi only in accordance with the Dhyāna Sūtra. Tracing cause and result through three lives belongs to wisdom in character, yet it is still called a contemplation for settling mind. Only when mind has come to rest like a sealed room without wind can one proceed to cultivate the establishments of mindfulness. Only when contemplation through the establishments of mindfulness is accomplished is it called wisdom from hearing, which is already contemplation of principle.

When Pūrṇa gained understanding, he said, “I have understood and known.” “How do you know?” “If one knows ignorance, grasping and existence will no longer arise.” This expresses wisdom from hearing. The present contemplation of dependent origination still precedes the establishments of mindfulness and does not yet possess the power of wisdom from hearing; it therefore belongs to phenomenal contemplation.

The dependent-origination gate differs according to sentient beings’ faculties. The Pusa Yingluo Benye Jing teaches ten kinds of twelvefold dependent origination, the Great Collection teaches dependent origination as retribution and dependent origination in one thought, and various masters mostly transmit dependent origination through three lives. Nāgārjuna begins the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā with the “Examination of Conditions.” Some treatise masters hold that dependent origination cannot embrace every Dharma and that the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā therefore does not take it as the treatise’s cardinal principle, counting it only as conventional truth. They say that only after dependent origination has been broken entirely is there ultimate truth, and therefore take the two truths as the treatise’s cardinal principle.

The present text asks in return: what chapter of the entire treatise does not first explain conventional truth and then break attachment to it completely? This is merely the method used throughout the treatise, not the distinctive cardinal principle of one particular chapter. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā first contemplates dependent origination in general. The “Examination of Defilement” and subsequent chapters separately break the links of craving and grasping; the “Examination of the Six Faculties” separately breaks the links belonging to the result of suffering; and the final two chapters further explain how śrāvakas contemplate dependent origination. The various intents of general and specific contemplation all lie in contemplating dependent origination. How could one say the treatise does not take dependent origination as its cardinal principle? Northern treatise masters take the remedial meaning in the final chapter and establish six causes and four conditions as the cardinal principle. Yet that is only arising-and-ceasing dependent origination, the intent of the final two chapters, not the true cardinal principle of the whole treatise. After the Buddha’s passing, people’s faculties grew increasingly dull. They clung to dependent origination as having fixed real marks and could not understand the Buddha’s intent. Nāgārjuna therefore composed the treatise to illuminate the contemplative gate of the twelve links.

〔Section §14〕 Cultivating the Ten Modes of Contemplation through Dependent Origination

Now that the Dharma of dependent origination has arisen, calming-and-contemplation is explained through dependent origination, likewise in ten meanings〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §14.1〕 Conceivable and Inconceivable Objects and the Four Teachings

First is the conceivable object. In past states of ignorant mind, constructing black karma and various unwholesome formations accomplishes the Dharma realms of the three evil destinies: hell beings, hungry ghosts, and animals. Constructing various white and unmoving karmas accomplishes the Dharma realms of the three wholesome destinies: humans, gods, and asuras.

Transforming ignorance into discerning wisdom that contemplates arising and ceasing is contemplation by inferior wisdom and attains śrāvaka awakening. Outflowed formations are transformed into world-transcending practices assisting the path. For the seven kinds of trainees, residual karma is not yet exhausted and they are still born in wholesome destinies. Those beyond training employ outflow-free karma; moreover, because they are attached to ultimate truth, this craving combines with root ignorance and they are born in the Land of Expedient Means with Residue, receiving name-and-form in that land. There, encountering objects, they again produce craving and anger and proceed to grasping and existence. This is the śrāvaka Dharma realm.

Transforming ignorance into the illumination of neither arising nor ceasing is middling wisdom and attains pratyekabuddha awakening. The Invocation of Avalokiteśvara says, “Contemplate the twelve links as a dream, an illusion, and a plantain tree, and one accomplishes the pratyekabuddha path.” This is its meaning. Outflowed formations are transformed into outflow-free practices assisting the path. Whether the fetters and karma are exhausted or not follows the preceding case. This is the pratyekabuddha Dharma realm.

Transforming ignorance into prajñā and unwholesome formations into the five perfections of giving, moral discipline, patient endurance, diligence, and meditative concentration—while ultimate truth has not yet arisen and the twelve links within the three realms are still present—is the Dharma realm of bodhisattvas practicing the six perfections. Transforming ignorance into the wisdom of emptiness and formations into the six perfections—while delusion remains unexhausted before the sixth and seventh grounds of the Shared Teaching—likewise follows the preceding case. Once delusion is exhausted, one is born in the Land of Expedient Means, only with merit and wisdom somewhat surpassing those of the Two Vehicles. This is called contemplation by middling wisdom and attains the awakening of a bodhisattva of the Shared Teaching.

Transforming ignorance into sequential illumination and formations into distinct sequential practices, while delusion remains unexhausted through the ten faiths and ten abodes of the Distinct Teaching but has been exhausted through the ten practices and ten dedications, follows the preceding account concerning birth. This is called contemplation by superior wisdom and attains the awakening of the Distinct Teaching.

Transforming ignorance into the illumination of buddha-wisdom means knowing from the initial arousal of mind that the twelve links are precisely the three buddha-natures. Contemplating in general the true principle of suchness in the twelve links is the proper-cause buddha-nature. The wisdom contemplating the twelve links is the discerning-cause buddha-nature. The mind contemplating the twelve links and fully possessing various practices is the conditioning-cause buddha-nature.

Correlated individually, ignorance, craving, and grasping are the discerning-cause buddha-nature; formations and existence are the conditioning-cause buddha-nature; and the seven links of consciousness, name-and-form, six sense fields, contact, feeling, birth, and aging-and-death are the proper-cause buddha-nature. Why? The path of suffering is birth and death; transforming the body of birth and death is Dharma body. Afflictions are Dharmas of darkness; transforming ignorance makes illumination. Karmic formations are Dharmas of bondage; transforming bondage makes liberation. In their very identity, the three paths are the three virtues of Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation.

Intrinsically complete at the time of cause, the three buddha-natures are neither vertically successive nor horizontally arrayed. Manifested through cultivation at the time of result, the three virtues are likewise neither vertical nor horizontal, like the three dots of the Sanskrit graph yi. This is called the nirvāṇa of the three virtues. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa says, “All sentient beings are precisely great nirvāṇa, are precisely buddhas, and are precisely awakening.” This is its meaning. It is called contemplation by the most superior wisdom and attains a buddha’s awakening.

The five grades of the Perfect Teaching have not yet severed delusion and resemble trainees. On entering the iron-wheel station of the ten faiths, one forever parts from the sea of suffering and resembles one beyond training. Although transformational birth and death remains, the five faculties and merit received in birth are vastly different from those of the Two Vehicles. The Great Treatise says, “People of the Two Vehicles who receive a Dharma-nature body still have faculties that are dark and dull because they take a circuitous route on the Buddha path.”

The Distinct and Perfect Teachings can break ignorance and directly disclose the Dharma that is true as such within the path of suffering, receiving real retribution from real Dharma. They can also directly perfect various practices within the two links of formations and existence and obtain direct and circumstantial retributions free of obstruction. Their faculties are sharp and merit profound, unlike those of middling and inferior faculties. The three worthies and ten sages abide at resultant stations in the Land of Unobstructed Real Reward, all accomplishing the twelve links of that land. At the stage of equal awakening, only the dependent origination of a final life remains.

Finally exhausting the root-source of ignorance and bringing craving and grasping to ultimate exhaustion is ultimate prajñā. Exhausting the seven resultant links beginning with consciousness is ultimate Dharma body. Exhausting formations and existence is ultimate liberation. Although exhaustion is spoken of, in reality there is no Dharma that can be severed; this is inconceivable severance. Without needing to sever ignorance, craving, and grasping, one enters the nirvāṇa of perfect purity. Without needing to sever the seven links beginning with name-and-form, one enters the nirvāṇa of purity by nature. Without needing to sever the wholesome and evil within formations and existence, one enters the nirvāṇa of purity through skillful means. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa says, “One attains liberation through the marks of the five heinous acts, yet is neither bound nor released.” Examined in this way, the twelve links are precisely all the immeasurable Buddha-Dharmas. This is called the inconceivable object.

〔Section §14.2〕 Ten Suchnesses, Ten Objects, and One Thought

Next correlate the twelve links with the ten suchnesses of the Lotus Sūtra. “Suchness-nature” corresponds to ignorance. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa says, “If one knows the nature of ignorance, it is precisely the nature of illumination.” “Suchness-mark” corresponds to formations; “suchness-substance” to the seven links beginning with consciousness; “suchness-power” to craving and grasping; “suchness-function” to the cause of existence, namely the habituated causes of ignorance, craving, and grasping; “suchness-condition” to formations and existence; “suchness-result” to the habituated result in which ignorance is transformed and wisdom arises; and “suchness-recompense” to the five kinds of nirvāṇa obtained through formations and existence. Within “the suchness of the ultimate equality of beginning and end,” beginning corresponds to the three paths and three buddha-natures, while end corresponds to the nirvāṇa of the three virtues.

Next correlate the twelve links with the ten objects. The objects of aggregates, sense fields, and elements in the ten Dharma realms and the object of illness correspond to the seven links beginning with consciousness. The objects of afflictions, views, overbearing pride, and the rest correspond to ignorance, craving, and grasping. The objects of karma, Māra, meditative concentration, the Two Vehicles, bodhisattvas, and the rest correspond to formations, existence, and related links.

If the twelve links, ten suchnesses, and ten objects are dispersed among different thoughts, they arise and cease and are conceivable. If they are present in one thought of mind, they neither arise nor cease and are inconceivable. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra says, “The twelve links are within one thought of mind.” The Great Collection says, “The twelve links are all fully present in one person’s single thought.” Even this formulation is abbreviated. Only if one person’s single thought fully possesses the ten Dharma realms, ten suchnesses, and twelve links can it be called the Great Vehicle’s inconceivable twelvefold dependent origination.

Someone asks: The Twelve Gates Treatise says, “Conditionally arisen Dharmas are in reality unborn. If one says they arise, do they arise within one mind or within many minds?” If so, how can one say the twelve links are in one thought?

Answer: The Avataṃsaka Sūtra says, “Within one are immeasurables; the immeasurables are within one.” The Great Perfection of Wisdom says, “All Dharmas tend toward ignorance, and no Dharma exceeds this tendency; through to all Dharmas tending toward aging-and-death, with no Dharma exceeding it.” What fault is there in now saying that one mind possesses the twelve links? Moreover, “one thought” does not mean the thought of a fixed single mark or different mark grasped by worldly people. One is provisionally spoken of within neither-one-nor-different. For example, when torpor covers mind, one thought within a dream can pass through immeasurable lives, as taught in the Lotus Sūtra〔and so forth〕.

As for the true mind of awakening: if compassionate vows are aroused only in dependence upon arising-and-ceasing, non-arising, provisionally named, or other forms of the twelve links, they are still not true. The Avataṃsaka Sūtra therefore speaks of a Māra of the mind of awakening. Only when compassion is aroused in dependence upon the inconceivable twelve links, universally covering, protecting, delivering, and freeing all, is it called true.

Removing suffering has two aspects. First, remove the five causal sufferings of ignorance, craving, grasping, formations, and existence in the ten Dharma realms. Second, remove the seven resultant sufferings of consciousness, name-and-form, six sense fields, contact, feeling, birth, and aging-and-death in the ten Dharma realms. Loving-kindness that gives happiness likewise has two aspects. Contemplate ignorance, craving, and grasping in the ten Dharma realms and make them the correct path of wisdom-practice; transform formations and existence into the assisting path of practice-practice. This is giving the cause of happiness. Further contemplate the seven links beginning with name-and-form in the ten Dharma realms as originally the nature of peace and happiness, precisely great nirvāṇa, with nothing more to extinguish. This is giving the result of happiness.

In dependence upon these four meanings—removing the cause of suffering, removing the result of suffering, giving the cause of happiness, and giving the result of happiness—arouse the four vast vows. “Cause those not yet delivered to be delivered” means delivering the resultant suffering of birth and death in the seven links of the ten Dharma realms. “Cause those not yet freed to be freed” means freeing the five links of ignorance, craving, grasping, formations, and existence that form the causal accumulation of the ten Dharma realms. “Cause those not yet at peace to be at peace” means settling ignorance, craving, grasping, formations, and existence in the ten Dharma realms within the correct and assisting paths. “Cause those not yet attaining nirvāṇa to attain nirvāṇa” means making the seven links beginning with consciousness manifest as the nirvāṇa of peace and happiness〔and so forth〕.

