摩訶止觀 義疏通講 · 冊1

The Mohe Zhiguan (Great Calming-and-Contemplation) confronts its reader with an unusual fact on its first page: the summer of teaching at Yuquan was never completed. The exposition reached only the Object of Views; the later portion was not taught. If that is so, on what basis can this book still become a path one can walk? Guanding does not begin by inventing a reason for the missing text, nor does he turn what was never spoken into legend. He begins elsewhere: he follows the stream to its source and the fragrance to its root, explaining where this writing came from and what, ultimately, it transmits.

Origins is therefore more than a preface placed before a book. It asks three questions in sequence: Where does the Dharma come from? Why does the one true mark open into the three gates of the gradual, indeterminate, and perfect-and-sudden? If the true mark is inexpressible, why must three kinds of text nevertheless remain? In the end, these questions converge upon the Ten Broad Chapters. Written words do not replace practice; they bring a person to the gate of calming-and-contemplation.

Can an Unfinished Work Still Be a Complete Entrance?

The first thing Guanding records is Zhiyi’s summer of teaching at Yuquan Monastery: the Dharma was expounded morning and evening, his eloquence was inexhaustible, yet the Dharma wheel stopped at the Object of Views. An essential measure is kept here. An unfinished exposition does not mean that the portion already taught loses its sequence; a transmission missing its later portion does not mean that imagination may supply it.

The surviving text itself preserves both sides. On one side stands its explicit incompleteness: all Ten Objects are listed but only the first seven are explained, and all ten chapters are listed but Fruition and Retribution, Giving Rise to the Teaching, and Returning to the Purport lack a main text. On the other stands an already formed route: Origins opens the source; Great Purport gathers the whole; Explaining the Name reaches the essence; Embracing the Dharmas, Partial and Perfect, and Preparatory Means lead into Proper Contemplation; and the path then points toward fruition, transformation of others, and return to the source. Although the final three chapters have no text, the preceding chapters still place them within the work’s direction as a whole.

Thus, the first honesty required in reading an unfinished book is not to complete it on its behalf, but to distinguish what was spoken from what was not. What was spoken must be followed to the end of its wording; where the work itself draws a boundary around what was not spoken, the reader must stop. That boundary is not merely a note attached to a defect. It is itself the first layer of calming-and-contemplation left by Origins to the reader: do not fill a blank out of desire, and do not abandon the Dharma already manifest because a blank remains.

Why Are Having No Teacher and Having a Teacher Placed Together?

Guanding next places three statements side by side: the Buddha awakened to the path by himself and had no master to guarantee him; in a former life he nevertheless received a prediction from Dīpaṃkara Buddha; and the secular tradition distinguishes knowledge from birth from knowledge acquired through learning. If these lines are read merely as competing historical answers, they seem to conflict: did the Buddha have a teacher or not? Guanding is not forcing a choice between the two. He is saying that a Dharma gate possesses both awakening and transmission.

No one else cultivated buddhahood on the Buddha’s behalf, so ultimate awakening cannot be borrowed from outside. Yet the true Dharma does not arise in isolation, so causes and conditions, prediction, and lineage cannot be erased. Having no teacher preserves the truth that another cannot realize awakening for oneself. Having a teacher preserves the truth that practitioners do not create the path from nothing. Only when the two are seen together does transmission cease to mean that authority substitutes for direct realization, and direct realization cease to mean that one may sever the source of the Dharma.

This resolves the next question in Origins: was Zhiyi’s Dharma gate an innately solitary illumination, or did he inherit a lineage and then surpass his predecessors? The answer does not flatten either side. It appears in what follows: what Zhiyi transmitted was what he had actually practiced within his own mind. Because he had walked it himself, his transmission was not the repetition of an empty name. Because he had received it from others, his practice was not a private intention without roots.

What Are Twenty-Three Patriarchs Doing Before the Main Text?

From Kāśyapa through Siṃha, Guanding uses an extremely compressed style to narrate the transmission through twenty-three people. Each person carries more than a name; each is joined to a memorable act: Ānanda dividing his body in the river, Śāṇavāsa manifesting Dharma gates, Upagupta attaining fruits while a householder and another upon ordination, Dhītika successively cutting afflictions during the ordination karman, Pārśva emitting light to retrieve a scripture, Aśvaghoṣa using musical performance to teach impermanence, suffering, and emptiness, Āryadeva giving away his eyes, Jayata turning a fire pit into a pool, and Siṃha receiving the sword while white milk flowed.

To read these accounts only as a collection of marvels is to miss their work within the preface. They disclose that the Dharma treasury is not an object stored motionless in a vault. Whenever it passes from one person to another, it must become a practice that can counteract, teach, relinquish the body, and lead another into realization. To entrust the Dharma to a person is not merely to hand a sentence to the next person; it is to let the Dharma become, within another body and mind, something practicable, realizable, and capable of benefiting sentient beings once again.

The white elephant that became gentle beside a monastery and vicious beside the slaughterers shows how beings are perfumed by what they approach. The skulls that were venerated and consequently found a wholesome rebirth show how hearing Dharma and making offerings can alter the direction of a life. These two digressions draw the lofty patriarchal list back into the practitioner’s present. If what one approaches can alter the mind and its conduct, encountering the true Dharma and a good spiritual friend is not an ornamental blessing; it determines which road the mind will take.

Guanding nevertheless says only in general that the masters were noble ones; he does not assign a fruit or stage to each patriarch. The strength of the lineage lies in the Dharma transmitted and the benefit accomplished, not in later readers adding a tidier table of realizations to each name. This restraint also protects the reader: honoring the patriarchal transmission does not mean embellishing it with imagination.

What Is Transmitted Is Not a Set of Claims but a Path That Was Walked

After tracing the Dharma from the Buddha’s golden mouth, Guanding brings the lens closer—to Zhiyi, Nanyue, Huiwen, and Nāgārjuna. What matters is not merely who studied under whom, but how the lineage turns the meaning of a treatise into contemplative practice.

Zhiyi taught the Dharma gate he practiced within his own mind. He cultivated repentance, awakened to dhāraṇī, lectured on prajñā, and made scripture and treatise into a life within teaching and meditation. Nanyue spent years reciting scriptures, practicing the Vaipulya rites, and sitting constantly until realization arose. Huiwen directed his mind according to the Dazhidu Lun. Nāgārjuna opened emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle through dharmas born of causes and conditions. This line binds scripture, treatise, repentance, meditation, and teaching together. With doctrinal meaning but no contemplation, the Dharma gate stops at understanding. With inward cultivation but no testing against scripture and treatise, contemplation may lose its source and lineage.

Thus, when asked how the Madhyamaka Treatise, which breaks and sweeps away, can agree with calming-and-contemplation, which establishes Dharma gates, Guanding answers with the verse on causes and conditions. Emptiness does not annihilate dharmas; provisionality does not withdraw emptiness; and the Middle is not a third object placed outside emptiness and provisionality. What is broken is attachment to intrinsic nature. Within the absence of intrinsic nature, conditioned designation still stands. Precisely because emptiness and provisionality are nondual, the Middle Way is not a compromise. When both sweeping away and establishment rely on this point, their directions do not oppose one another.

Why Does the One True Mark Require Three Forms of Calming-and-Contemplation?

The gradual, indeterminate, and perfect-and-sudden all take the true mark as their condition, all belong to the Great Vehicle, and all are named calming-and-contemplation. If the three gates are the same in these respects, why divide them? Because the principle taken as condition is the same while practitioners’ modes of entry differ.

The gradual resembles climbing stairs. Practitioners begin with refuge and precepts to halt the three evil paths; use meditative concentration to halt desire and distraction; use the uncontaminated to leave the three realms; use compassion to halt the wish for personal realization alone; and finally use the true mark to leave the two extremes. They do not hear of the true mark for the first time at the end. They know the direction from the beginning, but their power of practice must proceed from shallow to profound.

The indeterminate resembles a jewel reflecting sunlight. Earlier and later, shallow and profound, phenomena and principle, and calming and contemplation may exchange positions. The worldly, person-oriented, counteractive, and ultimate-meaning siddhāntas may likewise alternate according to capacity. This is not an absence of order; it is a refusal to freeze one sequence as the only route for everyone. The Dharma gate turns according to the capacity, while its destination remains the true mark.

The perfect-and-sudden resembles a person of supernormal ability soaring through the air. Its first condition is the true mark, and no object encountered departs from the Middle Way. The five aggregates and twelve sense fields are not outside Dharma-nature; ignorance and defilement possess no separate intrinsic nature that could be cut off. Calming is named from the quiescence of Dharma-nature, and contemplation from its constant illumination within quiescence. This does not cancel suffering, origination, path, and cessation. It ceases to see what is relinquished, eliminated, cultivated, and realized as four things separate from the true mark.

The difference among the three gates is therefore both real and limited. Viewed as modes of practice, they differ as sequence, interchange, and sudden entry. Viewed in terms of what they reach, all three are gates to the true mark. To assert only sameness erases capacities and methods; to assert only difference divides the true mark into three. Guanding repeatedly preserves both sides through “different within sameness, the same within difference.”

How the Perfect-and-Sudden Grows from Hearing Dharma into Benefiting Others

The perfect-and-sudden is not a single view. Guanding unfolds it into six links: hearing, faith, practice, stage, adornment, and establishment.

To hear the perfect Dharma is to hear that Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation are three names but not three isolated essences, and that a single Dharma completely possesses the Buddha-Dharma without deficiency. Perfect faith hears the profound without fear and the vast without doubt; while negating attachment it does not fall into annihilation, and while illuminating distinctions it does not lose the single essence. Perfect practice seeks unsurpassed awakening alone and is neither shaken by the extreme of being nor extinguished by the extreme of nonbeing. Emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle become the direction of practice at the same time.

The perfect stage says that one abode includes all abodes. This shows that the Dharma-nature realized is perfectly interfused; it does not falsely pass off the first abode as the ultimate. Perfect, sovereign adornment then uses entering and emerging from concentration through faculties, objects, directions, and phenomena to show that the one mind is not confined to a fixed route. It may enter through one faculty and emerge through another, or both enter and emerge in one place. Sunlight is seen across the four continents as morning, noon, dusk, and night, but the difference lies in the viewer’s direction; there are not four suns.

Last comes the establishment of sentient beings. A single beam of light from a bodhisattva can give different beings the benefits of emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle. Walking, standing, sitting, lying down, speech, silence, and every deed can become a benefit. The Dragon King who does not depart from his palace yet raises clouds, thunders, and sends down rain is the governing image of this section. Inward penetration need not depart from Dharma-nature, yet outward function can differ endlessly according to conditions. If the perfect-and-sudden leaves only an inward view and does not establish sentient beings, it stops before the six links are complete. If it contains only outward provisions that do not arise from Dharma-nature, it loses the root of perfect functioning.

Sadāprarudita seeking in the east, Sudhana visiting in the south, Medicine King burning his arm, Puming going to his death, and the giving of bodies three times in one day all speak of the gravity of receiving Dharma. It is not that the Buddha-Dharma needs repayment from people. When hearing a Dharma truly changes a life, the practitioner naturally can no longer stand aside as an observer.

Why Is the Scriptural Attestation So Dense?

Origins next uses many scriptures to establish the three gates repeatedly. The gradual appears as sequential practice, learning, and path, and as milk and curds gradually becoming ghee. The indeterminate appears as the one voice understood differently by sentient beings, as a maṇi jewel changing the water’s color according to its wrapper, and as poison functioning whether placed in milk or ghee. The perfect-and-sudden appears as straightforwardly relinquishing skillful means, as the Forbearance grass making milk become ghee at once, and as the great ocean receiving the waters of all rivers.

These similes do not turn the three gates into three closed schools. They cause the same structure to appear repeatedly across different scriptures. In the final sunrise simile, the sun first illuminates high mountains, next secluded valleys, and then level ground: three manners of receiving light issue from one sun. The buddhas of past, present, and future honor this Dharma together precisely because calming-and-contemplation is not one person’s private teaching, but a principle upon which awakening relies.

The three forms of calming-and-contemplation are therefore also carried by three texts: the gradual in the Sequential Dhyāna Gate, the indeterminate in the Six Wondrous Gates, and the perfect-and-sudden in the present treatise recorded at Yuquan. The texts differ, but one must not cling to any text and grow a harmful excrescence. When words are grasped as substantial objects, they bind; when words are penetrated as they truly are, they can liberate.

If It Cannot Be Spoken, Why Speak at All?

At its close, Origins presses its inquiry to the deepest point. All dharmas are quiescent and extinguished; the path of language is cut off. The teacher has neither speech nor demonstration, and the hearer has neither hearing nor attainment. If so, why leave ten scrolls of writing?

The answer does not deny inexpressibility. It says that one side alone cannot be seen as the whole. Where causes and conditions obtain, there can be speech. The Tathāgata teaches through the two truths, ultimate and conventional. Although dhāraṇī has no written signs, written signs can disclose dhāraṇī. The nature of the written word is originally free from it, so speaking in its very moment can be absence of speech. Speech and silence are not positions that must destroy each other. Insisting on speech alone or silence alone equally misses the teaching’s intent.

The moon lies behind layered mountains and the practitioner cannot yet see it, so a round fan indicates the moon’s shape. Wind is itself formless, so the movement of trees lets people know it. Directly contemplating the true mark in its mystery is difficult for sentient beings; entering principle through words is easier. The problem is not that words exist but that words are sealed into substantiality. When one sees within a single text the text, non-text, and neither text nor non-text, the text becomes a gate. The gate itself does not depart from the true mark, so what is reached through it is not another object outside the gate.

Origins thus concludes by opening the Ten Broad Chapters. Great Purport awakens people from ignorance. Calming-and-contemplation gives that awakening a name. Essence and Characteristics keeps the name from floating empty. Embracing the Dharmas and Partial and Perfect order what is known. Preparatory Means makes practice possible. Proper Contemplation accomplishes contemplation. Fruition and Retribution discloses what is experienced. Giving Rise to the Teaching turns one’s own benefit toward others. Returning to the Purport brings self and others together into constant quiescence. This sequence is established because sentient beings do not realize non-arising and non-initiation. When it is truly traversed, its endpoint remains the quiescence of mental activity and the severing of the path of language.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The reading above has followed the questions, answers, and images of Guanding’s Origins itself. Zhanran’s Zhiguan Fuxing Chuanhong Jue (hereafter Fuxing) further illuminates several joints that are easily misread and clarifies the preface’s layers.

First, the four opening graphs “calming-and-contemplation, luminous and still” are not four coordinate adjectives. Zhanran takes calming-and-contemplation as the essential object heard and “luminous and still” as praise of its virtue: contemplation is essentially luminous, and calming essentially still. “Former generations had never heard it” does not mean that the two graphs for calming-and-contemplation had never appeared. It says that this Dharma gate makes concentration and wisdom both excellent, and meaning and contemplation both luminous. This reading prevents Guanding’s praise from being exaggerated into a negative historical assertion.

Second, Zhanran returns “eloquent exposition” to the four eloquences and explains “only” as “merely reached.” The Object of Views is the seventh of the Ten Objects. As for the remaining three objects and final three chapters not being taught, he records only that circumstances prevented their completion. This witnesses the incompleteness of the transmitted text; it does not authorize later readers to determine the circumstances of the teaching on that basis.

Third, the Fuxing gives an explicit clue to the function of the patriarchal succession: without listing the twenty-three patriarchs, there would be no basis for identifying Nāgārjuna as the thirteenth master. But the transmitted biography does not expressly determine each person’s fruit or stage, so stages must not be assigned to the patriarchs. The proximate-lineage passage likewise requires care with the grammatical subject. “The Dharma gate practiced within his own mind” is Guanding’s narration of Zhiyi’s practice. Zhanran calls it Zhang’an’s discreet statement of the practice obtained from the Great Master. This judgment discloses that what was transmitted was what had been practiced, but it cannot be rewritten as Zhiyi speaking about himself in the preface.

Fourth, all three forms of calming-and-contemplation rely on perfect principle; their difference lies in practice and understanding. Zhanran says that for the sudden person both practice and understanding are sudden; for the gradual person understanding is sudden while practice is gradual; and for the indeterminate person understanding is sudden while practice may be sudden or gradual. He thereby preserves both “taking the same true mark as condition” and “differing in mode of practice.” In the perfect-and-sudden teaching, “encountering an object is itself the Middle” likewise does not mean that mind manufactures an external object. It means that whatever object the contemplating mind encounters does not, in its very identity, depart from the Middle Way.

Fifth, the dense scriptural attestation is not a flat pile of books. The Fuxing first judges four scriptures to establish the gradual, indeterminate, and sudden in turn; then the Sūtra of Innumerable Meanings to establish the gradual; then six scriptures to establish the perfect; and finally the Avataṃsaka sunrise simile to conclude the whole. Each of the three texts thereby receives its place, while together they become gates to the true mark. At “the account of the origins has now been briefly completed,” Zhanran explicitly judges that Zhang’an’s preface concludes itself. Only after it do the Ten Broad Chapters open the main exposition.

Sixth, the Fuxing itself preserves layers of book formation that must remain distinct. The opening preface is signed by Pumen Zijing; Zhanran’s attribution and main text follow. That main text also records three successive textual states of the complete work and identifies the presently transmitted third state as the re-redacted text. These statements explain the textual transmission Zhanran witnessed, but they cannot be turned backward into an inference about why the Yuquan teaching remained unfinished. Preface writer, commentator, recorder, and speaker each retain their place: recognizing those places is indispensable to reading this composite work.

Ultimately, this mirror does not add a second doctrine outside Origins. It returns grammatical subjects, doctrinal boundaries, and the functions of similes to their proper places one by one. Guanding first acknowledges the incomplete transmission, then completes the entrance through patriarchal succession, the three gates, scriptural attestations, and the exchange on speech and silence. The Fuxing lets the reader see who placed each stone of the entrance and where it belongs. The unfinished book is not completed by supplementation, yet it is read more completely.

Is any mind pointed upward a mind of awakening? Seeking heavenly merit, power, intelligence, meditative pleasure, or even one’s own nirvāṇa gives the mind a clear direction and may demand great effort, yet the Mohe Zhiguan (Great Calming-and-Contemplation) excludes each in turn. Genuine arousal does not merely make the wish larger. It asks whether this mind simultaneously seeks the Buddha path above and transforms sentient beings below, abiding neither in the bondage of birth and death nor in the pursuit of personal release alone.

The chapter on Arousing the Great Mind therefore does not begin with an elegant definition of the mind of awakening. It first asks which minds look as if they face the path while still being drawn by attachment. Does mind arise by itself, through another’s instruction, or through stimulus and response? How do one’s understanding of the Four Truths, the vows established through that understanding, and the stages traversed connect? The treatise advances from ten false minds to four kinds of Four Truths and four kinds of Four Vast Vows, then concludes with the Six Identities. The arc of this instruction makes “I wish to become a buddha” cease to be a phrase. It becomes a direction for one’s life: understanding suffering, having suffering to remove, possessing a practice to advance, and distinguishing the stages.

Why Do the Five Summaries Begin with Arousing the Mind?

Great Purport distills the Ten Broad Chapters into Five Summaries: Arousing the Great Mind, Cultivating the Great Practice, Bringing Forth the Great Fruit, Tearing Open the Great Net, and Returning to the Great Abode. These are not five unrelated things. Arousing the mind gives the whole journey its direction; cultivation makes direction into steps underfoot; fruition discloses the results brought forth by accord and opposition; tearing the net keeps practitioners from being bound by one-sided views of scriptures and treatises; and returning to the abode brings benefit of self and others together into the Dharma realm.

If arousing the mind does not come first, later practice may be diligent without knowing for whom it is done. Fruition may be excellent yet become a new attachment. Scriptures and treatises may be abundant yet weave nets around one another. Conversely, merely arousing the mind and staring down the road without moving never reaches the destination. The Five Summaries therefore place arousing the mind first and immediately send it toward great practice; they place return to the abode last, yet from the beginning let the Dharma realm be without beginning or end, passage or obstruction.

Arousing the mind itself divides into regional terminology, exclusion of the false, and disclosure of the true. The text first determines that “mind” here means what deliberates and knows, not plant heartwood or the center of a physical accumulation; it then distinguishes the roads mind travels; only then does it disclose the genuine mind of awakening. The sequence seems to begin with names, but actually clears away, step by step, what can easily be mistaken for arousal of the mind.

Ten False Minds: Evil Is Not the Only Problem

The first six classes begin with hells, animals, hungry ghosts, asuras, humans, and gods. Unremitting absorption in greed, anger, and delusion is the path of fire; swallowing followers as the sea swallows streams is the path of blood; possessing no real virtue while craving fame in every direction is the path of blades; refusing any lower place while disdaining others and esteeming oneself is the asura mind; seeking only comfort for this body is the human mind; gathering the six faculties solely to seek heavenly pleasure is the heavenly mind. They rise from obvious evil into worldly good, but all remain centered on what the self will obtain.

The seventh through ninth are subtler. Wishing for power that makes everyone obey is the mind of a ruler of the desire realm. Wishing for intelligence and eloquence unsurpassed in the world is the mind of an outsider endowed with worldly wisdom. Disdaining external sensual pleasure while clinging to profound inner meditative pleasure is the Brahmā mind. They need not look violent; they may appear dignified, intelligent, and pure. Yet they remain drawn by “I must become the highest” and “I must obtain the deepest pleasure.”

The tenth deserves a pause. A practitioner sees the wearying cycle of the world, honors discipline, concentration, and wisdom, and seeks uncontaminated liberation; the treatise still includes this among what must be excluded. It does not reject discipline, concentration, wisdom, or liberation. It says that leaping alone from the net and stopping there, without great compassion, still does not complete Buddha-Dharma. The first nine resemble silkworms binding themselves; the tenth a muntjac leaping out alone. One side remains trapped in birth and death, the other seeks only its own escape. Neither is the great mind that seeks above and transforms below.

Excluding the false is therefore more than dividing good from evil. It simultaneously excludes attachment to the two sides of conditioned and unconditioned, contaminated and uncontaminated, defiled and pure, bondage and liberation. The problem in the first nine is easier to see; the tenth may be mistaken for the destination. The genuine mind of awakening is not complete when evil turns to good or the world turns toward personal nirvāṇa. Wisdom and great compassion must both be present.

The simile of elephant, fish, and wind muddying a pond returns observation to each thought. An external object can step into the water like an elephant and directly arouse false tendencies. Weak inward contemplation can stir from below like a fish. Inward and outward can mix as wind moves both surface and depth. An erroneous mind does not come only from outside or only from within. Practitioners must continually see it amid faculties and objects, the three karmic activities, and four comportments: guard against what has not arisen and quickly extinguish what has. The list of ten false minds thereby becomes a present method for contemplating mind.

Arousal Is Not Self-Creation but the Conjunction of Stimulus and Response

If the mind of awakening is not merely an enlarged wish, where does it arise? The treatise refuses to fix it as produced by oneself alone, poured in by another alone, jointly manufactured by both, or wholly without conditions. It uses the simile of a child falling into water or fire and parents starting up to rescue it. The child’s suffering is stimulus, the parents’ compassion response. When the two meet, the act of rescue arises.

There is no isolated practitioner who first completes the self and then decides whether to care about others. Seeing sentient beings ill, buddhas and bodhisattvas become ill with them as parents do. Sentient beings’ suffering causes the mountain of Dharma-nature to shake through great compassion, and the practitioner enters the ocean of birth and death. The practices of illness and infancy are not distractions that drag one away from cultivation; they are the form assumed by compassionate arousal.

The four accommodations unfold this stimulus and response as methods of teaching. Follow what sentient beings presently enjoy and make them happy; follow what suits their former habits and make practice easy; follow counteraction by giving different doses according to the severity of afflictive illness; when the time for the path matures, teach the ultimate meaning and let them enter awakening immediately. Dharma does not depart from reality, yet the teaching does not have only one tone of voice.

The four siddhāntas and five reasons for teaching prajñā describe the same matter from another side. Some must first obtain worldly joy, some develop wholesome roots, some counteract evil error, and some enter ultimate meaning directly. The many bodhisattva practices, recollection-of-the-Buddha samādhi, signs of non-retrogression, rescue from error, and ultimate meaning are all provisions according to capacity. Their names can open into and gather one another. The core remains this: teaching is not emptying what one knows outward, but Buddha-Dharma meeting sentient beings where causes and conditions have matured.

Thus arousing the mind of awakening is contemplation, and the cessation of perverse mind is calming. Stimulus and response are not only external affairs involved in transforming others. Every moment in which mind can give rise to great compassion because of sentient beings without being drawn away by perversity is already the simultaneous functioning of calming-and-contemplation.

The Four Kinds of Four Truths First Clarify Suffering · Origination · Path · Cessation

Before establishing vows, the treatise lets practitioners see that suffering, origination, path, and cessation can be read at four levels.

The Four Truths of arising-and-ceasing see all things changing. The body and mind of suffering move through arising, abiding, and cessation; the thoughts of origination flow without interruption; path removes delusion through counteraction; cessation returns what exists to nonbeing. This level first awakens practitioners from the burning house of impermanence. The three realms are like a chest filled with suffering; the four mountains of birth, aging, illness, and death close in. Seeing a plow turn the soil and birds eat worms, or a jeweled platform collapse in an instant, suffices to arouse compassionate vows.

The Four Truths of non-arising ask: if all conditioned dharmas lack intrinsic nature, where is a real suffering that oppresses or a real origination that combines? Counteragent and object counteracted cannot be obtained; neither can arising and ceasing. This does not say that sentient beings do not suffer. It ceases to turn suffering and sufferer into substances. Precisely because suffering cannot be fixed, bodhisattvas are not turned by it; precisely because sentient beings cannot be fixed, bodhisattvas do not abandon their liberation.

The Immeasurable Four Truths see immeasurable differences already within one suffering, much more the ten Dharma realms. Greed, anger, and delusion issue in immeasurable bodily, verbal, and mental karma. Path includes analytical and identity-emptiness, skillful and awkward, crooked and straight, provisional and real. Cessation likewise differs according to the delusions eliminated and primary and auxiliary means used. Bodhisattvas do not use one medicine for every illness, nor does nondifference in ultimate meaning make them blind to different capacities.

The Unconstructed Four Truths say that suffering, origination, path, and cessation all remain inside the true mark. Ordinary dharmas need not be thrown far away before a separate noble Dharma is gained. Birth and death do not depart from nirvāṇa, afflictions do not depart from awakening, and not a single color or fragrance is other than the Middle Way. This does not defend affliction. It cuts the duality that first preserves a substantial affliction and then attempts to manufacture a substantial awakening.

The four levels can be vertically or horizontally correlated with the four lands; stated generally as Four Truths or opened specifically into twelvefold dependent origination; and read in the dependent-origination verse as arising-and-ceasing, non-arising, immeasurable provisional names, and the unconstructed Middle Way. These openings and gatherings do not accumulate classifications for their own sake. They provide the same arousal of mind with a fitting contemplative object for different capacities.

Why Can Hearing the Same Sentence Produce Four Minds?

The treatise brings the Four Truths into ten kinds of arousal: investigating principle, seeing marks, seeing transformations, hearing Dharma, traveling through lands, seeing assemblies, seeing practices, seeing the Dharma become extinct, seeing faults, and seeing others suffer. It unfolds the first classes in detail so readers can see how one object becomes four vows through different understandings.

When Dharma-nature is investigated, the arising-and-ceasing contemplation resembles clouds dispersing to reveal the moon: afflictions must first be removed before the true is seen. The non-arising contemplation resembles ice and water as one essence: suffering and origination cannot be obtained in their very identity. The immeasurable contemplation sees the true mark pass beyond the two extremes and pure virtue concealed within coverings. The unconstructed contemplation resembles someone trying to flee the open space here and find open space elsewhere, finally knowing that ordinary dharmas in their very identity do not depart from the true mark. Dharma-nature has not suddenly become four; delusion differs as light and heavy, identity and separation, while understanding differs as skillful and awkward, provisional and real.

Seeing the Buddha’s marks can mean seeing the excellence of the responsive body born of parents; the superior response whose marks cannot be obtained; the reward body whose one body manifests everywhere; or the Dharma body whose every mark and excellence is wholly the true mark. Seeing transformations can mean one beam illuminating everywhere; a buddha responding without duality so that each being sees the Buddha before them; comportments throughout the ten directions without movement from Dharma-nature; or Tathāgata and transformation as nondual, transformation producing transformation without end. Each level must do more than increase amazement. It becomes “May I become a buddha and liberate countless beings.”

Hearing the single phrase “arising-and-ceasing” may lead one to seek quiescence through seeing change; awaken to non-arising in the Four Truths; see the Middle by leaving the extremes of arising-and-ceasing and non-arising-and-ceasing; or see the secret treasury in which one is three and three are one. Hearing non-arising, the immeasurable, or the unconstructed also turns progressively deeper, but the number of levels follows each teaching and is not mechanically uniform.

The crucial point is not a table of four vehicles but “one teaching, many understandings.” A sentence does not carry one fixed depth of practice by itself. Entering different capacities, it can become analysis of dharmas, penetration of identity-emptiness, sequential three truths, or perfectly interfused three truths. Hearing Dharma therefore asks not only which sentence one remembers, but what understanding it has produced in the mind and what vow arose from that understanding.

The Four Vast Vows Press Understanding into an Irrevocable Vow

The treatise says the Four Truths primarily concern understanding and the Four Vast Vows primarily concern vows. Understanding that does not become a vow can see birth and death clearly and still remain on the bank. A vow not arising from understanding may possess ardor without direction.

The Four Vast Vows of arising-and-ceasing begin from momentary impermanence. The five aggregates resemble bubble, foam, mirage, city, and illusion; land, home, family, and property suddenly exist and vanish. Vowing upon seeing the burning house turns discipline, concentration, and wisdom from personal insurance into a path that vertically breaks inversion, horizontally cuts the sea of death, removes sentient beings’ suffering, and gives them happiness. Understanding the Four Truths keeps one from the nine bondages; arousing the great vows keeps one from the one liberation.

The Four Vast Vows of non-arising contemplate one thought as coming from neither self, other, both, nor no cause and going nowhere. Mind is only a provisional name; the moon in water, mirror image, and illusion cannot be obtained. Suffering, origination, path, and cessation are all empty; even true Dharma as a raft must be relinquished, much more what is not Dharma. Yet bodhisattvas do not abandon compassionate vows because of emptiness. Precisely because they do not substantialize suffering and nirvāṇa, they can remove the two sufferings and give the two happinesses without constructing a burden of rescuer and rescued.

The Immeasurable Four Vast Vows contemplate mind as a master painter that paints the six paths and immeasurable delusion and understanding. The same mind can wash away old colors and paint many factors of the path. Some go circuitously to the conjured city and some directly; some circuitously to the place of treasure and some directly. The sixteen gates and Buddha-Dharmas as numerous as the Ganges sands all open from mind. Ordinary beings resemble a blind child sitting in a treasury, the Two Vehicles a sick person mistaking jewels for ghosts and beasts. Bodhisattvas abandon neither and vow to provide immeasurable treatments for immeasurable illness.

The Unconstructed Four Vast Vows contemplate one thought as emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle. A bright mirror’s purity, image, and substance are neither three successive levels nor three horizontally arranged objects; emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle stand simultaneously without obstruction. Mind, Buddha, and sentient beings are not separated. One mote of dust can contain a trichiliocosm scripture scroll, and one thought contains Dharma treasuries, defilements, samādhis, and perfections. Ignorance turns into luminosity as ice melts into water; nothing is imported from far away. Sentient beings bind themselves within the Dharma that has no bondage and seek liberation outside the Dharma that has nothing to release. Seeing this, great compassion and the Four Vast Vows arise together.