Skillfully settle mind: skillfully contemplate the seven links beginning with consciousness in the ten Dharma realms as themselves Dharma-nature, no longer producing ignorance, craving, grasping, or the delusions of the eight inversions; this is contemplation. The various inverted formations and existences of the ten Dharma realms come to rest; this is calming〔and so forth〕.

Pervasively break through Dharmas: horizontally break the twelve links of the ten Dharma realms, all of which are only one thought. This thought arises neither from itself, another, both, nor no cause, and therefore all ten Dharma realms are unborn. Vertically break the delusions of views and thought, dust-and-sand delusions, lack of knowledge, and ignorance within formations and existence in the ten Dharma realms, causing them not to arise, through to the forty-two grades in which even nonarising does not arise. This is called great nirvāṇa.

Skillfully discern passage and obstruction: penetrating the ultimate truth of dependent origination is passage; producing defiled attachment through views and thought is obstruction. Stagnating in ultimate truth is not passage; penetrating the phenomenal marks of dependent origination is not obstruction. Producing Dharma-attachment toward the three paths is obstruction; penetrating the principle within dependent origination is passage. If ignorance, craving, grasping, formations, and existence arise anew within every level of contemplation, this is loss; if wisdom is present at every level, this is gain. One can also directly discuss obstruction through suffering and origination in the four kinds of Four Truths beginning with the constructed, and passage through their path and cessation; or directly take the three provisionalities as obstruction and breaking them to realize nonarising as passage. This applies to general delusion and likewise to specific delusion. One can also directly take the four views producing the ten afflictive agents as obstruction and breaking views as passage〔and so forth〕.

Skillfully cultivate the factors of the path. In a general classification, all form Dharmas within the dependent origination of the ten Dharma realms are called body; all Dharmas of receiving are called feeling; all Dharmas of consciousness are called mind; and all perceptions and formations are called dharmas.

In a specific classification, take the form portion of the link name-and-form; the five entrances of eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body within the link of six sense fields; the five contacts and five feelings produced by the five faculties within the link of contact; and the form portions of the links birth and death. All are included in the establishment of mindfulness of body. Take the consciousness portion of name-and-form, the mind entrance within the six sense fields, and the consciousness portions of birth and death. All are included in the establishment of mindfulness of mind. Take perception and formations within the links of ignorance, formations, and name-and-form; mental contact produced by the Dharma-object within contact; perception and formations within craving, grasping, existence, and birth; and perception and formations within death. All are included in the establishment of mindfulness of dharmas.

Another account treats ignorance as past craving, while craving is the defiled five aggregates. Correlating only the twelve present links: ignorance is included in the establishment of mindfulness of dharmas; formations in dharmas; consciousness in mind; name-and-form in body and mind; the six sense fields condition the six objects, so the objects are included in dharmas while the entrances of the five faculties are included in body; contact is included in dharmas; feeling in feeling; craving, being defiled, in body and mind; grasping in dharmas; existence in formations; and birth and death, as the arising and ceasing of form Dharmas, also in dharmas.

Someone asks: The Sarvāstivādins hold that birth and death are both formations dissociated from mind. They should therefore be included only in the establishment of mindfulness of dharmas. Why say they extend through the establishments of body, mind, and dharmas?

Answer: The Great Sūtra says, “The five aggregates of this life cease and the five aggregates of the next life arise in continuity, like pressing a wax seal into clay: the wax seal is destroyed while the writing in the clay is formed.” One therefore knows that the Dharmas of birth and death do not depart from the five aggregates and can be classified as above〔and so forth〕.

When perfect contemplation contemplates the various forms within the dependent origination of the Shared and Distinct Teachings, it sees form as neither defiled nor pure while simultaneously illuminating defilement and purity; this is the establishment of mindfulness of body. Contemplating the various feelings within Shared and Distinct dependent origination, it sees feeling as neither suffering nor happiness while simultaneously illuminating suffering and happiness; this is the establishment of mindfulness of feeling. Contemplating the mental consciousness within Shared and Distinct dependent origination, it sees mind as neither permanent nor impermanent while simultaneously illuminating permanence and impermanence; this is the establishment of mindfulness of mind. Contemplating perceptions and formations within Shared and Distinct dependent origination, it sees dharmas as neither self nor no-self while simultaneously illuminating self and no-self; this is the establishment of mindfulness of dharmas.

These four establishments of mindfulness can break the eight inversions within the twelve links: permanence, happiness, self, and purity, together with impermanence, suffering, no-self, and impurity. The eight inversions turn into the four witherings and four flourishings; one then abides in neither withering nor flourishing and, between them, enters nirvāṇa and sees buddha-nature. Diligently cultivating these four contemplations is the four right efforts. The four bases of spiritual power, five faculties, five powers, seven factors of awakening, and Noble Eightfold Path that follow are as explained above.

〔Section §14.3〕 Three Liberations, the Assisting Path, and the Buddhas’ Deportment

Contemplate that the root of the twelve links has none of the four alternatives of arising from self, another, both, or no cause. In its very identity it neither arises nor ceases and is ultimate emptiness. This emptiness fully possesses the eighteen emptinesses, while the eighteen are only one emptiness. A Vaipulya scripture says, “Small emptiness and great emptiness all return to one emptiness.” The Great Perfection of Wisdom says, “The one solitary emptiness.” This is the gate of liberation through emptiness. All Dharmas enter this emptiness. One does not grasp the four marks of arising, abiding, changing, and ceasing upon Dharma-nature; does not receive or become defiled and attached; and does not recollect or discriminate new and old, inner and outer〔and so forth〕.

If mind has no dependence, sees true buddha-nature through nonseeing, and abides in great nirvāṇa by not abiding in a single Dharma, this is the gate of liberation through signlessness. This great nirvāṇa is neither contrived through cultivation nor made by conditioned activity. It does not arise from itself and therefore has no self-cause; does not arise from another and therefore has no other-condition; does not arise jointly and therefore is not a conjunction; and does not arise without cause and therefore is not apart from causes. Since within it there is neither cultivation nor attainment, this is the gate of liberation through nonaction.

Next is counteraction through aids to the path. The preceding factors of the path directly condition only principle and transform ignorance, craving, and grasping into luminous wisdom. Although correct wisdom is already present, entry still may not occur. Why? Ignorance, craving, and grasping are the evil of principial delusion and hold one another in check with principial wisdom. Moreover, the phenomenal evils formed by the two links of formations and existence help cover principial wisdom, like a multitude of thieves against one person. One must therefore additionally cultivate phenomenal good within formations and existence to assist in opening the gate of nirvāṇa.

When formations and existence of stinginess and greed arise, transform them into formations and existence of giving so the wholesome root of dāna arises. When formations and existence of broken moral discipline arise, transform them into formations and existence of keeping moral discipline so the wholesome root of śīla arises. When formations and existence of anger arise, transform them into formations and existence of patient endurance so the wholesome root of kṣānti arises. When formations and existence of indolence arise, transform them into formations and existence of diligence so the wholesome root of vīrya arises. When formations and existence of distracted movement arise, transform them into formations and existence of meditative concentration so merits like a forest of dhyāna factors arise. When formations and existence of delusion arise, transform them into formations and existence awakening to impermanence, suffering, and emptiness, so phenomenal wisdom becomes distinct and assists in breaking principial delusion.

The presence of even one obscuration prevents vision of principle; how much more when all six obscurations are present? It is enough first to break the strongest obscuration, and the weaker ones will be removed along with it. The profound strength of aids to the path can accomplish every merit, regulate and subdue the faculties, fulfill the six perfections, and fully possess the Buddhas’ deportment, including the ten powers, four fearlessnesses, marks and excellences, and the rest. The remaining meanings are as explained above; practitioners should reflect and apply them themselves.

The “Buddhas’ deportment” means that the Buddhas’ sitting at the site of awakening, turning the Dharma wheel, and entering nirvāṇa can all be explained through the twelve links. The Great Perfection of Wisdom says, “Profoundly contemplating the twelve links is precisely sitting at the site of awakening.” There are four kinds of site. When the arising and ceasing of the twelve links is contemplated to culmination, the Buddha of the Tripiṭaka Teaching sits at the site of awakening, with a wooden tree as the bodhi tree and grass as the seat. When the immediate emptiness of the twelve links is contemplated to culmination, the Buddha of the Shared Teaching sits at the site of awakening, with a seven-jeweled tree as the bodhi tree and a celestial robe as the seat. When the provisional naming of the twelve links is contemplated to culmination, Rocana Buddha of the Distinct Teaching sits at the site of awakening, with the seven jewels as the seat. When the Middle Way of the twelve links is contemplated to culmination, Vairocana Buddha of the Perfect Teaching sits at the site of awakening, with empty space as the seat. From this one knows that the Great- and Small-Vehicle sites of awakening do not go beyond contemplation of the twelve links.

All buddhas likewise turn the Dharma wheel in dependence upon contemplation of the twelve links. At the site of quiescent cessation, through seven places and eight assemblies, they teach sharp-facultied bodhisattvas that the twelve links neither arise nor cease, that they are provisional names, and that they are the meaning of the Middle Way. At Deer Park they teach dull-facultied disciples the arising-and-ceasing marks of the twelve links. The twelve divisions of the Vaipulya scriptures teach the twelve links as arising and ceasing yet immediately empty, provisional, and the Middle. The Mahāprajñāpāramitā teaches the twelve links as immediately empty, provisional, and the Middle. The Lotus Sūtra teaches the twelve links as immediately the Middle and relinquishes the three kinds of expedient means. The Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra teaches that the twelve links fully possess the intent of the four teachings and all have buddha-nature, like milk intrinsically possessing the nature of ghee. Although the four teachings and five flavors differ, all skillfully distinguish in dependence upon the twelve links and disclose, teach, and guide in accord with sentient beings’ faculties.

The teaching that poison is placed into milk is the indeterminate teaching illuminated through the twelve links in the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra. The statement, “When I first accomplished the path, bodhisattvas of the ten directions had already asked about this meaning,” is the secret teaching illuminated through the twelve links in that sūtra. Why? At first the arising-and-ceasing marks of the twelve links were taught to dull-facultied disciples, yet sharp-facultied bodhisattvas were also present in the Dharma assembly and secretly heard the non-arising-and-non-ceasing marks of the twelve links. They immediately awakened to buddha-nature and attained forbearance concerning nonarising. This is the secret meaning. All the foregoing are signs of turning the Dharma wheel in the Land Where Ordinary and Noble Dwell Together.

All buddhas likewise enter parinirvāṇa in dependence upon contemplation of the twelve links. For dull faculties, the cessation of ignorance through the cessation of aging-and-death, with both direct agents and residual habits entirely exhausted, is the nirvāṇa with residue and without residue of a Buddha of the Tripiṭaka Teaching. Causing ignorance through aging-and-death to cease by contemplation of immediate emptiness is the nirvāṇa with residue and without residue of a Buddha of the Shared Teaching. Causing ignorance through aging-and-death to cease through contemplation of the provisional naming and Middle Way of dependent origination is the nirvāṇa of permanence, happiness, self, and purity of a Buddha of the Distinct Teaching. Contemplating the three paths within the twelve links as precisely the three buddha-natures and therefore the three nirvāṇas—nirvāṇa being called the Dharma realm of all buddhas—is the four-virtue nirvāṇa of Vairocana Buddha of the Perfect Teaching.

These are the four kinds of nirvāṇa displayed by the buddhas in the Land Where Ordinary and Noble Dwell Together, drawn from the Sūtra Resolving Doubts during the Semblance Dharma. Accomplishing the path, turning the Dharma wheel, and entering nirvāṇa in the Land of Expedient Means with Residue and the Land of Unobstructed Real Reward can be understood accordingly. The foregoing is called the meaning of the twelve links embracing all Dharmas〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §14.4〕 Stages, Patient Endurance, and Freedom from Dharma-Attachment

Know the stages: heavier and lighter states within the three evil destinies are all caused by ignorance, evil formations, unwholesome craving, and grasping. Higher and lower states within the three wholesome destinies are likewise caused by ignorance, wholesome and unmoving formations, craving, grasping, and existence.

When ignorance, craving, and grasping are transformed and wisdom contemplating arising and ceasing is produced, there are the higher and lower stations and practices of worthies and nobles liberated through wisdom in the Tripiṭaka Teaching. When formations and existence are transformed and the meritorious practice-practices of contemplation, refinement, cultivation by infusion, and higher cultivation arise, there are the higher and lower stations and practices of worthies and nobles liberated in both respects in the Tripiṭaka Teaching. The stages of minor and major kalā can be understood accordingly.

Transforming the preceding five perfections makes formations and existence into prajñā-practice; transforming ignorance, craving, and grasping regulates and subdues the faculties. Thus there are the various stages and practices across three asaṃkhyeya kalpas. Transforming ignorance, craving, and grasping, embodying and penetrating them as immediately true; transforming formations and existence and cultivating the six perfections like planting a tree in empty space—thus there are higher and lower practices at the four forbearance stages of the Shared Teaching. Transforming ignorance, craving, and grasping produces wisdom of the varieties of the path; transforming formations and existence accomplishes cultivation of the perfections through successive kalpas, superknowledges, purification of buddha lands, and accomplishment of sentient beings—thus there are higher and lower practices at the six wheel-stations of the Distinct Teaching. Transforming ignorance, craving, and grasping so that they are themselves the blazing lamp of complete awakening—thus there are higher and lower practices within the Six Identities of the Perfect Teaching.

The twelve links are all fully present in one person’s single thought. Delusion is inexhaustible like empty space, and aging-and-death is likewise inexhaustible like empty space. Within emptiness there is neither exhaustion nor nonexhaustion; emptiness is precisely the Great Vehicle. The Twelve Gates Treatise says, “Emptiness is called the Great Vehicle. Because great beings such as Samantabhadra and Mañjuśrī ride it, it is called the Great Vehicle.” The Great Perfection of Wisdom says, “This vehicle neither moves nor departs. Even if someone wished to make Dharma-nature and reality-limit depart, this vehicle would still neither move nor depart.” The Great Sūtra says, “All sentient beings are precisely the One Vehicle.” That these names are immediately so in principle is called identity in principle.

Because there is identity in principle, there can be identity in name. From the initial arousal of mind, one hears the Great Vehicle taught and knows that sentient beings are precisely buddhas. Yet mind still grasps erroneously and cannot truly engage in contemplative practice, like a worm boring into wood and accidentally forming a written character. Because there is identity in name, there can be identity in contemplative practice. When the seven rounds of contemplation explained above are penetrated without obstruction, this is the place of practice. Because there is identity in contemplative practice, there can be identity in resemblance.

When the first grade arises, there is only perfect faith. In the second grade, reading and recitation assist faith. In the third, teaching Dharma to others likewise assists faith. These first three all have the vehicle urgent and moral discipline lax. The fourth grade can also cultivate moral discipline in part. In the fifth, phenomenal cultivation and contemplation of principle are both urgent; various samādhis and dhāraṇīs then arise, the six faculties are purified, and one enters the iron-wheel station.

Because there is identity in resemblance, there can be identity in partial realization. The three paths are immediately the three virtues; one suddenly awakens, sees the three buddha-natures, abides in the three nirvāṇas, and enters the secret treasury. The pure and wondrous Dharma body remains lucid and unmoving while universally responding to all. Through the stage of equal awakening, all belongs to identity in partial realization. Transforming ignorance and producing the illumination of wisdom resembles the moon from the first through the fourteenth day, its light gradually becoming full. Transforming formations and existence and producing liberation resembles the moon from the sixteenth through the twenty-ninth day, its shadow gradually receding. The Dharma body disclosed through the original consciousness and name-and-form resembles the body of the moon itself becoming gradually manifest.

Because there is identity in partial realization, there can be ultimate identity. The three virtues are perfected: prajñā is ultimate, Dharma body wondrous to the utmost, and liberation sovereign and free. Beyond the Sanskrit letter cha, no written character remains to be taught. From this one knows that all Great- and Small-Vehicle stages are established in dependence upon the twelve links of the ten Dharma realms.

If one speaks from quiescent suchness, what stages could remain? The first ground is precisely the second. All grounds arise from suchness, while suchness originally has no arising; one may also say all grounds cease through suchness, while suchness originally has no ceasing. All sentient beings are in their very identity great nirvāṇa and cannot be extinguished again. What higher or lower, great or small stages could remain? The non-arising of non-arising is inexpressible, yet where causes and conditions obtain it can also be provisionally expressed. The ten Dharmas of dependent origination serve as causes for the arising of cultivation, like drawing in empty space or provisionally planting a tree there; only as skillful means are all stages taught. If someone does not understand the stages above, grasps erroneously, and produces overbearing pride, that person is a caṇḍāla among bodhisattvas.

Patient endurance: while contemplating dependent origination in the ten Dharma realms, various Dharmas that obstruct the path will arise—the three obstructions, four Māras, and various adverse and favorable objects. The objects of karma, Māra, meditative concentration, the Two Vehicles, and the various practices of bodhisattvas all arise from the two links of formations and existence. If one can patiently endure them, one can accomplish the Tathāgata’s merits of formations and existence, namely the resultant marks of purification of the six faculties.

When the obstruction of afflictions arises, it consists of greed, anger, deviant reckoning, profound and acute views, pride, the wisdom-practices of the Two Vehicles, and the wisdom-practices of bodhisattvas in the Shared, Distinct, and Tripiṭaka Teachings. All arise from the three links of ignorance, craving, and grasping. If one can understand and patiently endure them, the Buddha’s knowledge and vision opens. When the obstruction of retribution arises, it consists of various aggregates, sense fields, and elements; the various eight winds; and various illnesses. All arise from the seven links beginning with consciousness. If one knows that they are themselves buddha-nature and does not move into grasping or rejecting them, so mind resembles empty space, then without severing birth and death one enters nirvāṇa, and without destroying the aggregates and sense fields one reveals the real Dharma body.

Penetrating in this way, one has no obstruction amid the three obstructions. One abides on the ground of patient endurance, gentle and compliant rather than coarse or impetuous, while mind is likewise not alarmed. This is called accomplishment of the mind of patient endurance. For example, once a śrāvaka abides in the Dharma of forbearance, that person will never retreat to commit the five heinous acts or become an icchantika. Once a bodhisattva abides on the ground of endurance, that bodhisattva likewise will never again produce grave offenses obstructing the path.

Not producing Dharma-attachment toward what follows the path has two levels, resemblance and the real. A bodhisattva advances from the initial forbearance of subduing into pliant forbearance and produces the merits of resemblance-understanding at the iron-wheel station, yet does not become defiled and attached to three Dharmas: resembling wisdom, resembling merit, and resembling Dharma-nature. Why should one not attach to them? Ignorance, craving, and grasping still remain within wisdom; the karma of formations and existence still remains within merit; and name-and-form and birth and death still remain within Dharma-nature. None should therefore be objects of defiled attachment.

If attachment to these three Dharmas arises, one can neither enter the bodhisattva stage nor fall back into the Two Vehicles. This is called falling from the summit and is also called following the path. Contemplating ignorance, craving, and grasping follows the path of wisdom-practice. Contemplating formations and existence follows the path of practice-practice. Contemplating the seven links beginning with consciousness follows the path of Dharma-nature. Because one follows these three paths, one does not fall to the śrāvaka ground; because one attaches to the three paths, one also cannot enter the bodhisattva ground.

How does Dharma-attachment arise? It resembles someone entering a campaka grove and no longer smelling any other fragrance. A bodhisattva loves only the merits of the buddhas and no longer thinks of the Two Vehicles or other expedient paths; this is called attachment. Because of this attachment, one cannot transform ignorance, craving, and grasping into true illumination; cannot transform formations and existence into wondrous practice; and cannot make consciousness and name-and-form manifest as Dharma body. If the three paths cannot be transformed, how could one enter the bodhisattva stage?

If one does not become defiled and attached to the three resembling Dharmas and has no Dharma-attachment toward what follows the path, immeasurable offenses can be eliminated and pure mind remain constantly one-pointed. Only such an honored and wondrous person can see prajñā. If one does not attach even to prajñā, how much less to other Dharmas?

“Prajñā that enters principle is called abiding.” Thus, at the initial abode one immediately accomplishes correct awakening, knows the real nature of all Dharmas, fully possesses the wisdom body, and awakens without depending upon another. To “see prajñā” means truly seeing the three paths as precisely the three kinds of prajñā. From then onward, thought after thought becomes quiescently extinguished, naturally flowing into the ocean of wisdom of all modes as immeasurable ignorance is naturally broken.

The Great Treatise asks, “Why is the samādhi that breaks ignorance taught everywhere?” It answers, “Ignorance has many grades. From the initial arousal of mind through the Diamond Summit, ignorance is continuously broken and Dharma-nature disclosed, until only one grade remains. If this final grade is removed, one is called a buddha.” The Tathāgata’s body is a vajra-substance; every evil is severed, every good universally converges, and the three virtues are ultimate. Beyond the Sanskrit letter cha, no written character remains to be taught. This is called riding this jeweled vehicle straight to the site of awakening and abiding within wisdom of all modes. The remaining meanings are as explained above〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §15〕 Arising Signs of Recollection of the Buddha

Ninth are the arising signs of recollection of the Buddha. Sometimes recollection of the Buddha arises first and various dhyānas arise afterward; sometimes the various dhyānas arise first and recollection of the Buddha then arises through dhyāna.

While seated in meditation, practitioners suddenly consider that the merits of the buddhas are immeasurable, boundless, and inconceivable. Faith, reverence, shame, conscience, and profound longing arise in mind. They hold in contemplation that the buddhas possess great spiritual power, great wisdom, great merit, and great marks and excellences. This mark and excellence arises from this merit; that mark and excellence from that merit. This mark and excellence possesses this kind of merit; that mark and excellence possesses that kind. Practitioners know the substance of each mark, its result, and its karma. They illuminate and penetrate every Dharma gate distinctly, deeply understand the ocean of marks, and have no doubt or obstruction. Concentrated mind becomes stable and continuous, without movement or confusion. Abiding in this concentration, it gradually deepens until coarse abiding and fine abiding, desire-realm concentration, and access concentration suddenly arise, followed by entry into the first dhyāna and the rest.

The Dharma of recollecting the Buddha and root dhyāna each have their own domain. Awareness of the present object of recollecting the Buddha is the factor of awareness. Distinguishing the various marks and various meritorious Dharma gates in recollecting the Buddha, recognizing them all clearly, is examination. Having seen in this way, mind rejoices greatly and celebration fills within; this is the factor of joy. One mind becomes stable and the entire body pleased; this is happiness. Without conditioning or delusive thought, one enters deeply into lucidity; this is the factor of one-pointed mind.

These five factors arise together with the Dharma of recollecting the Buddha. Perfused by the power of the Tathāgata’s merit, their Dharma-flavor doubles that of other dhyāna factors and cannot be fully expressed; those who realize it know for themselves. Since the merits, marks, and excellences of the Buddha-Dharma are immeasurable, the samādhis that arise should likewise be immeasurable, and the five factors that arise likewise immeasurable—inexpressible, inexpressible. Every set of five factors fully possesses the ten attendant merits, like branches and leaves forming a forest. This is the first dhyāna arising through the samādhi of recollecting the Buddha. The four formless concentrations, sixteen special excellences, penetrating illumination, impurity, relinquishments, loving-kindness, and the rest can likewise all arise in dependence upon this samādhi〔and so forth〕.

How does the samādhi of recollecting the Buddha arise through dhyāna? After root and other dhyānas arise, practitioners suddenly recollect the buddhas and tathāgatas within concentrated mind. They clearly understand that the merit that moves and inspires arises from marks and excellences, while marks and excellences arise from wholesome karma. These three Dharma gates—responsive merit, marks and excellences, and wholesome karma—correspond with mind and become suddenly clear. When this Dharma arises, the five factors of the existing meditative concentration become doubly wondrous. The same applies when recollection of the Buddha arises within the four dhyānas, sixteen special excellences, relinquishments, and other concentrations.

The concentration of recollecting the Buddha also has two kinds: first, hidden; second, unhidden. If a hidden sign is attained first, one inwardly understands the Buddha’s merits and recollects and distinguishes them clearly. If an unhidden sign is then attained, one distinctly sees the Buddha’s light and marks and looks up to and attends the Buddha’s spiritual form, definite and clear. This is not a sign of Māra. It can increase merit and make the branches and leaves of one’s existing wholesome roots flourish.