All four can be called true because they all leave the nine bondages and single liberation and reach toward seeking above. The first three can also enter the real in sequence, and the real can gather provisional dharmas. Ultimately, however, the first three rely on the provisional to disclose the real, while the unconstructed directly discloses it. One secret prescription of an excellent physician gathers all prescriptions; one wish-fulfilling jewel contains all treasures. “Gathering” does not erase skillful means but lets them know where they return.

How Do the Causes and Conditions of the One Great Work Land in One Arousal of Mind?

The mind of awakening is called one because one unfalse reality and one pure path lead out of birth and death; great because it is vast and inclusive, possesses great wisdom and elimination, and greatly benefits ordinary and noble beings; work because the buddhas of the three times use it both to accomplish the Buddha path and liberate sentient beings; causes and conditions because sentient beings stimulate the Buddha through capacity and the Buddha responds through compassion.

This mind cannot be fixed as three or one, nor annihilated as neither-three-nor-one. Wisdom grasps no object; the object has no graspable characteristic. Wisdom and object darkly unite as one while still being distinguished as a skillful means. Arousing the mind can also be viewed through breaking, following, and illuminating both: break every arousal involving acquisition, arouse in accord with the true mark of awakening, and pass beyond breaking and following while illuminating both without adhesion. Arousal then does not manufacture a grand object within the mind. It lets every practice begin simultaneously from great compassion and non-acquisition.

The treatise praises it through forceful similes. The mind of awakening is like adamant born from adamantine nature, clear water used before medicine, the life faculty among all faculties, a prince born with royal marks, and a kalaviṅka whose voice within the shell already surpasses other birds. It is also like a lion-sinew bowstring, lion’s milk, an adamantine hammer, Nārāyaṇa’s arrow, and a wish-fulfilling jewel. All point to one thing: although the initially aroused mind is small, once its direction is genuine it already contains all later bodhisattva merit.

Thus, the first arousal of the Great Vehicle mind surpasses the ultimate fruit of the Two Vehicles not because the beginner already possesses buddhahood’s merit as grounds for pride, but because from the first step this mind does not take personal liberation as its endpoint. Even if one received clothing as vast as the earth and food as large as Sumeru, the direction of seeking all-knowledge and universally liberating beings could repay the donor’s kindness. Grave offense is likewise not a substance abiding forever. As one lamp instantly illuminates a room dark for a hundred years, knowing dependent origination, no-self, and original purity makes transformation possible. The power of arousal does not beautify faults; it prevents any fault from being sentenced as incapable of transformation.

Six Identities: Neither Self-Abasement nor Pretense

The final question is the sharpest: Does the initial mind count as the mind of awakening? If it does, is an ordinary being already a buddha? If it does not, how can arousal lead to buddhahood? The Six Identities answer both sides together.

The final flame cannot occur apart from the first ignition of the lamp wick, yet the first flame cannot be called the complete consumption of the wick. Faith prevents denying the Dharma-nature originally present in one thought; wisdom prevents passing off possession in principle as realization in phenomena. Without faith, one pushes the noble sphere so high that it can never be reached. Without wisdom, overweening pride claims equality with the Buddha. The treatise therefore lists identity in principle, name, contemplative practice, resemblance, partial realization, and ultimate identity, beginning at the ordinary stage and ending at the noble. One does not become timid because of the beginning, nor elevate the beginning into the ultimate.

Identity in principle is one thought’s original possession of emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle. The principle of tathāgatagarbha is not diminished through being unknown. Quiescence in its very identity is calming; illumination in its very identity is contemplation. Original possession, however, is not realization.

Identity in name is hearing of the one real awakening from a good spiritual friend or scripture and knowing that every Dharma does not depart from Buddha-Dharma. Hearing stops the mind that races outward and begins right view of Dharma-nature. Understanding the name is not yet correspondence in contemplative practice.

Identity in contemplative practice is clear contemplation within, practice corresponding to speech and speech to practice. Merely speaking resembles a worm boring wood and accidentally leaving the shape of a character while not recognizing writing. Wisdom from hearing, reflection, and cultivation must be like eyes receiving sunlight, and contemplation of mind must continue without interruption before contemplative practice begins.

Identity in resemblance is contemplation growing brighter and calming more quiescent, like a diligent archer whose arrow draws near the target. Worldly livelihood does not contradict the true mark, and thought begins to correspond to true Dharma. Ignorance is perfectly subdued and wisdom resembling the Middle Way appears, but ignorance has not yet been partially broken.

Identity in partial realization is entering the first abode through the power of resembling contemplation, breaking one portion of ignorance and seeing one portion of buddha-nature. From the first abode to equal awakening, it resembles the moon moving from the first through the fourteenth day, light approaching fullness and darkness exhaustion. The capacity to manifest a buddha body or bodies in the nine Dharma realms according to sentient beings’ needs is altruistic function after Dharma-nature is partially disclosed.

Ultimate identity is equal awakening turning once into wondrous awakening. Wisdom’s light is perfectly full and cannot increase; everything to be eliminated is exhausted and cannot be further eliminated. Only this is ultimate awakening and ultimate calming-and-contemplation.

The house-treasure simile joins the six stages in one line. The house already has a treasure: identity in principle. A good spiritual friend points it out: identity in name. Clearing weeds and digging: identity in contemplative practice. Gradually drawing near: identity in resemblance. Opening the treasury and partially seeing the jewels: identity in partial realization. Taking out and using everything: ultimate identity. No step departs from the original treasury, and no step can bypass the actual digging.

The five kinds of awakening can be correlated with this path: arousing the mind with name, subduing the mind with contemplative practice, luminous mind with resemblance, emerging and arriving with partial realization, and unsurpassed with the ultimate. The five may also mutually include one another at successive perfect stages. Mutual inclusion does not cancel stages, nor do stages divide the one Dharma-nature.

Looking back over the whole chapter, the truth of suffering first excludes nine minds rising and falling in the world; the four kinds of Four Truths then exclude crooked, awkward, shallow, and near wisdom; the Four Vast Vows establish practice and vow; and the Six Identities distinguish principle and stage. The genuine mind of awakening resembles a luminous moon-jewel hidden beneath the jaw of a black dragon in a ninefold abyss. Tiles, stones, grass, and wood cannot be passed off as treasure. Yet for those with resolve and virtue, the way is not closed forever.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The reading above follows the treatise’s own sequence from excluding the false to disclosing the true, and from object through vow to stage. Zhanran’s Zhiguan Fuxing Chuanhong Jue (hereafter Fuxing) further separates several joints whose layers are easily confused.

First, the Five Summaries are not five chapters outside the Ten Broad Chapters. They gather the following nine Broad Chapters into the causes and fruits of one’s own practice and the agent and object of transforming others. Regional terminology says only that Chinese and Sanskrit sounds and meanings differ. Exclusion is necessary because “path” is too general a name and ten classes of non-path must be distinguished. The asura category can be opened or combined, and the Two Vehicles can be combined in the count; ten is therefore a pedagogical arrangement, not grounds for inventing a fixed new taxonomy of destinations.

The Fuxing also connects each summary back to the Ten Broad Chapters. Arousing the mind gathers the resolve and understanding of the first five; cultivation gathers Preparatory Means and Proper Contemplation; fruition forms its own chapter; tearing the net uses Giving Rise to the Teaching to bring scriptures and treatises into communication; and return is gathered in Returning to the Purport. Through this correspondence, Great Purport is not an abstract general essay preceding the work, but a miniature of its following nine Broad Chapters. Every later chapter continues to fulfill one of the initial five questions.

Second, the stimulus-and-response passage first uses the Four Truths to determine true and false, then the four accommodations to explain stimulus and response. The four siddhāntas, five “furthermore” passages, and five causes and conditions may open into and gather one another, but the Dazhidu Lun has more than five “furthermore” passages. The present treatise selects five to correlate with arousal, cultivation, fruition, tearing the net, and return. The verse on “true Dharma and its speaker” simultaneously points to the difficulty of stimulating a wondrous response and arousing a wondrous capacity; it does not blame only the rarity of a good listener.

Third, the “Noble Practice” chapter of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra opens the meaning of the four kinds of Four Truths, while the four names and complete classification as arising-and-ceasing, non-arising, immeasurable, and unconstructed become explicit within Zhiyi’s organization. The treatise names the ten similes of the Fozang Jing; Zhanran later identifies their text as the Da Fangdeng Rulaizang Jing and says its ten meanings appear as nine similes. Title and referent must coexist; neither layer may be silently changed.

Fourth, the Four Vast Vows require preserving the order of object, understanding, and vow. Zhanran explains “vast” as broad and “vow” as binding, explicitly calls the Four Truths the object, and says the Four Vast Vows arise as vows on the basis of understanding. The prajñāpāramitā passage in the Four Vast Vows of non-arising directly says only that path factors and fruit attainment cannot be obtained. Zhiyi supplies the sentences about suffering and origination by extending the pattern. Attributing all four sentences to scripture erases the doctrinal work of the treatise’s author.

The Four Vast Vows themselves must be read separately according to the four kinds of Four Truths. Arising-and-ceasing raises compassion within the impermanent burning house; non-arising does not abandon sentient beings within non-acquisition; the immeasurable opens medicines as numerous as the Ganges sands for illnesses equally numerous; and the unconstructed lets Dharma treasuries, defilements, samādhis, and perfections turn within the same thought. Zhanran establishes the boundaries of arising-and-ceasing, non-arising, immeasurable, and unconstructed section by section, preventing the four passages from being flattened beneath the single label “Four Vast Vows.”

Fifth, textual differences in the unconstructed arousal can only be recorded side by side. “Break every arousal” differs from “pass beyond every arousal” in the extant scripture. The Fuxing explicitly says the treatise follows the scripture’s meaning and also provides an interpretive gloss. The number of bhikṣus differs as sixty and two hundred; Zhanran himself records only that this may result from earlier and later translation and that other divisions of the collection were not examined. The mirror demonstrates here not how to choose the superior ancient reading, but when to stop before a difference.

Sixth, the Six Identities both extend through ordinary and noble and divide into six phenomenal stages. Zhanran says this meaning arose within the Tiantai tradition precisely to prevent the two errors caused by failing to understand both “six” and “identity.” Identity in principle possesses the three truths but is not phenomenal realization. Identity in name hears the name; contemplative practice makes word and conduct correspond; resemblance purifies the six faculties; partial realization partially breaks ignorance; and ultimate identity perfects wisdom and elimination. The six treasure similes preserve the same principle and different stages simultaneously.

The lamp-wick simile of initial and later mind establishes continuity, not the erasure of stages. Moonlight from the first day to fullness instead distinguishes the progressive disclosure of partial realization from ultimate completion. Although the names of the five kinds of awakening can be correlated with five identities, their assignment remains Zhiyi’s renewed placement within the stages of the Perfect Teaching, not the original stage table of the cited treatise. By explicitly attributing these relations one by one, the Fuxing prevents a later correlation from being written backward as an earlier text’s own sentence.

The Zhiguan Dayi compresses the whole chapter into one clear relation: the Four Truths are the objects relied upon, the Four Vast Vows the vows that can be aroused, and the Six Identities the stages traversed. A vow without an object becomes a mad vow; an object without distinctions of stage confuses ordinary and noble. Through the eye of the Fuxing, arousing the great mind is neither shouting the largest vow nor stating the loftiest emptiness. It is producing understanding from the object, vow from understanding, and practice according to stage—never abandoning sentient beings and never pretending to have reached the endpoint.

Must practice mean sitting without moving? If one walks continually, alternates walking and sitting, or practices amid every thought of seeing, hearing, awareness, knowing, the wholesome, the unwholesome, and the indeterminate, how can all of these bear the same name, samādhi? The Mohe Zhiguan does not arrange the four kinds of samādhi into four higher and lower ranks. It first gives their common measure: the Dharma realm is the single locus, and correct contemplation abides there unmoving. Constantly sitting, constantly walking, half walking and half sitting, and neither walking nor sitting then become four conditions for straightening contemplation of mind.

The issue, therefore, is not whether the body ultimately sits or walks, but how the mind does not leave calming-and-contemplation within each bodily deportment. Constantly sitting reduces external conditions to a minimum and faces the Dharma realm in one thought. Constantly walking joins every step, voice, and thought without interruption. Half walking and half sitting lets worship, recitation, circling, sitting, and contemplation of the true mark complete one another. Neither walking nor sitting carries illumination into every daily activity. Because the fourth gate includes unwholesome objects, it must especially be read with the warning against abuse. To replace “evil can be an object of contemplation” with “evil conduct itself is practice” turns following one’s own intention into following desire at will. The long warning in the latter half of this chapter is therefore no digression. It is the indispensable guardrail of the fourth gate.

Why Does One Dharma Realm Require Four Practices?

〔科§一〕 Samādhi as the Common Name, Four Conditions as the Distinctions

Question: If the Dharma realm is a single locus and correct contemplation simply abides there unmoving, why not establish only one practice?

Answer: The principle in which one abides may be nondual, while the approaches through which sentient beings apply the mind are not identical. Milk must be churned before it becomes clarified butter; arousing the mind must likewise become a practicable discipline of body, speech, and mind before there are steps for ascending the stages. The four kinds of samādhi do not divide the Dharma realm into four pieces. They allow different bodily deportments, periods, and faculties to have conditions upon which they can rely.

“Straightening” is especially important. Ordinarily the mind bends along with its objects: it sinks while sitting, scatters while walking, turns outward while speaking, and may fall into the indeterminate while silent. Samādhi is not accomplished merely by fixing the body in one posture. It uses posture, sound, duration, practice site, and contemplation to return the mind to the single locus of the Dharma realm. If only the outer form is guarded, mind can be lost in all four practices. If mind is genuinely regulated, the difference between walking and sitting does not prevent return to one principle.

Constantly Sitting: When Every Activity Is Reduced to a Minimum

〔科§二〕 One Rope Bed for Ninety Days

Question: Why does constantly sitting contract life so severely?

Answer: It reduces external options to a minimum so that practitioners have nowhere to flee their own minds. One room, one bed, one direction of one buddha, and ninety days: apart from walking meditation, eating, and relieving oneself, walking, standing, or lying down never replaces upright sitting. Neck and back remain straight, the body unmoving, unswaying, unslumped, and unleaning; not even a second seat is placed nearby. This does not worship a painful posture. It uses an explicit vow and duration to cut off bargaining: do not deceive the Buddha, betray your own mind, or deceive sentient beings with a public vow.

The bodily permissions and prohibitions are therefore clear. Exclusive sitting is permitted and what is prohibited is not violated. One may live with a community, though solitude more easily leaves noise behind. Whether alone or with others, the point is not to construct an atmosphere of mystery, but to continue moment after moment without letting the mind run outward even briefly.

〔科§三〕 Silence as the Norm, Reciting a Name as Rescue

Question: If constantly sitting values quiet, why recite the Buddha’s name aloud when obstructions arise?

Answer: Silence is not the goal; protecting right mindfulness is. When extreme exhaustion, illness, the covering of sleep, or internal and external obstacles seize the mind and weak mental strength cannot dispel them, body and speech assist mentation. When grief, joy, or depression becomes knotted, crying or laughing aloud can release the body’s breath. Reciting a name likewise joins breath, sound, and vow into one force. It resembles someone dragging a heavy object and borrowing another’s hands. The original road is not abandoned; help is sought to prevent collapse halfway.

Reciting one buddha’s name equals reciting the merit of the buddhas of the ten directions. One name is used exclusively to gather the mind. When the Dharma gate is unclear, draw near someone who understands prajñā and practice according to what is heard. Even scripture and dhāraṇī recitation disturbs the quiet under ordinary conditions, so idle worldly speech should certainly cease. Silence when unobstructed and recitation for rescue when an obstruction seizes right mindfulness are both judged only by whether they protect the single-practice samādhi.

〔科§四〕 From Tathāgata and Sentient Beings to Afflictions and Grave Karma, Nothing Leaves the Dharma Realm

Question: Once seated upright, what does the mind contemplate?

Answer: First relinquish unwholesome mental activity and scattered thought, grasp no appearance, exclusively bind the mind to the Dharma realm, and contemplate the Dharma realm in a single thought. Binding conditions prevents scattering and is calming; clear comprehension in one thought is contemplation. Calming does not shut down awareness, and contemplation does not pursue images. Together in one thought they leave the extremes of existence and nonexistence, knowing and not knowing, and abide in non-abiding.

The Dharma realm may be called awakening, prajñā, neither arising nor ceasing, or the inconceivable object. Although names are many, they do not indicate two objects. When contemplating the Tathāgata, do not split Tathāgata and Tathāgata-wisdom into knower and known or place the Tathāgata in a direction, time, or defiled or purified form. This contemplation resembles space. Seeing the Buddha does not require spiritual travel outward. A form appearing on water or in a mirror, and the passage from seeing one buddha to the buddhas of the ten directions, are established without grasping a buddha’s marks. If one Dharma realm separately realized another Dharma realm, contention would arise. Hence neither realization nor attainment.

Contemplate sentient beings in the same way. The measure of their realm is like that of the buddhas and is inconceivable. Since no fixed ordinary dharma is seen, there is nothing ordinary to abandon; since no fixed noble Dharma is seen, there is nothing noble to grasp. Birth and death and nirvāṇa, defilement and purity, do not become confused because they are not grasped, or two entities because they are distinguished. One simply abides in the ultimate limit.

Next contemplate greed, anger, and delusion. This does not call their effects harmless. It traces them to the true mark that cannot be fixed as birth and death or nirvāṇa. Only by neither separately abandoning a view-affliction nor embracing an unconditioned object can the path be cultivated where the affliction appears. Extend this to the gravest five heinous offenses: even they do not lie outside the ultimate limit. Karmic conditions neither come nor go and cause and result have no fixed intrinsic nature, so they can be illuminated. The seal of the Dharma realm cannot be destroyed by the four māras because even māras cannot escape the Dharma realm. This path of contemplation travels from the purest names to the gravest karma, leaving no dharma as a black hole outside the Dharma realm.

〔科§五〕 A Jewel Does Not Shine Completely after One Stroke of the Polisher

Question: How can a beginner trust such a profound Dharma?

Answer: The treatise does not encourage with an easy promise. It makes “hearing without alarm” the threshold. Only after an elder’s lost maṇi jewel is recovered does he know the joy of return. Sentient beings have long lost the true Dharma of the Dharma realm; hearing, trusting, and understanding it resembles recognizing one’s own treasure again. As the jewel emits light in proportion to the polishing, merit appears in proportion to practice. Understanding one sentence does not license a claim to realization.

The encouragement extends throughout the fourfold assembly. Bodhisattvas thereby approach awakening; monastic men and women genuinely leave home in the Buddha’s following by hearing without alarm; laymen and laywomen genuinely take refuge in the same way. Marks and excellences, voice, ten powers, fearlessnesses, and every Buddha-Dharma do not depart from diligent, unrelenting practice. The encouragement to constantly sit therefore returns to its first sentence: no stage is ascended without practice.

Constantly Walking: Binding Every Step, Voice, and Thought Together

〔科§六〕 Not a Solitary Forced March, but the Convergence of Three Powers

Question: Why is constantly walking called Buddha standing?

Answer: In samādhi the practitioner sees the presently abiding buddhas of the ten directions standing in front, like someone with clear eyes seeing stars on a lucid night. This vision does not rely on willpower alone. The Buddha’s majestic power, samādhi power, and the power of the practitioner’s own past merit accomplish it together. Abiding in the first through fourth or intermediate meditation, the length of abiding, and the number of worlds and buddhas seen may differ as few, middling, and many. The shared name does not mean everyone’s concentration has an identical appearance.

The bodily requirements resemble an expedition even more than constantly sitting. Leave bad spiritual friends, relatives and hometown, and the mind that seeks acquisitions. Remain alone, receive alms, decline private invitations, adorn the practice site, bathe, and change clothes. Rely upon three assisting conditions—a discerning teacher, external protector, and fellow practitioners—for a period of ninety days. Honor the teacher as the Buddha, let the protector resemble a mother raising a child, and let companions resemble people crossing danger together. Then vow not to stop even if sinews and bones wither. This is not heroic isolation. It openly recognizes that long constant walking requires a teacher, protection, and companions.

For three months there is not a finger snap of worldly desire or a finger snap of lying down and leaving, and teaching Dharma is not exchanged for clothing or food. If great faith, vigor, and wisdom do not correspond, ninety outward days leave only exhaustion. Drawing near a good spiritual friend, unflagging vigor, firm wisdom, and unwavering faith are the four genuine pillars within the period.

〔科§七〕 Why Must Chanting and Recollection Remain Unbroken?

Question: If the body already walks constantly, why must the mouth chant for ninety days and the mind recollect the Buddha for ninety days as well?

Answer: If body, speech, and mind go separate ways, walking meditation quickly becomes habit. Chanting and recollection may occur together or continue one after the other. The Dharma gate does not impose one mechanical order, but it does not permit the three activities to lose contact. Taking Amitābha exclusively as principal does not deny the buddhas of the ten directions; one name gathers the merit of all ten directions. Step, voice, and thought become three lines joined as one, leaving no gap through which the body remains at the practice site while the mind returns to the world.

〔科§八〕 Seeing the Buddha Like Dream, Shadow, and Mirror

Question: Will constantly recollecting the Buddha’s marks turn the Buddha into an external object?

Answer: The treatise first teaches reverse contemplation from the thousand-spoked wheels beneath the feet to the invisible crown, then forward contemplation from crown to feet, together with a vow to obtain the marks and excellences. It immediately asks: can the Buddha be attained from mind or body? Body, mind, form, and wisdom are each investigated, but no entity capable of obtaining the Buddha is found. Even the “I” cannot be obtained.

The seven treasures and family delight in a dream cannot be found upon waking. A starving person dreams of eating but wakes with an empty belly. A man and woman meet in a dream; the other did not come and I did not go, yet delight vividly appeared. These similes do not deny that dream objects appeared; they dismantle coming, going, and substantial existence. A treasure leaning against crystal displays an image; light in white-bone contemplation is made by mentation; a mirror image neither enters from outside nor arises within. When the mirror is clear, the form appears. When practitioner and supporting objects are pure, seeing the Buddha, asking questions, receiving answers, and rejoicing are established in the same way.

Finally ask: from where did the Buddha come, and where did I go? What is recollected is seen; mind makes the Buddha and sees the Buddha. Yet mind cannot make itself into a visible object. A substantially grasped conception is delusion, while fixation on total absence of conception remains a fixation upon nirvāṇa. To understand a present thought as empty while seeing the Buddha without greed or attachment is the Buddha seal. It does not destroy appearances; it prevents possessions, desires, arisings, and cessations from becoming a solid grip.

Recollection of the Buddha deepens from form. It may traverse the essence, action, result, and function of the marks, proceed to the exclusive qualities, and then to the real Buddha. Power has inferior, middling, and superior degrees, but finally neither form body nor Dharma body is grasped. Moving from form into the real does not first cherish an image and later despise it. The form body becomes a gate into the unattached Dharma body.

〔科§九〕 Hearing of Treasure and Not Using It Is the Real Loss

Question: Why is the merit of constantly walking praised through such vast comparisons?

Answer: The treatise calls it mother of the buddhas, Buddha eye, father of the buddhas, and mother of non-arising and great compassion. Giving jewels throughout countless worlds does not equal hearing of this samādhi without alarm. Hearing leads to trust; trust to receiving, preserving, reciting, and explaining; those lead to even a brief gathering of the mind in practice and to actual accomplishment. Each exceeds the last. Kalpa fire, officials, thieves, enemies, poison, nāgas, beasts, and illness cannot harm the practitioner, and devas, nāgas, and buddhas protect them because their whole body and mind abide in this Dharma.

The two reverse similes are sharper. Someone with a blocked nose holds sandalwood but cannot smell it; a farmer’s son trades a maṇi jewel for one cow. The problem is not failure to encounter treasure, but encountering it without recognition and hearing the Dharma without cultivation. Ninety days of constantly walking appears to emphasize never resting, but its deepest encouragement is not to let a Dharma already heard lose its value in one’s own hand.

Half Walking and Half Sitting: Ritual Forms Are Not the Opposite of Contemplating Principle

〔科§十〕 Why Does Vaipulya Arrange Seven Days in Such Detail?

Question: If the true mark is empty and quiescent, why require scented clay, circular altar, banners and canopy, images, clothing and shoes, bathing, and one hundred and twenty circuits?

Answer: Wisdom of emptiness does not flee bodily and verbal ritual practice. Vaipulya establishes seven days as a period that cannot be shortened, first seeks permission through a dream sign, separately invites a discerning teacher, limits the assembly to ten people, and transmits the twenty-four precepts and dhāraṇī. Clothing for inside and outside the practice site is kept separate, bathing occurs three times daily, and offerings are made to monastics on the first day. Every detail trains a mind that does nothing carelessly or in confusion.

Speech also has a complete cycle. Memorize the dhāraṇī, invite the noble ones three times, make offerings, bow, and weep while confessing offenses. Then walk one hundred and twenty circuits while reciting once per circuit; afterward bow and withdraw to contemplate, then rise to circle and recite again, repeating the sequence. Walking and sitting are not “half walking and half sitting” merely because each occupies half the time. Repeated movement between recitation while circling and contemplation while sitting prevents bodily practice from losing contemplation and contemplation from leaving repentance.

〔科§十一〕 How Does One Practice Site Become a Diagram of Contemplating Mind?

Question: How do these implements enter calming-and-contemplation?

Answer: The secret essential indicated by the Mohe Danchi dhāraṇī is the true mark, the Middle Way, and correct emptiness. One comes from the real without grasping a comer. Something is sought, yet the seeker is empty; obtaining, clinging, reality, coming, speaking, questioning, quiescence and extinction, nirvāṇa, and the boundary of space are all empty. Precisely because nothing is sought, seeking within the six perfections does not become possession. As this wisdom of emptiness traverses ritual forms, the practice site ceases to be mere decoration.

A pure practice site is a pure object. Removing chaff to reveal rice is counteracting the five abodes and disclosing the true mark. Scented clay is morality; incense and lamp are morality and wisdom; the high seat is the emptiness of all dharmas. The five-colored canopy uses contemplation of the five aggregates to arouse compassion that covers the Dharma realm. The circular altar is the unmoving true mark, and the moving banner turns delusion into understanding. The altar remains still while the banner moves, revealing that moving emergence and unmoving emergence are inseparable.

The twenty-four images are forward and reverse contemplation of the twelve links. Sour and bitter foods turn impermanence and suffering into aids to the path. Fresh clothing becomes new by turning anger into patience. Seven days correspond to the seven factors of awakening, one day to the single real, three baths to the single real and three contemplations, the three obstructions and three wisdoms. One teacher corresponds to the single real, and the twenty-four precepts transform forward and reverse dependent origination into precepts shared with the path. The one hundred and twenty dhāraṇī recitations finally return to the three paths of suffering, karma, and afflictions. If objects and numbers do not return to repentance of these three paths, only a display remains.

〔科§十二〕 What Distinguishes Full, Middle, and Lower Portions?

Question: How does repentance address suffering, karma, and afflictions at once?

Answer: Phenomenal repentance addresses the paths of suffering and karma; repentance through principle addresses the path of afflictions. Regaining precepts transforms karmic obstruction, purity of the eye, ear, and other faculties transforms the obstruction of suffering, and seeing buddhas, hearing the Dharma, and not retreating transforms the obstruction of afflictions. When the three obstructions go, the tree of the twelve links collapses and the house of the five aggregates empties. Contemplating the true mark attacks their root.

Cultivation obtains the full portion of treasure, reading and recitation the middle portion, and offerings of flowers and incense the lower portion. The treatise distinguishes cultivation, recitation, and offering so that different depths of reception each obtain something while their sequence remains clear. Piling treasure from the earth to Brahmā heaven as an offering to the Buddha does not equal one meal offered to a preserver of scripture. Abstract reverence is thereby returned to supporting living practice.

〔科§十三〕 Why Do Practice with Marks and Practice without Marks Not Reject Each Other?

Question: The Lotus gate has a practice site, worship, circumambulation, and recitation, yet also says that no dharma is practiced. Are these opposites?

Answer: The ten dharmas—from purifying the site and body, threefold offering, invitation and worship of the buddhas, repentance of the six faculties, circumambulation and recitation through meditation and signs of realization—are plainly ritual practice. Mind being empty in itself, offense and merit having no master, and the wisdom-sun dispersing offenses are plainly contemplation of principle. Preservation and recitation do not mean clinging to marks, and contemplating emptiness does not mean abolishing worship and repentance.

Practice with marks uses repentance of the six faculties and other phenomenal practices as a guide into awakening; practice without marks directly contemplates every dharma as empty. Both are skillful means and are relinquished together at wondrous realization. Using absence of marks to attack marks turns emptiness into a new attachment. Using marks to reject their absence makes ritual self-sufficient. The two scriptures each bring forth phenomena and principle precisely to correct one another.

〔科§十四〕 The White Elephant Is Not a Catalog of Mysteries

Question: How should the white elephant with six tusks and its many adornments be read?

Answer: The six tusks are the six uncontaminated superknowledges. Their sharpness represents the speed of those knowledges, the elephant’s strength the Dharma body bearing beings, and its whiteness uncontaminated purity. The pestle, wheel, and jewel held by the three figures on its head make visible wisdom guiding practice, turning the Dharma wheel by emerging into provisionality, and the wish-fulfilling Middle Way. The pool on the tusks is the concentrated essence of the eight liberations, while the tusks are the function of superknowledge; essence and function do not separate. A flower in the pool is the wondrous cause born through superknowledge, purifying lands and benefiting beings. The woman within it is kindness, which moves superknowledge to enter the Sahā world. Her instruments are the four means of gathering: gifts of wealth and Dharma, kind speech, beneficial action, and shared activity guide beings like immeasurable sounds.

The universally manifested form body appears according to what beings delight in and need not be fixed as a white-jade image. Verbal dhāraṇī means compassion permeating speech to teach many Dharmas. The whole image therefore proceeds from the essence of concentration and function of superknowledge through the wondrous cause and movement of kindness to the four means of gathering, finally arriving at benefiting beings. It is not an extraordinary sign to be pursued for its own sake.

The wishes in the encouragement likewise unfold step by step from removing karmic obstruction to teaching Dharma: eliminate offenses of many kalpas; arouse the mind of awakening and purify the faculties; see Śākyamuni, Prabhūtaratna, and emanated buddhas; attain samādhi and verbal dhāraṇī; enter the Tathāgata’s room, wear his robe, and sit on his seat; teach among devas and nāgas; and receive the attendance of Mañjuśrī, Bhaiṣajyarāja, and others. Frost and dew vanish under the wisdom-sun, but wisdom of emptiness must still correspond with mind. Pursuing signs without contemplating the true mark loses the axis of all these wishes.

Neither Walking nor Sitting: Extending the Practice Site into Every Activity

〔科§十五〕 Not Excluding Walking and Sitting, but Not Exhausted by One Posture

Question: Does neither walking nor sitting exclude walking and sitting?

Answer: Exactly the opposite. It includes both and every activity. It is called neither walking nor sitting to complete the fourfold relation with the first three; following one’s own intention because practice begins as soon as mentation arises; and awareness of mentation because when the mind turns anywhere, illumination immediately seeks its source, endpoint, arrival, and departure, finding none. Three perspectives name one Dharma.