Through recollecting the Buddha, one can further penetrate broadly the Dharma gate of the six recollections. The Dharma gate of the Buddha’s merits that one recollects, as a Dharma of meaning, is recollection of Dharma. The Buddha’s disciples receive and practice it; recollecting the conjunction of the three matters of the karma, substance, and result of their marks is called recollection of the Saṅgha. Skillfully displacing various evil thoughts through recollection of the Saṅgha, Buddha, and Dharma is recollection of relinquishment. Faith, reverence, shame, and conscience present during these recollections are recollection of moral discipline. Recollecting the forest-like merits of the dhyāna factors within concentration and the marks of the gods is recollection of deities. Recollection of the Buddha, Saṅgha, and deities concerns others; recollection of Dharma, relinquishment, and moral discipline concerns oneself. From this one may penetrate all Dharmas and accomplish the Great Vehicle within the gate of recollecting the Buddha.

When Sadāprarudita saw a buddha, he obtained immeasurable Dharma gates and neither inward mind nor outward marks were hidden. If inward mind is dark and hidden so that not one meritorious Dharma gate can be distinguished, while outwardly dazzling marks of light are seen, this is a sign of Māra. It breaks the sprouts and stems of wholesome roots and damages the flowers and fruits of the path. People today who claim to see a buddha while no corresponding Dharma gate is present in mind have not encountered a true buddha-object.

If this meaning is understood, only whether the Dharma gate is correct should be taken as the standard, not a form-mark. If form-marks alone were taken, Māra could transform into a buddha-mark, and clay sculptures, wooden carvings, and painted images would all have to be true buddhas. Moreover, the Tathāgata manifests freely and without obstruction. Why would he invariably manifest a ten-foot radiance? That form merely displays conformity with an upright human being.

A buddha can universally manifest a body that beings delight in, a body suited to their faculties, a body that counteracts their illness, or a body through which they can be delivered. When any form-image—a teacher, monastic, parent, deer, horse, or monkey—is seen in accord with the present capacity, only if a correct Dharma gate arises together with it and it further increases the practitioner’s existing wholesome roots is this called the samādhi of recollecting the Buddha〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §16〕 Arising Signs of Superknowledge

Tenth are the arising signs of superknowledge. They are briefly divided into five: divine-eye superknowledge, knowledge of others’ minds, divine-ear superknowledge, knowledge of past lives, and superknowledge of bodily mastery. Outflow-free superknowledge belongs to a later object and is explained there.

Superknowledge can arise only through dhyāna; dhyāna cannot arise through superknowledge. Why? The various dhyānas are all Dharmas of concentration and can mutually bring one another forth. The dhyānas are the substance of superknowledge, while superknowledge is their function. Function can arise from substance, so superknowledge arises attached to the substance of concentration. Function cannot arise in isolation; how could it bring forth its own substance in return? A scripture says, “Deeply cultivating meditative concentration, one attains the five superknowledges.” This is the meaning.

Speaking generally, all five superknowledges can arise within every dhyāna. Distinguished according to where each arises more readily, root dhyāna generally cannot produce superknowledge; even when it does, the power is neither swift nor acute. The sixteen special excellences and penetrating illumination often produce bodily superknowledge of lightness and elevation. The relinquishments and spheres of mastery often produce bodily superknowledge of transformation at will, sovereign and unobstructed. Concentration of loving-kindness conditions a person’s form and appearance and apprehends the sign of that person attaining happiness; from outward form it knows inward mind and distinguishes another’s suffering and happiness, so it often produces knowledge of others’ minds. Since it can know mind by relying upon form, it can also know another’s words and sounds and therefore produces divine-ear superknowledge. Contemplation of dependent origination contemplates a person’s three lives: illuminating past matters, it often produces knowledge of past lives; illuminating future matters, it often produces divine-eye superknowledge. When the concentration of recollecting the Buddha is unhidden, it often produces divine-eye superknowledge.

When the superknowledges become fine and precise, they correspond to the three illuminations, though they are not yet the outflow-free three illuminations. If a blind person’s eyes suddenly saw or a deaf person’s ears suddenly heard, that person would rejoice greatly. How much more when beings, inwardly blind in the five faculties for immeasurable kalpas, now break the five coverings and purely bring forth the five superknowledges?

Each superknowledge contains five factors. When the obstruction of the eyes is broken, awareness of the eye faculty facing a form-object is the factor of awareness. Distinguishing the immeasurable kinds and marks of form is examination. When this superknowledge opens, great celebration is the factor of joy. Happiness received within mind is the factor of happiness. Abiding lucidly without conditioning or delusive thought is the factor of one-pointed mind. The remaining four superknowledges are the same.

If one considers only the concentrated substance of the various dhyānas, inward understanding sometimes occurs while outward marks remain unclear, so a hidden form is possible. Superknowledge is the function produced by the substance of concentration, and whenever that function appears it must be clear. The five superknowledges are therefore all unhidden signs.

〔Section §17〕 Cultivating Calming-and-Contemplation after Dhyāna Arises

Fourth is the explanation of cultivating calming-and-contemplation. If practitioners have brought forth various dhyānas but lack skillful means and greedily attach to their flavor, this is a bodhisattva’s bondage. They will receive birth according to the dhyāna to which they are attached and continue revolving through birth and death. If they seek the essential path of escape, they should contemplate through ten meanings〔and so forth〕.

〔Section §17.1〕 First Contemplate How Dhyāna Can Produce the Ten Dharma Realms

Contemplate meditative concentration as one would contemplate a cucumber: it can serve as a cause and condition producing the ten Dharma realms. When concentration first arises, body and speech become gentle and subdued, like a snake entering a bamboo tube and becoming straight because of dhyāna. Later, after leaving contemplation and encountering objects, body, speech, and mind become crooked again and afflictions arise anew. At first the afflictions resemble a small amount of water, but later they fill a large vessel. Having lost the Dharma of dhyāna, practitioners break moral discipline, turn against the correct path, and may even create immediate-retribution karma.

When the Buddha was in the world, a bhikṣu attained the four dhyānas but believed he had realized the four fruits; there are also the accounts of Xiongzi and others〔and so forth〕. Bodhisattva Shengyi became self-exalting through attachment to meditative concentration and slandered and rejected Bodhisattva Xigen〔and so forth〕. Some have no evil thoughts while in concentration but produce evil and create karma after emerging. If they later lose concentration, evil karma pulls them into an evil destiny. If concentration is not lost, they first experience its retribution; when that retribution is exhausted, evil karma emerges and they receive the body of a flying civet that devours fish and birds. This is the principle. Before attaining dhyāna, fame and profit do not arrive; after dhyāna is accomplished, one may use it to create the Dharma realms of the three evil destinies.

If one becomes defiled and attached to the marks of concentration within dhyāna yet, after emerging, can still produce loving-kindness, benevolence, righteousness, and ritual propriety, and if concentration is not lost, then after its retribution is exhausted one can be born in the human destiny. If dhyāna contemplation perfumes the ten wholesome actions so they become naturally accomplished without separate guarding, this forms heavenly karma—the retribution in the form and formless realms produced by the four dhyānas and four formless concentrations. Exclusive cultivation of root dhyāna only increases human and heavenly retribution and never provides a time of escape. In the age of Great Universal Wisdom Excellence Buddha, the Brahmā kings themselves said, “One hundred and eighty kalpas passed in vain without a single buddha appearing, and the three evil destinies became full.” Not one person escaped birth and death.

If one exclusively cultivates contemplative dhyānas such as impurity and relinquishment, outflow-free wisdom can arise without waiting separately for wisdom concerning the truths, accomplishing the śrāvaka Dharma realm. If one contemplates that the various dhyānas can break the six obscurations—stinginess and greed, broken moral discipline, anger, indolence, distraction, and delusion—the obscurations are origination, and origination draws forth the result of suffering; the contemplation that can break them is the path, and the path can reach cessation. This belongs to the śrāvaka Dharma realm and also to the Dharma realm of bodhisattvas practicing the six perfections.

Furthermore, entry into dhyāna necessarily abandons the defilement of desire; this is giving. If moral discipline is not maintained, samādhi does not appear; this is moral discipline. Because attainment of dhyāna leaves no angry mind, this is patient endurance. Because attainment of dhyāna leaves no mixed thoughts, this is diligence. The Dharma itself is called meditative concentration. Knowing that all Dharmas are impermanent is wisdom. This is the Dharma realm of bodhisattvas practicing the six perfections arising through dhyāna.

Further contemplate dhyāna as a Dharma born of causes and conditions. Contemplating the various dhyānas as the link of existence, existence as arising from grasping, and continuing in sequence through aging-and-death as explained above is the pratyekabuddha Dharma realm. Further contemplating the various dhyānas as Dharmas born of causes and conditions and therefore empty in their very identity—the immediate emptiness of arisen Dharmas being the truth of the unborn path—is the Dharma realm of śrāvakas, bodhisattvas, and others of the Shared Teaching.

Further contemplate the conditionally arisen Dharma of dhyāna as immediately empty, provisional, and the Middle. The ten Dharma realms arise through dhyāna and also cease through dhyāna. Why? If the three evil destinies or the six destinies arise through dhyāna, the twenty-five existences increase, the six Dharma realms of the six destinies arise, and the four noble Dharma realms become hidden and cease. If the relinquishments and other Dharmas arise through dhyāna, the twenty-five existences can be subdued and the Dharma realms of the six destinies can be crushed and covered.

Contemplating the relinquishments and other Dharmas as impermanent uses the clumsy method of the arising-and-ceasing teaching to break the twenty-five existences, extinguishes six Dharma realms, and brings forth the single śrāvaka realm. Contemplating conditionally arisen dhyāna as immediately empty uses the skillful method of the non-arising teaching to break the twenty-five existences, extinguishes seven Dharma realms, and brings forth the single realm of Shared-Teaching bodhisattvas. Contemplating dhyāna as immediately provisional uses the clumsy method of the immeasurable teaching to break the twenty-five existences and adventitious afflictions, extinguishes eight Dharma realms, and brings forth the single realm of Distinct-Teaching bodhisattvas. Contemplating conditionally arisen dhyāna as immediately the Middle uses the skillful method of the one-real teaching to break the twenty-five existences and the delusion of ignorance, extinguishes nine Dharma realms, and brings forth the single Buddha Dharma realm.

In this way the king samādhi is accomplished and universally gathers in all samādhis. Root dhyāna and the relinquishments all enter it like streams returning to the ocean, and are thereby all transformed into the Great Vehicle. Gathering in resembles water flowing into the ocean; becoming hidden and extinguished resembles the disappearance of fresh flavor; arising resembles the formation of salt flavor. The perfection of dhyāna transforms the existing concentration of loving-kindness into great unconditioned loving-kindness and compassion; transforms the existing recollection of the Buddha into the great ocean of recollecting the Buddha, with all buddhas of the ten directions present before one’s eyes; and transforms the existing superknowledges into the Tathāgata’s skillful means that function without deliberation.

In summary, when all moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom in the nine Dharma realms enter the king samādhi, they are transformed and named noble practice. What noble practice corresponds with is the principle of truth; abiding in that principle is named heavenly practice. Heavenly practice possesses objectless loving-kindness of the same substance; this is brahmā practice. Speaking only of compassion as sharing one substance with sentient beings’ afflictions and wishing to remove their suffering is illness-practice. Speaking only of loving-kindness as sharing one substance with sentient beings’ slight wholesome roots and wishing to give them happiness is infant-practice. These five practices produce the ten merits and continue through ultimate accomplishment of great nirvāṇa.

Thus the ten Dharma realms arise and cease through dhyāna, while the three truths of emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle become hidden or manifest and arise in sequence. Layer by layer they turn, advance, and are gathered in to become Buddha-Dharma, all fully present within the king samādhi of immediate identity with the Middle. This remains a conceivable object, not the inconceivable object that is truly to be contemplated now.

〔Section §17.2〕 One Thought of Concentrated Mind Is the Inconceivable Object

In inconceivable contemplation, when one thought of concentrated mind arises—whether savor-attached dhyāna, pure dhyāna, or even superknowledge—one immediately knows that this thought of mind is precisely ignorance, Dharma-nature, and the Dharma realm. The ten Dharma realms and hundred Dharmas, together with immeasurable meditative concentrations and distractions, are all fully present in one thought.

Why? Because of delusion about Dharma-nature, every distracted evil Dharma exists. Because of understanding Dharma-nature, every wholesome Dharma of meditative concentration exists. Since concentration and distraction are in their very identity ignorance, ignorance is also in its very identity Dharma-nature. Delusion and understanding, concentration and distraction, are nondual in intrinsic nature, wondrous and difficult to conceive; here the path of language is cut off. Trying to calculate with ordinary emotion and thought only produces futile exhaustion. How could this be an object ordinary people or the Two Vehicles can know to the utmost? Although it surpasses ordinary emotion, it does not depart from any sentient being.

A scripture says, “All sentient beings are precisely the attainment of cessation.” Although it may be named concentration in terms of mind, sentient beings have never been wholly identical with concentration and have never been wholly different from it. Why? If sentient beings were left behind, where else could concentration be sought? Sentient beings have therefore never been wholly different. Yet if one says sentient beings are themselves concentration, concentration is not an ordinary sentient being governed by emotion; sentient beings have therefore never been wholly identical. Because they are not wholly identical, they are not the same; because they are not wholly different, they are not separate. In neither identity nor separation lies the wondrous, difficult to measure like empty space and exhaustively fathomed only by buddhas together with buddhas.

As with meditative concentration in one thought, so with every object. If one contemplates in this way and suddenly awakens and enters, merely hearing this meaning directly cures the grave illness of afflictions; the following nine modes of contemplation need not be applied.

〔Section §17.3〕 Arousing Mind, Settling Mind, Pervasive Breaking, and Passage and Obstruction

If contemplation has not yet brought awakening, arouse loving-kindness and compassion. The substance of principle is originally quiescent, yet sentient beings produce delusion. The conceptual proliferation of ignorance covers the tathāgatagarbha and forms a dense forest of afflictions. Therefore arouse compassion to remove this grave suffering at its root. Moreover, because ignorance is in its very identity Dharma-nature and afflictions in their very identity awakening, wish to make sentient beings disclose the true in the midst of phenomena and manifest the Dharma body. Therefore arouse loving-kindness to give ultimate happiness.

Such vows are pure and true. They seek the Buddha path above and transform sentient beings below, contain no poison or harm, incline neither one-sidedly nor deviantly, have no dependency, and leave the two extremes of existence and nonexistence. This is called arousing the mind of awakening. When this mind arises, some suddenly awaken and enter, like a swift horse that merely sees the shadow of the whip and already races onto the correct road.

If awakening still does not occur, one should skillfully settle mind in calming-and-contemplation, turn the thought of mind around, and cultivate through skillful means, sometimes calming and sometimes contemplation. Contemplating the two extremes of existence and nonexistence within one thought of meditative concentration as quiescently extinguished is called calming that embodies truth. Illuminating Dharma-nature as pure and unobstructed is contemplation entering emptiness.

Further contemplating dhyāna-mind as immediately empty and provisional while simultaneously illuminating the ultimate and conventional truths without moving the true limit is expedient calming that follows conditions. Penetrating various medicines and illnesses and applying each appropriately according to the immediate capacity is contemplation entering the provisional. Contemplating dhyāna-mind still more deeply and seeing it as immediately empty, provisional, and the Middle, with the three neither dual nor different, is calming that ceases discrimination. Penetrating the true mark, tathāgatagarbha, and ultimate truth as neither dual nor different is contemplation of the Middle Way.

The three calmings and three contemplations are together within one thought of mind, neither before nor after, neither one nor different. To break the two extremes of existence and nonexistence, they are skillfully named one and the Middle. To break one-sided attachment and arising and ceasing, they are skillfully named perfect and quiescently extinct. To break sequential cultivation of the three calmings and three contemplations, they are skillfully named three contemplations in one mind. In reality there is no fixed mark of Middle, perfect, or one mind. One should settle mind through calming-and-contemplation in this way〔and so forth〕.

If grinding inner mind with the two Dharmas of calming and contemplation still does not bring entry, know that before true wisdom arises, the various objects of mind are all delusion and confusion. Use the three contemplations in one mind to break pervasively every horizontal and vertical delusion. When delusion is eliminated, wisdom arises; when distraction ceases, meditative concentration is accomplished.

If awakening still does not occur, one is obstructed and cannot penetrate. One should further contemplate which Dharma fails to pass and which Dharma does not obstruct. If it does not obstruct, it should be passage; if passage still does not occur, continue contemplating. Know written signs without attaching to written signs and distinguish gain and loss within contemplation of the Four Truths.

〔Section §17.4〕 Factors of the Path, Assisting Counteractions, and the Final Three Dharmas

If awakening still does not occur, one does not know how to regulate the factors of the path. Why? One thought of dhyāna-mind fully possesses the five aggregates of the ten Dharma realms. Contemplating all aggregates as immediately empty breaks the four inversions within the three realms—permanence, happiness, self, and purity—and accomplishes the four witherings. Contemplating all aggregates as immediately provisional breaks the four inversions beyond the three realms—impermanence, suffering, no-self, and impurity—and accomplishes the four flourishings. Contemplating all aggregates as immediately the Middle, neither inner nor outer, neither flourishing nor withered, one enters parinirvāṇa between withering and flourishing. In this way the four establishments of mindfulness open the gate of the factors of the path, and the factors of the path open the three gates of liberation and enter nirvāṇa. Path and concentration are both fully present.

If this is so, why does awakening still not occur? Past obstructions must remain, while in the present one again greedily attaches to the flavor of dhyāna and cannot relinquish it. Past and present assist one another and together form the obscuration of stinginess. How could the path arise? One should repent with utmost earnestness, relinquish body, life, and wealth, relinquish greedy attachment to savor-attached dhyāna, and cultivate the perfection of giving to assist in counteracting the obstruction of stinginess.

Again, greedily savoring various dhyānas destroys moral discipline that follows the path and may even destroy the complete precepts. Past and present assist one another and together form the obscuration of broken moral discipline. One should repent with utmost earnestness and make phenomenal conduct careful and pure, assisting in counteracting the obstruction to śīla.

Again, even the Brahmacārin Black Teeth and Great Brahmā each possessed anger. How could the mere arising of phenomenal dhyāna now leave no anger at all? Every conditioned meditative concentration is neither unborn nor quiescently extinct and does not constitute forbearance concerning beings or Dharmas; anger therefore still arises spontaneously. Past and present assist one another and together form the obstruction of anger. One should repent with utmost earnestness and additionally cultivate phenomenal loving-kindness to assist in counteracting the obstruction to patient endurance.

Again, greedy attachment to the flavor of dhyāna is covered by heedlessness and delusion and still mixed with distracted movement. Past and present assist one another and together form indolence. One should become diligent with utmost earnestness and cultivate continuously without interruption, assisting in counteracting the obstruction to diligence.

Again, karmic signs arising within dhyāna trouble and confuse dhyāna-mind, preventing lucid one-pointedness. The Two Vehicles sever only afflictions; they offset karmic power through wisdom and leave the three realms, without separately speaking of severing karma. After bodhisattvas sever afflictions and receive a Dharma-nature body, some Dharma gates still develop while others do not, showing that they remain subject to karmic obstruction. One must cultivate various wholesome karmas with utmost earnestness. If this remains true even of a Dharma-nature body, how could a fleshly body in birth and death lack karmic obstruction? Cultivate wholesome karma, therefore, to assist in counteracting the obstruction to meditative concentration.

Again, greedy attachment to the flavor of meditative concentration wholly fails to understand that the various dhyānas are impermanent, arising and ceasing. How much less could it understand that attachment to their flavor is in its very identity neither arising nor ceasing? Past and present assist one another and together form the obstruction of delusion. One should repent with utmost earnestness and counteract phenomenal confusion and deviance.

The foregoing only briefly explains counteractions; an extensive explanation could not be exhausted. If practitioners have cultivated according to the methods of contemplation this far and still cannot awaken, their faculties are extremely dull and their obstructive offenses extremely grave. Lest those karmic obstructions cause them to create still more faults, three final meanings are taught. Knowing stages inwardly prevents overbearing pride. Cultivating patient endurance outwardly guards against the eight winds. Removing Dharma-attachment prevents falling from the summit.

When the ten Dharmas are accomplished, one can swiftly enter nonarising, obtain one great carriage, roam in the four directions, and proceed directly to wondrous awakening; break the twenty-five existences and realize the king samādhi. One’s own practice and transformation of others are fully present from beginning to end. The remaining meanings are as explained above〔and so forth〕.

Mohe Zhiguan, Fascicle Nine〔Lower〕.

The joy of dhyāna is lucid, body and mind are light and at ease, and distraction has temporarily ceased. Is this not precisely what practice seeks? Yet after demonic affairs, the Mohe Zhiguan establishes meditative concentration itself as the sixth object of contemplation. The reason is direct: without meditative concentration, one loses a powerful aid to the path; once meditative concentration is attained, attachment to it binds one through concentration. Fire should indeed be avoided, but falling into water while escaping fire does not mean danger has truly been escaped.

This chapter therefore neither teaches people to pursue a succession of extraordinary experiences nor urges them to reject every concentrated object. It first distinguishes how ten gates of dhyāna are opened and combined; their outflowed and outflow-free dimensions; their depths; and their mutual arising. It then explains in detail how past habituation arises as signs of body and mind. Only at the end does it return to the decisive question: once dhyāna has arisen, how can it be prevented from producing bondage within the six destinies and instead be transformed into a gate of calming-and-contemplation? Seed, rain, sun, and sprout; wheat, ferment, mash, and wine; corpse, bone-light, cucumber, and streams entering the sea—a sequence of images all answers this question.

〔Section §1〕 Why Dhyāna Can Also Become an Obstruction

Prolonged illness, long travel, many affairs, and excessive recitation can prevent mind from abiding. These obstructions to dhyāna are easy to see. What is truly difficult to distinguish is the obstruction that arises after dhyāna has appeared. If demonic affairs have passed but true luminous wisdom has not arisen, past habituations will arise in profusion through general cultivation of calming-and-contemplation. The coolness, wonder, and happiness present at such a time most readily make one mistake the experience for arrival at the path.

If an arisen sign of dhyāna is taken as noble realization, overbearing pride follows. If fear of error makes one rebuke and abandon everything indiscriminately, one loses an aid to the path. The former is attachment and the latter escape; neither truly contemplates the object. The treatise establishes the object of meditative concentration separately precisely to transform “What have I attained?” into “How does this object arise, how does it abide, and how does it make one attach?” Dhyāna factors can assist the path, but assistance is not the fruit of the path. Happiness can become a wholesome condition and can also become subtle bondage.

This measure determines how the whole chapter must be read. The various contacts, lights and colors, recollection of the Buddha, and superknowledges that follow would reverse the chapter’s intent if read only as powers to pursue. They are described in detail so they can be recognized when they arise and contemplated after recognition—not so the arising sign itself can be raised into the endpoint.

〔Section §2〕 Why Five, Ten, and Fifteen Gates Can All Be Established

The gates of dhyāna are immeasurable. The treatise provisionally selects ten: the four root dhyānas, sixteen special excellences, penetrating illumination, nine perceptions, eight relinquishments, Great Impurity, loving-kindness, dependent origination, recollection of the Buddha, and superknowledge. These ten are neither the only possible classification nor an arbitrary count. They stand between five and fifteen gates and thereby preserve the scope of phenomenal dhyāna.

If the five gates are not opened out, the special excellences and penetrating illumination within breath-counting, and the relinquishments and Great Impurity within impurity, cannot each reveal their own arising signs. Superknowledge arises in dependence upon many kinds of dhyāna and cannot be forced into a single gate. Yet if all fifteen gates were retained, subtle contemplations of principle such as loving-kindness conditioned by Dharmas, unconditioned loving-kindness, dependent origination as retribution, and dependent origination in one thought would be mixed into this chapter. Breath-counting and impurity are therefore each unfolded; loving-kindness, coarse dependent origination across three lives, and recollection of the response-body Buddha retain their original names; and the five superknowledges are separately established as one gate, making ten.

The principle of opening and combining lies not in the number but in the level contemplated. This chapter distinguishes how phenomenal dhyāna from past habituation arises, so it opens phenomenal marks and temporarily hides subtle principle. The Dharmas temporarily hidden are not denied; each belongs to a later passage. This also reminds the reader that one Dharma-name can be opened or combined differently according to the contemplative gate. Sectional headings guide observation; they do not cut the Dharma realm into ten fixed substances.

〔Section §3〕 If Phenomenal Dhyāna Is Outflowed, How Can It Produce the Outflow-Free?

Viewed only through substance and marks, all ten gates are phenomenal dhyāna and can be called outflowed. Viewed through whether they can condition world-transcending wisdom, they cannot be judged with one undifferentiated cut. The four root dhyānas already exist in the world and can be attained in common by ordinary people and non-Buddhists; cultivated exclusively on their own, they increase only the outflowed. The sixteen special excellences and penetrating illumination already possess contemplative wisdom and, when disclosed within Buddha-Dharma, can produce the outflow-free, yet they still retain phenomenal concentration. The nine perceptions, impurity, and related contemplations exert such strong disenchantment that they can become an initial condition for the outflow-free without separately awaiting wisdom concerning the truths.