Mind, mentation, and consciousness are not three tiny subjects hidden within the body. Awareness of an object is mind, subsequent deliberation is mentation, and clear differentiation is consciousness. They are not one, so three names are established; not three, so one nature is taught. Grasping three shatters mental dharmas; grasping one congeals nature into an entity. Through neither one nor three, one avoids merging and scattering, emptiness and existence, permanence and annihilation, identity and difference. Taking mentation as the object includes mind, consciousness, and all dharmas. The “awareness” in awareness of mentation lies in not being deceived by names into making entities.

〔科§十六〕 How Does One Avalokiteśvara Invocation Open into All Scriptural Practices?

Question: If it follows one’s own intention, why begin by displaying a strict ritual?

Answer: Following one’s own intention is not casual. Inviting and installing images, willow twigs and pure water, bathing and clean clothes, worshiping the Three Jewels, seven buddhas, and honored ones, counting ten breaths, inviting the noble ones, reciting names, verses, and dhāraṇīs, disclosing repentance, and chanting scripture from the seat give body, speech, and mind an ordered sequence. Follow the form before noon and at the first watch, returning to the scripture wherever the account is abbreviated. “Following” does not pare the Dharma down to a single feeling.

Contemplation of principle enters the limit of things as they really are where the six faculties correspond with the six objects. Earth is not solid, water does not abide, wind is unobstructed, and fire is unreal; each intrinsic nature is broken through the four propositions. Form is so, and so are sensation, perception, formations, and consciousness; the twelve links resemble a valley echo, plantain trunk, dew, and lightning. Three dhāraṇīs separately break the obstructions of retribution, karma, and afflictions. Six Avalokiteśvaras separately break the three obstructions of the six paths and further open into twenty-five samādhis. The result may become the śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, or bodhisattva path according to faculties, and the practice also includes the repentance of the seven buddhas and eight bodhisattvas, the Ākāśagarbha practice, and other scriptural methods. One ritual serves as an illustration, not as the only permitted form; it teaches how contemplative mind penetrates phenomenal dharmas.

The Four Phases and Twelve Matters: Where Exactly Is One Thought?

〔科§十七〕 Why Can What Has Not Arisen and What Has Ceased Still Be Contemplated?

Question: Before a thought, it has not arisen; after thinking, it has ceased. How can absence of mind be contemplated?

Answer: Not yet performing an act does not mean no person exists, or who would later act? Completing an act does not mean the person is eternally annihilated, or who acted before? The four phases—before a thought, about to think, thinking, and after thinking—keep practitioners from staring only at a supposedly stationary present. The past is gone, the future has not arrived, and the present does not abide. Minds of the three times have no fixed reality but are not annihilated; if they were, cause, result, offense, and merit would vanish with them.

The four phases do not cut one thought into four mental particles. They resemble slowing a lens: mind has not arisen, is about to arise, abides upon an object, and has ceased. No fixed entity can be found anywhere, yet conditional continuity remains clearly knowable. Because it is empty without annihilation and continuous without permanence, an arising wholesome or unwholesome thought presents a place for illumination.

〔科§十八〕 How Do the Six Receptions and Six Actions Make Giving More Than Possessions?

Question: How can giving be cultivated without possessions?

Answer: Where there are six objects, relinquish the six receptions; where there is no wealth, direct the six actions. The eye receiving form through mentation engaging dharmas are the six receptions. Walking, standing, sitting, lying down, speaking, and silence are the six actions. Together they make twelve matters. In each, pursue mind through the four phases, then pursue the aware mind as neither coming from outside, emerging within, abiding between, nor existing causelessly and forever. Faculty, object, and recipient cannot be obtained; when all three matters are empty, giving is no longer bound by giver, receiver, and gift.

Emptiness does not erase cause and result. The continuity of eye-consciousness, mentation-consciousness, and greedy defilement can produce, upon the same form, hell’s broken precepts, the hungry ghost’s concealment, the animal’s possession, and the asura’s superiority and inferiority. It can also produce the five precepts and ten wholesome actions of humans and devas, contemplation of fault in the Two Vehicles, and the bodhisattva’s compassion. Then illuminate the ten Dharma realms within emptiness. One thought is empty while conditions remain vivid. Because it is not existent, it is empty; because it is not empty, it exists. Simultaneously illuminating emptiness and existence, all three truths are complete.

Walking can also be giving. Coming and going may serve broken precepts, deception, family, and competition, or propriety, meditation, nirvāṇa, and compassion. Lifting and lowering the foot are illusion-like. Forget agent and object, do not calculate far and near, do not waste the work, and do not expect repayment. Then open the six perfections within walking: great compassion that makes beings fearless is giving; not harming is morality; unmoving mind is patience; absence of arising, abiding, and ceasing is vigor; not savoring and not scattering is meditation; and a body like cloud, shadow, dream, and illusion, neither bound nor liberated, is wisdom.

If the object of concentration becomes an attachment, contemplate the concentrated mind as born from inversion. If the contemplator is grasped as wondrous wisdom, it becomes an obstruction of knowledge; illuminate the unobtainability of the contemplator. Emptiness samādhi breaks existent marks, signlessness samādhi breaks the mark of emptiness, and wishlessness samādhi breaks the agent. The three inversions, three poisons, three realms of existence, and four māras thereby enter contemplation. Each of the twelve matters can possess every Dharma in this way. “Daily life is the path” is not left as a slogan.

〔科§十九〕 Why Does Keeping Precepts Still Require Contemplative Wisdom?

Question: Is careful deportment, like carrying a bowl of oil without spilling a drop, still insufficient?

Answer: It can be called keeping precepts and bring the result of heavenly pleasure, but does not automatically become samādhi or perfection. When the four phases are contemplated and neither arising mind nor contemplating mind is obtained, the seven bodily and verbal branches become pure like space. This opens the ten moralities: without deficiency, unbroken, without puncture, unmingled, shared with concentration, shared with the path, unattached, praised by the wise, sovereign in the Great Vehicle, and ultimate. Morality not only prevents one act. It prevents the four phases from disturbing mind, keeps discrimination free from error, and embraces every Dharma and the four virtues.

The same object of form also contains the other five perfections and three samādhis. The disappearance of giver, recipient, and gift is giving; settling the mind without movement is patience; undefiled and uninterrupted cultivation is vigor; non-distraction is concentration; and illusion-like appearance is wisdom. Equality with space, the unobtainability even of that emptiness, and absence of agent and act are respectively emptiness, signlessness, and wishlessness. The same applies to sound, scent, taste, touch, dharmas, and the six actions. Complete deportment is therefore not an orderly surface; contemplative wisdom penetrates every advance and retreat.

〔科§二十〕 If One Perfection Embraces All, Why Can the Others Not Be Discarded?

Question: If patience, vigor, meditation, and wisdom can each embrace everything, can one alone be cultivated?

Answer: Patience neither loves the agreeable nor hates the adverse. Vigor is not only diligent recitation; it contemplates sound as echo and neither reciter nor text as obtainable, letting each thought flow into the ocean of nirvāṇa. Meditation is not only fundamental concentration, nine perceptions, and liberations; it contemplates the four phases of entering concentration and penetrates meditation’s true mark. Wisdom also turns back upon worldly knowledge and the six receptions and actions as unobtainable. Each perfection can open the whole Dharma realm, but each addresses a different deficiency.

The six perfections resemble armor worn into battle: protection must be close. Contemplation is a lamp and calming a sealed room. Prajñā universally embraces the dharmas, and each dharma is the Dharma realm and embraces prajñā. “Identity” does not cancel distinctions; it lets them complete one another. Abolishing five perfections because one embraces all mistakes perfect integration for convenience.

Evil Can Be an Object: Why Does That Never Mean Indulging Evil?

〔科§二十一〕 The Hook Must Follow the Unwholesome Fish, but It Does Not Raise Fish

Question: If the wholesome supports correct principle and can contain calming-and-contemplation, why say that evil, which opposes principle, can also be contemplated?

Answer: The names wholesome and unwholesome change relative to each level. Pleasant human and divine results still end in a fall. The Two Vehicles’ goodness lacks universal benefit. If the view in the six perfections is partial, even fine food is served in a poisoned vessel. Only accordance with the true mark is ultimately called the path. Conversely, attachment to the Buddha path makes its ambrosia indigestible, and the path becomes non-path. This analysis does not abolish good and evil. It refuses to enthrone the goodness of any one stage as the endpoint.

Ordinary afflictions arise repeatedly. If contemplation waits until every affliction disappears, it never begins. The unwholesome covering resembles a strong fish and calming-and-contemplation the hook and bait. When the line is weak, do not pull violently, but never let the hook lose contact. When desire arises, contemplate not yet desiring, about to desire, desiring, and after desiring. Investigate its arising through ceasing, non-ceasing, both, and neither, then reverse the inquiry upon its ceasing. Neither arising nor ceasing can be obtained, while conditional appearance and disappearance remain illuminated.

Then ask from which object and action it arises, and whether for broken precepts or family, deception or jealousy, humanity or meditation, nirvāṇa or the four virtues, the six perfections, three samādhis, or every Buddha-Dharma. Traversing evil places an unwholesome thought under examination more exacting than usual; it does not exempt it from examination. If the covering obstructed Dharma-nature, that nature could be destroyed. If Dharma-nature obstructed the covering, the covering could not arise. The covering not departing from Dharma-nature means it can be illuminated completely, not that its painful result disappears.

Contemplative practice that follows like form and shadow must vertically traverse the six identities: correspondence in contemplative practice, worldly livelihood not opposing real contemplation, partial breaking of ignorance, and finally exhaustion of the covering’s source. It must also horizontally possess the six perfections. Anger, broken precepts, indolence, distraction, wrong views, and delusion are each pursued through the four phases and twelve matters: who is angry, at whom, and from where does it come and go? If one has only the sentence “afflictions are the path” without this entire hook and bait, it is not the contemplation taught in this treatise.

〔科§二十二〕 The Indeterminate Is Not Empty Space

Question: What can be contemplated in a hazy mind that acts neither wholesomely nor unwholesomely?

Answer: Leaving the indeterminate outside calming-and-contemplation would leave people whose faculties do not visibly incline to good or evil without conditions for leaving the world. Contemplate whether the indeterminate is identical with or different from determinate mind. If identical, it is not indeterminate; if different, investigate its arising through ceasing, non-ceasing, both, and neither. Even determinate mind cannot be obtained, much less identity or difference. Traverse the twelve matters and pursue where it arises, for whom, and who is indeterminate; then know it as space.

One indeterminate dharma can also give rise to the ten Dharma realms. It does not depart from Dharma-nature: constant quiescence is calming and constant illumination contemplation. It still horizontally embraces all dharmas and vertically all six stages. Explaining it through the final wholesome Dharma alone is gradual; traversing wholesome and unwholesome together is sudden; and alternation and interpenetration before and after is indeterminate. The indeterminate is not an interval without content. It is the mind-ground most easily passed without awareness and therefore most in need of illumination.

〔科§二十三〕 Method Is Restricted to Three; Contemplation of Principle Extends through Four

Question: Since the four methods differ, does each possess a different truth?

Answer: The first three have many ritual methods and more often activate helpful or obstructive signs. The fourth has fewer fixed forms and produces fewer such events. If only method is understood, a helpful event cannot be integrated when it appears. If contemplation of principle is understood, every event can be penetrated. Without it, phenomenal forms fail; with it, they are naturally accomplished. Some people apply the mind upon entering a practice site and lose it upon leaving. Following one’s own intention opens a passage between inside and outside. Method is therefore chiefly restricted to the first three; contemplation of principle extends through all four practices.

〔科§二十四〕 Why Does the Fourth Gate Warn Instead of Encourage?

Question: The first three gates encourage practice. Why does the fourth not?

Answer: People of dull faculties and heavy obstructions can easily sink into the surface wording that the non-path of the six coverings can become the path of liberation. A deviant teacher north of the Huai failed to penetrate contemplation of the wholesome, turned to evil, gained slight concentration and shallow understanding, and treated the accidental benefit of one or two people as universal proof, like a worm accidentally boring a written graph into wood. He mocked precepts and taught people to commit every evil. Those inclined toward desire answered at once, finally harming both Buddha-Dharma and sentient beings.

The ugly woman copying Xishi’s frown, the mad dog chasing thunder, and the fly stuck in spit all show that imitating a skillful means without wisdom only amplifies ugliness and bondage. Violent medicine is given only to a sick child whom no other medicine can cure, and a swift horse turns at the shadow of the whip. According to faculties, the Buddha sometimes calls the wholesome the path and sometimes instructs contemplation in an unavoidable evil object. The latter cannot be excerpted to denounce goodness and approach evil.

If the good ford is available, why drive cattle through the bad ford where scarcely one in a hundred survives? If a level road reaches the destination, why insist on water, fire, and mountain walls? A person’s mind may delight in goodness at one time and evil at another. A deviant teacher does not know even one person’s faculties but uses desire to teach immeasurable people. If smooth touch contains the path but painful touch does not, desire may be practiced but anger and harm may not, the practice is already partial; it is not contemplation of every evil in its identity.

The treatise therefore requires expulsion according to discipline and concludes that violent rhubarb medicine needs a plain rice drink. The first three practices are difficult and require encouragement. The fourth initially appears easy and requires warning. Warning against abuse is part of following one’s own intention; deleting it is what turns the Dharma gate into following desire.

Four Medicines, Four Capacities, and the Conclusion through Vehicle and Precepts

〔科§二十五〕 Why Might One Person Need All Four Kinds of Samādhi?

Question: If one correct contemplation of the Middle Way concentrates mind, do four practices, wholesome and unwholesome objects, and twelve matters instead muddy the water and dim the pearl?

Answer: One contemplative method may not suffice when many minds arise. A physician gathers many medicines for many illnesses; someone with one illness cannot blame the physician for having more than one medicine. Even one person may delight upon hearing all four dharmas, produce goodness through them, counteract an illness through one, or realize the ultimate meaning through all four. Many people require even more adaptation to different desires for constantly sitting, constantly walking, and the rest.

One samādhi also contains many adjustments. Walk when wholesome roots unfold in walking and sit when sitting brings coolness and joy. Rise and walk when sitting produces torpor; sit when walking produces distraction and fatigue. Continue walking when walking becomes empty and quiescent; remain sitting when sitting becomes bright and sharp. The four dharmas are not four dead prescriptions, but a complete capacity for observing the patient, selecting medicine, and testing the result.

〔科§二十六〕 Four Combinations of Faculties and Obstruction

Question: If an unwholesome object can be contemplated, does creating evil cause no obstruction?

Answer: The four alternatives—sharp faculties without obstruction, sharp with obstruction, dull without obstruction, and dull with obstruction—show precisely that faculties and karmic obstruction cannot be merged into one thing. Those sharp and unobstructed cultivated both goodness and contemplation in the past and enter with little cultivation now. Those sharp yet obstructed may still break grave offenses upon seeing the Buddha and hearing the Dharma because their faculties are sharp; but creating evil produces future obstruction and is never harmless.

Those dull yet unobstructed have no fault in the three activities, but without studying calming-and-contemplation they remain like Panthaka, who long recited one verse and struggled to awaken. Those dull and obstructed neither cultivate contemplation nor refrain from evil; like a numb person who does not feel a needle pierce the bone. Wholesome conduct cannot replace contemplative wisdom, and contemplative wisdom cannot erase obstruction. Both axes must remain.

〔科§二十七〕 Hearing, Reflection, and Cultivation Must Never Stop

Question: Why does the chapter turn from faculties and obstruction to vehicle and precepts at the end?

Answer: The treatise turns from the four alternatives of faculties and obstruction to urgency and laxity in vehicle and precepts and requires the two sets to be read together. Keeping precepts without learning calming-and-contemplation may leave one unobstructed but dull. Cultivating contemplation where an unwholesome dharma appears may make faculties sharp through contemplation and produce obstruction through the evil. Urgency and laxity in both have corresponding results. Honoring the vehicle does not mean abolishing precepts. It warns that although goodness supports principle, attaining the path remains difficult without calming-and-contemplation; although evil can be contemplated, it really creates obstruction.

The treatise closes with the drunken brahman whose head was shaved and the actress who donned a kāṣāya, urging practitioners to hear diligently, reflect according to principle, and put it into cultivation without stopping from beginning to end.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

Zhanran first fixes the common and distinct levels of the four kinds of samādhi. Samādhi is the common name and sitting and the others are distinct forms. According to bodily deportment, they are constantly sitting, constantly walking, half walking and half sitting, and neither walking nor sitting. According to Dharma gates, they are single practice, Buddha standing, Vaipulya and Lotus, and following one’s own intention. All four rely upon the single locus of the Dharma realm; different bodily deportments do not create separate principles. “Different practices, identical principle” does not erase method. It preserves the differences in method before confirming that the contemplated is nondual.

Zhanran explicitly judges that constantly sitting is named single practice because bodily deportment is pruned back and no other matter is combined with it, not because only one truth is contemplated. For speech, smooth progress means silence and removing obstruction means voicing. Reciting a name is a means for removing obstruction and does not turn constantly sitting into a practice ordinarily governed by sound. In mental contemplation, binding conditions and one thought are judged to make quiescence and illumination, calming and contemplation, operate together. Yet this chapter gives only a broad indication of the contemplative gate and does not fully present the later ten modes of contemplation. The Zhiguan Yili statement that ritual procedures are extensive here while the ten dharmas are abbreviated prevents treating this chapter as the complete later sequence.

Zhanran also distinguishes the three powers of constantly walking one by one: the Buddha’s majestic power, samādhi power, and the power of the practitioner’s own past merit converge as conditions, and none can be omitted. Contemplating the Buddha’s form does not stop with marks and excellences. Dream, shadow, water, and mirror progressively deepen the vision so that recollection of the form body reaches the body of the true mark without clinging to form or Dharma body. The sandalwood and maṇi similes are restored to full scenes, rebuking someone who has already met great treasure but refuses to smell it or does not recognize its value, rather than serving as general advice about valuing time.

The Vaipulya gate contains an important compositional layer. The treatise says that the method of invitation is in the Guoqing Bailu, while Zhanran says that no work bearing this title existed during Zhiyi’s life and that Guanding and others collected records after Zhiyi’s death. The treatise need not be rewritten; the levels of oral teaching, transcription, and later compilation must be seen. Nor are the full, middle, and lower portions of treasure ranks within the true mark. Zhanran states explicitly that the difference lies only in the superiority or inferiority of practitioners’ conduct of mind.

In the Lotus gate, the ten dharmas gather the ritual procedures in full. Practice with marks is named for entering through phenomenal practice, and practice without marks for directly contemplating the emptiness of dharmas; both are relinquished at realization. The many marks of the white elephant with six tusks are explained individually through the six superknowledges, eight liberations, three wisdoms, and four means of gathering. Zhanran follows the treatise phrase by phrase, with the emphasis still on kindness moving supernormal power and benefiting beings according to need. Reading the elephant only as an extraordinary response reverses the direction of its symbolism.

Zhanran explains that neither walking nor sitting has three names for one Dharma and that all designate cultivation in the four deportments. The four phases embrace the three natures of wholesome, unwholesome, and indeterminate. The twelve matters extend contemplation from the inner before-a-thought through the six receptions and six actions. “Cultivating contemplation from what has not yet occurred and from phenomena” particularly indicates that constantly sitting may incline toward contemplating principle, whereas following one’s own intention investigates from before a thought arises throughout daily phenomenal objects. This does not split phenomena and principle; it identifies different points of entry.

The four kinds of samādhi differ in method and share the same contemplation of principle. Zhanran states the sameness precisely: the contemplator is nothing other than a single mind, and the contemplated principle nothing other than the three truths. The first three have many methods and more readily activate assisting and obstructive signs; the fourth has few and has no gap between entering and leaving the practice site. Because traversing evil in the fourth is easiest for dull faculties to distort, the treatise deliberately gives it no separate explicit encouragement and replaces encouragement with a long warning. Zhanran judges the school north of the Huai as false emptiness that abusively claims the Great Vehicle and enters evil without contemplation. What it lacks is precisely investigation through the four phases, discernment of faculties, and precepts—not one more sentence praising evil.

Why one person may need four Dharmas is concluded through the four siddhāntas: accord with desire and bring delight, adapt suitably and produce goodness, counteract the illness, and bring entry into ultimate meaning. Each of the four kinds possesses all four siddhāntas; “four” cannot be treated as four fixed prescriptions for four fixed types of person. Finally, the four alternatives of faculties and obstruction become the four of vehicle and precepts. Sharp faculties are the result of urgency in the vehicle; absence of obstruction the result of urgency in precepts. Dull faculties correspond to laxity in the vehicle and obstruction to laxity in precepts. This correlation makes the chapter’s final warning transparent: contemplative wisdom and moral discipline govern separate axes, and neither can be canceled by the other.

There is another easily overlooked level in constantly sitting’s mental contemplation. Zhanran judges the passage traversing Tathāgata, sentient beings, afflictions, and the five heinous offenses within the Dharma realm as a broad indication of quiescent illumination as contemplator through its objects. “Broad” does not mean unimportant. It means the outline has not yet unfolded each of the later ten modes of contemplation. Filling every later name back into the first sentence about the Dharma realm erases the chapter’s own movement; dismissing the passage because its sequence is not complete cuts the common root by which all four kinds rely upon the Dharma realm.

Within the three-month period of constantly walking, Zhanran also distinguishes three conditions: the discerning teacher, external protector, and fellow practitioners. The teacher resolves doubt and removes obstructions, the protector supplies necessities, and companions mutually urge one another onward. Strong language about offering one’s flesh to the teacher aims at breaking the pride that scrutinizes a teacher’s strengths and faults; it does not sanctify a teacher’s personal desires. Chanting and mental recollection may occur in either order, permitting differences of faculty; the unbroken continuity of step, voice, and thought is the common covenant.

The symbolism of the Vaipulya practice site does not arbitrarily mystify numbers. Zhanran first calibrates the meaning of emptiness through the scripture’s exchange about reality, then connects altar, banner, incense and lamps, high seat, images, bathing, precepts, and dhāraṇī back to the true mark, concentration and wisdom, dependent origination, and the three obstructions. The order runs from scriptural meaning into symbolism and cannot be reversed. Free association from implements alone loses the treatise’s explicit axis of carrying wisdom of emptiness through every phenomenon.

In the Avalokiteśvara section, Zhanran first judges this only the initial example within the gate of scriptural practices and explains that its meaning can extend through all three vehicles. The six-graph formula corresponds to six Avalokiteśvaras and further unfolds into twenty-five samādhis, creating a network of counteractions from the three obstructions of the six paths. Self-regulation by the śrāvaka, contemplation of conditions by the pratyekabuddha, and the bodhisattva’s great compassion are listed together, showing that one repentance practice may issue in different destinations according to faculties. No result of one vehicle can define the entire passage.

The core of the four phases is not only asking “at which moment is the thought?” Zhanran explains that the three natures are omitted nowhere: wholesome, unwholesome, and indeterminate all fall under the four phases, which are then placed within the twelve matters. Greedy defilement while receiving form, intention while walking, subject and object while reciting, and attachment while entering concentration can no longer hide behind “this is a wholesome activity.” Wholesome dharmas also require contemplation precisely because the phenomenal result of goodness is not yet perfection.

After traversing evil, the vertical establishment of the six identities preserves a sequence from correspondence in contemplative practice to ultimate exhaustion of the covering. An unwholesome object can be contemplated in its identity, but this does not mean an ordinary being has presently realized the true mark. Erasing the six identities passes off identity in principle as realization in practice and falls directly into the error of the deviant teacher rebuked by the treatise. Nor does the lack of explicit encouragement in the fourth gate make it lower. It makes its risk higher: if encouragement reaches people who know neither faculties nor precepts and lack contemplative wisdom, desire will seize it. Silence itself is therefore teaching according to capacity.

At the conclusion, Zhanran positively identifies the sentence about Devadatta and Udraka Rāmaputra as Emperor Wu of Liang’s vow text. The drunken brahman appears in a treatise, while the actress who donned a robe supplies a distant cause through a past-life story. Together, these three layers show that the final sentence only urges continuity of the contemplative vehicle; it does not call grave offense, drunken confusion, or wearing robes in play exemplary practice. Through the mirror, source levels and ethical direction must remain clear at once: any subtle aspiration can become a seed, and no actual harmful result is thereby canceled.

Cultivation can produce realization, and realization can be called a result. Why, then, must evidence of realization obtained by a practitioner in this life remain distinct from the great fruition brought forth by a bodhisattva? In explaining why calming-and-contemplation is taught, the treatise first uses the Middle Way to indicate two directions of fruition, next uses the Fragrant City to disclose the appearance of anticipatory result, and finally answers directly how this life differs from a future life.

The Middle Way First Separates Two Directions

Fruition is not an accidental encounter unrelated to practice. Practice that opposes the Middle Way brings forth fruition at the two extremes; practice that accords with it brings forth excellent and wondrous fruition. The direction of practice is viewed first and the resulting destination second. Both are called fruition, yet because opposition and accord differ, their destinations also differ.

This contrast is brief, but it joins the preceding unit, Cultivating the Great Practice, to Bringing Forth the Great Fruit. Practice does not merely change one present thought. The direction it accords with or opposes becomes a condition for the fruition later received. The excellent and wondrous is not an ornate realm sought apart from the Middle Way, nor do the two extremes arrive without cause. Fruition discloses the direction of practice.

Why Does the Fragrant City Flash Past Only Once?

The treatise next says that even before leaving fragmentary birth and death, the anticipatory result already differs from that of the seven preparatory means—how much more the true fruition. The sentence moves from anticipatory to true fruition: if even the former is so, how much more the latter. It does not unfold the names of the seven preparatory means or spread true fruition into a complete panorama. It lets relative weight alone show that what is brought forth already differs.

The Fragrant City’s seven walls and picture-like bridges and fords form the passage’s only concrete image. They prevent the appearance of fruition from remaining an abstract name. Yet the image flashes once and is immediately gathered by a sentence pointing to extensive later explanation. The author lets readers see the direction without filling in advance what is still to be taught.

That restraint matters. The Fragrant City is raised here as the appearance of anticipatory result, showing that practice and fruition are not empty names. Pointing to the eighth Broad Chapter does not mean the present passage is already exhaustive. Its own measure is this: practice accords or opposes; fruition tends toward an extreme or the wondrous; anticipatory result has a visible appearance; and true fruition awaits extensive explanation.

What Is Attained in This Life and Received in a Future Life

The question therefore returns to the easiest point to confuse. The Sequential Dharma Gate of Dhyāna speaks of cultivation and realization, and realization can be called a result. How does that differ from the fruition here?

The answer gives two names each for cultivation and realization. Cultivation is “habituated practice” and “habituated cause”; realization is “arising attainment” and “habituated result.” Habituation is repeated cultivation that comes to accomplishment. Cause and result correspond earlier and later within this relation, and both can be attained in this life. Cultivation is not fruitless, and realization really arises and is attained from cultivation. Distinguishing fruition must not turn present evidence of realization into nothing.

The real boundary lies in time and in what is under discussion. Habituated cause and result formed through cultivation and realization both occur in this life; the realm-retribution discussed here lies across a future life. Both may contain the word “result,” but their shared name does not merge them. The first answers how cultivation brings realization in the present life; the second what future-life fruition conduct will bring forth.

The last sentence concludes through the Two and Great Vehicles: the Two Vehicles have only habituated result, not the fruition meant here; the Great Vehicle possesses both. This does not deny what the Two Vehicles attain through cultivation and realization. It precisely limits the scope of “fruition” in this passage. Preserve that boundary and one knows that realization does not mean all fruition has already appeared, while future fruition is not unrelated to present practice.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

Zhanran’s Zhiguan Fuxing Chuanhong Jue (hereafter Fuxing) illuminates the boundaries of the abbreviated text, while the Zhiguan Yili judges that this passage indicates beginning and end rather than itself presenting the marks of cultivation. The excellent and wondrous fruition here is explained through the real-reward land; the lands of skillful means and common residence remain the two extremes. Not breaking ignorance is called opposition, while the first ground of the Separate Teaching and first abode of the Perfect Teaching mark wondrous fruition. The four lands and stages unfold in the mirror and are not lists supplied by the author’s own sentence.

Anticipatory result names the adorned land of one who has not left fragmentary birth and death and not yet entered extinction. The seven preparatory means list humans, devas, the Two Vehicles, and bodhisattvas of the three teachings. The City of Many Fragrances discloses the excellence of anticipatory result. The later eighth Broad Chapter should have explained it extensively, but no such text survives, so it cannot be supplied.

The eye of the final distinction is that two kinds of result must not be confused. Cultivation and realization are only present-life habituated cause and result; realm-retribution lies across a future life. What the Two Vehicles obtain remains habituated result, while the fruition here is stated in relation to the Great Vehicle. The mirror gives present realization and future fruition each its proper place.

Skillfully use calming-and-contemplation to contemplate mind, and inner wisdom becomes clear, penetrating even the gradual and sudden teachings. A question naturally arises: if Buddha-Dharmas as numerous as the Ganges sands can be understood within one mind, why does the next passage turn immediately to different faculties, identities, questions, and answers?

Because tearing open the great net does not concern only how much one personally understands. It first loosens the way teachings become knotted against one another in the mind, then transforms penetration into the capacity to teach according to faculties. The first half opens wisdom through contemplating mind; the second gives rise to transformation through wisdom. One line extends from inner wisdom to outward benefit without stopping at intellectual understanding.

How Do Scriptures and Treatises Become a Net?

Scriptures and treatises originally open people’s eyes. If mind clings to one work and doubts another, declaring one teaching correct and all others wrong, the eye-opening teachings instead become a net of doubt. The net is not the scriptures and treatises themselves, but the mutually exclusive way people grasp them.

“Tearing” therefore does not destroy words, and “interconnecting” does not flatten every difference. Practitioners must skillfully use calming-and-contemplation to contemplate their own minds and make inner wisdom clear. Only then can they penetrate how gradual and sudden teachings each guide sentient beings. Their differences remain, but the knots of doubt can loosen. Dharma gates remain many, but mind is no longer trapped by their multiplicity.

Breaking Open a Mote and Bringing Forth a Trichiliocosm Scripture Scroll

The treatise writes this as an immense image: a mote contains a great trichiliocosm scripture scroll, and when the mote breaks, the vast scroll appears. The mote is exceedingly small and the scroll exceedingly large. Placed together, they reveal that one seemingly tiny mind can become the place where Buddha-Dharmas as numerous as the Ganges sands are understood.

The simile does not compress immeasurable Buddha-Dharma into one slogan. The scripture scroll retains the breadth of a trichiliocosm and Buddha-Dharmas remain as numerous as the Ganges sands. The turn is simply that practitioners no longer view the teachings outwardly as unrelated fragments. Skillfully contemplating mind through calming-and-contemplation breaks the mote and brings forth the scroll: as knots of doubt loosen, the vast content they concealed becomes visible again.

After Inner Wisdom Becomes Clear, How Does It Benefit Sentient Beings Outwardly?

The phrase “if one wishes” turns the text toward outward benefit. To benefit sentient beings and establish teachings according to their faculties, one cannot teach only the single method one knows best. See what each can receive and teach a corresponding Dharma. Teaching according to capacity is not catering to desires, but making Dharma an entrance where the other person can bear it.

This function extends through becoming a buddha and transforming beings. One may teach sudden and gradual Dharmas as a Dharma king; manifest as a bodhisattva, śrāvaka, deva, māra, human, or ghost; or take various images in the ten Dharma realms and respond in different identities before the Buddha. Roles change, but the work they accomplish is continuous: corresponding sentient beings encounter a teaching within corresponding conditions.

Penetrating the teachings is therefore not for turning doctrinal classifications into a collection. If it stops at “I understand,” breaking the mote and bringing forth the scroll has not yet benefited beings. Only when one teaches according to what each person can bear does inner wisdom begin to become a Dharma wheel that sentient beings can receive.

How Can Both Question and Answer Set the Dharma Wheel in Motion?

Teaching is not only a one-way declaration. Sometimes the Buddha asks first and bodhisattvas or others answer broadly through the sudden and gradual. Sometimes bodhisattvas and others first strike the Dharma capacity by questioning the Buddha; his answer then turns the sudden and gradual Dharma wheel. Receiving a question and answering, and posing a question to elicit an answer, move in opposite directions but both disclose the Dharma needed by sentient beings.

“Responding and initiating” is therefore more than verbal exchange. Whoever asks or answers does so according to what sentient beings need. Dharma king, bodhisattva, and images of the ten Dharma realms show that transformation can present different relations and positions according to capacity. The Dharma wheel turns not only because someone can speak, but because someone in an appropriate identity uses the appropriate question or answer to make teaching occur.

The treatise ends by pointing to the ninth Broad Chapter and Embracing the Dharmas. This brief passage establishes only the guiding thread: Giving Rise to the Teaching, the ninth Broad Chapter, should have extensively explained transforming others, while Embracing the Dharmas has already briefly shown the relation between one mind and the teachings. Tearing Open the Great Net therefore stands at a pivot—receiving inner wisdom born from contemplating mind and opening the teachings that arise according to capacity.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

Zhanran first distinguishes levels within “interconnect and tear open.” Although the first half begins from inner wisdom, it generally removes the nets of doubt of self and others. Only from “if one wishes” onward does it specifically speak of tearing others’ nets for their benefit. The two halves have a boundary without severing one’s own and others’ benefit.

The treatise skips intermediate stages with “through to becoming a buddha.” Zhanran reads this as extending from the first abode through wondrous awakening, and gathers the repeated “perhaps” as responsive transformations throughout the ten Dharma realms. The sequence of stages and this gathering belong to the mirror’s interpretation; they do not turn the base text into an explicit list of every stage.

In the passage on receiving and posing questions, Zhanran explains that when sentient beings’ capacities mature, bodhisattvas rely upon the Buddha’s power to answer or ask. Both self and other accord with the wondrous object through wondrous contemplation, and wondrous function thereby becomes possible. Questions and answers are thus skillful means by which Buddha-Dharma arises when capacity matures.

Finally, Zhanran says that responding before the Buddha to benefit beings is called giving rise to teaching, while causing others to remove doubt is called tearing the net. The fourth of the Five Summaries and ninth of the Ten Broad Chapters thereby interlock. Contemplating mind and penetrating teaching turn into benefiting according to capacity. Transforming others is not an addition outside contemplation of mind, but the wondrous function of matured inner wisdom.

When a work of calming-and-contemplation speaks of a place of return, two misunderstandings arise easily. Some think the destination is merely one more summary of what came before. Others rush to seize upon a single supreme statement and take that statement for the whole. Zhiyi, however, does not first answer where the teaching returns. He first portrays the mind that grasps in the wrong direction: glue on the hand sticks to whatever it touches; a person talking in a dream becomes harder to awaken the more they speak; people compete to seize rubble, each declaring that they have obtained a jewel.

The problem is not that there are too many words, but that mind seals one passage into the whole. If even nearby matters and explicit speech can be mistaken, distant principle and hidden teaching are still more readily replaced by one’s own preconceptions. Returning to the Great Abode therefore begins by recognizing attachment. Unless one knows that what one has seized is only rubble, one cannot truly ask toward what the purport of the teaching text tends.

The Place of Return Is Not Another Place Outside Words

What is purport and return? Water flows toward the ocean; flame rises toward space. Water and fire do not remain where they were, yet neither leaves itself behind to fabricate a separate tendency. Their movement itself discloses where they tend. A teaching text is the same: each sentence points toward a purport. If one sees only its surface wording without penetrating where it tends, the text detains one. If one reaches meaning through the text, nearby words of teaching can open into distant principle.

The simile of a wise minister understanding the king’s secret speech carries this point further. The same word can indicate different things on different occasions. Wisdom is not arbitrary guessing; it lies in hearing the words while also understanding the setting in which they are spoken and the work that must actually be done. Reading calming-and-contemplation is the same. One does not leap over words in pursuit of a mysterious answer, but recognizes within the words where they are leading.

This direction simultaneously includes one’s own practice and transforming others. From the perspective of personally tending toward the three virtues, it can be called purport; from that of guiding others to enter the three virtues together, it can be called return. From another angle, personally entering the three virtues is called return, while causing others to enter them is called purport. The two sets of terms are established reciprocally because practice and transformation are not two unrelated roads. If only oneself arrives and no sentient beings do, purport and return lack one direction. If there is only teaching directed outward while oneself has not entered, the other direction remains incomplete.

Why Do Buddha and Sentient Beings Return Together to the Three Virtues?

The general aspect of purport and return begins with the buddhas’ appearance in the world. The buddhas manifest many forms so that sentient beings may see the Dharma body together; teach many Dharmas so that sentient beings may ultimately attain omniscience of all aspects; and manifest many skillful means, supernormal powers, and transformations to release sentient beings from their bonds, not allowing one person alone to attain extinction. Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation are therefore not three virtues possessed by the Buddha alone. From the beginning, what the Buddha manifests, teaches, and does is directed toward sentient beings entering together. Only the joint return of buddhas and sentient beings is called the general aspect.

The distinct aspect unfolds this direction level by level. Body comprises form body, Dharma-gate body, and true-mark body; once their work is complete, they return respectively to liberation, prajñā, and Dharma body. Prajñā comprises wisdom of the varieties of the path, omniscience, and omniscience of all aspects, which likewise return respectively to liberation, prajñā, and Dharma body. Liberation comprises release from the bond of non-knowing, release from the bond of grasping marks, and release from the bond of ignorance, which again return respectively to liberation, prajñā, and Dharma body.

These three groups do not divide nine items into mutually isolated categories. Wisdom and freedom are already present in the manifestation of body; Dharma body and liberation are already present in wisdom’s illumination; and the function of liberation does not leave body or wisdom. The more finely the distinct aspect divides, the more it discloses that no virtue stands alone. All three paths finally enter the same secret treasury.

Neither Three nor One: How Does This Appear as Body, Knowing, and Liberation?

If Dharma body is fixed as something that can only be called Dharma body, it is not the Dharma body spoken of here. Dharma body can manifest every form and is therefore called body. Wisdom illuminates forms and non-forms and is therefore called non-body. True-mark body is neither a body of colored images nor a Dharma-gate body and is therefore called neither body nor non-body. Once their work is complete, the three return respectively to liberation, prajñā, and Dharma body. Penetrating that these three bodies have no fixed mark of sameness or difference is return; explaining this to others is purport.

Prajñā likewise cannot be fixed as a single kind of knowing. Wisdom of the varieties of the path knows the conventional throughout and is called knowing; omniscience knows the ultimate throughout and is called non-knowing; omniscience of all aspects knows the Middle throughout and is called neither knowing nor non-knowing. Here non-knowing is not ignorance. Rather, it prevents knowing from being sealed within one kind of object or one mode. The three kinds of prajñā each have what they illuminate and where they return, yet possess no fixed mark of sameness or difference.

Liberation is likewise not only a release that can be grasped. Liberation through purity of skillful means disciplines sentient beings without being stained by them and is called release. Liberation through perfect purity sees neither a fixed sentient being nor a fixed mark of liberation and is called non-release. Liberation through purity of nature goes beyond the opposition of release and non-release and is called neither release nor non-release. The three liberations each return to the three virtues, while both penetrating and teaching them enter the secret treasury together.

Thus “not three” does not delete the three virtues, and “not one” does not pull them apart. If only three are asserted, Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation become unrelated. If only one is asserted, the distinct functions of body, knowing, and release are erased. The inconceivability of the three virtues lies precisely in the three remaining clearly present while none can exist in isolation.

If Obstruction Is Virtue, Why Must the Path Still Run from Arousing the Mind to the Ultimate?

New and old next bring the question into the time of practice. Ignorance obstructs Dharma body, grasping marks obstructs prajñā, and non-knowing obstructs liberation. Because the three obstructions are prior, they are called old. Because the three virtues remove obstruction and only now become manifest, they are called new. If one stops with this side alone, practice appears to use later, new virtues to destroy earlier, old obstructions.

The treatise immediately overturns this fixed sequence: the three obstructions do not depart from the three virtues, and the three virtues do not depart from the three obstructions. If obstruction lay entirely outside virtue, Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation could not be disclosed from the present moment. If virtue lay entirely outside obstruction, removing obstruction would amount merely to seeking another object in the distance. The three obstructions therefore cannot fixedly be called old, and the three virtues cannot fixedly be called new.

Yet not fixing new and old does not mean that there is no arousing the mind, no counteraction, and no ultimate. Not new yet new: therefore there are three virtues attained at arousing the mind and three virtues attained at the ultimate. Not old yet old: therefore there are three obstructions treated at arousing the mind and three obstructions treated at the ultimate. The three virtues in principle have no new or old, while the course of practice still has disclosure and what is treated. Identity preserves nonduality; beginning and end preserve actual practice. Both stand at once.

The three distinct explanations—ignorance and luminosity, grasping marks and signlessness, and non-knowing and knowing—make this relation concrete one by one. Luminosity removes ignorance without standing outside ignorance. Signlessness removes marks without establishing itself elsewhere beyond marks. Knowing removes non-knowing without being brought in from outside it. The treatise states generally that vertical and horizontal, opening and gathering, beginning and end, and the other modes can all be understood according to the preceding examples.

When Names Reach Their End, What Can Still Be Said?

Finally, the treatise places the two graphs “purport” and “return” themselves within a threefold opening and gathering. Purport, non-purport, and neither purport nor non-purport, as well as return, non-return, and neither return nor non-return, must all enter the secret treasury. Purport is spoken from one’s own practice, non-purport from transforming others, and the double negation from the absence of any fixed self and other. Even the name that points to the place of return cannot stand outside that place.

The three virtues are quiescent, and no name can express or indicate them completely; names can only be provisionally established. From the side of Dharma body there are the Middle, true mark, Dharma body, and neither calming nor contemplation. From the side of prajñā there are omniscience of all aspects, great wisdom of equality, and the contemplation of prajñāpāramitā. From the side of liberation there are the Śūraṅgama samādhi, great nirvāṇa, and the calming of inconceivable liberation. These names are not competing jewels. According to different functions, they point toward the same secret treasury.

The entire passage therefore closes with three questions: What is purport and return? Where does purport and return go? Who is the one who purports and returns? If some Dharma, place, or person is seized as the answer, the glue has not yet released the hand. Only when the path of words is severed, the place of mental activity ceases, and all is forever quiescent like space has the passage brought a person to its destination. The fifth summary marks the direction here and leaves extensive explanation to the tenth Broad Chapter. Its final sentence is only a remote pointer to that chapter; the body of the tenth Broad Chapter is not unfolded here.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

Zhanran’s Zhiguan Fuxing Chuanhong Jue first illuminates the hinges in the opening similes. The glue-covered hand is mind giving rise to attachment as it follows words. Talking in a dream is partial grasping arising again within ignorance. Sealing wording and equating meaning is grasping one side within the teachings, gates, and truths. Distant principle is identified as the Middle, and hidden teaching as the perfect and constant. “Hidden” here therefore concerns the profundity of the teaching’s meaning, not the name of a later sectarian school.

When explaining the name, Zhanran analyzes text, purport, and return as teaching, meaning, and tendency, then assigns water and fire, their movement, and space and ocean to the teaching, the text’s meaning, and the destination. He explicitly judges the two reciprocal pairings of purport and return to be explanations made by dividing the two graphs according to one’s own practice and transforming others. The two names are therefore not contradictory: through the two sides of entering and causing others to enter, they jointly disclose what self and other realize.

The framework for properly explaining the three virtues begins with the general and distinct explanations, then enters the inconceivable. The distinct aspect opens the three virtues within each single virtue; the inconceivable means one virtue possesses all three. Ceasing transformation means that conditions for transformation are complete and entry into nirvāṇa is manifested. The passage on new and old is further judged an explanation through phenomena and principle, beginning and end: in principle, virtue and obstruction are nondual and there is neither new nor old; phenomenally, original possession and attainment through cultivation, obstructer and obstructed, remain. It is therefore nondual yet two.

Zhanran also defines vertical, horizontal, opening, and gathering. Vertical lists Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation successively. Horizontal and opening let each virtue open into three. Gathering means that the three are simply one. Beginning and end include both the axis from arousing the mind to the ultimate and the axis from Deer Park to the twin śāla trees. When explaining through the two graphs, he further divides the purporting and returning agents as the teaching of the three virtues and what they purport toward and return to as the principle of the three virtues. When integrating different names, he uses marks, teaching, and power to illuminate Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation. Their many kinds mutually include one another and still do not leave the one secret treasury.

Finally, Zhanran does not fabricate a substantive answer for each of the three questions, but gathers his explanation into an exhortation on the difficulty of encountering the true Dharma. The Zhiguan Yili gathers purport and return through the wondrous Dharma and secret treasury of the three tracks, while the Zhiguan Dayi restates the fifth summary as returning to the three virtues. Both confirm that this is the return of the Five Summaries within Great Purport. The final sentence only points remotely to the tenth Broad Chapter; the body of that chapter is not already present at the end of this fascicle.

Does calming mean pressing the mind down until it does not move? Does contemplation mean seeing more things and seeing them more clearly? Understood only through everyday usage, calming easily becomes suppression and contemplation easily becomes pursuit—one contracts while the other reaches outward, as though they oppose one another.

Zhiyi begins elsewhere. He does not hurry to give calming-and-contemplation a fixed definition but asks: On what are these two names established? If names are established through dependence, can dependence itself be exhausted? What relation do the many scriptural and treatise names—detachment, quiescent extinction, wisdom, knowledge and vision—have to calming-and-contemplation? Finally, why can calming-and-contemplation communicate with the three virtues of Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation?

Explaining the Name is therefore not a dictionary gloss. It makes the name itself travel an entire road: first using the relative to give people an entrance, then using the absolute to break fixation upon the name; after breaking that fixation, integrating the different names one by one; and after integrating them, disclosing that what the two graphs express is not one partial exercise but the complete structure of the three virtues in the secret treasury.

Why Must One “Calming” Be Explained Three Times?

Calming first has three meanings: cessation, staying, and calming spoken in relation to non-calming.

Cessation is named from the side of what is broken. Evil examinations, delusive thoughts, and conceptual reflection originally climb and condition without stopping. When mind attains nothing, that climbing and conditioning quiescently ceases. What is seen is the ending of delusive thought, and it is therefore called cessation.

Staying is named from the side that can calm. Mind no longer flows outside true principle but binds right mindfulness to what is present and rests in principle. What is seen is wisdom’s capacity to make mind stay, and it is therefore called staying.

The third meaning drives the question deeper. Dharma-nature originally cannot fixedly be called calming, and ignorance cannot fixedly be called non-calming. Only so that people can speak and understand are the name non-calming established in relation to ignorance and the name calming in relation to Dharma-nature. It resembles Dharma-nature being beyond purity and defilement yet still provisionally called pure, and beyond arising and ceasing yet still called quiescently extinct. Calming at this level does not merely describe the disappearance of delusive thought or mind’s resting in principle. On the same Dharma-nature, the two names delusion and awakening mutually disclose one another.

The three meanings are therefore not three unrelated calmings. The first two let one see calming through function: one says what is ceased, the other what can cause staying. The third returns to the principle of truth and shows that agent and object of breaking are not two real things each possessing self-nature.

Contemplation Is Not Spectating but Penetrating and Arriving

Contemplation likewise has three meanings: penetrating, contemplative comprehension, and contemplation spoken in relation to non-contemplation.

Penetrating is named from what is broken. Wisdom resembles a sharp mattock cutting down through earth and stone, or digging a well on a high plateau, applying effort from dry earth until damp earth appears and finally mud. Affliction does not disappear by being avoided; wisdom must penetrate its covering. Penetrating names this power to break delusion.

Contemplative comprehension is named from that which contemplates. Mind ceases climbing and conditioning and penetrates the source; pure and single, it sees prajñā. Contemplation does not merely place an object before oneself for inspection. Wisdom accords with suchness and actually arrives at the principle toward which it tends.

The third meaning says in turn that ignorance originally cannot fixedly be called non-contemplation and Dharma-nature cannot fixedly be called contemplation. Only in relation to delusion and darkness is ignorance called non-contemplation and Dharma-nature called contemplation. Dharma-nature is beyond brightness and darkness yet can be called bright; emptiness of the ultimate truth is beyond wisdom and foolishness yet can be called wisdom. Contemplation thereby also moves from function into the principle of truth. Penetrating and comprehending still involve agent and object; contemplation established in relation to non-contemplation shows that although delusion and awakening differ in name, neither possesses an essence apart from Dharma-nature.

The three meanings of calming and three meanings of contemplation run in parallel. Cessation and penetrating are named from what is left behind; staying and contemplative comprehension from the wisdom that can condition; calming in relation to non-calming and contemplation in relation to non-contemplation according to the principle of truth. These six meanings first set every name in its place, while preparing the next question: since all are named through the relative, can a separate absolute be seized somewhere beyond the relative?

If the Relative Is Useful, Why Must It Be Broken?

The relative enables understanding, but can also make one imagine that each name has a fixed source. If cessation arises entirely from the affliction broken, the name depends on another. If staying arises entirely from illuminating wisdom, the name depends on self. If it arises jointly from wisdom and severing delusion, it falls into joint arising. If it arises without relying on either agent or object, it falls into causeless arising.

The problem is not which of the four propositions is best. All four first presume a calming that can arise from somewhere. As long as calming-and-contemplation is treated as an entity arising from self, other, both, or no cause, it remains within the range of what can be thought, spoken, broken, and destroyed.

After horizontally breaking the four theories of nature, the treatise vertically breaks successively established calmings and contemplations. Ceasing the delusions of views and thought and abiding in the ultimate truth still establishes non-arising in relation to birth and death. Entering the provisional from emptiness, ceasing dust-and-sand delusions, and abiding in conventional truth still opens a new arising from the preceding level of non-arising. Ceasing ignorance and abiding in the principle of the Middle still establishes itself in relation to the two extremes of birth and death and nirvāṇa. The stations may grow progressively deeper, but if each proves itself through before and after, it has not truly left dependence.

The absolute is therefore not a highest level added above the relative Dharmas. What it ends is the fixation that “this name must rely on an opposite in order to stand.” Horizontal breaking prevents the name from arising through the four natures. Vertical breaking prevents successively established levels from being grasped as a final entity. Only when both sides are exhausted does the absolute begin to become clear.

Does the Absolute Turn into Nothing at All?

The absolute first ends every horizontal and vertical dependence and all conceptual construction, affliction, karma, and result arising from them; even teaching, contemplation, and realization are included among what is ended. Yet so far only what is depended upon has ended. If at the end one retains a calming that declares, “I have ended everything,” that which ends becomes a new object of grasping.

Therefore, because nothing arises, it is called calming, yet calming itself cannot be attained. Contemplation interpenetrates with its object; once the object contemplated is quiescent, the contemplator is not independently established outside it. Calming cannot be attained; contemplation cannot be attained; calming and non-calming, contemplation and non-contemplation, through to neither calming nor non-calming, cannot be attained. This does not erase everything into a blank. It prevents every fixed position that stands only through opposition from finding a place to abide.

The fire-and-wood simile illuminates this level most clearly. Fire burns fuel; when the wood is exhausted, the fire does not announce that its burning is complete and remain forever. Once what is ended is exhausted, that which ends it naturally does not remain. The treatise presents both “extinguishing the absolute” and “absolutely extinguished” to name absolute calming. If the absolute is preserved as a final thing, it must again be named in dependence upon the non-absolute and falls back into the relative.

The absolute cannot itself be fixedly expressed, yet it can still be taught according to sentient beings. In response to worldly conditions, it can be taught through integrating differences. To enable people to give rise to goodness, it can be taught through communicating with the three virtues. To counteract grasping, it can be taught through the relative. In the face of the ultimate truth, it can be taught through the absolute. Its teachability is not the failure of the absolute; the principle beyond fixed speech can open different entrances according to four kinds of conditions.

This also resolves the beginner’s doubt. If the absolute belonged only to sages, beginners would seem to have no share at all. If beginners already possessed the absolute, they could easily pass off their first understanding as the ultimate. The six identities let both sides stand together: beginners do not lose the principle of Dharma-nature, and the sage’s realm is not usurped by beginners. The absolute is not fragmented by stations, nor do stations disappear because of the absolute.

If Names Cannot Be Attained, Why Integrate Differences?

Breaking fixation upon names does not abolish every name. Precisely because no name can monopolize the true mark, scriptures and treatises establish many names according to sentient beings and according to function.

Detachment, non-abiding, non-attachment, unconditioned, quiescent extinction, non-discrimination, meditative concentration, discarding, removing, and relinquishing can all be understood from the calming side. Knowledge and vision, bright discernment, eye and awakening, wisdom, illumination and comprehension, and reflecting and penetrating can all be understood from the contemplation side. Prajñā is originally one Dharma for which the Buddha gives many names according to sentient beings. Liberation likewise has many names. Space can also be discussed as without possession, unmoving, and unobstructed.

Integrating differences does not press all words into synonyms. It lets one see that the quiescence and illumination indicated by different names can all be integrated into the same Dharma realm. Names enter through different gates, but do not arrive at many mutually isolated entities. Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation have three names without being three separate treasuries. Different words are established according to kinds of sentient beings, while what they disclose remains one Dharma.

Calming and contemplation can also be mutually integrated. Calming can be called contemplation and non-calming; contemplation can be called calming and non-contemplation. At this point integrating differences does more than gather names from other scriptures and treatises. It also opens the two names calming and contemplation into one another so they are no longer mutually sealed.

How Do Two Graphs Communicate with Three Virtues?

Why are three meanings established for each of calming and contemplation? Because what they disclose is the three virtues—Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation. The secret treasury is nirvāṇa; nirvāṇa does not depart from the three virtues; and the three virtues do not depart from calming-and-contemplation. From first arousing the mind to final entry through cultivation, from one’s own contemplative practice to transforming others, all unfold within this structure.

First take the two graphs together. Calming communicates with liberation by severing delusion; contemplation communicates with prajñā through wisdom; and the equality and nonduality of calming and contemplation communicates with Dharma body. Concentration and wisdom can be taught separately but have never been separate. The nondual is provisionally divided into two, while the two remain nondual throughout.

Next unfold calming and contemplation separately. Cessation is the goodness of the concentration gate and communicates with liberation. Staying has the function of contemplation and communicates with prajñā. Calming as non-calming is established according to principle and communicates with Dharma body. Penetrating can calm and break affliction and communicates with liberation. Contemplative comprehension is the practice of wisdom and communicates with prajñā. Contemplation as non-contemplation is established according to principle and communicates with Dharma body.

The third mode arranges calming and contemplation in pairs. Cessation and penetrating are both named from what is left behind and communicate together with liberation. Staying and contemplative comprehension are both named from the wisdom that can condition and communicate together with prajñā. Calming as non-calming and contemplation as non-contemplation are both named according to Dharma-nature and communicate together with Dharma body.

The fourth mode reverses the direction. The names calming and contemplation do not only summon the three virtues; the principle of the three virtues also responds to calming-and-contemplation. Liberation communicates with calming, prajñā with contemplation, and Dharma body with neither calming nor contemplation. Liberation itself further has the three aspects purity of skillful means, perfect purity, and purity of nature; prajñā has path wisdom, wisdom of the varieties of the path, and omniscience of all aspects; and Dharma body can be unfolded through form body, Dharma-gate body, and true-mark body.

These four modes are not repetitions of one correspondence chart. In sequence they show the two graphs communicating jointly, each graph communicating individually, the three meanings communicating in pairs, and the three virtues communicating back to the names. Name can disclose principle, and principle can fill out the name. Calming-and-contemplation is therefore not a tool outside the three virtues, nor are the three virtues a result acquired elsewhere only after calming-and-contemplation has been completed.

What Does Neither Vertical nor Horizontal Guard Against?

If one virtue is superior and two inferior, like three things arranged simultaneously, the three virtues become horizontal. If body comes first, wisdom is obtained later, and then body and wisdom are extinguished to obtain liberation, they are stacked before and after and become vertical. If in different states only body, wisdom, or liberation remains, the three become separated and unrelated.

Even to say Dharma body is intrinsic while prajñā and liberation will exist only in the future remains vertical. To say the three virtues are one essence but their three meanings separate may still make the essence horizontal and meanings vertical. To say essence and meaning are wholly the same with only concealment and disclosure different may grasp non-difference as horizontal and concealment and disclosure as vertical.

Zhiyi’s answer is not a more elaborate diagram but a return to the inconceivable. Dharma body is constant, wisdom complete, and the severing of delusion fulfilled. All are Buddha-Dharma, with none superior or inferior, and therefore they are not vertical. The three virtues interpenetrate as one Dharma realm, with no other Dharma outside that realm, and therefore they are not horizontal. They can establish many things and therefore are not fixedly one; they return together to the ultimate truth and therefore are not mutually different.

The three dots of the graph yi disclose this structure. They are neither arrayed horizontally nor stacked vertically and cannot be separated, yet no dot can be omitted. The one itself is three and therefore not horizontal; the three themselves are one and therefore not vertical. Not fixed as three yet establishing three, they are not one. Not fixed as one yet returning to one, they are not different.

Why Does Explaining the Name End with the Three Obstructions, Three Paths, and Four Inversions?

If Explaining the Name dealt only with lexical meaning, it might seem able to end with neither vertical nor horizontal. Zhiyi instead asks further about the relation of the three virtues to permanence, bliss, self, and purity, then opens the three obstructions, three paths, and four inversions through different forms of karma, retribution, and affliction.

The three virtues do not each receive only one of the four virtues. Explained generally, Dharma body, prajñā, and liberation each possess permanence, bliss, self, and purity. Explained distinctly, the five aggregates can be transformed into the three virtues; or through the four establishments of mindfulness, consciousness can correspond to permanence, feeling to bliss, perception and formations to self, and form to purity. General and distinct each have two modes of opening; the Perfect meaning is sudden, the Distinct meaning gradual.

Likewise, karma can be opened into the three kinds outflow, non-outflow, and neither outflow nor non-outflow, bringing forth the three retributions delimited, expedient, and true. Three paths can be opened within every retribution, and four inversions within every kind of affliction. Because the three virtues are pervasive, the knots of delusion obstructing them must also be distinguished level by level according to what they obstruct.

The chapter thereby returns to its first question: Why do calming and contemplation each have three meanings? Because the names must bear more than a temporarily quiet mind or the understanding of one principle. They bear the road from the delusion of affliction, karma, and result to the awakening of liberation, prajñā, and Dharma body; from the skillful means of the relative to the unattainability of the absolute; and again, from within unattainability, the opening of every practicable gate according to sentient beings.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The preceding reading followed Zhiyi’s own questions, answers, and similes across the four divisions. Zhanran’s Fuxing further separates, one by one, several hinges easily conflated into a single level.

First, although the four divisions have four names, their meanings are gathered into only the two levels relative and absolute, and the intent returns to the absolute. The first three directly explain the name that expresses; communicating with the three virtues uses the principle expressed to disclose the name in return. Integrating differences is therefore not a third ultimate Dharma established outside the relative and absolute. It integrates the different names as absolute calming-and-contemplation. The opening simile of forgetting the snare after obtaining the rabbit likewise teaches that a name is an instrument for grasping principle and is no longer clung to after the intent has been attained.

Second, at the point of explaining the name, the three calmings and three contemplations remain general names. They include the three truths but do not yet determine depth or shallowness. Cessation and staying immediately rely on wisdom and severance; the third calming relies specifically on the principle of truth, and the three contemplations run in parallel. The two groups introduced as scriptural statements do not refer precisely to one scripture. Their function is to use the opposed names brightness and darkness, wisdom and foolishness, purity and defilement to disclose that principle has no difference, not to establish a single source text.

Third, the absolute clearly has three steps: breaking the horizontal, breaking the vertical, and properly clarifying the absolute. The four horizontal propositions face one another without depth or shallowness; the four vertical propositions unfold successively with depth and shallowness, but both deep and shallow remain dependent. After properly clarifying the absolute, dependence ends and is named calming, while calming itself then disappears; contemplation likewise is not independently established outside its object. “Extinguishing the absolute” means extinguishing what is depended upon; “absolutely extinguished” means that which extinguishes is also absent. Each order indicates something distinct.

Fourth, self-realization of the absolute has only one flavor; only in transforming others does it open according to the four capacities into the worldly, individually adapted, counteractive, and ultimate-truth teachings. “Neither abiding nor non-abiding” is further judged to comprise the two levels nature emptiness and mark emptiness: it does not abide in the horizontal and vertical propositions, nor does it abide in a state without horizontal and vertical. The answer through the six identities simultaneously preserves that the beginner is identical in principle and loses nothing, while the sage is at the ultimate station and the beginning cannot be confused with it.

Fifth, the three groups in integrating differences have explicit assignments. Names for prajñā belong to contemplation and the virtue of prajñā; names for liberation belong to calming and the virtue of liberation; the four names of space belong to the nonduality of calming and contemplation and the virtue of Dharma body. Communicating with the three virtues also has four directions: the two graphs communicating jointly, calming and contemplation each communicating, the three meanings communicating in pairs, and the three virtues communicating back. If the four directions are compressed into a static table, the movement between names summoning principle and principle responding to names disappears.

Sixth, the scriptures’ partial presentation of one Dharma is only a partial name; the meaning included remains perfect. None of the six Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna vertical and horizontal explanations enters the three dots of the graph yi. This tradition therefore gives its proper explanation through the three levels treasury of principle, causes of practice, and function of the graph. At the end, the treatise’s original text reads “retribution arises from three kinds of affliction,” while Zhanran raises the textual doubt that it should be “karma arises from three kinds of affliction.” This is a doubt concerning text and meaning left by an ancient master; the original graphs and the doubt must both remain visible.

This mirror does not establish another system of calming-and-contemplation in place of the four divisions. It gives name and principle, skillful means and ultimate, one’s own practice and transforming others, and original wording and textual doubt their respective places. Zhiyi makes the name move from relative to absolute, then opens outward again from the absolute into different names and the three virtues. What Zhanran illuminates is the level at which each opening and gathering actually occurs. Read this way, the name calming-and-contemplation is neither fixedly grasped nor deprived by unattainability of its power to guide people into the path. A name is a skillful means for entering principle and must be released when its intent is attained: do not lose the skillful means, and do not mistake it for what is realized.

“Essence and characteristics” is easily read as a static table of definitions: first find one sentence stating what essence is, then list several properties explaining characteristics. The treatise takes another road. The essence is too deep to hold up for display, so one must see how teaching points toward it, how practitioners’ eye and wisdom disclose it, how objects are explained, and what manner of grasping causes gain or loss.