The key is not to rename phenomenal dhyāna contemplation of principle, but to distinguish “what this Dharma itself is” from “what this Dharma can produce.” One stone medicine makes a dose heating and another cooling; phenomenal dhyānas likewise can act differently upon afflictions. Without convergence with wisdom concerning the truths, root dhyāna cannot sever views and thought on its own. Contemplation of impurity can directly weaken the defilement of desire and open the gate of the establishment of mindfulness of body and the factors of the path.

Loving-kindness, dependent origination, recollection of the Buddha, and superknowledge cannot be judged apart from the concentrations upon which they depend. Loving-kindness arising in dependence upon root dhyāna follows its outflowed concentration; arising in dependence upon impurity or relinquishment, it can instead follow an outflow-free condition. These Dharmas have no fixed meditative ground of their own, and their depth and purity must be judged from their support. “Outflowed” and “outflow-free” are therefore not permanent labels pasted onto the names of the ten gates. They are layered observations according to substance, conditions, and the wisdom produced.

〔Section §4〕 Is the Sequence of Ten Gates a Staircase Everyone Must Climb?

The treatise first explains how this chapter differs from the Sequential Dhyāna Gate and the earlier counteractive methods. There, to accomplish the perfection of dhyāna, dhyāna first arises and its goodness or evil is then tested. Counteractive Dharmas are deliberately cultivated as aids to the path in order to break obstructions. This chapter comes after the objects of afflictions, karma, Māra, and the rest and contemplates the spontaneous arising of past habituation. The names of the Dharma gates may be the same, but their purposes differ.

The ten gates still form a pedagogical arc from shallow to deep. Root dhyāna is readily attained but has little contemplative wisdom. The special excellences turn from savor to purity. Realized signs in penetrating illumination are finer. The nine perceptions use forceful preliminary visualizations to subdue desire. The eight relinquishments turn from outward objects to treating inner mind. Great Impurity expands the contemplated object from direct to circumstantial retribution. Loving-kindness broadly cultivates merit after disenchantment. Dependent origination establishes correct worldly view. Recollection of the Buddha turns from lower causes toward higher results. Superknowledge reveals the sovereign function of meditative concentration.

Yet arrangement does not mean every practitioner experiences these gates in the same order. Past habituations have their own before and after, and the gates of dhyāna can bring one another forth. Sequence only enables one to distinguish depth, function, and relation. Treating chapter order as the sole order of arising forces one route upon actual experience; refusing all distinctions of depth mixes savor-attached dhyāna, contemplative dhyāna, and world-transcending conditions into one confused mass.

〔Section §5〕 If Every Seed Is Present, Why Does Each Ripen at a Different Time?

The arising of dhyāna has inner causes and outer conditions. Since the remote past, beings have cultivated various concentrations; these past habituations resemble seeds in the earth, while present calming-and-contemplation resembles rain. The rain falls at once, yet plum, peach, pear, and persimmon bear fruit in different months. Although the Dharma-condition encountered is the same, the arising signs of dhyāna ripen unevenly according to past habituation.

“Natural arising” therefore does not mean birth without cause. It means only that one is not at this moment deliberately cultivating that particular gate, while what was perfused in the past appears under corresponding conditions. If one practiced in sequence in the past, the gates may now arise in sequence. If one phenomenally cultivated a phenomenal Dharma in the past, a phenomenal sign may now arise. Different seeds yield various forms of mutual arising.

Seeds alone are still insufficient. Even if seed is present in the ground, it does not sprout without sunlight. Sentient beings’ wholesome roots must correspond with the Buddha’s power and Dharma-conditions. A great bell can sound by itself, yet the volume depends upon the striker. The Buddha’s empowerment is equal; the depth of what arises depends upon beings’ habituations. Delivering oneself and being delivered through hearing Dharma appear opposed, but one says the inner cause cannot be replaced and the other that outer conditions cannot be absent. Attributing everything to buddha-power erases one’s own cultivation by infusion; attributing everything to self-power fails to see the reciprocal response of capacity and stimulus.

〔Section §6〕 From Coarse Abiding to the First Dhyāna, How Are the Signs Distinguished Correctly?

After the body is upright, mind gathered, and breath regulated, the course of mind becomes clear and quiet. Though it has an object, it does not race or scatter; this is coarse abiding. Finer and more stable is fine abiding. Between them, a Dharma that sustains the body may make it naturally upright. A wholesome sustaining makes the body neither tight nor slack; an evil sustaining brings stiffness and pain when it comes and fatigue when it leaves. One level deeper, the body resembles the shadow of a cloud and the mind-ground has one measure of brightness and purity, yet body and mind are still seen and the dhyāna factors are not present. This is desire-realm concentration.

Desire-realm concentration can abide for a long time but remains fragile. Only when it silently turns so that body and head, clothing, and bedding no longer appear, and open vacuity becomes stable, is there a sign of access concentration. The disappearance of bodily marks does not mean nonarising has been realized. Fire covered by ash still burns anyone who steps upon it because the flame is unseen. Empty quiescence in concentration is the same: the obstruction of nature remains, so stillness cannot be passed off as noble forbearance.

From coarse abiding through neither perception nor non-perception, four divisions—retreat, protection, abiding, and advance—apply throughout. Retreat can come from improper regulation of body or breath, or from inner obstruction, Māra, grief, or craving. Protection guards mind through skillful means; abiding remains stable without loss. Advance can be spontaneous or effortful, arise horizontally or vertically, and progress gradually or suddenly. Every division can again contain all four. A dhyāna-object is not a straight line that only ascends and never retreats.

When the eight contacts of movement, itching, lightness, heaviness, cold, warmth, roughness, and smoothness arise in access concentration, the treatise does not first cling to a decision that they emerge from within or arrive from without. Counting breaths makes mind subtle; mind and the four elements transform in sequence, like wheat becoming ferment, ferment becoming mash, and mash becoming wine. The first dhyāna need not be a new thing arriving from outside, yet one cannot therefore grasp it as truly self-produced. The eight contacts are only a skillful classification of the mutual increase of the substance and function of the four elements.

Correct contact must possess the ten merits of emptiness, brightness, concentration, wisdom, wholesome mind, softness, joy, happiness, liberation, and correspondence. Excess and deficiency must be distinguished within each merit: emptiness is not extinction of awareness, brightness is not pursuit of intense light, concentration is not rigid immobility, and correspondence is not loss of discernment. The first dhyāna lies near the border of the desire realm, where deviant Dharmas readily enter through openings. A ghost can follow deviance into dhyāna, but that does not make the substance of dhyāna a ghost. Wind can make rain and can also destroy it. The stronger an arising sign, the more carefully one must test whether its merits are balanced and correct.

The five factors arise together yet become manifest in sequence according to strength. Initial contact with the object is awareness; fine distinction, examination; celebration of attainment, joy; peaceful pleasure, happiness; and quiescence, one-pointed mind. They resemble one mallet striking a bell, with coarse and subtle tones appearing in sequence within one sound. They also resemble opening a treasury: first knowing that it contains treasure, then distinguishing gold and silver, then rejoicing, becoming happy, and entering one-pointed mind.

When awareness and examination are rebuked away, the first dhyāna retreats. If the intervening bare concentration is not lost through grief or regret, inner purity arises as the second dhyāna. Joy is then rebuked and one enters the third dhyāna, with happiness throughout the body; noble ones can relinquish it, ordinary people with difficulty. Happiness is then rebuked and one enters the unmoving concentration of the fourth dhyāna. After that, form is extinguished and space conditioned; space is relinquished and consciousness conditioned; consciousness is relinquished and nothingness conditioned; and then one enters neither perception nor non-perception. Although this summit concentration of the three realms is exceedingly subtle, it remains dark realization. Non-Buddhists mistake it for nirvāṇa, but when its retribution is exhausted they still do not escape circulation.

〔Section §7〕 Why the Sixteen Special Excellences Resemble a Tonic within a Purgative

Contemplation of impurity can act too forcefully; it once made bhikṣus so disenchanted with the body that they sought death. The sixteen special excellences therefore retain a dimension that regulates and nourishes body and mind while purging afflictions. If rhubarb and croton purged without restoring, a weak body would instead be harmed. The special excellences activate practice more powerfully than root dhyāna and accommodate body and mind better than impurity. Because they possess contemplative wisdom, they can communicate with the outflow-free; because their counteraction is less forceful than intense visualization, they can still be called outflowed.

They begin by knowing the length of breath, that inhalation comes from nowhere and exhalation goes nowhere. Root dhyāna only realizes darkly that body and bed no longer appear; the special excellences use contemplative wisdom to see breath pervade the entire body. When the mind-eye opens further, the thirty-six substances within the body are distinct like grains in a storehouse, with inhalation and exhalation encompassing them. Practitioners thereby see impurity, impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and no-self and no longer commit evil for the body. Awareness, examination, joy, happiness, and one-pointed mind remain, but their Dharma-flavor is transformed by contemplative wisdom.

The sixteen Dharmas advance step by step through the four establishments of mindfulness of body, feeling, mind, and dharmas. Even at the fourth dhyāna, unmoving concentration is contemplated as impermanent. On entering the sphere of space, one knows emergence from scatteredness; on entering the sphere of consciousness, one leaves desire for scatteredness; on entering nothingness, one contemplates the cessation of consciousness; and on entering neither perception nor non-perception, one can still abandon subtle attachment. Root dhyāna resembles food without salt, while the special excellences resemble food receiving salt. No strange flavor is added; the same object of dhyāna is no longer obscure because of contemplative wisdom.

〔Section §8〕 Why Penetrating Illumination Sees Body, Breath, and Mind as One Affair

The thirty-six substances contemplated in the special excellences remain general marks. Penetrating illumination makes the three affairs of body, breath, and mind interpenetrate during cultivation and converge as one upon realization. Through fine contemplation it can produce the three illuminations and six superknowledges and even enter the attainment of cessation of feeling and perception; hence “penetrating illumination.” The factor of awareness knows not only mind but also the ultimate and conventional: contemplation of the ultimate makes form, breath, and mind disappear without difference, while contemplation of the conventional again sees fine signs of skin, flesh, bones and organs, the movement of worms through their apertures, and even implantation and embryonic formation.

The treatise explains continuity from earlier to later through a wax seal pressed into clay. Past karma resembles the wax seal and the parents’ reproductive fluids the clay. That old karma does not remain is the breaking of the seal; that a new period of name-and-form forms is the completion of the impression. Five colors, sounds, vital energies, and flavors are then used to distinguish the formation of the five organs and the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body. These passages do not establish a secret bodily history existing separately from mind. They unfold how, within conventional truth, karma, consciousness, and name-and-form depend upon one another.

When concentration arises, the three affairs resemble a plantain trunk without substance at access concentration; foam at the first dhyāna; a floating cloud at the second; a shadow at the third; and a mirror-image at the fourth. From there, one enters cessation of feeling and perception through space, consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception nor non-perception. Every simile loosens substantial attachment to body, breath, and mind; it does not establish plantain, foam, cloud, or shadow as a fixed meditative sign to collect.

〔Section §9〕 Why the Nine Perceptions Do Not End in Disgust toward the Body

The nine perceptions proceed from swelling, destruction, blood-smearing, festering, blue-blackening, being devoured, scattering, bones, and burning. Practitioners who destroy the Dharma-support hasten to the stage beyond learning and burn away even the bone-person, retaining no further merits of phenomenal concentration, superknowledge, and the rest. Practitioners who preserve the Dharma-support stop at the perception of bones, providing a basis from which streaming light, relinquishments, spheres of mastery, contemplation, refinement, cultivation by infusion, and higher cultivation can continue to develop. Both cultivate disenchantment, but their aims and the preparatory means retained differ.

A corpse is seen first because, although not counted among the nine, it is their root. A person able to speak a moment ago suddenly loses breath and becomes cold; rich or lowly, old or young, upright or ugly, none escapes. The corpse is then seen swelling, splitting, flowing with blood, festering, turning blue-black, being devoured by birds and beasts, and scattering into separate bones. Concentrated mind deepens as the signs change, while defiled attachment ceases through directly seeing the body’s destination.

This does not substitute disgust for wisdom. After the fire of desire is counteracted forcefully, the nine perceptions can also open the outflow-free and the Great Vehicle. Treating the later six perfections and four immeasurable minds merely as textual displacement would overlook that a bodhisattva can arouse vast practice within the very first perception. The treatise compares the method’s force to a rhubarb decoction, yet still returns it to the factors of the path and benefit of others rather than stopping at hatred of the body.