The treatise provisionally discloses its essence through teaching characteristics, eye and wisdom, objects, and gain and loss: teaching makes principle clear; eye and wisdom distinguish entrances into principle; objects distinguish provisional and real truth; gain and loss distinguish people’s accordance and departure. If the moment one speaks one grasps self, other, both, or no cause, even the most precise preceding names and marks become contention. Only when such grasping is broken while one can still teach according to conditions is the essence disclosed in one’s own practice and transforming others together.

1. Why Do Things with the Same Name “Calming-and-Contemplation” Not Have the Same Essence?

Because “calming-and-contemplation” is too general a name. Ordinary beings’ subduing evil and cultivating goodness can be called calming-and-contemplation; the four dhyānas, four immeasurables, and six practices can be called calming-and-contemplation. The Two Vehicles’ use of phenomenal meditation to calm mind and Four-Truths wisdom to contemplate can also be called calming-and-contemplation. If the shared name alone blends outflow, analytical non-outflow, successive Mahāyāna, and the perfect and sudden into one, what is called disclosing the essence instead conceals it.

The treatise begins with the most easily confused boundary. Ordinary beings’ goodness of calming can temporarily treat evil and their wholesome practice give rise to contemplation, yet they still have not escaped birth and death. The Two Vehicles’ calming-and-contemplation can leave birth and death but is limited by extinguishing form to enter emptiness and reducing body to ashes and wisdom to extinction. They are not entirely without calming-and-contemplation; rather, their characteristics cannot disclose the essence this chapter seeks to disclose. This boundary matters: “not what is presently discussed” does not erase earlier Dharmas, but prevents a general name from replacing a distinct essence.

Are the Mahāyāna three successive calmings the answer, then? Not yet. Calming that embodies truth penetrates the provisional combination of causes and conditions so that climbing delusive thought ceases in emptiness. Expedient calming that follows conditions does not guard emptiness, distinguishes medicine and illness, and abides in conventional truth. Calming that ceases the two extremes makes both the movement of birth and death and nirvāṇa grasped as security quiescent. The three calmings advance level by level and far surpass ordinary and Hīnayāna practices, but still possess three distinguishable characteristics. The treatise must therefore keep questioning.

2. Why Do the Three Calmings Have Similar Names but Different Meanings and Characteristics?

Because the preceding chapter’s three calmings are three meanings, while this chapter’s are three kinds of calming, each forming its own characteristic. Cessation, staying, and neither calming nor non-calming previously resembled three lines that together explained calming. In Essence and Characteristics, all three lines are present together within every kind of calming.

Calming that embodies truth does more than cease moving evil. It also lets mind stay in the principle of causes and conditions, while the true source of causes and conditions falls into neither calming nor non-calming. Expedient calming that follows conditions does more than busily distinguish sentient beings’ medicines and illnesses. It ceases scattering and non-knowing, makes mind stay in provisional principle, while provisional principle itself does not move. Calming that ceases the two extremes likewise possesses the three meanings: birth and death and nirvāṇa both cease, mind abides while conditioning the Middle Way, and true mark falls into neither calming nor non-calming.

This style of writing shows that repeated names do not mean the teaching is standing still. The same “cessation” treats different things when it enters embodying truth, following conditions, and ceasing the two extremes. The same “staying” does not nail the mind down but settles it in the principle reached. The same “non-calming” is not scattering but refusal to shrink true mark into one extreme opposed to non-calming.

The treatise therefore first asks whether the later three are only another wording for the earlier three because their names resemble one another. The answer is that names may be similar while their organization has changed. The earlier three together accomplish the later three, and every later calming possesses the earlier three. Here one can already anticipate the perfect-and-sudden relation of one and three, but at this moment succession must still be preserved; difference cannot be erased in advance.

3. If Entering Emptiness Already Sees the True, Why Enter the Provisional from Emptiness?

Because seeing emptiness does not equal benefiting sentient beings without error amid provisional dharmas. Entering emptiness from the provisional takes the provisional as what is broken and the true as what is used. It contemplates both provisional and true and is therefore called contemplation of the two truths, but it uses the true and not the provisional. Entering the provisional from emptiness turns back to break stagnation in emptiness and again uses provisional dharmas, distinguishing sentient beings’ faculties, illnesses, and medicines. It is therefore called equal in relation to the preceding contemplation.

The treatise answers with a pair of newly opened eyes. When a blind person’s eyes first open, they can see both space and form. Yet although flowers, grasses, and trees stand before them, they cannot distinguish root, stem, branch, and leaf or know which are edible, medicinal, or poisonous. This is no longer total blindness, but what is seen cannot yet be used to benefit others. Only as vision becomes clearer can one not merely see space and form but understand causes and conditions and distinguish coarse and subtle, medicines and foods. Entering the provisional from emptiness is this transition from “seeing existence” to “using existence without error.”

Why are the first two contemplations still not the Middle Way? The initial contemplation empties birth and death; the later contemplation further empties nirvāṇa. Although both acts of breaking serve as skillful means, they still have before and after. On one side the two contemplations obstruct birth and death and nirvāṇa together; on the other they retain the functions of emptiness and provisionality. Only by entering the Middle Way through them do they illuminate both truths. The Middle is not a third territory added outside emptiness and provisionality, but their double obstruction and double illumination once the two skillful means no longer become stuck.

The exchange concerning excess concentration and excess wisdom sharpens this limit. The initial contemplation leaning toward concentration and the second leaning toward wisdom cannot thereby claim already to have seen buddha-nature. They must serve as skillful means for entry into the third contemplation. Even the same name wisdom eye requires discrimination by station: the eye of one-sided emptiness and the wisdom eye of the Perfect Teaching’s ten abodes that partially sees buddha-nature share a name but do not see the same thing.

4. What Is the Difference among Dry Earth, Damp Earth, Mud, and Water?

The difference is whether the practice and teaching reach the Middle Way. The treatise unfolds four stages of digging a well on a high plateau: seeing dry earth means water is still far; seeing damp earth means it is approaching; seeing mud means it is closer; obtaining water finally relieves thirst. As a simile for contemplation, dry earth, damp earth, and mud are the first, second, and third contemplations, while water is perfect-and-sudden contemplation. As a simile for teaching, the Tripiṭaka does not express the Middle Way, the Shared Teaching draws closer, the Distinct Teaching clarifies the Middle while retaining succession, and only the Perfect Teaching resembles obtaining water.

The simile affirms earlier practice without letting “near” masquerade as “arrived.” Damp earth is not water, nor is mud; yet without continued digging, water does not appear. The provisional and real, shallow and deep, before and after of the three successive contemplations must therefore all be preserved. Each possesses penetrating, contemplative comprehension, and contemplation as non-contemplation, yet remains clearly distinct. As long as this division remains, it is not the perfect-and-sudden characteristic finally employed by the treatise.

Entering emptiness from the provisional can pierce the bedrock of the four abidings and is penetrating; wisdom discloses empty principle and is contemplative comprehension; empty principle falls into neither contemplation nor non-contemplation and is contemplation as non-contemplation. Entering the provisional from emptiness can break the obstruction of non-knowing and is penetrating; it illuminates the provisional and distinguishes without error and is contemplative comprehension; provisional principle is constantly so and is contemplation as non-contemplation. Contemplation of the Middle empties the two extremes and is penetrating; properly enters the Middle and is contemplative comprehension; while Dharma-nature of the Middle falls outside an active contemplator and is contemplation as non-contemplation. All three contemplations possess the three meanings without canceling their succession.

5. If the Perfect and Sudden Has No Before or After, How Can It Still Be Called Three?

Because absence of before and after does not leave only a blank one. Perfect-and-sudden calming-and-contemplation teaches one truth as three truths, one calming as three calmings, one object as three objects, and one contemplation as three contemplations. Three are not outside one, nor does one swallow the functions of three. The treatise does not support this with an abstract formula alone but gives three images.

The first is one thought possessing three marks. Mind is only one thought; its three marks need not be arranged as three moments. The Dharma calmed is one and three, while the mind that calms is three and one. The second is three eyes on one face. Maheśvara has only one face, but three eyes are on it. One cannot deny the eyes because there is one face, nor tear the face into three because there are three eyes. Contemplating three is itself one, while one object can give rise to three contemplations—like one face and three eyes.

The third is eye, sun, and form. If the eye could see alone, sunlight would not be needed. If there were no forms, even with eye and sun there would be nothing to see. Eye represents calming, sun contemplation, and form object. None completes its work first and waits for the others, and none independently accomplishes seeing. The perfect and sudden’s absence of before and after is precisely this absence of different times and separation.

Every preceding successive name and meaning can therefore enter one mind without losing its function. Embodying ignorance and inversion and seeing true mark can still be called calming that embodies truth. Moving through all objects while mind abides unmoved can still be called expedient calming that follows conditions. Birth and death and nirvāṇa both coming to rest can still be called calming that ceases the two extremes. Entering emptiness, entering the provisional, and entering the Middle all stand within one thought. The many names are not deleted, yet no longer obstruct one another. One thought does not move from the limit of the true and still skillfully distinguishes the marks of all dharmas.

6. If the Essence Is Neither Knowing nor Seeing, Why Speak of Eye and Wisdom?

Because an essence that cannot be directly indicated can still be made intelligible through two degrees of relation, distant and near. Calming-and-contemplation is cause; eye and wisdom are result. Cause discloses essence from farther away, result from nearer. In the successive explanation, the three calmings separately give rise to the wisdom, Dharma, and Buddha eyes, while the three contemplations separately accomplish omniscience, wisdom of the varieties of the path, and omniscience of all aspects. Eye can see and wisdom can know, so the true, conventional, and Middle essences are disclosed from the results attained.

Do knowing and seeing differ? The treatise first answers through four propositions: some know without seeing, some see without knowing, some both know and see, and some neither know nor see. Ordinary beings have neither realized nor heard and therefore neither see nor know. The Two Vehicles have both heard and realized and therefore know and see. Pratyekabuddhas realize by themselves without hearing from another and therefore see without knowing. People on the expedient path know through hearing but have not realized and therefore know without seeing. Practitioners who follow faith give rise to wisdom from hearing and are called wisdom knowing; practitioners who follow Dharma attain concentration through reflection and give rise from concentration to the wisdom eye and are called eye seeing. Both realize the true, but retain different names according to their causes.

Upon entering the non-successive, the answer turns another level: calming is contemplation and contemplation calming; eye is wisdom and wisdom eye. Eye is named from the function of seeing, wisdom from the function of knowing. The Buddha eye does not discard flesh, deva, wisdom, and Dharma eyes but is one eye possessing five illuminating functions. It resembles streams entering the ocean and losing their river names while the function of water does not disappear. Buddha wisdom is likewise not three masses of wisdom arranged side by side. One wisdom illuminating emptiness is called omniscience, illuminating the provisional wisdom of the varieties of the path, and illuminating emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle and seeing true mark omniscience of all aspects.

Object and truth are therefore like left and right names for one thing; seeing and knowing like one function named through eye and wisdom. Although scriptural explanations are presented successively for ease of understanding, the Dharma itself remains in one mind. This resolves a common doubt: teaching in a sequence does not mean the Dharma taught must be cut into before and after; increasing or decreasing names does not mean the essence disclosed increases or decreases with them.

7. If the Three Truths Cannot Be Spoken, Why Are There Three Modes of Teaching Them?

Because “cannot be spoken” means the principle of truth has no fixed self-nature, while the three modes explain how one speaks when facing conditions. According to sentient understanding follows another’s intent; according to understanding and wisdom follows the intent of self and other; according to wisdom follows one’s own intent. These are not three mutually exclusive verdicts on one proposition, but disclose the distance between teaching and realization according to the person addressed and the station reached.

The blind person asking about milk writes this distance most vividly. One person says milk is white like a shell; others say rice flour, snow, or a crane. All four similes can point toward white, yet none is the true color of milk. If the blind person seizes one simile to refute another, the harder the dispute, the farther from direct seeing. Teaching the three truths through the four gates is the same: existence, emptiness, both existence and emptiness, and neither existence nor emptiness can all be established according to faculties and understanding. When those who have not seen grasp one passage and reject the others, ambrosia becomes a drink that harms life.

Teaching according to sentient understanding therefore does not mean that everything sentient beings think is truth. It means the Tathāgata lowers himself and follows their faculties and understanding, using different gates to give them an entrance. Teaching according to understanding and wisdom gathers what ordinary understanding reaches into two and what sage wisdom realizes into one. Although those at the stage resembling realization contemplate the three truths, they remain in skillful means; only at the first abode, after breaking ignorance and seeing buddha-nature, is the Middle spoken from wisdom. Teaching according to wisdom directly says the three truths are illuminated only by wisdom, with a hundred negations dismissed and all four propositions gone. The color of milk can be directly seen only when the eyes open; words cannot see on a blind person’s behalf.

The treatise then asks in return: if the two truths can be taught in three rounds according to sentient understanding, understanding and wisdom, and wisdom, why could the Middle Way not likewise respond to conditions? The Buddha’s entering the womb, birth, leaving home, awakening, and nirvāṇa all use midnight to represent the Middle, and not a single color or fragrance is other than the Middle Way. The Middle Way is not a silent object refusing conditions, so it can likewise be taught according to three intents.

8. Why Does Three Times Four Not Make Twelve Kinds of Truth?

Because the four siddhāntas describe functions of teaching, not four more essences realized. Every way of teaching the truths can delight sentient beings, cause wholesome roots to grow, counteract evil illness, and lead into the ultimate truth. Some rejoice upon hearing the true, others the conventional, and others the Middle: this is worldly. Some hear absence, existence, or the Middle and morality and wisdom grow: this is individually adapted. Some use different Dharmas to break sleepiness, scattering, and partial deviation: this is counteractive. Some hear existence, absence, or the Middle and awaken at the corresponding place: this is the ultimate truth.

Each of the three modes of teaching possesses the four intents and therefore totals twelve. This multiplication does not require the sentences in twelve boxes to be identical; it instead recognizes that sentient beings’ needs, illnesses, obstructions, and entrances into awakening differ. At times arising dharmas are taught and sentient beings are liberated through non-arising; at times non-arising dharmas are taught and they are liberated through arising. The key is not whether the sentence matches an expectation, but which benefit this act of teaching actually accomplishes.

Desire, nature, practice, and recollection and thought further disclose the four intents. What is desired differs, so the worldly first gives delight. Wholesome nature lies concealed, arises upon hearing Dharma, and belongs to the individually adapted. Evil practice appears openly and must be broken by a corresponding Dharma, so it belongs to counteraction. Partial and deviant perception is itself a mental factor of wisdom; properly directed, it becomes non-inversion, and therefore belongs to the ultimate truth. Three times four analyzes “teaching through conditions” into twelve distinguishable functions. Its purpose is not to proliferate names but to stop ordinary understanding from restricting a sage’s intent to one teaching.

At “my private view,” the voice changes. The recorder summarizes the three rounds as full granting, half granting and half withholding, and full withholding. Teaching according to sentient understanding grants both conventional and true through ordinary understanding. Teaching according to understanding and wisdom permits what ordinary understanding knows to be conventional but assigns the true to sage wisdom. Teaching according to wisdom says ordinary understanding recognizes neither of the two truths. This passage marks itself as a private explanation. It helps gather the preceding dense relations into an accessible pattern of granting and withholding, but must not be used to obscure the full unfolding of the three modes and twelve siddhāntas.

9. As the Numbers of Truths and Wisdoms Keep Changing, Does the Essence Change Too?

No. Separation and combination change the teaching gate’s mode of speech; they do not cut the essence disclosed into more pieces or compress it into fewer. The expedient Tripiṭaka first teaches two truths and can add the Middle Way above them to speak of three. The Shared Teaching distinguishes only-emptiness and not-only emptiness within ultimate truth, combining them as one true and separating them as two. The Distinct Teaching combines the existence and absence of the preceding two teachings as its conventional, then opens existence as conventional and absence as true, with not-only emptiness as the ultimate. The Perfect Teaching clarifies only the one real truth and teaches three through skillful means.

The earlier dispute over going beyond or not going beyond also receives a place within separation and combination. To say only that the Buddha’s fruit goes beyond the two truths requires an answer about what different object Buddha wisdom illuminates and what different delusion it severs. To say only that it does not go beyond makes it difficult to distinguish Buddha wisdom from that of the Two Vehicles. The treatise does not select one slogan, but through opening and combining only-emptiness and not-only emptiness lets going beyond and not going beyond each stand in its appropriate meaning.

The Four Truths open the same relation horizontally: active corresponds to the Tripiṭaka, non-arising to the Shared, immeasurable to the Distinct, and actionless to the Perfect. The four clauses dharmas arising through conditions, emptiness itself, provisional names, and the Middle Way can in turn be assigned to the four kinds of Four Truths. Wisdom can likewise open from one, two, three, and four through eleven. One Buddha wisdom is quiescent in one mark and still knows many marks. Two wisdoms use the provisional to illuminate existence and absence and the real to illuminate the Middle. Four wisdoms have multiple explanations through cause and result, provisional and real, general and distinct, and simple and compound. Eleven wisdoms illuminate conventional, true, and Middle distinctly. Names increase and decrease without moving what is illuminated.

When truth and wisdom are taught together, the Tripiṭaka, Shared, Distinct, and Perfect Teachings each have arrangements in which eye and wisdom arise from truth and return to condition truth. The Distinct Teaching’s reception of the Shared further shows that after contemplations of emptiness and provisionality break delusion, practitioners must still hear the Middle Way, cultivate contemplation, and break ignorance. What is received is the hinge through which practitioners of the Shared Teaching enter the Middle, not an arbitrary joining of any cause and result from one teaching to another.

10. From Which Thought Does Real Loss Begin?

It begins with deciding that object and wisdom must arise through one fixed nature. If wisdom arises by itself and illuminates a naturally present object, this is self-arising. If wisdom exists entirely through the object and the object entirely through wisdom, this is arising from another. If object and wisdom jointly arise in combination, this is shared arising. If none of the first three applies and they are naturally so, this is causeless. The four statements appear to explain object and wisdom, but once grasped as natures they all become dependencies.

The treatise follows the fault link by link. With dependence, one judges oneself right and others wrong. Right and wrong produce love and anger; love and anger produce affliction; affliction produces conceptual play and contention; contention generates bodily, verbal, and mental karma; karma draws beings through the ocean of cyclic suffering. Loss does not suddenly appear only when suffering is finally experienced. It has already begun when one first grasps an explanation as self-nature.

How is this chain stopped? Break the four natures through non-arising from self, other, both, or no cause. When nature is broken, dependence breaks; right and wrong, love and anger, affliction, karma, and suffering lose their root. At this point inexpressibility does not mean nothing exists, but that there is no arising Dharma to be fixed through language. Śāriputra’s silence and Vimalakīrti’s wordlessness separately disclose this severing of the path of words.

The treatise immediately asks again: if it cannot be spoken, can it still be taught? The answer is yes. Through the causes and conditions of the four siddhāntas, arising from self, other, both, and no cause can be taught. Grasping at nature has already been broken; everything remaining is provisional name. Breaking the four natures is real wisdom. Afterward still teaching four in accord with conditions is provisional wisdom. If “inexpressible” becomes a refusal to transform others, provisional wisdom is lost; if expedient teachings are grasped anew as self-natures, real wisdom is lost.

Ordinary beings lose twice because they grasp the four natures in their own practice and lack the four siddhāntas in transforming others. The Two Vehicles break the four natures and gain in their own practice, but do not liberate sentient beings and lose in transforming others. Bodhisattvas both break nature and respond to conditions and gain in self and other. This judgment of gain and loss is then successively judged again through the Shared, Distinct, and Perfect Teachings. A later teaching looking back at an earlier one may find that a gain previously called inconceivable still bears traces of conceivable skillful means. Only in the Perfect Teaching, where ultimate principle is beyond speech yet can be taught in four ways through conditions and provisional names are themselves non-arising, does the chapter conclude with both self and other gaining.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The preceding reading followed the treatise’s sequence from teaching characteristics through eye and wisdom and objects to gain and loss. Zhanran’s Zhiguan Fuxing Chuanhong Jue adds several crucial guideposts to this long road.

First, the four divisions are not parallel. Teaching can express principle and therefore comes first. Reaching principle requires practice, and practice depends on eye and wisdom, so these come next. Object is the principle reached and therefore follows. Gain and loss then discern the person who grasps principle and the self and other of practice. Read backward through this structure, the treatise does not move from names and marks to another batch of names and marks, but step by step from what expresses and what practices toward what is reached, then returns whether principle is grasped to the person.

Second, the mirror supplies the concise distinction between essence and characteristics: the principle of truth expressed is called essence; differentiating provisional and real, great and small, is called characteristics. This judgment gathers the whole chapter but belongs to the interpretive layer. The base treatise discloses essence through four divisions and does not first state the same definition. Reading both layers together leaves chapter structure and base teaching each clear.

Third, the mirror states the relation between the earlier and later three calmings most clearly: the three calmings in Explaining the Name together form one truth, while the three in Essence and Characteristics each form one truth; every calming here again possesses the preceding three meanings. The successive three contemplations likewise remain clearly distinct. Only at the turn to perfect and sudden does the name absolute disclose one truth as three truths and clarify agent and object as simultaneously pervasive, one itself and three. Reading succession as perfect integration too early and remaining in succession without entering perfect and sudden equally lose the text’s turn.

Fourth, the blind-person-and-milk simile is deliberately repurposed. In its original scripture it addresses another non-Buddhist setting, while the treatise borrows its meaning to teach the four gates and three truths. The mirror explicitly notes that its use differs slightly. This reminds cross-readers that when one simile enters another argument, its image can remain while its referent changes. Recognizing this repurposing follows ancient scriptural usage more closely than assuming all similar wording can bear only one fixed meaning.

Fifth, “my private view” is not something Zhiyi taught publicly. Zhanran explicitly marks it as Zhang’an’s private explanation because it was neither spoken by the Great Master before the assembly nor stated directly to him for confirmation. Full granting, half granting and half withholding, and full withholding can therefore help explain the three rounds of the two truths, but cannot be reattributed as Zhiyi’s own statement, still less mistaken for something Zhanran independently established. This small authorial marker protects the credibility of the teaching, recording, and commentary layers throughout the work.

Sixth, the numbers in separation and combination must not be reified. The mirror’s statement that “the essence of the truths remains constantly three” explains how wisdom-numbers can increase and decrease, while preserving the Dazhidu Lun’s many explanations of the four wisdoms without deciding on Nāgārjuna’s behalf. Zhuangyan says beyond and Kaishan not beyond, and each grasps one side. Once the whole intent is obtained, beyond and not beyond can both stand. This is not vagueness but recognition that partial sentences each have a scope when teaching gates open and gather according to faculties.

Seventh, the four natures in the gain-and-loss chapter are not an abstract logical game. Zhanran ties self, other, both, and no cause one by one back to object and wisdom and illuminates the chain from dependence through right and wrong, love and anger, conceptual play, karma, and suffering. Breaking the four natures is itself contemplative practice. All teachings leave grasping at nature, though what they break differs in depth. Only when four teachings remain after breaking do real and provisional wisdom, one’s own practice and transforming others, form both sides.

Eighth, the treatise cites the Suvarṇaprabhāsa Sūtra as saying “the inconceivable object of wisdom and inconceivable illumination by wisdom,” while the mirror lists the scripture’s light of wisdom, torch of wisdom, practice of wisdom, accumulation of wisdom, and object of wisdom and expressly records that the treatise reads “illumination.” This is not a place to smooth the wording through similar meanings, but an actual difference between the treatise’s usage and the extant scriptural sentence. Zhanran preserves both while still explaining the chapter’s purport through the identity of wisdom and object. The four inexpressibles are the same: the treatise explicitly cites Śāriputra and Vimalakīrti at the beginning and end, while the mirror supplies the two middle levels by assignment according to teaching. Interpretation can complete the structure, but cannot pretend that the assigned parallels were already quoted in the base text.

The Zhiguan Yili uses “opening and disclosing the essence brings forth eye and wisdom” to show that the chapter count can open, while the Zhiguan Dayi compresses the entire chapter through three and one having nowhere to lodge and truth and contemplation differing in name but sharing an essence. Both outlines point in the same direction: Essence and Characteristics neither turns three into one nor spreads one into three. Amid separation and combination of names and marks, it continuously sees that what is disclosed does not move; amid the inexpressible, it preserves speech responding to conditions. Returning in this way to the chapter’s end, self and other gaining together is no longer merely the final cell in a classification table, but the most practical verification of the essence and characteristics of calming-and-contemplation.

“The names calming-and-contemplation are concise; their embrace of Dharmas is incomplete.” The doubt is entirely natural. Worldly and world-transcending Dharmas are so numerous: principle may be provisional or real, delusion internal or external, wisdom and practice shallow or deep, while stations and gates of teaching each unfold in their own way. If only calming and contemplation are spoken, do two simple names merely cover over the differences among Dharmas?

The treatise does not answer by first adding more names. It points out that calming-and-contemplation already stands at the vital point of all Dharmas. Calming makes them quiescent, like cauterizing illness and finding the point: once the point is accurate, every ailment is removed. Contemplation illuminates principle, like obtaining the jewel king: with this one jewel in hand, all treasures are acquired. Calming is not another Dharma outside the many samādhis, but the king samādhi into which they all enter. Nor is contemplation one wisdom outside the many wisdoms; none of the Dharmas that prajñā should study departs from contemplative wisdom. There are only two names, yet their function reaches the root directly.

The Six Embraces Are Not Six Boxes

The embrace of Dharmas by calming-and-contemplation first opens six intents: principle, delusion, wisdom, practice, station, and teaching. They do not pack the Buddha-Dharma into six unrelated boxes. They form one complete sequence extending from principle to persons.

Whether a Buddha appears or does not appear, the nature of principle constantly abides. Sentient beings are confused about principle, and so the delusions of birth and death arise. They contemplate in accord with principle, and so there is wisdom. Understanding without implementation can never reach its destination, so practice is established from understanding. Practice leads to realization of stations. When stations are fulfilled, one turns to teaching and transforming others. Principle and phenomena, understanding and practice, cause and result, and self and others follow one another within this sequence.

First is embracing principle. Although the principle of truths may be opened and gathered according to faculties, and although partial and perfect or provisional and real differ, no separate principle exists outside provisional and real. Just as there is no sandalwood beyond Mount Moli, establishing another principle would be a false addition. Since calming-and-contemplation can disclose Dharma-essence, no principle is left outside what it discloses.

Delusion Is Not a Mass of Darkness but a Turning Wheel

Second is embracing delusion. Delusion arises from confusion about principle, and confusion is ignorance. Confusion about provisional principle gives rise to associated and solitary-head ignorance within the three realms. Ignorance joined with the dispositions of views and thoughts is called associated; ignorance not associated with them is called solitary-head. From this one thought of not knowing, craving is activated, and the establishment of birth and death can be seen along the twelve links. Not knowing is ignorance; the movement of craving is formations; the craving mind is consciousness. Consciousness arising with the other aggregates is name-and-form; form activating the faculties becomes the six entrances; faculties adhering to objects become contact; contact conforming to objects becomes feeling; delight within feeling becomes craving; the bonds born from craving become grasping; making future karma becomes existence; the future aggregates arising become birth; the aggregates maturing become aging; abandoning them becomes death.

The twelve links do not stop when their list reaches aging and death. Affliction communicates with karma, karma with suffering, and suffering again with affliction; the three paths are bound together. Aging and death can still revolve back to ignorance, hence the name wheel. Births in the three times are separated from one another, hence segmentary. This wheel covers the true truth and prevents liberation, so it is the illness to be treated. Once the illness is known, the medicine is known as calming-and-contemplation that enters emptiness from provisionality. Observing the medicine’s action can in turn clarify the illness. All delusions within the realms are therefore embraced by calming-and-contemplation that enters emptiness.

Confusion about real principle means that associated and solitary-head ignorance remain beyond the three realms. Although delusions within the realms have been severed, habituations remain. Although the Two Vehicles treat them through impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and non-self, inversion remains with respect to the Buddha’s Dharma body. Karma produced by non-outflow wisdom may therefore correspond to formations; mind-made bodies to consciousness, name-and-form, the six entrances, contact, and feeling; subtle delusions and conceptual play not yet exhausted to craving and grasping; the three stains not yet exhausted to existence; and the transference of mind-made causes and transformation of their results to birth, aging, and death. The twelve links then gather into four obstructions—condition, characteristic, arising, and destruction—without leaving the three paths of affliction, karma, and suffering.

Although the twelve-spoked wheel beyond the realms does not fall back into the three realms, it still turns from ignorance to aging and death and from aging and death to ignorance. Those of dull faculties first sever delusions within the realms but have not cultivated the provisional and middle contemplations. Born beyond the realms, they must spend eons learning Buddha-Dharmas as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, first breaking dust-and-sand delusions that obstruct teaching others and then advancing to sever the three paths beyond the realms. Provisional contemplation directly treats dust-and-sand delusions and can also subdue ignorance. Those of sharp faculties have exhausted shared delusions and subdued distinct delusions; they need only cultivate middle contemplation. From the first ground through the later grounds, portions of ignorance are extinguished and karma and suffering extinguished portion by portion along with it. Only in the Buddha’s mind is ignorance entirely absent and the three paths ultimately pure. What calming-and-contemplation embraces as delusion is therefore not merely a temporary affliction, but the whole picture of how birth and death begin, continue, and cease layer by layer.

Eyes Still Need Feet

Third is embracing wisdom. Worldly wisdom does not illuminate principle, while every kind of world-transcending wisdom, however extensively opened or gathered, can be embraced by the three contemplations. Yet understanding without implementation reaches nowhere, so the fourth intent immediately follows: embracing practice.

The treatise does not list the eleven or twenty wisdoms again here; “as explained above” carries forward the preceding discussion. Although worldly wisdom cannot illuminate principle, it has already been included among the eleven wisdoms. If twenty wisdoms are explained more broadly, the three contemplations still embrace them completely. Classifications may open or gather, but no function of contemplative wisdom illuminating principle is omitted.

Practice divides into wisdom-practice and practice-practice. Wisdom-practice is primary and practice-practice auxiliary. Vipaśyanā can break afflictions, yet śamatha is still needed to assist right knowledge and vision. Primary and auxiliary practices move with wisdom like two feet following the eyes: the eyes discern direction and the feet make arrival possible. The Tripiṭaka Teaching takes impermanence and analytical Dharma as wisdom-practice and impurity, kindness, and the rest as practice-practice. The Shared Teaching takes embodying Dharmas as illusion for wisdom-practice and mindfulness of breathing, establishments of mindfulness, and phenomenal calming-and-contemplation for practice-practice. Conditioning conventional principle to transform sentient beings is wisdom-practice, while passing through conventional phenomena is practice-practice. Conditioning the true mark of the Middle Way so the one path is pure is wisdom-practice; passing through every Dharma gate and seeing all perfections as Mahāyāna and the twelve links as themselves buddha-nature is practice-practice.

This primary and auxiliary pair can expand to embrace all gates of practice on the path. Where concentration and wisdom are equal, calming and contemplation both embrace the gate. Little concentration and much wisdom inclines toward contemplation; much concentration and little wisdom toward calming. The four immeasurable minds, nine perceptions, eight recollections, ten perceptions, eight liberations, and nine successive concentrations are assigned according to quiescing or illuminating. The four establishments of mindfulness take wisdom as their nature and emphasize contemplation; when termed the Four Intentional Calmings and used to make mind retain impurity and the other contemplations, they also have a calming function. The four right efforts may generally belong to contemplation but may be distinguished so that preventing evil belongs to calming and causing goodness to grow to contemplation. The four bases of spiritual power obtain concentration through causes and are named from the result, so they belong to calming.

The five faculties, five powers, seven factors of awakening, and Eightfold Path are likewise divided according to function, with mindfulness sometimes extending across both sides. Among the Four Truths, conditioned practices belong to contemplation and unconditioned cessation to calming; the sixteen aspects belong to contemplation. The four great vows arise from the Four Truths. The eighteen distinctive Dharmas and four fearlessnesses enter calming or contemplation according to the functions of threefold action, freedom from error, knowledge of the three times, omniscience, exhaustion of outflows, the path to destinations, and obstruction of the path. The three gates of samādhi are embraced by calming and the three gates of liberation by contemplation. The six perfections may be divided so that the first three belong to merit and the latter three to wisdom, or the first five to merit and prajñā to contemplation, or all six as merit-adornment to calming. Through to the nine great dhyānas and 108 samādhis, the eighteen emptinesses, ten similes, and five hundred dhāraṇīs, no wisdom-practice or practice-practice escapes calming-and-contemplation.

This long series of assignments is not a display of technical names. It repeatedly asks the same question: how does a particular gate of practice make mind quiescent, how does it make principle clear, and how do eyes and feet accomplish one another? Names may be many, but calming and contemplation cannot be separated in cultivation.

Stations without Abiding in Stations, No Stations without Destroying Cause and Result

Fifth is embracing stations. Someone appeals to quiescent true thusness and says that one ground is the second and the second the third, so no successive stations exist in thusness. The treatise first acknowledges that there is neither arising nor cessation and that right wisdom attains nothing, but then points out that right wisdom can still treat affliction, karma, and suffering. Since purification of the three paths has greater and lesser depth, differences may be spoken even within unconditioned Dharma. Mahāyāna scriptures teach stations throughout; nothing attained does not mean erasing cause and result in cultivation and realization.

Analytical entry into emptiness has stations such as the seven worthies, seven sages, and four fruits of a śramaṇa. Direct entry into emptiness by embodying Dharmas has shared stations of the Three Vehicles. In entering provisionality from emptiness, those who have not grasped its intent attain stations that subdue delusion, while those who grasp it and can break the three paths attain the stations of the ten grounds. In the Perfect Teaching, faith, understanding, and practice lead from contemplative practice into resemblance; ignorance is broken, the Buddha’s knowledge and vision opened, shown, awakened to, and entered, and the forty-two stations together mount the jeweled vehicle to the place of awakening. Moonlight becoming more manifest through the fifteenth day can represent the virtue of wisdom; its diminishing from the sixteenth can represent the virtue of severance. Stations disclose wisdom increasing and delusion decreasing without cutting true thusness into a set of substantial levels.

When faced with the objection that Mahāyāna does not clarify grounds and stations, the treatise first asks whether attachment to no stations also destroys cause and result, the Three Jewels, Four Truths, and four fruits of a śramaṇa. The nature of written words is originally free and is liberation in its very essence. Speaking of stations therefore does not give stations an intrinsic nature, while speaking of no stations should not become a new bondage. According to teaching, when they exist the graded stations stand distinctly present; when they do not, they open unobstructedly into empty purity. Stations spoken within emptiness cannot be attained. Precisely because they cannot be attained, there is no reason to contend over the alternatives existence and nonexistence.

The treatise then distinguishes breaking attachment from destroying everything. If worldly cause and result are broken until present and future life no longer exist, and world-transcending cause and result until the Three Jewels, Four Truths, and fruits of a śramaṇa no longer exist, even the first fruits of the path cannot be established, much less the later three kinds. The true meaning of emptiness is not like this. When analytical Dharma breaks affliction, karma, and suffering within the realms, the Tripiṭaka Teaching’s Three Jewels, Four Truths, and fruits of a śramaṇa can be established. When direct embodiment of Dharmas breaks delusion, those of the later three teachings can also be established. What is broken is fixation on the two extremes, not cause and result or the fruits of the path.

Conditionally arisen Dharmas can be called empty, provisionally designated, and expressive of the Middle Way. Through emptiness, the three paths within the realms are broken and corresponding stations of wisdom and severance established. Through provisionality, the three paths beyond the realms are gradually broken and stations of worthies and sages established. Through the Middle, the five dwellings are perfectly broken and the stations of the six identities established. The four clauses embrace all stations, and the four clauses do not leave calming-and-contemplation. Stations without substantializing stations, and no stations without destroying cause and result in cultivation and realization: these are the two aspects preserved when calming-and-contemplation embraces stations.

How Teaching Unfolds from Mind

Sixth is embracing teaching. Mind can establish names for all Dharmas; without mind, there would be no names. Contemplating mind partially and wrongly while following the stream of ignorance gives rise to teachings of wrong views. Mind also gives rise to wholesome worldly teachings such as the five phases, six cyclical signs, yin and yang, classics, and histories. As worldly names and teachings arise from mind, so do world-transcending ones.

The treatise first explains this through the simile of a scripture scroll hidden in a mote. An immense scroll records every matter in a great trichiliocosm yet is stored complete inside one mote; every mote is the same. A person of wisdom sees the scroll, breaks open the mote, and brings it forth to benefit sentient beings. The Tathāgata’s wisdom exists complete in sentient beings’ bodies but cannot be seen because inversion covers it. By cultivating the Eightfold Noble Path and breaking falsehood, one sees one’s own wisdom as equal to the Tathāgata’s.

Another simile writes the twelve divisions of scripture upward upon space. Every phrase stands clearly present but sentient beings cannot see it. Someone sees it in space, copies it down, and discloses it to them. Contemplating mind’s causes and conditions as arising, ceasing, and impermanent and cultivating the Eightfold Path writes out the Tripiṭaka scripture. Contemplating conditionally arisen Dharmas as empty in their very essence writes out the Shared-Teaching scripture. Contemplating the immeasurable distinctions complete in mind writes out the Separate-Teaching scripture. Contemplating mind as buddha-nature writes out the scripture of the Middle Way. Breaking the mote and writing in space—one discloses from concealment, the other establishes written teaching within emptiness. Both say that teaching is not something alien added to mind.

Contemplating mind as immediately provisional and Middle therefore embraces the Avataṃsaka. Contemplating dependent origination as arising and ceasing embraces the Four Āgamas. Contemplating emptiness in the very essence embraces shared prajñā. Fully contemplating immediate emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle embraces the Vaipulya teachings. The three contemplations embrace the Great Perfection of Wisdom. Middle contemplation that opens the Buddha’s knowledge and vision embraces the Lotus. Contemplating mind through the mutual identity of the four clauses embraces the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra. Five levels of contemplation also disclose indeterminate teaching: contemplating dependent origination while seeing it as itself buddha-nature is killing in milk; contemplating analytical emptiness while seeing it as buddha-nature is killing in curds; contemplating immediate emptiness while seeing it as buddha-nature is killing in raw cream; contemplating provisional names while seeing them as buddha-nature is killing in clarified cream; contemplating the immediate Middle while seeing it as buddha-nature is killing in ghee. The treatise itself explains that killing here means that the two kinds of birth and death are severed and the three paths purified.

All teaching unfolds from mind in two senses. Every Dharma gate is present in the minds of sentient beings; the Tathāgata sees their minds and teaches according to their mental Dharmas, so immeasurable teachings issue from mind. The Tathāgata also cultivated gradual and sudden contemplation of mind in the past, complete in both partial and perfect forms, and according to those contemplations teaches sentient beings to break the mote and bring forth the scroll and to write scripture upon space. Mind does not reduce teaching to a kind of inward feeling. It is the source through which teaching is disclosed, established, and used to transform others.

When the Six Dharmas Mutually Embrace, What Could Remain Outside?

After the six intents unfold in sequence, the treatise does not stop with six parallel classifications. It further says that one Dharma embraces all Dharmas. One principle embraces principle, delusion, wisdom, practice, station, and teaching. One delusion likewise embraces the other five. One wisdom, one practice, one station, and one teaching each fully embraces all six.

The six statements spell this out item by item. First, one principle embraces not only all principle but also all delusion, wisdom, practice, station, and teaching. Second, one delusion embraces not only all delusion but also all principle, wisdom, practice, station, and teaching. Third, one wisdom embraces not only all wisdom but also all principle, delusion, practice, station, and teaching.

Fourth, one practice embraces not only all practice but also all principle, delusion, wisdom, station, and teaching. Fifth, one station embraces not only all stations but also all principle, delusion, wisdom, practice, and teaching. Sixth, one teaching embraces not only all teaching but also all principle, delusion, wisdom, practice, and station. Each statement begins from its own gate but lists the same set: principle, delusion, wisdom, practice, station, and teaching. Every one gathers itself and the other five together. The direct conclusion remains that the names calming-and-contemplation are concise while their embrace of Dharmas is comprehensive. The six may be distinguished in sequence, yet no one Dharma lies outside calming-and-contemplation.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The reading above follows the treatise’s own sequence from the six intents to the mutual embrace by one Dharma. Zhanran’s Fuxing further separates several junctures that can easily be conflated.

First, although the two names calming and contemplation are concise, their essence is not thereby incomplete. Calming-and-contemplation is what embraces; principle, delusion, wisdom, practice, station, and teaching are what is embraced. This is the higher-level relation between embracer and embraced. The text has six chapters; the meaning has two aspects, successive and nonsuccessive; the purport converges solely upon perfect-and-sudden calming-and-contemplation. Thus there are six in text, two in meaning, and one in purport. In the final passage, Zhanran separately explains how one principle through one teaching each embraces the remaining five〔T1912 0245a06–0245b16〕. Those reasons belong to the Fuxing’s explanation and are not retrojected as if the base treatise had stated them one by one.

Second, the passage on delusions within the realms cites the Satyasiddhi Śāstra immediately after the twelve links but does not use the twelve links to explain that sentence again. Zhanran distinguishes the ten paths of karma: the three intentional actions are activated first but listed later, while the seven bodily and verbal acts are activated later but listed earlier. The treatise is cited precisely to explain the three paths through the three kinds of karma. The base text also uses leading to future lives and leading to the former seven to explain mutual communication; these cannot be rewritten and passed off as verbatim sentences of the extant treatise. Reading them as the twelve links merely because of their adjacent arrangement changes the object being explained.

Third, although the same names—ignorance, formations, and so on through aging and death—are used within and beyond the realms, the essences indicated differ. The correspondence beyond the realms also opens and gathers in several ways: three mind-made bodies may open into five, while four obstructions may gather into three paths. Those of dull faculties first sever dust-and-sand delusions, then advance to break the branches and root of associated and solitary-head ignorance; provisional contemplation directly embraces dust-and-sand delusions and secondarily embraces ignorance. Those of sharp faculties use middle contemplation to treat the three paths beyond the realms directly. These are Zhanran’s layers of explanation for the treatise’s concise sentences and cannot be reversed into definitions already enumerated by the base text.

Fourth, the treatise calls wisdom-practice primary and practice-practice auxiliary as a distinction established within its immediate exposition. Zhanran separately points out that concentration and wisdom are actually both primary cultivation; only phenomenal contemplations such as impurity and kindness are auxiliary. When both levels remain present, calming is not reduced to a minor method that can only assist contemplation. Assigning different gates of practice to calming or contemplation also distinguishes their function as what is embraced; it does not lock every Dharma permanently into a single gate.

Fifth, the scripture’s statement of no stations appears only once in the passage cited by the treatise, whereas the surrounding text extensively clarifies stations. Zhanran therefore judges that attachment to no stations falls into having neither cause nor result. No stations must be read as immediately identical with stations: the unattainability of stations does not cancel differences in severing delusion and realizing fruits, while establishing stations does not turn true thusness into a graded substance.

Sixth, whatever gives indication, classification, or explanation can be included as teaching, so worldly teachings, wrong or right, and world-transcending teachings, partial or perfect, are all embraced. The two similes for embracing teaching also have separate functions. Breaking open the mote and taking out the scroll reveals the Dharma gates inherently complete in sentient beings’ minds but hidden by delusion. Writing scripture upward on space reveals the establishment of teaching-text through contemplative practice. Since gradual and sudden teachings issue both from sentient beings’ mental Dharmas and from the Tathāgata’s past contemplation of mind, the embrace of teaching by mind is not merely the abstract proposition that all names come from mind. It simultaneously points toward disclosing what is inherently complete and transforming others according to their faculties.

This mirror finally fastens concise names and expansive meaning together again. Calming-and-contemplation does not compress every Dharma into two labels. With quiescence and illumination as what embraces and the six Dharmas as what is embraced, it first displays in sequence the roads from confusion to awakening, understanding to practice, cause to result, and self to others, then discloses the whole through the mutual embrace by one Dharma. Only by preserving the base text’s sequence while also seeing the nonsuccessive conclusion can one avoid losing the one root and one point among the many names and characteristics—without using that root and point to flatten the differences among Dharma gates.

Once practitioners know that calming-and-contemplation embraces all Dharmas, a new difficulty appears: with so many Dharmas, how does one know which road one is actually practicing? Zhiyi presents five pairs—great and small, half and full, partial and perfect, gradual and sudden, provisional and real—not to rank people in five grades but to distinguish wisdom, contemplative method, progress, and ultimate reference. When the names are conflated, practitioners may mistake skillful means for the ultimate. Or they may speak loftily of the ultimate while their feet remain within skillful means.

The chapter’s direction can first be grasped in one sentence: ultimate principle originally belongs to neither great nor small, provisional nor real, yet may be taught as great or small, provisional or real, for sentient beings. Inexpressibility does not cancel teaching within causes and conditions. Expressibility does not turn provisionally established names into substantial entities. Between these two aspects, the five pairs discern the road for practitioners.

Why Use Five Pairs to Distinguish One Partial and Perfect?

First ask: if the chapter is titled only Partial and Perfect, why does its body unfold five pairs?

Because “partial and perfect” is not an isolated verdict. The body examines five sets of meanings in sequence. Great and small first distinguish the wisdom capable of bearing a teaching and the contemplative method cultivated. Half and full then reveal comprehensive and restricted reach through the teachings expressed. Partial and perfect expand the range from the fixed small and half into the whole expanse of partial Dharma extending from the small through the Separate. Gradual and sudden enter into the process of teaching, contemplation, practice, and realization. Provisional and real finally ask why these Dharmas arise, when they are opened, and when they are abolished. The five pairs prevent “perfect” from being only a supreme name and make it a measure for examining method, course, and destination.

Ultimate principle itself cannot be enclosed by the five pairs. Without causes and conditions, great, small, provisional, and real are all inexpressible. With causes and conditions, the Buddha may teach the small to the five monks and the great to bodhisattvas. Great and small are both skillful means, yet their shared name “skillful means” does not make them wholly undifferentiated. The real issue is not whether speech occurs, but for whom each teaching is spoken and where it can take them.

In What Sense Is the Small Small?

First ask: does “small” in Hīnayāna belittle practitioners, or identify what its contemplative method can bear?

The treatise locates small in the strength of wisdom and in calming-and-contemplation that analyzes Dharmas. Non-Buddhist paths also analyze form and mind but fall into views of permanence or annihilation between existence and nonexistence of particles and mind. Correct Buddhist analysis does not choose either existence or nonexistence. It contemplates coarse and subtle form as arising wholly from ignorance and conditions. Because conditionally arisen, they are provisional, impermanent, and without intrinsic nature. Thoughts likewise arise in dependence upon faculties and objects. Whether one says one thought contains sixty moments or thirty billion, the point is that no moment stops and every thought is impermanent.

Because impermanent, there is no controller; affliction, karma, and suffering have no immovable entity. Through extinction of birth and death it is called nirvāṇa. This analysis also turns back to break Buddhist disciples’ attachment to Dharma gates. Each of the Four Teachings has four gates. If any gate becomes a view that takes itself as right and others as wrong, ambrosia turns into something that harms life, and a golden chain remains a chain. Analyzing Dharmas therefore breaks not only external error but also internal conceptual play that says, “The gate I rely on must be true.”

Every gate must further possess the ten Dharmas, from recognizing right causes and conditions through not producing attachment to Dharma, before first meaning can be seen within it. Small does not mean an absence of contemplative practice or a capacity only to negate. It has its own gates, complete cultivation, and attained nirvāṇa. It is called small because it analyzes real Dharmas to enter emptiness and accords only with partial truth.

Does the Great Merely Include the Hīnayāna?

First ask: since scripture says that anyone wishing to attain śrāvakahood should study prajñā, is Mahāyāna merely a larger collection?

Zhiyi answers with the Vermilion Bird Gate. A great gate established by the royal house may let ordinary people enter and leave, yet does not lose its character as the imperial gate because people borrow its road. Prajñā is originally a bodhisattva Dharma. The great can include the small and therefore brings śrāvakas along incidentally, but its proper intent remains the bodhisattva’s direct embodiment of Dharmas into emptiness. Conversely, although the Tripiṭaka Teaching discusses buddhas and bodhisattvas, it takes analytical Dharma as its core and remains small. Great and small are not decided by which classes of people occur in a list, but by how the contemplative method faces form and mind.

Analytical Dharma takes Dharmas as really existent and then analyzes them until empty, like seeing empty space only after dismantling a pillar. Embodying Dharmas sees that names and realities are both provisionally established through conditions and immediately empty in their own marks, like the image of a pillar in a mirror: it was never an actual pillar and need not first be destroyed to become empty. The simile of transforming earth and gold in meditative concentration likewise does not establish another substance for the transformed earth or gold. It reveals form and mind as transformation, originally unborn and now without real extinction. One bolt of cloth immediately possessing the eighteen emptinesses similarly returns emptiness to the Dharma contemplated itself rather than placing it after the Dharma has been dismantled.

The treatise therefore calls the two modes of seeing following dispositions and following principle. Following dispositions analyzes what is held to exist and enters a posited truth through phenomenal contemplation. Following principle traces an illusion to the illusionist and then to the method of illusion, like tracing a dream to sleep and sleep to mind. It sees ignorance from illusory form and mind and buddha-nature from ignorance. Contemplation does not seek another truth outside phenomena but penetrates what those phenomena arise from in their immediacy.

Yet embodiment of Dharmas cannot become a new attachment. The four Mahāyāna gates likewise each possess the ten Dharmas. From the form and mind of non-Buddhist retribution through all the gates of the Four Teachings, any gate grasped into a view must be penetrated as illusion. One who grasps the Perfect gate and disparages others has still not genuinely entered the great Dharma being named. A firefly does not become equal to sunlight by calling itself the sun; a high mountain and the tip of a hair do not lose their difference because their names seem close.

Why Can Half, Small, and Partial Not Be Interchanged?

First ask: half, small, and partial all seem less than complete, so why distinguish three names?

Half uses the nine and twelve divisions to speak and still aims to support great and small. Small and half have fixed, short ranges: analytical Dharma, half-word teaching, and Hīnayāna. They cannot extend outward into the great. Partial is a name that can extend. It begins with Tripiṭaka analysis, passes through Shared and Separate, and reaches everything before the Separate Teaching has left the extremes and entered the Middle. If partial is explained only as small, one cannot see the still-imperfect Dharmas within Mahāyāna.

The moon simile illuminates this distinction clearly. Half moon names only the upper or lower half. The waxing moon extends from the bow-like, eyebrow-like crescent through the fourteenth night and throughout may be called gradual; only the fifteenth is full moon. Partial resembles the whole lunar course before the fifteenth night and is not identical to one half moon. The Perfect Teaching’s three truths in one mind alone bear the name perfect. This does not say that the first fourteen nights have no moonlight; it says that what is not yet full cannot call itself the full moon merely because light is already present.

Gradual and Sudden: Is the Measure Teaching, Practice, or Result?

First ask: does knowing the Middle Way make something sudden, or must it be completed in one step to count as sudden?

Zhiyi first gives a general judgment. The first two teachings are gradual and not sudden because they accord only with partial truth. The Perfect Teaching is sudden and not gradual because it travels the great straight road and is immediately middle at the extremes. The Separate Teaching is both gradual and sudden: from the initial mind it already knows the Middle Way and therefore has sudden meaning, yet it must still pass through skillful means and therefore also has gradual meaning. This already shows that knowing one’s destination cannot be conflated with the actual course traveled.

When teaching, contemplation, practice, and realization are separated, the distinction becomes clearer. All four in the first two teachings are gradual. The Separate Teaching’s teaching, contemplation, and practice are gradual, while its path of realization is sudden. All four in the Perfect Teaching are sudden. The first two are like a thatched hut and winding path; what is taught, contemplated, practiced, and attained all remain within skillful means. The Separate first uses skillful means to break shared delusions, then breaks ignorance and sees buddha-nature; the course remains gradual while realization turns sudden. From real teaching and real practice through real realization, the Perfect Teaching is threaded throughout by the unsurpassed path, one real matter, Tathāgata-practice, and ultimate Middle Way.

One must next ask whether a person actually reaches the resultant station. The first two teachings have teaching, practice, realization, and persons at the causal stage, but retain only a teaching-name at the result. Their practitioners reduce the body to ashes and enter quiescence and cannot actually reach the buddhahood described. The Separate Teaching likewise has all four at cause, but when someone breaks ignorance and ascends the first ground, that person has become the Perfect Teaching’s first abode and is no longer at a Separate first ground. Thus the Separate resultant summit also has no person. Only in the Perfect Teaching do teaching, practice, realization, and persons continue genuinely from cause through result, and so it is said that persons really exist at the result. A result with teaching but no person marks the boundary that prevents a provisional result from posing as a perfect one.

When Does an Earlier Gradual Practice Become the Gradual within the Sudden?

First ask: if the first three teachings do not know the perfect, how can they possibly enter it?

The answer lies in opening the gradual to reveal the sudden. When the Buddha converges the purport, former gradual Dharmas are opened and all enter the perfect. “What you practice is the bodhisattva path” does not erase earlier skillful means but lets practitioners see where the course they have followed can lead. The jeweled cart fitting the children’s original wish, and the scripture that resolves the śrāvaka Dharma and is king of scriptures, likewise reveal the destination after opening. The paths and fruits of the Two Vehicles are therefore not separated from perfect permanence; advancing according to what they have learned, all will become buddhas.

Entry into the perfect, however, does not occur only after practice is complete or only at the public convergence. The treatise uses poison placed in milk to explain indeterminacy. The direct cause in sentient beings’ mind-nature is like the four subtle constituents always present in milk. Although the five flavors change, those constituents are not lost. The Dharma of the revealing cause one hears is like poison that follows them into every flavor and acts when conditions mature. There are therefore arousal through principle, teaching, contemplative practice, and realization. Spontaneous awakening after planting wholesome roots for a long time is arousal through principle; awakening on hearing teaching is arousal through teaching; awakening while reflecting after hearing is arousal through contemplative practice; awakening at purification of the six faculties or while advancing to break ignorance is arousal as realization.

Practitioners of the first three teachings likewise have four kinds of arousal: spontaneous arousal at the ordinary station, arousal through hearing, arousal while cultivating skillful means, and arousal at worthy or noble stations. Another arousal may leave both deaths unsevered or sever only the death within the three realms rather than both, and is likewise called indeterminate. “Arousal” therefore does not mean that the ultimate has been reached. It only marks the perfect cause maturing at different positions and cannot erase what still must be severed afterward.

Does Every Teaching Have Its Own Gradual and Perfect?

First ask: if the first three teachings have already been judged gradual and the Perfect sudden, why say that each teaching has gradual and perfect?

Because one can observe the initial and later minds within the scope of each teaching. In the Tripiṭaka, entering truth from skillful means is gradual, while severing bonds with thirty-four thoughts and accomplishing the result is completion within that teaching. Shared and Separate likewise have gradual advance from beginning to end and an accomplished result. The Perfect Teaching is called perfect because its essential principle is ultimate, yet still has gradual sequence from the initial mind through forty-one grounds; wondrous awakening is again perfect. This is called gradual and perfect within each teaching.

Completion within each teaching does not mean that the teachings can substitute directly for one another. Gradual-gradual can become perfect-gradual through opening and convergence; gradual-perfect cannot become perfect-perfect. Likewise small-small can become great-small, while small-great cannot become great-great; provisional-provisional can become real-provisional, while provisional-real cannot become real-real. A provisionally established resultant station cannot itself later become wondrous awakening.

The five milk-flavor similes unfold from this point. Ordinary beings through the Three Vehicles all converging in ghee reveals gradual and perfect within the Tripiṭaka’s own scope. Sentient beings as milk mixed with blood and the sequence through buddhas as ghee reveals the Shared Teaching’s stages. A newly calved cow with blood and milk unseparated, followed by śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, bodhisattvas, and buddhas, reveals Separate-Teaching stations. Forbearance grass making a cow’s milk become ghee without passing through four flavors reveals the Perfect. Poison permeating all five flavors and killing in each reveals the indeterminate. The five similes are not five mutually exclusive roads; they preserve together the three aspects “each has a sequence,” “the time need not be fixed,” and “only the Perfect is ultimate.”

If Provisional Dharma Is Not the Original Intent, Why Teach It?

First ask: if the Buddha appears for the one real, perfect-and-sudden calming-and-contemplation, are the three provisionals merely a detour?

The treatise answers through three steps: establishing, opening, and abolishing. Establishing the provisional for the real means that sentient beings cannot immediately bear the one real, so three provisionals are established. Opening the provisional to reveal the real does not bring a real Dharma from somewhere outside skillful means; it opens the three provisionals so their direction becomes visible. Abolishing the provisional to reveal the real means that the provisional function is complete and its temporary name is no longer grasped as ultimate. The provisional is not the Buddha’s original intent, yet that intent is not outside it. Precisely because the provisional can be opened, skillful means is not futile.

The four siddhāntas explain how provisional Dharma responds to faculties. Those wishing to hear right causes and conditions, causes and conditions as empty, practice over eons, or the immediate as Middle each receive one of four contemplations according to the worldly siddhānta. Those needing phenomenal goodness of true truth, principial goodness of true truth, phenomenal goodness of the Middle Way, or principial goodness of the Middle receive them according to the individual siddhānta. Those needing to break erroneous causes and conditions, clumsy crossing, shared Dharma, or Dharma still carrying skillful means receive them according to the counteractive siddhānta. Conceivable or inconceivable faculties, dull or sharp, are led by clumsy or skillful methods to see the true or the Middle. The differences among the four contemplations are not arbitrarily arranged; sentient beings differ in disposition, desire, wholesome roots, illness, and timing of entry into principle.

Provisional and real therefore arise according to the siddhāntas and are abolished according to them. Where afflictions are thick and sharp wisdom thin, Tripiṭaka contemplation arises first. Once phenomenal goodness arises and afflictions thin, it is abolished and Shared contemplation arises. When principial goodness arises, Separate contemplation arises. When phenomenal goodness beyond the realms arises, Perfect contemplation arises so principial goodness beyond them will arise. Arising and abolition in the teachings of the five flavors likewise unfold over time: Avataṃsaka, Tripiṭaka, Vaipulya, Prajñā, Lotus, and Mahāparinirvāṇa each see four contemplations arise or be abolished. Benefit to sentient beings and entry into buddha-nature remain the standard.

Is It Contradictory That All Four Are Real, All Four Provisional, and Finally Neither?

First ask: how can the same four kinds of calming-and-contemplation first be called all real, then all provisional, and finally neither provisional nor real?

All four are real because after opening and resolution all can enter the perfect. As a swift horse sees the shadow of a whip and immediately enters the right road, every skillful means correctly opened can become a gate to reality. All four are provisional from the perspective of spoken teachings relative to inexpressible principle. The four principles are originally inexpressible; as soon as names are forcibly established and enter teaching, they have a provisional aspect.

Neither provisional nor real returns the issue to the principle illuminated. “Real” is spoken relative to provisional teaching; “principle” when the teaching-name is abolished. What is called real was originally neither provisional nor real, and no other wisdom illuminates another principle. Teaching immediately opens to principle; provisional and real are immediately the double negation, nondual and undifferentiated, neither combined nor scattered. The nature of principle constantly quiescent is called calming; quiescent yet constantly illuminating is called contemplation. Calming-and-contemplation, wisdom, prajñā, eye, and Śūraṃgama are many names, but what they reveal is inconceivable, nondual calming-and-contemplation.

Opening the real reveals neither provisional nor real, and opening the provisional reveals the same. This is precisely why opening the provisional does not destroy skillful means: opened skillful means is no longer enclosed within its provisional name but reveals a destination nondual with real principle.

Why Does Receiving the Shared into the Separate Not Become a Fifth Contemplation?

First ask: since the Separate Teaching receives the Shared, is this receiving provisional or real, why is it not listed among the Four Teachings, and why does it receive only the Shared?

The treatise asks five questions together: whether it is provisional or real; why it is not included in the count of four; why only the Shared is received; which station is received; and into which station. The answer first divides teaching and realization. Receiving only into teaching is provisional; receiving into realization is real. Each of the Four Teachings has its own beginning and end, while receiving is only a segment redirected at the Shared Teaching’s endpoint and has no independent starting point. It is therefore not a fifth teaching or contemplation.

Tripiṭaka and Shared clarify principle within the realms; Separate and Perfect clarify principle beyond them. Only at the junction between the two is receiving needed. When a practitioner at the Shared Teaching’s eighth ground has exhausted delusions of views and thoughts, the Middle Way within true truth is first heard. At the ninth ground ignorance is subdued; at the tenth one portion of ignorance is broken and the practitioner is called a buddha. Yet breaking one portion cannot be ultimate, so the station entered already belongs to the Separate. Tripiṭaka bodhisattva stations differ, while Separate and Perfect practitioners know the Middle Way from the arousal of mind and have nothing by which to be received. Receiving therefore exists only at the Shared-Separate junction.

If One Knows Permanent Abiding, Why Might the Teaching Still Be Provisional?

First ask: do the three provisional teachings ultimately know reality?

The treatise answers: the Separate knows it at the beginning, the Shared only later, and the Tripiṭaka never from beginning to end. Although the Separate knows at the beginning, the teaching heard still carries skillful means. Although the Shared knows later, only those received know it. Both therefore remain provisional. The Tripiṭaka does not know perfect permanence, but can know “permanence” regarding the unconditioned true truth it realizes. The same name permanent abiding means the one unchanging mark of the unconditioned in Hīnayāna and the permanence of true mark and buddha-nature in Mahāyāna. The name is shared, while what is known is great or small.

An arhat who has neither opened the Buddha eye nor heard the Buddha’s teaching cannot know perfect permanence through personal power alone. On encountering another buddha and receiving resolution, the arhat is opened through another’s power. Scripture says that the Two Vehicles attain the permanently abiding real nature of all Dharmas without thereby being called buddhas; this distinguishes the permanence they know. It is like “desire”: birth in the Brahmā heaven requires severing desire, while awakening requires severing desire for the two extremes. The same graph is used, but what is severed differs. One cannot infer identical realization merely from the identical phrase permanent abiding.

The chapter ends by using two kinds of initial practice to explain the Three Refuges, precepts, and goodness. Proximately, wisdom born of hearing during the four establishments of mindfulness in the present life is the beginning; from that beginning one knows the permanence of true truth, and with mind free of dependence becomes a worthy or sage. Remotely, one first aroused the mind of awakening in the ancient past and knew permanent abiding, then feared birth and death and retreated from great to small. The great Dharma received earlier was not wholly lost. Like earth invisibly nourishing trees, it enables later Hīnayāna refuge and precepts to sprout and mature. Proximate initial practice does not exceed what the small knows; remote initial practice preserves the earlier great mind. Together the two interpretations keep the meanings of the great and small scriptures from contradiction.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The reading above unfolds only according to Zhiyi’s questions, sequence, and similes in the base treatise. In the Zhiguan Fuxing Chuanhong Jue, T1912, Zhanran further labels the places most easily conflated.