〔Section §10〕 Do the Relinquishments Turn Their Backs on Form or on the Attached Mind?

“Turning one’s back” means becoming disenchanted with the pure five desires of a lower ground and one’s present ground. “Relinquishing” means abandoning the defiled and attached mind. While afflictions are unexhausted and concentration incomplete, the method is called only relinquishment. Only when severance of delusion is ultimate and phenomena and principle complete is it called liberation. Naming the result within the cause or the cause within the result can each be valid in context, but neither erases the distinction between cultivation and realization.

In the first relinquishment, one inwardly contemplates one’s own skin, flesh, and white bones and outwardly contemplates a corpse. The body swells and splits from toes to crown, skin and flesh fall away, and the joints support the skeleton. Practitioners thereby no longer reckon an inner self or love outer things. The bones then emit the eight colors, beginning with blue, yellow, white, and dove-gray; light follows mind upward and downward and universally illuminates the ten directions. Every color likewise possesses eight contacts, ten merits, five factors, and deviant and correct signs. The presence of light does not make a sign correct; mottled confusion must still be removed.

When the inner bone-person disappears and only outer form and the eight colors remain, this is the second relinquishment. When pure color is further tempered through a pure conditioned object so happiness is felt throughout the body without defiled attachment, this is the pure relinquishment. One then transcends all form and enters space, abandons space and conditions consciousness, abandons consciousness and enters nothingness, and finally abandons subtle feeling and perception to accomplish the relinquishment of cessation of feeling and perception. What the relinquishments break at each stage is not merely coarse form, but the mind’s renewed cherishing of each progressively purer object.

〔Section §11〕 Why Does the Object Expand from One Corpse to the Entire World?

Small Impurity mainly contemplates the direct retribution of oneself and others: one corpse, two corpses, and eventually corpses throughout villages and countries. Great Impurity includes circumstantial retribution as well—houses, wealth, food and drink, clothing, mountains and rivers, gardens and forests, rivers and seas. A house resembles a tomb, money a dead snake, soup foul liquid, a mountain a mass of flesh, and a pond a river of pus. Once the power of contemplation gathers force, like fire no longer choosing its fuel, neither direct nor circumstantial retribution can continue to support attachment to desire.

Yet the treatise also asks: what thing has a fixed purity or impurity? Through retribution from wholesome karma, tiles and stones can become gold and silver. Through retribution from evil karma, the flesh of a body may appear as fields, forests, mountains, and houses in hell. Great Impurity does not establish another eternally impure world. Through strong contemplative power it overturns the great inversion, “This thing is certainly lovable.” Form Dharmas can transform according to karma and concentration precisely because they lack a fixed mark that cannot be transformed.

The spheres of mastery then make mind transform many and few, beautiful and ugly, and the eight colors with sovereignty. “Knowing with mastery” means mind is not bound by form and can transform it. “Seeing with mastery” means pure and impure are both understood clearly within contemplation. At the totalities, blue pervades the ten directions and the remaining colors likewise pervade; the colors enter one another without confusion. What pervades issues from inner mind rather than grasping an external leaf. Only when mind can first transform can transformation of an outer object be discussed.

This sovereignty must in turn be realized within the six perfections. If even body can be relinquished, how could one be stingy with wealth? Seeing wealth and sex as filth, how could one break moral discipline for them? Refusing to contend with another person over impure things accomplishes patient endurance. Not retreating because body or land is impure is diligence. Full possession of contemplation, refinement, cultivation by infusion, and higher cultivation is meditative concentration. The unobtainability of contemplative subject and contemplated object is wisdom. If spiritual transformation is not turned into moral conduct and benefit of others, only a subtler attachment remains.

〔Section §12〕 If Impurity Has Broken the Mark of Beings, Whom Can Loving-Kindness Still Condition?

Concentration of loving-kindness first apprehends the sign of sentient beings attaining happiness. Moving gradually from loved ones through neutral people to enemies and making them equal is called broad, great, and immeasurable. Moving from one direction through the four intermediate directions to the ten directions is likewise unfolded as broad, great, and immeasurable. If mind inwardly and decisively forms the perception of beings attaining happiness while outwardly not seeing them receive it, this is unhidden within and hidden without. If inner mind is bright and pure and attainment of happiness is seen outwardly, both are unhidden.

In dependence upon root dhyāna, loving-kindness can possess the five factors of awareness, examination, joy, happiness, and one-pointed mind, yet its Dharma-flavor is deeper than root dhyāna alone. It can also possess contemplative wisdom in dependence upon the special excellences and penetrating illumination, or arise mutually with impurity. A question then appears: if impurity has contemplated the body of beings as destroyed, who remains to receive happiness? The treatise answers that although an outflowed happiness attained by a being is unobtainable, the happiness of nirvāṇa can still be conditioned, transforming the method into loving-kindness conditioned by Dharmas.

Pure and impure marks do not mutually exclude one another. Seeing the body as impure does not prevent seeing a person’s clothing and appearance as upright. The arising of loving-kindness concentration does not prevent knowing that the body will disintegrate. Disenchantment without loving-kindness readily seeks only to escape; loving-kindness without truthful contemplation readily sticks to lovable marks. Only when the two arise mutually can one avoid deception by bodily marks without abandoning sentient beings.

〔Section §13〕 How One Thought of Grasping Unfolds Birth and Death through Three Lives

Dependent-origination dhyāna can trace backward from one present thought. Mind conditions wholesome or evil, and conditioning subject and conditioned object form existence. Existence arises from grasping, grasping from craving, craving from feeling, feeling from contact, contact from the six sense fields, the six sense fields from name-and-form, name-and-form from consciousness implanted in the womb, consciousness from karmic formations, and formations from ignorance. The existence formed by present craving and grasping then draws forth future birth and aging-and-death. The three lives revolve; every link depends upon another and no master exists within them.

This inquiry is itself wisdom in character, yet it can still correspond with root dhyāna and arise as five factors. If dependent origination is understood within and the inversion of self broken while outward marks remain unclear, this is hidden. If implantation, wholesome and evil karma, and future birth and death are seen so all three lives are distinct, this is unhidden. One can also proceed in reverse from the existence of the root dhyānas and trace, level by level, hope, savor-attached craving, receiving, conjunction of faculties and objects, name-and-form, consciousness, karma, and ignorance.

Dependent-origination samādhi still precedes the establishments of mindfulness and belongs to phenomenal contemplation that settles mind. It makes mind resemble a sealed room without wind, fit to become the basis for further contemplation of principle. Pūrṇa’s statement that knowing ignorance prevents grasping and existence from arising already belongs to wisdom from hearing. A shared word “wisdom” cannot collapse the interval between enabling mind to settle and truly penetrating nonarising into one stage.

〔Section §14〕 When Does Dependent-Origination Dhyāna Turn from Arising Signs to the Ten Modes?

Once the Dharma of dependent origination has arisen, the ten meanings of calming-and-contemplation are explained through it. The treatise first describes arising signs of dependent origination across three lives and then immediately asks: since the twelve links contain all birth and death, can the ten modes of calming-and-contemplation be clarified through this very object? The answer unfolds through four kinds of wisdom.

Inferior wisdom transforms ignorance into illumination of arising and ceasing and accomplishes the śrāvaka path. Middling wisdom contemplates neither arising nor ceasing and accomplishes pratyekabuddha awakening and the awakening of the Shared Teaching. Superior wisdom cultivates distinct successive practices through sequential illumination and accomplishes Distinct-Teaching awakening. Most superior wisdom contemplates from the initial arousal of mind that the twelve links are the three buddha-natures. Ignorance, craving, and grasping can be transformed into prajñā; formations and existence into liberation; and the seven links beginning with consciousness can disclose Dharma body. The three paths are not removed so that three virtues can be installed elsewhere. The three virtues are disclosed by transforming delusion into awakening, neither vertical nor horizontal.

The twelve links can also be correlated with the ten suchnesses and ten objects. Aggregates, sense fields, and elements together with illness largely correspond to the resultant links; afflictions, views, and pride largely to ignorance, craving, and grasping; and karma, Māra, meditative concentration, the Two Vehicles, and bodhisattvas largely to formations and existence. Dispersed among different minds, they merely arise and cease and are conceivable. Contemplating one person’s one thought as possessing the ten realms, ten suchnesses, and twelve links does not mean placing all Dharmas into a small mind as a container; it speaks of one within neither-one-nor-different. One thought in a dream can pass through immeasurable lives, already showing that time and enumerated Dharmas cannot be measured through ordinary emotion.

The true mind of awakening thereby removes five kinds of causal suffering and seven kinds of resultant suffering in the ten realms, transforms the five causal links into the correct and assisting paths, and sees the seven resultant links as originally peaceful and happy. Settling mind contemplates the seven links as immediately Dharma-nature so the eight inversions do not arise, and calms the inversions of formations and existence. Pervasive breaking horizontally contemplates the twelve links of the ten realms as only one thought and vertically breaks views and thought, dust-and-sand, lack of knowledge, and ignorance. Passage and obstruction, factors of the path, the three liberations, and counteraction through the six perfections can all be established upon the twelve links.

The Buddhas’ sitting at the site of awakening, turning the Dharma wheel, and entering nirvāṇa likewise do not depart from the twelve links. The sites of awakening of the four teachings, teaching through the five flavors, and four kinds of nirvāṇa are all skillful means suited to faculties. Finally the Six Identities distinguish stages: beings being the One Vehicle in principle does not mean identity in name, contemplative practice, resemblance, partial realization, and ultimate identity have no difference. Moonlight gradually becomes full while the moon’s substance has never separately arisen. Stages have higher and lower, while suchness originally neither arises nor ceases. Only by knowing both sides does one avoid both abandoning oneself and producing overbearing pride.

Patient endurance gathers the ten objects back into the twelve links. Karma, Māra, meditative concentration, the Two Vehicles, and bodhisattva practices largely arise from formations and existence. Greed, anger, various views, and different attachments to wisdom arise from ignorance, craving, and grasping. Aggregates, sense fields, and elements; the eight winds; and illness arise from the resultant links. If the three obstructions are seen as not departing from buddha-nature, one does not turn with adverse or favorable objects. Although resembling wisdom, merit, and Dharma-nature are delightful, each still carries ignorance, karma, and birth and death. If one loves only the Buddhas’ merits and rejects expedient means, the three paths cannot truly be transformed into the three virtues.

〔Section §15〕 Why Seeing a Buddha’s Light Is Not Necessarily the Samādhi of Recollecting the Buddha

Recollection of the Buddha can arise first and bring forth various dhyānas, or arise through those dhyānas. Within concentration, practitioners contemplate the Buddha’s spiritual power, wisdom, merit, marks, and excellences, and further know the substance, result, and karma of each mark. The five factors then arise together with the Dharma of recollecting the Buddha. Since the Buddha’s merits are immeasurable, the samādhis, five factors, and forest-like attendant merits that arise are likewise immeasurable.

The concentration of recollecting the Buddha can be bright within and hidden without, or bright both within and without. If mind can distinguish the Dharma gates of the Buddha’s merits, outwardly sees light, marks, and spiritual form, and thereby increases wholesome roots, the experience corresponds. If inner mind is dark, does not recognize a single Dharma gate, and sees only intense light filling the eyes, the treatise directly judges it a sign of Māra. The criterion for deviance and correctness lies not in how magnificent the form appears, but in whether the Dharma is correct and wholesome roots increase.

The Tathāgata’s manifestation likewise need not be fixed as a buddha-body with ten-foot radiance. Teachers, monastics, parents, and even deer, horses, and monkeys can appear according to what beings delight in, what suits them, what counteracts their illness, and what enables their deliverance. Only when a form-image and Dharma gate arise together and existing wholesome roots increase is this called the samādhi of recollecting the Buddha. If form-marks alone are grasped, there is no way to distinguish a Māra-image from a clay sculpture, wooden carving, or painting. The Dharma gate and transformation toward good are the eye of discernment.

〔Section §16〕 Is Superknowledge the Substance or the Function of Dhyāna?

The five superknowledges—divine eye, knowledge of others’ minds, divine ear, knowledge of past lives, and bodily mastery—can arise only in dependence upon dhyāna; dhyāna cannot arise in return from superknowledge. Dhyāna is the substance of concentration and superknowledge its function. Substance can bring forth function; function cannot independently produce substance. Scripture therefore says that deeply cultivating meditative concentration attains the five superknowledges, not that superknowledge is attained first and produces dhyāna afterward.

Every dhyāna can produce all five, though the ease differs. The special excellences and penetrating illumination often produce lightness and elevation; relinquishments and spheres of mastery, sovereign transformation. Concentration of loving-kindness conditions a person’s appearance and knows suffering and happiness, readily producing knowledge of others’ minds and divine hearing. Contemplation of the three lives through dependent origination readily produces knowledge of past lives and divine vision. Unhidden recollection of the Buddha likewise often produces divine vision. Every superknowledge still possesses the five factors of awareness, examination, joy, happiness, and one-pointed mind.

The substance of dhyāna may sometimes produce only inward understanding while outward marks remain unclear and therefore can be hidden. Superknowledge, as the function of concentration, must be clear when present and is therefore unhidden. This distinction acknowledges the clear function of superknowledge while still placing it after the substance of dhyāna, preventing function from eclipsing substance.

〔Section §17〕 Once Dhyāna Has Arisen, What Is Ultimately Contemplated?

Only at its end does the chapter enter the fourth major section: cultivating calming-and-contemplation after dhyāna arises. Without skillful means, attachment to dhyāna-flavor leads to birth according to dhyāna and may even make attainment of concentration produce pride, broken moral discipline, and karma. A snake entering a bamboo tube becomes temporarily straight but curves again upon emerging. Body and speech becoming gentle and subdued within concentration does not mean the root of afflictions has been severed. A cucumber can serve as a condition for various results; dhyāna likewise can produce the ten Dharma realms.

When dhyāna corresponds with loving-kindness, benevolence, ritual propriety, righteousness, and the ten wholesome actions, it can produce human and heavenly realms. Impurity and relinquishment can produce the śrāvaka outflow-free. Contemplating the circulation of causes and conditions within dhyāna can accomplish the pratyekabuddha realm. Breaking the six obscurations through dhyāna can accomplish the six perfections. Contemplating a conditionally arisen Dharma as immediately empty, provisional, and the Middle can further open the Dharma realms of the Shared, Distinct, and Perfect Teachings. Dhyāna itself does not decide a person’s destination; grasping and the method of contemplation unfold it toward different Dharma realms.

Conceivable contemplation draws all moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom of the nine Dharma realms into the king samādhi like streams entering the sea. Entry is gathering in; disappearance of fresh flavor is cessation; formation of the ocean’s flavor is arising. Concentration of loving-kindness can be transformed into unconditioned loving-kindness and compassion; recollection of the Buddha into the great ocean of recollecting the Buddha; superknowledge into the Tathāgata’s skillful means. Noble practice, heavenly practice, brahmā practice, illness-practice, and infant-practice then produce the ten merits. Yet this remains a gathering that can be taught sequentially and is not the true object of the chapter.

Inconceivable contemplation directly takes one thought of concentrated mind. When savor-attached dhyāna, pure dhyāna, or even superknowledge appears, know that this one thought is precisely ignorance, Dharma-nature, and the Dharma realm; neither the concentration nor distraction of the ten realms departs from it. Delusion about Dharma-nature produces all distracted evil Dharmas; understanding Dharma-nature produces all Dharmas of concentration. Concentration and distraction are immediately ignorance, and ignorance immediately Dharma-nature. Sentient beings and the attainment of cessation cannot be said to be wholly identical or wholly different: apart from sentient beings there is nowhere to seek concentration, so they are not separate; ordinary sentient emotion does not equal noble concentration, so they are not identical. Neither identity nor separation is precisely the contemplative gate.

If direct hearing of this meaning brings awakening, the following nine modes need not be applied. If not, arouse mind through great compassion, settle mind through the three calmings and three contemplations, pervasively break horizontal and vertical delusion through the three contemplations in one mind, distinguish passage and obstruction, open the factors of the path, and cultivate the six perfections as assisting counteractions. Emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle are not arranged before and after within one thought, and the three calmings and three contemplations possess no fixed marks to grasp. Their names are established only to break partiality.

The final three Dharmas prevent practice from falling near the goal. Knowing stages prevents inner overbearing pride. Patient endurance guards against the external eight winds and the three obstructions and four Māras. Freedom from Dharma-attachment prevents resembling wisdom, merit, and Dharma-nature from becoming a fall from the summit. Only when the ten Dharmas are accomplished does meditative concentration cease to be another object in which one abides and become the jeweled vehicle proceeding directly to wondrous awakening, complete in one’s own practice and transformation of others.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The reading above has followed the treatise’s own sequence from the rationale for the object, through the arising signs of the ten gates, to cultivation through the ten modes. Zhanran’s Zhiguan Fuxing Chuanhong Jue further illuminates several junctions where levels are most easily confused.

First, the purpose of the meditative-concentration object is not to praise attainment of concentration. The Fuxing explains the opening obstructions through five matters that make meditative results retreat. It further says that preserving dhyāna without contemplating it makes views and craving arise through dhyāna, while abandoning dhyāna and refusing to train in it makes one return to scattered mind. Taking dhyāna as object simultaneously avoids indulgence in its savor and abandonment of what has arisen. This also limits the chapter’s subject: not general step-by-step cultivation of dhyāna, but contemplative treatment after past habituation spontaneously arises within the four kinds of samādhi.

Second, the opening and combining of ten gates retain only phenomenal dhyāna. Zhanran expressly says that loving-kindness conditioned by Dharmas and unconditioned loving-kindness belong to principle; the meanings of dependent origination as retribution and in one thought are likewise subtle and are attached to principle rather than included among the chapter’s ten gates. This judgment preserves the distinction between phenomena and principle. Yet phenomenal dhyāna can serve as a condition for the outflow-free, so the ten gates cannot all be judged as producing only the outflowed. “Able to serve as an outflow-free condition” and “outflow-free in substance” are two different claims.

Third, the shallowness and depth of the ten gates form the textual sequence, not a requirement that every practitioner fully experience them grade by grade. The Fuxing restricts the chapter’s structure through the phrase “here there is only arising through attainment” and removes the pair of deliberate activation from the nine pairs of mutual arising because the nine objects all arise spontaneously. Past habituation is the inner cause, while calming-and-contemplation and noble empowerment are outer conditions. Zhanran reads together the two accounts in the Jingdu Jing through the stimulus of beings’ capacities and the Buddha’s response, allowing neither self-deliverance nor deliverance by the Buddha to cancel the other.

Fourth, desire-realm concentration and access concentration must be distinguished according to the person. Treatises that state only their existence or nonexistence are gathered by Zhanran as differing according to faculties and conditions; one school alone cannot be held as exhaustive. Correct and deviant forms of the eight contacts must likewise be distinguished. A deviant Dharma can enter by riding upon dhyāna, but that does not make the substance of dhyāna a ghost. Excess and deficiency within the ten merits provide the measure for testing a contact. Light, total quiescence, or bodily movement by itself never suffices as proof.

Fifth, differing treatise explanations of the five factors of the first dhyāna are not forcibly harmonized. The Abhidharma says they arise simultaneously; the Satyasiddhi Treatise, successively; and the attribution in the Great Collection also involves a sixth silent mind. Zhanran preserves each account in turn. The variant readings “a person obtains a treasure-store” in this treatise and “a poor person obtains a treasure-store” elsewhere in the received texts should likewise be recorded side by side, each remaining in its own location. A later or more complete phrase must not overwrite the wording of the treatise.

Sixth, the boundary between the special excellences and penetrating illumination lies in the coarseness or fineness of contemplative wisdom. The special excellences have more concentration and less wisdom; penetrating illumination keeps concentration and wisdom in greater balance. The Great Collection uses only the name Jewel Torch and does not establish “Penetrating Illumination” as a scriptural title. The nine perceptions belong to contemplative dhyāna, not the three classes of refinement, cultivation by infusion, and higher cultivation. Although they subdue desire through disenchantment, they can still produce the Great Vehicle. Relinquishment is shared generally by the Two Vehicles and belongs specifically to bodhisattvas; relinquishment is cause and liberation result. Whether phenomena and principle and the severance of delusion are complete determines which name applies, and the names must not be conflated.

Seventh, the great and small in Great Impurity and Small Impurity distinguish general from specific and coarse from subtle, not higher from lower in value. Whether concentration of loving-kindness is outflowed or outflow-free is likewise judged according to whether it depends upon root dhyāna, the special excellences, penetrating illumination, impurity, or another support. At the method of dependent origination the contemplative chapter truly turns. Zhanran expressly says that the other nine dhyānas are contemplated only after they arise, while dependent-origination dhyāna can be contemplated immediately. The ten modes therefore open separately after the arising signs across three lives; the entire passage cannot be counted merely as a description of dhyāna arising.

Eighth, one thought in the contemplation of dependent origination cannot be read as a container grasped by worldly people. Zhanran unfolds one thought’s full possession as the ten realms, ten suchnesses, and twelve links, then integrates dependent origination, the three paths, and the three virtues level by level. The three substances are neither vertical nor horizontal and have no before or after. Here the Six Identities prevent intrinsic possession by sentient beings from being passed off directly as ultimate resultant realization.

Ninth, the passage on recollecting the Buddha explains only signs arising from past habituation. Zhanran explains the Buddha’s responsive manifestation through four causes and conditions: what beings delight in, what suits them, what counteracts their illness, and what enables their deliverance. The criterion therefore remains the Dharma gate and wholesome roots rather than a fixed form or appearance. The passage on superknowledge likewise distinguishes arising signs only. Phenomenal superknowledge is a function of dhyāna and does not equal outflow-free superknowledge; one who has not attained noble fruit is not thereby encouraged to seek extraordinary powers widely.

Tenth, the final passage turns from what has arisen to the application of contemplation. The Fuxing first uses the cucumber to explain that dhyāna can produce the ten realms, then distinguishes the conceivable and inconceivable. Nonduality of concentration and distraction in one thought must still be guarded by the Six Identities so an ordinary being does not usurp a noble stage. Zhanran further judges that from contemplating the object through assisting counteractions, the Dharmas of correct contemplation are already complete. Stages prevent usurpation, while patient endurance and freedom from attachment spur the shallow onward into the deep. These three are important but do not add three more contemplative substances outside the ten modes.

The source judgments also reveal the restraint of this mirror. Concerning the thirty-six defilements, Zhanran directly records that he had not examined the source; later readers cannot revise that into a successful retrieval. Concerning the three phrases about white bones, fine soup, and sentient beings being precisely the attainment of cessation, he still assigns them to the Great Sūtra; the same wording has not been found in the extant scripture, but his source judgment cannot therefore be erased. “The sixth silent mind is the substance of concentration” is attributed by the treatise to the Great Collection, while parallel wording in the extant canon appears instead in the Yingluo. Both ends must be preserved. Commentary supplies transmitted judgments; it does not authorize readers to replace the treatise silently with a later, fuller sentence.

The Zhiguan Yili further explains the vertical sequence of the ten dhyānas as a sequence for breaking partiality and expressly says that actual practitioners need not proceed from shallow to deep. The opening and combining of the ten dhyānas and the arising signs of the ten objects are established specifically so signs can first be recognized and then cultivated through the gate of practice. The Zhiguan Dayi says that past habituations must be recognized when they arise and that the arising of various objects is not fixed: among the four root dhyānas, special excellences, penetrating illumination, nine perceptions, relinquishments, recollection of the Buddha, and superknowledges, whichever gate is nearest ripeness arises. Though the arisen sign is difficult to know, its handling still returns to quiescence and illumination; an extraordinary object does not require a different contemplative method.

Later reception develops these same junctions. The Siming line contrasts savor-attached dhyāna with the conception that the Six Wondrous Gates and higher methods are outflow-free, refusing to reduce the samādhi of recollecting the Buddha to the phenomenal alone. It further uses the king samādhi to gather all samādhis, directly titles the meditative-concentration object as lodging cultivation within the object to distinguish arising, and traces from the link of existence to know result from cause and cause from result. These are rereadings of the chapter’s scene. They show how its meaning was transmitted but still cannot be written backward as Zhizhe’s original phrase-by-phrase sectional judgment.

The Fuxing mirror finally refocuses the chapter’s immense table of meditative signs and gives discernible criteria before, during, and after arising: chapter sequence is not the order of arising; arising signs are not resultant realization; phenomenal dhyāna does not belong only to the outflowed; and light or superknowledge does not equal correct Dharma. The true turn remains at one place throughout—whether one can recognize the object when it appears, avoid attachment after recognition, and then contemplate concentration and distraction together as the inconceivable Dharma realm.