First, the text has five chapters but their meanings gather into three classes: half and full return to great and small, gradual and sudden to partial and perfect, while provisional and real judge the preceding four sections and point toward opening and disclosure〔0245c06〕. These three meanings are Zhanran’s comprehensive outline, not a list that Zhiyi places under his own title.

Second, great and small cannot be distinguished only by gate-names. Zhanran says that what is broken is the attachment of the one who reckons, not the teaching-gate relied upon as such〔0246a27〕. He further describes the Tripiṭaka’s following phenomena as emptiness attained through extinguishing phenomena and the Mahāyāna’s following principle as emptiness attained within the very phenomena〔0246c19–20〕, then explains the treatise’s tracing of illusion and dream through illusory form and mind, ignorance, and buddha-nature. These word-by-word assignments belong to the mirror’s judgment. Zhiyi’s base text itself says only analyzing real Dharmas to make them empty, names and realities as both provisional, and following dispositions and principle.

Third, between half and full and partial and perfect, Zhanran explicitly judges that half belongs only to the small and is forever separated from the great, while partial expands the comprehensive and restricted reach of the preceding two chapters〔0247c04–08〕. In gradual and sudden, he describes the Separate Teaching as having “sudden understanding and gradual practice”〔0248a11〕 and explains the three teachings’ provisional results through the presence only of a teaching-name of buddhahood at the result and no actual practitioner. When the Separate first ground breaks ignorance, it immediately enters the Perfect first abode〔0248a26–0248b15〕. In the section on gradual and perfect within each teaching, he further says that persons at the causal stages of the first three teachings can be opened into the perfect, while their buddha-persons cannot〔0249a26–27〕. These are Zhanran’s conditional judgments concerning gradual and sudden and completion within each teaching.

Fourth, opening and convergence must preserve chronology. Zhanran says that only after the Lotus has completed its opening are all called sudden. What was practiced formerly can now become the gradual within the sudden; one cannot reverse this and say that it was already sudden in the former time〔0248b18–20〕. The indeterminate five flavors likewise cannot be equated directly with the Lotus as fifth flavor, because the Lotus is determinate while poison placed in milk concerns indeterminate timing of awakening〔0248c14〕.

Fifth, Zhanran himself leaves the textual doubts in the five similes. The first is called the sixth, but he records that the text was not found. The treatise calls the second the thirty-second while he calls it the twenty-second. The newly calved cow sentence is moved forward for convenience in taking the meaning. The poison simile is called the eighth, but he suspects it should be in the twenty-seventh〔0249b16–0249c03〕. The present treatise still reads sixth, thirty-second, ninth, and eighth; Zhanran separately records the doubtful text and order he saw.

Sixth, the provisional is not strategy outside the Buddha’s essence. Zhanran explicitly calls it skillful means within the wondrous essence and makes establishing, opening, and abolishing depend entirely on the four siddhāntas〔0249c17–25〕. He further limits “all four are real” to their all entering the perfect upon opening and resolution, places “all four are provisional” in the perspective of spoken teaching relative to inexpressible principle, and judges that outside the one real the double negation is no separate principle〔0250a01–18〕. The base treatise’s threefold examination thus has distinct perspectives that do not overturn one another.

Seventh, Zhanran completely outlines the five questions concerning receiving the Shared into the Separate. Receiving only at the eighth ground applies to lower faculties, while the station entered should include both the Separate first ground and Perfect first abode〔0250b21–0250c08〕. Receiving also differs from the Lotus’s opening and convergence: receiving occurs at the junction of earlier teachings, whereas convergence opens all three preceding teachings into the perfect. This is Zhanran’s distinction between receiving and convergence.

Eighth, the final precision in the difficulty over permanent abiding is Zhanran’s small permanence and wondrous permanence: formerly one had to know small permanence, today one must know wondrous permanence〔0251b22〕. The two initial practices are one proximate and one remote. The proximate is wisdom born of hearing during the four establishments of mindfulness in the present life; the remote is first arousing the great mind in the distant past. The chapter closes by saying that the proximate account does not contradict the small, while the remote account did not penetrate the great〔0251b25–0252a10〕. Sharing a name does not equate what is realized, and possessing a great mind does not equate having reached the great result; neither boundary can be omitted.

Reading the five pairs therefore requires preserving three lines at once: what names and meanings indicate, what practitioners pass through, and before and after opening and convergence. The same name need not mean the same principle. Establishing a name for a result need not mean a person has actually reached it. The capacity to enter after opening cannot be reversed into perfection before opening. Zhanran adds all three as conditions for reading this chapter.

This mirror makes the function of the five pairs still clearer. Zhiyi first uses the base treatise’s own pillar-image, illusion and dream, phases of the moon, milk flavors, lotus, and earth to let practitioners see how skillful means can open toward reality. Zhanran then labels boundaries of sections, conditions, and chronology. When the two layers illuminate one another without rewriting each other, partial and perfect no longer deteriorate into labels of higher and lower. They become an eye for checking whether one’s own understanding, practice, and realization correspond.

The place has been chosen, external affairs have stopped, the body is free from illness, and clay, wheel, and cords are all in order. Must the vessel now appear? Not necessarily. If the potter will not begin, works without diligence, forgets the method, lacks skillful means, or cannot remain single-minded, every preparation still comes to nothing. Through this image of pottery-making, the Mohe Zhiguan explains why twenty-five preparatory means are needed before correct cultivation.

Preparatory means do not turn a difficult road into a shortcut. They make every necessary condition work together in its proper place. Possessing five conditions settles what cultivation relies upon. Rebuking five desires cuts off outward enticement. Abandoning five hindrances clears inner obstruction. Regulating five matters keeps food, sleep, body, breath, and mind from excess or deficiency. Practicing five Dharmas then makes the whole person genuinely move forward. If one link is missing, calming-and-contemplation may remain only an aspiration. As the five divisions follow one another, coarse distraction gradually enters subtle stillness.

Why Are Preparatory Means Not a Shortcut?〔Section One〕

What are preparatory means? The treatise first answers in terms of skillfulness: when a few wholesome roots are skillfully employed, they can accomplish immeasurable practices, generate understanding, and enter the bodhisattva stages. It then answers in terms of converging conditions: a Tathāgata’s body does not arise from a single cause or condition; both cause and result require many conditions to accomplish them together. The power of preparatory means therefore lies not in skipping steps, but in preventing a slight cause from being wasted and directing dispersed conditions toward one result.

Why, then, distinguish distant and proximate? Distance and proximity are established only in relation to correct contemplation. The twenty-five Dharmas regulate the coarse into the subtle and inspect distraction until it becomes still; these are distant preparatory means. The ten objects and ten contemplations directly accomplish contemplative practice and generate resemblance and true realization; these are proximate preparatory means. Distant does not mean inferior, nor can the proximate stand alone by leaping over the distant. Just as a vessel cannot be formed apart from workshop, health, clay, wheel, and hands, the work of shaping it nearby has already received the many conditions prepared at a distance.

The sequence of the five divisions arises naturally from this. The path is propagated by persons, and persons advance along the path through conditions. Once the conditions are complete, one first cuts away fond desires. With external desires set aside, one next purifies the inner mind. When the inner mind is quiet, one tests and regulates the five matters. Once those five are regulated, one practices the five Dharmas. This does not divide life into five compartments. It lets the space cleared at each level become the place where the next can work.

What Do the Five Conditions Settle First?〔Section Two〕

What must be present first in cultivating calming-and-contemplation? The treatise lists purity in keeping precepts, adequate clothing and food, quiet dwelling in a secluded place, cessation of entangling affairs, and attainment of good spiritual friends. Body and life require clothing and food; one’s place of practice must allow quiet; external affairs cannot continually pull at mind; and the Dharma gate requires a good teacher’s guidance. A lack in any one may obstruct the other four.

Why is the first condition, keeping precepts, unfolded at greatest length? Because keeping precepts is not a single prohibition. It reaches from fundamental good and evil in life all the way through concentration, wisdom, and contemplation of mind. The treatise lists ten precepts: not deficient, unbroken, unpunctured, unmixed, path-conforming, unattached, praised by wisdom, sovereign, concentration-conforming, and complete. The first three protect moral restraint; the unmixed precept protects the concentrated mind. Path-conforming and unattached penetrate true truth. Praised by wisdom and sovereign penetrate transformation of others. Concentration-conforming and complete preserve the movement of deportment and the constant stillness of the Middle Way at once.

Intrinsic precepts and precepts received through ordination must not be conflated. Intrinsic precepts apply whether or not one has received them; doing evil itself has karmic consequence. After precepts are received, violating the nonmanifest precept entails an additional offense. The Three Refuges, five precepts, full ordination, and the like are received according to regulations established after a buddha appears in the world. Contemplation, training, perfuming, cultivation, and wisdom of the Four Truths each also have a later disclosed level. Root and adventitious Dharma depend upon one another: one neither says regulated precepts always existed in the world, nor treats the form of receiving precepts as the whole of wholesome and unwholesome karmic result.

Why Do Precepts Move from Outward Safeguarding into Contemplation of Mind?〔Section Three〕

If one merely avoids violating bodily and verbal precepts, is keeping precepts already pure? The treatise first affirms the necessity of phenomenal keeping, then asks whether mind is still defiled. A vessel that is not deficient, unbroken, and unpunctured can of course be used. But if the inner mind still pursues acts that break precepts, the outwardly intact vessel resembles an unfired clay blank: when adverse conditions of craving and views arrive, it will break.

The ten precepts are therefore gathered into four levels. The first four take wholesome and unwholesome minds born through causes and conditions as objects of contemplation and use a wholesome, concordant mind to prevent an unwholesome one. Prevention is the goodness of calming; concordant activity is the goodness of practice and also contemplation. The path-conforming and unattached precepts contemplate wholesome and unwholesome, Dharma and non-Dharma, as entirely empty in their immediacy, without generating another view by relying on existence, nonexistence, or even neither existence nor nonexistence. The two precepts praised by wisdom and sovereign know that mind-Dharma has no possession, yet still distinguish medicines and illnesses within provisional names and guide beings without being confined by those names. The concentration-conforming and complete precepts contemplate mind as originally neither empty nor provisional: the two extremes are quiescent while both truths are simultaneously illuminated.

Why can contemplation of mind also possess the five names precept, vinaya, liberation, recitation, and discipline? Because the three contemplations can prevent the three delusions, and this prevention extends throughout the Dharma realm. They can extinguish views-and-thought, dust-and-sand, and ignorance, and this extinguishing also extends throughout the Dharma realm. Seeing the three truths allows the three delusions to preserve liberation. Names disclose the principles of the truths, and contemplative mindfulness continues to appear—this is recitation. The contemplations can also weigh the coarse and subtle dimensions of the three delusions and the medicine-and-illness relation of the three contemplations without the slightest error—this is discipline. The movement of precepts from body and speech deep into contemplation of mind does not abandon phenomenal precepts. It gives them a root not easily destroyed by craving and views.

Phenomenal precepts can bring differing grades of retribution among asuras, humans, and gods; emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle within precepts of principle likewise each have depths and shallows. Different stages entail different capacities for keeping them. Yet contemplation of mind in the Middle Way universally embraces all Dharmas. One must neither slight phenomena because principle is high, nor suppose that careful phenomenal conduct naturally completes contemplation of principle.

Why Does the Rākṣasa Ask for Only One Speck of Dust?〔Section Four〕

How does breaking precepts begin? The treatise does not depict only a sudden abandonment of every precept-Dharma. It has the rākṣasa of craving ask first for the whole flotation bladder, then half, a hand’s span, a finger’s span, and finally an amount no larger than a speck of dust. If the practitioner says that so little is harmless and a duṣkṛta does not matter, the gate of negligence has already opened. Though the hole is tiny, seawater gradually enters and can finally drown the one crossing the sea.

The rākṣasa of craving disguises pleasure as nirvāṇa. Sensual delight is like food to the hungry, treasure to the poor, or wine to a monkey: the immediate gratification entices a person to hand over the flotation bladder of precepts. It does not break only moral restraint. Reaching greedily for the five desires also breaks precepts shared with concentration; deep attachment to birth and death breaks emptiness in its immediacy; failure to protect another’s mind breaks provisionality in its immediacy; and disbelief that the goodness of precepts is equal to empty space and possesses every Buddha-Dharma breaks the Middle Way.

The rākṣasa of views is harder to recognize. Having gained a little understanding of emptiness or a small portion of meditative concentration, a practitioner without a good teacher or friend may take the personal mind as teacher, decide that the unborn has been realized, and invoke nondiscrimination to dismiss cause and result and destroy deportment. The monk in the Buddha’s time who attained the four dhyānas but mistook them for the four fruits, then saw the intermediate state at death and slandered the Buddha in return, clearly shows that contaminated concentration cannot guarantee the correctness of one’s own perceptions.

If emptiness could truly erase every offense, why would one who grasps emptiness still cherish personal life and fear the king? Such a person cannot empty self or worldly power, yet declares parents and the Buddha’s precepts empty. This reveals so-called nonobstruction as merely language protecting desire and conceit. The Dharma of emptiness originally treats existence. If emptiness itself is fixed into a real view, it becomes another rākṣasa, swallowing wisdom-life together with the bladder of precepts.

Which Can Be Relaxed, Keeping Precepts or Cultivating the Vehicle?〔Section Five〕

May phenomenal precepts and the vehicle of principle be reduced to only one side? The treatise answers with four alternatives. If vehicle and precepts are both urgent, one may not attain the path in this life, but powerful karma first draws one to a wholesome realm, where the contemplative vehicle already cultivated enables one to see a buddha and attain the path. If precepts are relaxed but the vehicle urgent, breaking phenomenal precepts may bring a body in the three evil destinies, yet the force of contemplation of principle enables one to hear Dharma and attain the path in that very body. If precepts are urgent but the vehicle relaxed, one may be born among humans, gods, or in a Brahmā heaven, yet attachment to merit and concentration prevents understanding even when a buddha appears. If vehicle and precepts are both relaxed, one loses the human and heavenly results, consciousness becomes benighted, and one sinks through long kalpas.

Why do these four alternatives not glorify relaxed precepts and an urgent vehicle as a heroic shortcut? Because seeing a buddha and attaining the path comes from the vehicle’s power, while receiving a body in the three evil destinies is precisely the result of breaking phenomenal precepts. Dragons, ghosts, and animals who come to assemblies in scripture can reveal urgency of the vehicle in past lives; this does not rename the suffering of evil destinies as preparatory means. If one can receive the path as a human or god, why deliberately enter the three courses in misery?

Conversely, urgent precepts and a relaxed vehicle are not a secure destination. It resembles a bound prisoner using wealth to have someone delay the execution while awaiting a pardon. Human or heavenly merit merely extends the time. Without meeting a good spiritual friend and cultivating the vehicle, one falls when that retribution ends. Practitioners must therefore examine themselves: which of the phenomenal and principial sides is stronger or weaker? Which grade of phenomenal precepts is urgent, and which grade of the vehicle of principle is relaxed? Only by knowing one’s own causes can one see the future result of rising or sinking.

Is There Still an Entrance to Calming-and-Contemplation after a Grave Offense?〔Section Six〕

If breaking precepts already obstructs concentration and wisdom, can one begin again? Light transgressions are removed through repentance according to the vinaya. Once precepts become pure, the obstruction turns and calming-and-contemplation can easily clarify and arise. In the Lesser Vehicle, grave offenses have no repentance. The Great Vehicle, however, opens a gate of repentance through the four kinds of samādhi. If contemplation of principle has only a slight deviation and attachment remains weak, correct contemplation can also break the view; ashamed and self-reproaching, the mind returns to the correct track.

But why can repentance not consist only of saying that the nature of offense is empty? A grave offense arises through weighty conditions and must be treated with an earnest mind. A present grave offense is like losing the road nearby: turning back with anguish is comparatively easy. A long-past grave obstruction is like having wandered far and deep: reversal is harder. Sitting upright and recollecting true mark, entering meditative concentration, practicing according to repentance rites, and following teachings on restoration each show that a grave offense can be transformed. At the same time, they require practitioners not to use empty words to omit the physical and mental anguish of repentance.

To repent the grave obstructions of this and a past life, one must first recognize the ten minds flowing with birth and death, then employ the ten minds flowing against it. Repentance thus does more than look back upon an old deed. It finds how the current of birth and death continues in the present and where it can turn.

Why Must the Ten Minds Move against the Current?〔Section Seven〕

How does the current of offense move from subtle to grave? At first, ignorance falsely reckons person and self. From the view of a body arise inversion, greed, anger, delusion, and many karmic acts. Afflictions are present within, evil friends encountered without, and the force of evil grows. One next extinguishes wholesome mind within and wholesome deeds without and does not rejoice in others’ goodness. Then the three kinds of conduct are indulged, letting an unwholesome mind spread and continue day and night. Concealment follows, then lack of fear of evil destinies, absence of shame before oneself or others, and finally denial of cause and result. Like a privy worm delighting in a privy without knowing its filth, mind follows a familiar road and is pushed from one thought to the four grave offenses, five heinous acts, and even icchantikahood.

Moving against the current is not reciting those ten in reverse order. Every step overturns one habit. Deep faith that karmic seeds do not disappear however long they remain breaks denial of cause and result. Shame before heaven and remorse before persons break shamelessness. Recollecting that life lasts only one breath—like the jackal suddenly hearing of beheading or King Aśoka hearing the bell of death each day—breaks lack of fear of evil destinies. Disclosure, like exposing roots so branches wither or drying a source so its stream runs out, breaks concealment. Cutting continuity, like refusing to swallow again what has been vomited, breaks repeated action.

One further generates the mind of awakening, turning concern only for personal safety into aid extending throughout the realm. With wholesome body, speech, and mind unceasing day and night, one cultivates merit and repairs fault as though moving a mountain or filling a sea. One safeguards wholesome Dharmas in self and others instead of envying or destroying them. Recollecting the compassion and wisdom of buddhas in the ten directions, one leaves evil friends. Finally, one follows greed, anger, deluded thought, inversion, the view of a body, and the view of self backward level by level and discovers that neither self nor mind has an abiding place. Offense and merit have no master, like morning dew disappearing suddenly when the sun rises.

These ten minds accord with the path to nirvāṇa and oppose the current of birth and death. Merely entering a sanctuary and enduring pain without distinguishing right and wrong does not naturally become repentance. Truly turning the current requires knowing which new mind overturns each old one.

Why Do Offenses of View Especially Require Both Phenomenal and Principial Repentance?〔Section Eight〕

How can delusions of view repent when they claim a principle of their own? The treatise still uses the ten minds as its frame, but carries observation more deeply into the mind of views. It first points out that Udraka Rāmaputra, Subhadra, Dīrghanakha, and others had deep concentration and sharp intelligence yet still had not escaped subtle delusion and the many views. To call the ignorance-mind that loves emptiness the path is to reckon a non-path as the path and a noncause as cause; to call the future painful result nirvāṇa is to reckon a nonresult as result. Only upon seeing that the mind of views itself is suffering and accumulation does one genuinely establish deep faith in worldly and world-transcending cause and result.

Shame and remorse also change: one is ashamed that one has not seen the three truths and remorseful before practitioners of preparatory means and those to whom true principle has appeared. Fear sees that the offense of grasping emptiness flows with karma and is not uncontaminated. Disclosure removes the three doubts concerning self, teacher, and Dharma so that the nature of the truths can appear. Cutting continuity lets contemplation of the three truths remain uninterrupted. The mind of awakening extends throughout the Dharma realm, overturning evil throughout the realm with uncontrived goodness. Cultivating merit and repairing fault then no longer merely moves from a view of existence to a view of nonexistence; upon the view itself, it cultivates path factors that are empty, provisional, and middle in their immediacy.

Safeguarding correct Dharma no longer protects one’s own view; it protects the three truths from destruction by wrong views. Recollection of the Buddha means recollecting the three truths as neither coming nor going, and unborn Dharma itself as Buddha. Contemplating the emptiness of offense-nature sees the three delusions as illusions: they come from nowhere and leave no trace. When one is empty, all are empty; offense-nature itself is empty.

Why add phenomenal Dharma after principial repentance? The mind of views is fierce and can bring forth grave afflictions, like a serious illness requiring stronger medicinal support. Deep contemplation of the three truths is aided by earnest phenomenal practice, like two strong persons, one wiping the body and the other washing the clothes, together subduing a venomous snake. Purity in phenomenal precepts produces root concentration and worldly wisdom. Purity in the precept of the unborn produces concentration of true truth and wisdom of all phenomena. Purity in the precept of provisionality in its immediacy produces concentration of conventional truth and wisdom of the varieties of the path. Purity in the precept of the Middle in its immediacy produces king samādhi and wisdom of all modes. With phenomena and principle supporting one another, calming-and-contemplation once again has an entrance.

How Does Clothing Turn from Covering the Body into Dharma Robes?〔Section Nine〕

Is clothing merely a minor matter of warding off cold and covering the body? Without clothes, body and life are unsettled and the path has no support. Clothing can cover what is unsightly, ward off heat and cold and mosquitoes and horseflies, and put the body in order. Practitioners in snowy mountains are content with grass mats and deerskins. Practitioners of the dhūta practices possess only three robes. Practitioners in cold lands may accept the hundred-and-one requisites that aid the body, but must have few desires and know contentment. Though superior, middling, and inferior provisions differ, all share one boundary: let clothing support the path, and do not let seeking and protecting clothing become a new affair.

What does the clothing of contemplative practice cover? Gentleness and patience make the two extremes of birth-and-death and nirvāṇa neither two nor different from the Middle Way. Settling mind in the Middle Way is patience; leaving the clamor of the two extremes is stillness; passing beyond the two deaths is extinction. The patience of still extinction covers the evils of the two extremes as clothes cover ugliness, removes the five abiding afflictions as clothes shield from heat, breaks views born of ignorance as clothes ward off cold, and relinquishes the discursive thought of the two extremes as clothes repel mosquitoes and horseflies. It does not declare phenomenal clothing useless. It asks whether mind has also put on Dharma robes when the body wears the kāṣāya.

The three robes can be turned into the three contemplations, covering the cold and heat of views and cravings upon the three truths and adorning the three bodies. The hundred-and-one additional garments can be turned into all practices that assist the path, together assisting the three contemplations. Clothing thus expands from an external requisite into the cultivation of patience throughout Dharmas. Of everything relied upon, one asks: is it covering delusion and aiding the path, or adding the burden of acquisition and protection?

How Does Food Nourish Dharma Body and Wisdom-Life?〔Section Ten〕

Does food sustain only the physical body? Practitioners deep in the mountains sustain themselves with fruit, water, pine, and cypress, then bind mind to seated dhyāna after eating. Practitioners in an araṇya go on alms rounds at a distance neither too far nor too near from a settlement. Those unable to abstain from grain or beg for food accept meals delivered by donors and pure food within the saṅgha. All three arrangements serve one purpose: fill the sore of hunger without letting the search for food obstruct the path.

Where does Dharma-food come from? Delight in Dharma and the joy of dhyāna are great impartial wisdom. Taking afflictions as fuel and wisdom as fire, they make the food of nirvāṇa, nourish the Dharma body, and lengthen wisdom-life. When not a single color or fragrance is other than the Middle Way, one is like the superior person for whom one blade of grass or one fruit is enough: this is obtaining food through the phenomenon in its immediacy. Those unable to enter the Middle through phenomena proceed through the three contemplations sequentially, like a dhūta practitioner begging for food, and finally see the Middle Way and become full. Those unable to contemplate through phenomena in their immediacy or progressively through Dharmas follow a good spiritual friend able to speak prajñā and generate understanding from hearing, like accepting a meal delivered by a donor. Or they awaken through the forest of merit in the factors of concentration, like receiving pure food in the saṅgha.

Dharma-food therefore does not use abstruse principle to cancel physical food. Physical food settles bodily life; Dharma-food increases wisdom-life. If one side is unregulated, the other is difficult to sustain. True contentment does not mean needing nothing. It means that once what one receives can support the path, one is no longer drawn away by additional flavors.

Must a Truly Quiet Place Be in the Mountains and Forests?〔Section Eleven〕

Does greater distance necessarily make mind quieter? Specific samādhis require a chosen place. Deep mountains and remote valleys, cut off from human traces, best allow unimpeded dhyāna-contemplation. A dhūta place lies at least three li from a settlement, where interaction is sparse yet afflictions are kept under warning. In a secluded monastery, one may live alone in a room, avoid entanglement in affairs, and think correctly. Lay settlements readily invite faults; noisy monasteries beside a market are unsuitable. Once an appropriate place is found, one should not move frequently.

Yet if a śrāvaka mind arises, even a body a thousand yojanas away is not called secluded. A body living beside a city but free from the mind of the Two Vehicles may instead be called secluded. The Middle Way is hidden, distant, and profound, unreachable by the tracks of the seven preparatory ranks, like deep mountains. It is lofty, broad, and unmoving, like a mountain mass. Separation from the two extremes is quiet; nonarising and nonactivation are secluded. The contemplation that emerges into the provisional neighbors emptiness while distinguishing medicines and illnesses, like a dhūta place neighboring a settlement. Entering emptiness through provisionality is like abiding in a single room even within a noisy monastery.

Mountains, forests, and rooms provide outward stability, but the principle of the three truths is the place where mind truly settles. If one only hides one’s shadow in mountains and forests while the mind of the two extremes does not cease, even the deepest valley can remain clamorous. Settled in the three truths, one may be secluded even beside a city.

Does Ceasing Entangling Affairs Mean Abandoning Every Activity?〔Section Twelve〕

Why cease the four affairs of livelihood, social relations, skills, and learning? The issue here is which matters continue to pull at mind after an araṇya practitioner has already left clamor for quiet. Managing a livelihood gains one thing and loses another. Congratulation, condolence, betrothal, and inquiry continue without end. Medicine, divination, crafts, spells, and arts invite others to seek one’s services. Reading, reciting, questioning, answering, and competing over superiority weary mind and muddy its water. One originally leaves kin and follows a teacher to seek the essential path; forming broad connections throughout prefectures and commanderies again is like putting on a robe upside down while looking for its collar, or drilling fire in search of water.

The four affairs are not judged by outward form alone. The practice of following one’s own intent has its own inclusions and is not discussed here. Reading sūtras and treatises is itself Buddha-work; only when it falls into competition over memory and obstructs calming-and-contemplation does it become an affair of learning. Medical knowledge and skills are likewise not offenses in themselves. But pursuing marvels before attaining the noble path resembles possessing beautiful hide and fine horns that instead invite injury to the body.

In contemplating mind, affairs of livelihood return to craving that moistens karmic seeds; severing craving ends them. Social affairs return to karma that makes beings come and go among the five paths; nonaction severs birth and death. Skills return to delusive conceptual play that obstructs prajñā. Learning returns to pursuing worldly intelligence and eloquence before attaining patience in the unborn and seeing only tiles, stones, plants, and trees. Once water stops, it clarifies by itself. Then one knows with wisdom of all modes and sees with the Buddha-eye, without running along narrow paths.

Why Is a Good Spiritual Friend the Whole of the Causes and Conditions?〔Section Thirteen〕

Can a good spiritual friend help only halfway while the other half depends entirely on oneself? In the cadence of the Buddha’s answer to Ānanda, the treatise says that a good spiritual friend is the whole of the causes and conditions for attaining the path. An external protector arranges necessities without prying into faults, causing disturbance, or offering hollow praise, like a mother raising a child or a tiger carrying its cub. Fellow practitioners spur one another, neither sleeping nor scattering, like passengers crossing together in one boat. An instructing teacher can distinguish path from non-path, inner from outer preparatory means, and penetration from obstruction and impediment, skillfully turning and breaking a person’s mind. Each keeps one face of the work, and together they protect the practitioner from taking the unknown as a personal authority.

Nor is a good spiritual friend limited to the form of one person. Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and noble ones shelter and nurture through majestic radiance—this is external protection. The six perfections and path factors are gates into the path, like fellow practitioners. Dharma-nature and ultimate reality are what all buddhas take as teacher; the object can generate wisdom—this is instruction. Conversely, buddhas and noble ones each possess all three meanings themselves: they shelter and protect, harmonize their light to accompany others, and guide through one voice. The six perfections and path factors protect and aid the correct path, accord with correct practice, and lead into the three gates of liberation. Dharma-nature can invisibly perfume and protect, correspond with wisdom, and give sight to the blind.

Why might a good spiritual friend still become a Māra? If someone leads a person only to the transformation city of the Two Vehicles, reducing half the afflictions and traveling half the path of awakening, then from what is gained that guide is a spiritual friend, but from what is taken away the guide is a Māra. Good spiritual friends, samādhi, and the mind of awakening can all aid the path. If they make someone stop at the half-word and fail to comprehend the Middle Way, they too become objects of attachment. One therefore cannot choose a teacher by outward appearance alone, nor absolutize any guidance in the quest for the whole.

Why Do the Five Objects Become the Five Desires?〔Section Fourteen〕

Are form, sound, fragrance, flavor, and touch themselves desires? The treatise expressly says that the five objects are not desires. The appealing savor within an object makes a practitioner generate desire and pursuit; only this is called one of the five desires. Each of the six faculties has its own rush outward: the eye is like a dog loving a village, the ear a deer loving mountains and marshes, the nose a fish, the tongue a snake, the body a monkey, and mind a bird. If one blames only the outer object and does not examine the faculty’s appropriation, one cannot grasp how desire arises.

Phenomenally, forms include shape, complexion, and jewels; sounds include seductive words, strings and flutes, and tinkling girdle ornaments; fragrances include orchids, musk, and bodily scent; flavors include liquor, meat, sweetness, sourness, curds, and blood; touches include cold, warmth, delicacy, smoothness, fine clothing, and bodily distinctions. Respectively, they resemble a hot pellet of gold, a poisoned drum, the breath of a lurking dragon, boiling honey and a honeyed blade, and lying beside a lion. At first approach they seem to have savor; after being obtained they never satisfy. An unwholesome mind is like a fire fed with fuel, plundering form and mind life after life.

Rebuking desire therefore does not mean hating the world. It means seeing the cost of desire as it is. Even after Nanda attained the fruit, habitual residue remained. A king may disregard ancestral temple and realm for sexual desire, and households and states may be overthrown by it. When the fault is seen, the thought that reaches out can cease and mind can genuinely enter concentration.

Why Must Rebuking Desire Pass through Emptiness, Provisionality, and the Middle?〔Section Fifteen〕

Does merely saying that form is impermanent thoroughly rebuke form? Upon form, people can establish permanence, impermanence, both permanence and impermanence, neither permanence nor impermanence, and the sixty-two views, contesting with one another and making karma for form. Analytical contemplation first sees ignorance and the many views being ground away thought after thought, without self or master, until karma recedes and result disappears. Contemplation that embodies emptiness further sees ignorance as empty in its immediacy and the many views likewise empty. There is no current of form to enter and no karmic result produced by entering form.

But if one remains in the emptiness of form, how can one distinguish the immeasurable suffering and accumulation that beings produce in dependence upon form and establish the medicines of immeasurable path and cessation? One therefore emerges from emptiness into the provisional, broadly distinguishing form while knowing it to be only a name, and the name empty in its immediacy. Differentiation does not return to grasping existence. It enables the wisdom of emptiness to transform others.

Finally, one must rebuke savor itself and leave both extremes. Ordinary beings savor form; the Two Vehicles savor separation from form. If savor were fixed, one could not separate; if separation were fixed, savor should never recur. Neither savor nor separation is fixed. Neither savor nor separation reveals the Middle Way within form. Distinguishing form sees the conventional; form empty in its immediacy sees the true; nonattachment to either extreme sees the Middle. The samādhis of the three truths open from the same desire for form. Rebuking form is like this, and so too are sound, fragrance, flavor, and touch.

Why Are Hindrances Harder to Detect than Outer Objects?〔Section Sixteen〕

Once the five desires have been rebuked, why must the five hindrances still be abandoned? The five desires arise when the five faculties face present objects and produce consciousness. With the five hindrances, an object has already entered the mental field; mind again pursues the past and imagines the future, repeatedly covering itself from within. Though the guest outside has departed, illness remains in the potter’s body, and the work still cannot be done.

The hindrance of craving replays past forms, sounds, fragrances, flavors, and touches and secretly devises means to obtain them again. The hindrance of anger forms resentments from the nine vexations across the three times, letting the fire of anger burn the forest of merit. The hindrance of sleep blocks the six consciousnesses in darkness and lets the four limbs droop, like a small death that steals illumination every day. The hindrance of restlessness-and-remorse first ranges across greed, anger, deviancy, and delusion as the body wanders and the mouth laughs, then binds mind in regret. The hindrance of doubt suspects that one is not a vessel for the path, the teacher lacks deep wisdom, or the Dharma received does not accord with principle. Each hindrance has its own entrance and cannot be reduced to a vague category of distraction.

Their treatments also differ. When craving is heavy, contemplate impurity; when anger is heavy, cultivate kindness; when sleep is heavy, spur body and mind diligently and generate delight in Dharma; when restlessness disperses, count breaths. For the three doubts, discriminatingly establish confidence in oneself, teacher, and Dharma. One seeking Dharma does not judge a teacher by outward appearance, just as one does not discard gold because its sack smells bad. Trusting Dharma does not prohibit questioning. Before the Dharma eye opens, it means not first covering the vessel with a blind mind. Only by recognizing which illness is especially strong does one know where to apply medicine first.

Which Hindrance Is the Direct Obstruction?〔Section Seventeen〕

Do the five hindrances equally obstruct concentration? Some take lack of knowledge as the direct obstruction and therefore emphasize doubt and sleep. Some take scattered movement as the direct obstruction and therefore emphasize restlessness-and-remorse. Some take the softness of dhyāna as treatment for hardness and therefore emphasize craving and anger. The treatise does not choose one hindrance as the eternally unique direct obstruction. It examines which is especially strong in this practitioner. When craving is heavy, craving is direct and the others peripheral; anger, sleep, restlessness-and-remorse, and doubt follow the same pattern.

This is like the four elements: any can become an illness, but they do not necessarily erupt together. Whichever element is disturbed now directly endangers life. Treating the strong hindrance first may let the weaker ones recede with it, so that meditative concentration can arise. This question and answer brings treatment back from abstract ranking to self-examination. One does not first decide the worst affliction in the world; one recognizes honestly the one most capable of covering mind at this moment.

When the First Dhyāna Arises, Are All Five Hindrances Exhausted?〔Section Eighteen〕

Once the first dhyāna arises, do the five hindrances disappear forever? The treatise first speaks of four divisions according to the predominant or equal arising of greed, anger, and delusion, then opens these into the five hindrances of craving, anger, sleep, doubt, and restlessness-and-remorse. Insofar as the five dull-driven hindrances obstruct the first dhyāna, this layer is removed when that dhyāna arises. Yet if the four divisions are broadly opened, each may contain 21,000 afflictions, together making 84,000. Through suffering, accumulation, path, and cessation, these can further open into a Dharma treasury, gates of dust and toil, samādhis and dhāraṇīs, and the perfections. The meaning of hindrance cannot be confined to coarse marks of the desire realm.

One who holds a view of emptiness takes that personal view as real, loving what agrees and becoming angry at what opposes. Deluded fixation through ignorance resembles sleep; conceptual play and disputes of views resemble restlessness-and-remorse; after one’s view is broken, great doubt arises. This layer of five hindrances obstructs true truth. Even after realizing a fruit, appropriation of the true, abandonment of thought-delusions, delusions not yet exhausted, lost mindfulness, and failure to reach beyond-training can likewise be examined in terms of craving, anger, sleep, restlessness, and doubt.

Sinking into emptiness and appropriating realization produces another layer of hindrances. Cherishing and preserving emptiness is craving. Rejecting birth and death and refusing to contemplate it is anger. Refusing to illuminate the provisional is sleep. Treating beings as disturbances is restlessness-and-remorse. Lack of clarity in provisional wisdom is doubt. These obstruct conventional truth and wisdom of the varieties of the path. Bodhisattvas seeking Buddha-Dharma may likewise love the Dharma, reject the Two Vehicles, fail to exhaust ignorance, retain faults in their three kinds of conduct when compared with a buddha, and possess less wisdom in the initial mind than the later mind. Left unexamined, these still obstruct the Middle Way. The arising of meditative concentration is therefore not permission to stop examining. It makes subtler coverings appear level by level.

How Does One Thought of Desire Become a Gate of Perfect Abandonment?〔Section Nineteen〕

Must perfect abandonment of the hindrances wait until a high stage? The treatise asks in return: if the wondrous Dharma were only for Dharma-nature bodhisattvas, why teach it to ordinary beings in the three realms? It is precisely because ordinary beings can cultivate that provisional teachings are conferred here to lead into the real. What the initial mind must examine is not some other Dharma far away, but the present thought of desire.

How can one thought of desire possess all Dharmas? When awareness of desire first arises, the coarse mind does not know it. Growing progressively smooth and sharp, it becomes habit. One then retreats from precepts and seeks the object, stealing, robbing, coercing, and trading for desire, killing to obtain wealth, indulging offenses when rich, and proliferating evil thoughts when poor. Once the offense and karma of desire are complete, “present tendency” and “this existence” draw forth birth and death, and the twelve links revolve in their wake. The five hindrances and birth and death are not added suddenly at the end. They are already present in the first thought.

Desire cannot be found when sought among the five outer objects, the inner mental faculty, or the consciousness between; neither when inner and outer are joined or separated, nor when past condition, present cause, or future result is sought. Desire is empty in its immediacy. From one’s own desire one also sees the immeasurable causes of desire, forms, sounds, mental conduct, and dependent environments of beings, as defeating raiders makes achievement possible, abundant fuel intensifies fire, and rotting manure produces flowers. Only by not abiding in the emptiness of desire can one produce hundreds and thousands of Dharma gates from the illnesses of beings’ desires.

Finally, because the real nature of desire is neither empty nor provisional, there is neither tendency nor nontendency. Without separately cutting or breaking, four sets of five hindrances are perfectly removed in one thought. From possession in principle through hearing and understanding, beginning contemplation, purification of the six faculties, breaking delusion and revealing the truths, until the hindrance of desire is exhausted, the six identities unfold along one line. “Desire itself is the path” does not make a slogan of perfection. It means not stagnating in emptiness within emptiness, not indulging desire within provisionality, and not retaining either extreme in the Middle Way.

Why Is Regulating Body, Breath, and Mind Like Tuning a Lute?〔Section Twenty〕

Once the hindrances have been abandoned, why still regulate food, sleep, body, breath, and mind? Clay and water that are out of balance cannot make a vessel; five matters not skillfully regulated likewise cannot enter dhyāna. Food is measured by whether it increases illness, sleep, or affliction and should leave one neither hungry nor full. Sleep is food for the eyes. Excessive restriction harms mind and body, while indulgence directly obstructs concentration; it should therefore be neither harshly restrained nor indulged.

Body, breath, and mind resemble warmth, life, and consciousness at conception: from infancy and adulthood through decline, old age, and death, they cannot be separated. On entering concentration, body is neither loose nor tense, breath neither rough nor slippery, and mind neither sunken nor floating. While abiding, one notices whatever is unregulated and corrects it; when emerging, one returns from subtlety to coarseness. If a melody fails after the lute strings have begun to sound, one goes back and adjusts strings and pegs. One does not suppose that tuning once at the beginning ends the need to inspect them.

When these three matters of an ordinary person are regulated, they can also turn into morality, concentration, and wisdom. The physical body becomes the basis for generating morality; breath becomes the gate for entering concentration; mind becomes the cause for producing wisdom. Morality relinquishes a body in the evil destinies and accomplishes the Dharma body. Breath turns scattered movement and unwholesome discursive thought into the joy of dhyāna and delight in Dharma. Mind turns the mind of birth and death into the mind of awakening. The three Dharmas together form the noble embryo and never separate from the initial mind to the later mind.

How Does Contemplating Mind Regulate Hunger, Fullness, Sinking, and Floating?〔Section Twenty-One〕

Does contemplation of mind also have hunger and fullness? Concentration and wisdom that enter emptiness mostly eliminate Dharmas and resemble hunger. Concentration and wisdom that support convention broadly establish Dharmas and resemble fullness. Delight in Dharma in the Middle Way inclines toward neither extreme and alone is neither hungry nor full. When emptiness-contemplation combines with ignorance, sinks into emptiness, and preserves itself, it resembles abundant sleep. Emerging into the provisional distinguishes phenomena and subdues ignorance, resembling little sleep. The Middle Way neither severs the nature of ignorance so that wholesome Dharmas have nowhere to arise nor indulges ignorance so that Buddhahood cannot be accomplished. It abides neither in regulation nor in nonregulation.

Suddenly rushing to practice the six perfections or suddenly abandoning them is tension or looseness of body. Prajñā falling into sharpness or dullness is slipperiness or roughness of breath. Describing the mind of awakening as too difficult or too easy is sinking or floating of mind. Regulation can also be distinguished according to entering emptiness, emerging into the provisional, and the Middle Way. Inclination toward the true easily sinks; breadth in the provisional easily floats; only true mark’s simultaneous occlusion and illumination is neither sunken nor floating. Severing delusion is tense, emerging into the provisional loose, and the Middle Way relies on neither extreme. Entering emptiness is slippery, entering the provisional rough, and the Middle Way is neither rough nor slippery.

Within each contemplation, if calming is too strong, body, breath, and mind become tense, slippery, and sunken; if contemplation is too strong, they become loose, rough, and floating. Only when calming-and-contemplation reaches the mean does it respectively become the preparatory means for entering the true, seeing the conventional, and entering the Middle Way. Regulation is not a single eternally fixed point. It means continual awareness within the contemplation being cultivated, allowing preparatory means and wisdom-perfection to unite and form the noble embryo.

Why Are the Final Five Dharmas Not Superfluous?〔Section Twenty-Two〕

If the preceding twenty Dharmas are complete, what remains lacking? If the potter does not wish to work, works without diligence, forgets the method, lacks skillful means, or cannot concentrate, no vessel appears. Practitioners likewise require aspiration, effort, mindfulness, skillful wisdom, and one-pointed mind: delighting in what is cultivated, remaining unremitting day and night, continuing thought after thought, skillfully grasping the meaning, and resolving without divergence. One-pointed mind is like a ship’s rudder, skillful wisdom like its nod toward the course, and the first three Dharmas like poles and oars. A flying bird likewise requires eyes, tail, and wings together.

The five Dharmas can first be explained in relation to the first dhyāna. Aspiration seeks to leave the desire realm; effort crosses the most difficult frontier; mindfulness remains bound to the first dhyāna; skillful wisdom distinguishes the first dhyāna’s excellence and wonder from the desire realm’s pain and coarseness; and one-pointed mind concentrates its resolve without engaging anything else. Here, one-pointed mind is decisive, exclusive pursuit, not the one-pointed mind that serves as the substance of concentration after entry.

The same five can turn toward true truth. Aspiration leaves birth and death for nirvāṇa; effort advances directly without mixture with contamination; mindfulness recollects only quiescent extinction; wisdom distinguishes the faults of birth and death from the bliss of nirvāṇa; and one-pointed mind cultivates the eightfold noble path without turning back. Turned toward transformation of others, aspiration broadly transforms beings, effort vows not to retreat, mindfulness resembles a mother remembering her child, skillful wisdom knows illness and recognizes medicine, and one-pointed mind decisively liberates. Turned toward seeking prajñā, they resemble Sadāprarudita, who did not cherish body or life, wept for seven days, constantly walked for seven years, and still sold his body and pierced himself for blood when meeting Māra’s obstacles, turning demonic affairs into Buddha-work. Turned toward the Middle Way, aspiration leaves the two extremes, effort remains unmixed and proceeds effortlessly, mindfulness binds itself to the Dharma realm, skillful means cultivates middle contemplation, and one-pointed mind clears into nonduality and sees prajñā.

Each time the five Dharmas turn, they preserve the same five names without carrying the goal of the preceding level into the destination of the next. When direction changes, what aspiration longs for, what effort leaves, what mindfulness binds itself to, what wisdom distinguishes, and what one-pointed mind resolves all change with it.

When Distant Preparatory Means Reach Their End, Do Distance and Proximity Remain?〔Section Twenty-Three〕

Do the twenty-five Dharmas apply to only one kind of dhyāna-contemplation? The treatise says they serve universally as preparatory means for every dhyāna and wisdom. As the object contemplated differs, preparatory means also turn, like different melodies requiring different ways of tuning lute strings. Differentiated in detail, they become immeasurable and cannot be exhausted by a fixed checklist.

Here the twenty-five are provisionally called external to concentration and distant so that practitioners have a place to begin. Once mind is regulated through them and suddenly sees principle, who can still establish a fixed inner and outer? Where could any real distance or proximity remain? Wisdom is not attained solely from inner contemplation, outer contemplation, or both inner and outer contemplation. Nor is it attained apart from these contemplations, and still less through complete absence of contemplation.

The conclusion therefore does not establish external preparatory means as a sectarian position. When the meaning is attained, sinking and floating each find their place and both inner and outer become preparatory means. When the meaning is missed, neither inner nor outer is a preparatory means. True skillfulness does not grasp one extreme as the only correct road. It lets every condition carry a person to the seeing of principle, then does not turn the gate traversed into a new bond.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

The reading above has followed the treatise’s five divisions and its images of pottery-making, the flotation bladder, the strong men, six animals, lute-tuning, and the ship’s rudder. Zhanran’s Fuxing further illuminates several joints in the long text where levels can easily be confused.

First consider the overall outer frame. Zhanran’s direct explanation begins with “explaining the twenty-five preparatory means” and ends with a lament that people do not understand inner and outer preparatory means. The next passage begins to explain correct contemplation and has already moved into the following chapter. His commentary carries the text in thirteen long segments: the general heading and five conditions, keeping, transgression, vehicle and precepts, and repentance and purification each have their own passage; clothing, food, place, affairs, and good spiritual friends follow; and finally rebuking desire, abandoning hindrances, regulating matters, and the five Dharmas close the sequence. This frame supports a finer division of the present chapter according to meaning, but does not permit material on correct contemplation from the next chapter to be imported early into preparatory means.

At the outset of explaining preparatory means, Zhanran first uses skillfulness to show how the few can oppose the many, then uses convergence to show how many conditions accomplish the work together. Distant and proximate are named in relation to correct contemplation, not to disparage the distant and honor the proximate. He also points out that each of the five divisions has textual sources, without reducing their provenance to a claim that each division was copied item by item from one book. Skillfulness therefore names both the function of cultivation and Zhiyi’s ability to organize materials dispersed among sūtras and treatises into a practicable sequence.

First, Zhanran comprehensively gathers the whole chapter under four levels: wording, meaning, principle, and intent. The wording opens the five divisions; their meaning returns to phenomena and principle; principle further has sequential and nonsequential forms; and the chapter’s intent is only one—to aim exclusively at correct contemplation. These do not add four more divisions beside the five. They show that if the five phenomenal inventories are separated from correct contemplation, they lose the name preparatory means; if contemplation of principle is separated from phenomena, it has no body, mind, conditions, or objects to regulate.

“Aiming exclusively at correct contemplation” does not demote the first four divisions into optional preliminaries outside the gate. Precepts and conduct, clothing and food, place, desires and hindrances, and body and mind all exist within the Dharma realm. Every phenomenal adjustment aims toward contemplation; if contemplation cannot illuminate those phenomena in return, it has not yet displayed the skillfulness by which many conditions converge.

Second, the ten precepts within possessing five conditions are not a neatly copied passage from one sūtra or treatise. Zhanran first points to recollection of precepts in the prajñā scriptures, the Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom, the ten treasuries of the Flower Ornament Sutra, and other texts. At the ten modes of receiving full ordination, he says they draw principally on the Ten Recitations Vinaya while also taking meanings from the Vibhāṣā. In the end, he expressly judges that they do not rely exclusively on one work. Zhiyi’s sequence of ten items is itself therefore a synthesis of sūtra, vinaya, and treatise.

Third, Zhanran judges the reading order of the precept-keeping passage to be phenomena first and principle later. Moral restraint, precepts shared with concentration, precepts shared with the path, and differences among stages are established first; contemplation of mind through emptiness, provisionality, and the Middle is opened afterward. The latter makes phenomenal keeping firm; it does not declare that phenomenal precepts can now be removed. Although the passage on transgression is long, Zhanran gathers its nine textual sections into two meanings: transgression through craving and transgression through views. Begging for the whole flotation bladder, half, and a speck of dust unfolds in layers at the level of the text. What truly drives all nine is the two rākṣasas of sensual craving and wrong view; they must not be mislisted as nine parallel causes of transgression.

Within the story of breaking precepts, Zhanran also expressly locates the monk of the four dhyānas in fascicle nineteen of the Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom. The received text says that he attained the four dhyānas, became overbearingly proud, mistook them for the four paths, generated a wrong view upon seeing the mark of the intermediate state at death, and later fell into Avīci. The treatise’s brief account of four fruits and hell and the received source’s four paths and Avīci each have their textual context. Read together, they make the warning against overbearing pride clearly traceable.

Fourth, when reading repentance and purification, Zhanran first distinguishes light from grave. Light offenses are repented phenomenally. For grave offenses, phenomena and principle support one another, with contemplation of mind primary. This judgment corresponds to the treatise’s simile of the second strong man. Rite and contemplation of the unborn assist one another, while disclosure, cutting continuity, and earnest practice each find their place. The twenty minds flowing with and against the current also interweave craving and views, phenomena and principle. The current flows from ignorance gradually to denial of cause and result; the countercurrent turns back by beginning with deep confidence in cause and result. Nearby, it restores pure precepts; farther away, it aids correct practice. The commentary’s structural judgment reveals this crosswise synthesis of the twenty minds while leaving the treatise’s item-by-item unfolding at its own level.

Fifth, clothing, food, place, entangling affairs, and good spiritual friends each have a joint where phenomenal marks turn into contemplation of mind. Zhanran especially judges the good-spiritual-friend passage to be phenomena first and principle later. External protector, fellow practitioner, and instructor are first persons and conditions upon whom the practitioner relies; only afterward does each of the three meanings appear within buddhas and noble ones, path factors, and Dharma-nature. Thus the “whole of the causes and conditions” is neither narrowed to dependence upon a single teacher nor abstracted into dependence only upon an inner Dharma-nature.

For the story of the good spiritual friend as half or whole, Zhanran expressly names the final portion of the Chronicle of the Causes and Conditions of the Dharma Treasury. For Improper Measure of Persons and Śāriputra’s personal vow, he expressly names the second fascicle of the Samantabhadra’s Transcendent Scripture. He connects the verse on regulating food to the text in which a Nirgrantha answers a king. These explicit judgments reconnect the treatise’s condensed retellings to concrete settings, letting Zhiyi’s précis and the source scriptures’ fuller accounts illuminate one another as two levels.

Zhanran’s fine judgments on clothing and food likewise preserve the relation between three grades and contemplation of mind. The three modes of clothing are first divided into superior, middling, and inferior according to place of practice and requisites; the clothing of contemplative practice then uses patience to cover the two extremes. The three modes of food are first distinguished as provisions in deep mountains, alms food, and food delivered by donors; Dharma-food then opens understanding through phenomena in their immediacy, sequential practice, hearing from another, or reliance on concentration. Once the text turns into contemplation of mind, the original clothes and food are not judged delusive. They remain necessary conditions for stability of body and life.

Sixth, rebuking the five desires likewise proceeds first through phenomena and then principle. Form, sound, fragrance, flavor, and touch first stop enticement through their faults; analytical emptiness, embodied emptiness, emergence into the provisional, and the Middle Way then penetrate their source and bottom. Abandoning the five hindrances moves from their five marks and five treatments into questions and answers, then opens sharp drivers, reliance upon emptiness, reliance upon the Middle, and perfect contemplation. Zhanran marks each transition passage by passage. The treatments of impurity, kindness, breath-counting, confidence in Dharma, and the like in the earlier passage are the actual first steps inherited by the later perfect abandonment in one thought.

At the questions and answers on the five hindrances, Zhanran also marks the boundary of the analysis: the first question asks whether all five hindrances obstruct concentration; only the next asks whether they are ultimately exhausted when the first dhyāna arises. The first establishes direct and peripheral hindrances according to whichever is strongest in a practitioner. Only the latter extends from dull to sharp drivers, reliance upon emptiness, and reliance upon the Middle. The perfect explanation does not arrange these levels as a stairway belonging only to later stages. It says that because the wondrous Dharma is taught to ordinary beings in the three realms, the initial mind has a gate it can cultivate. Perfection and sequence thus illuminate one another rather than cancel one another.

Seventh, in regulating the five matters, Zhanran points out that food and sleep are regulated separately, while body, breath, and mind must be regulated together when entering, abiding in, and emerging from concentration. Regulation through contemplating mind is another turn. Practicing the five Dharmas differs: Zhanran expressly says it is no longer divided into phenomena and principle. The same aspiration, effort, mindfulness, skillful wisdom, and one-pointed mind turn according to their direction. The preceding four divisions disclose principle through phenomena; the fifth turns within the phenomenal Dharmas themselves. The treatise’s five repetitions of “at the next level” reveal the same five Dharmas continually changing direction.

Where various schools differ on the five Dharmas, Zhanran particularly uses the Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom’s agreement with the Abhidharma position to illuminate the account adopted by the treatise: one-pointed mind is the common substance, while the distinct factor of each dhyāna reveals its depth or shallowness. This does not change the treatise’s sequence in presenting the Satyasiddhi Treatise, the Necklace Scripture, the Abhidharma, and the Great Treatise. It explains why Zhiyi finally adopts one account among them. More importantly, the initial one-pointed mind among the five Dharmas remains decisive and exclusive aspiration; it must not be read prematurely as the substance of concentration after entry.

Finally, Zhanran turns the concluding prajñā statement back toward attaining or missing the meaning. The twenty-five Dharmas may be called external to concentration and distant, but there is no eternally fixed inner or outer, distant or proximate. If the meaning is attained, both inner and outer can lead into correct contemplation; if missed, both become attachments. This mirror therefore does not make another road beside the treatise. It only lets each of the five divisions take its proper place: phenomena do not leave principle, principle does not abandon phenomena, sequence does not obstruct perfect contemplation, and all skillfulness returns to correct contemplation. This is the measure indispensable to reading Preparatory Means.

If so many principles have already been understood, why open another chapter called Proper Cultivation of Calming-and-Contemplation? Does the simultaneous arising of the three obstructions and four Māras mean that earlier practice went wrong? Why do the ten objects begin with aggregates, sense fields, and elements, and why do they both follow a sequence and crisscross one another? If one thought originally has no fixed mark, where do the ten Dharma realms appear from?

The treatise does not write proper cultivation as a pure state that can be entered only after every change has been left behind. It begins precisely when an object arrives. Torpor, distraction, afflictions, illness, karmic marks, demonic affairs, meditative concentration, views, and even objects close to the path can all become what is contemplated. The real dividing line is not whether an object is present, but whether practitioners can neither follow nor fear it and can investigate it with calming-and-contemplation—whether they can move from knowing principle to remaining oriented when an object actually appears.

Why Can Wondrous Understanding Not Yet Be Called Correct Practice?

The preceding six layers open wondrous understanding on the basis of scripture; only here is correct practice established on the basis of understanding. “Understanding” can point out the road but cannot walk it for someone. “Practice” can make one advance but cannot do without eyes. The treatise begins with two pairs of similes—oil and flame, eyes and feet—and establishes proper cultivation upon mutual support. Without oil, lamplight cannot continue; without flame, oil cannot display its illuminating function. Eyes without feet cannot arrive, while feet without eyes do not know the direction.

Practice and understanding are therefore not completed one at a time and then joined. Wisdom becomes pure within practice, and practice advances within wisdom. Illumination and moistening, guidance and penetration interweave, like two hands on one body rubbing one another and together cleaning that body. Proper cultivation does not leave wondrous understanding behind. It turns wondrous understanding into a force that can walk, illuminate, and cross the wilderness of birth and death.

This also explains why the treatise immediately discusses benefiting oneself and others. Only when one can open inwardly through obstructions and advance one’s own path can one outwardly master sūtras and treatises and awaken those who have not heard. One can shape oneself and also shape others. Giving Dharma does not hand over a collection of terms; it resembles opening gates and pouring out a treasury or relinquishing a wish-fulfilling jewel. Its light illuminates darkness, and its treasure relieves lack. Calming and contemplation are two wheels that carry a vehicle far; practice and understanding two wings that carry a bird high. Without either side, one cannot arrive.

Are Obstructions Racing to Arise a Regression or a Place to Work?

Once practice and understanding become diligent, the three obstructions and four Māras instead race to arise. This easily creates doubt: if cultivation is correct, why does torpor become heavier, distraction greater, and every object more distinct? The treatise does not first label the object success or failure. It establishes only two boundaries: do not follow, and do not fear. Follow an object and it carries one toward evil destinies; fear an object and fear obstructs correct Dharma.

When torpor appears, contemplate it so that darkness can become clear. When distraction appears, calm it so that scattering can become still. One does not first expel torpor and distraction completely and only then begin calming-and-contemplation. They are precisely where calming-and-contemplation works. A pig rubbing against a golden mountain, many streams entering the sea, fuel intensifying fire, and wind enlarging the kalā-gurula insect all turn resistance into a condition for exertion: friction need not harm the gold; streams are not outside the sea; fuel entering fire increases its force; and wind makes what it meets grow.

The treatise immediately calls contemplation a vajra able to cut the battle formation of afflictions, and calls the feet firm and powerful, able to cross the wilderness of birth and death. The key is not imagining an object as an enemy army outside cultivation, but making calming-and-contemplation capable of investigating it. If one seeks only a mind where nothing ever happens, an object’s arrival brings alarm and doubt. Knowing beforehand that strange transformations can be contemplated, the inner mind can remain settled like empty space.

Who Can Hear Calming-and-Contemplation, and Who Can Teach It?

Proper cultivation tests not only the listener but the teacher. A swift horse enters the correct road upon seeing the whip’s shadow; this is sharp capacity able to receive. In one where poison has entered deeply and the original mind is lost, absence of confidence prevents Dharma from entering the hand. Without the hook of hearing Dharma, one cannot understand even after listening; without the eye of wisdom, one cannot distinguish true and false. Vessel, confidence, hearing, and wisdom are not decorations. They decide whether Dharma heard can become correct practice.

Weariness with the world does not necessarily mean knowing the road. Some savor an inferior vehicle and cling to branches and leaves, like a dog that begs only from laborers; some take a monkey for Śakra and gravel for the bright pearl. Outwardly all appear to seek the path, but they may mistake what they honor. These similes do not mock a lack of learning. They ask whether practitioners possess the eyesight to distinguish root from branch and bright pearl from gravel.

The teacher’s danger is just as real. Some dhyāna practitioners guard one track alone and do not penetrate others’ capacities. Although obstacles and difficulties have ten thousand roads, they use only one medicine of milk. At the first unusual mark, they immediately judge it the path. Unsuitable as vessels and lacking the ability to shape others, they become blind and lame persons leaning on one another, teacher and disciple falling together on a night road. Proper cultivation therefore also includes the discipline of not judging objects rashly. When one cannot recognize persons, Dharmas, obstructions, or difficulties, greater decisiveness in speech does not necessarily bring greater benefit.

Why Open the Contemplated into Ten and Place Aggregates, Sense Fields, and Elements First?

The objects faced by calming-and-contemplation open into ten: aggregates/sense fields/elements, afflictions, illness, karmic marks, demonic affairs, meditative concentration, various views, overbearing pride, the Two Vehicles, and bodhisattvas. All can cover and obstruct calming-and-contemplation, but they are not ten eternally isolated worlds. This ordered map first answers a practical question: when objects arise in confusion, how does a practitioner know what is being faced?

Aggregates, sense fields, and elements stand first for two reasons: they are presently manifest, and they accord with the scriptural course that often begins contemplation from the physical body. When the remaining nine do not arise, there is no such object to contemplate. Aggregates and sense fields are present at every moment and never leave. Receiving a body means carrying the burden of five aggregates; contemplative practice need not wait for a special experience and can begin from the body and mind before one’s eyes.

The treatise uses a closed boat moving downstream to show what happens without contemplation. Sitting inside the cabin, one feels at rest and does not know the water is carrying the boat rapidly. Only when turning back upstream does one perceive the rush of the current. Contemplating the aggregates is the same. Ordinarily, five aggregates and four elements combine while afflictions and illness move hidden and unnoticed. As illumination and examination begin, the force previously latent appears level by level.

Thus, contemplating the result of aggregates stirs the cause of afflictions; contemplating body and mind together makes illness arise disproportionately; powerful calming-and-contemplation stirs past karma; the movement of wholesome and unwholesome karma attracts demonic affairs; crossing demonic affairs makes meditative concentrations race to arise; if a contemplative factor within dhyāna produces wrong wisdom, various views arise; quieting views without knowing one’s depth produces overbearing pride that takes nonattainment for attainment; once views and pride are still, past Lesser Vehicle habituation may arise; and remembering the original vow without falling into emptiness may make a bodhisattva object of preparatory means arise. This describes, according to the text, how ten objects can follow one another; it does not declare that everyone must experience them according to a table.

The ten objects extend from an ordinary person’s direct retribution to the noble person’s preparatory means. Aggregates and sense fields are always manifest; the other nine await arising. The first eight are relatively distant from the correct path and require deep protection; the final two lie near paths of preparatory means but still require contemplation. Near does not mean arrived; distant does not mean unable to return. All ten remind the practitioner that an object’s name alone cannot place one in a completed stage.

If There Is a Sequence, Why Can It Also Be Nonsequential?

The treatise begins from a forked road: without understanding the objects’ mutual arising, one resembles a person standing where many roads meet and not knowing which to follow. It lists ten gates: sequential/nonsequential, mixed/unmixed, complete/incomplete, intentional/unintentional, accomplished/unaccomplished, beneficial/nonbeneficial, lasting/nonlasting, difficult/not difficult, repeated/not repeated, and the three obstructions/four Māras. These are gathered as nine pairs and seven singletons.

Sequence can be discussed from Dharma, cultivation, and arising. Dharmas have an order from shallow to deep. Cultivation may inherit study from the past or proceed sequentially in this life. Arising may follow the order of cultivation. Nonsequence is likewise discussed from all three sides. In arising, order is unfixed: a bodhisattva object may appear before the object of aggregates and sense fields. In cultivation, whichever object has greater force is cultivated first. From the standpoint of Dharma itself, eye, ear, nose, tongue, aggregates, sense fields, and elements are all gates of quiescence and all the Dharma realm, with no need to abandon one and take another.

The crucial point is that sequence and nonsequence do not cancel each other. In how objects appear, earlier and later can be distinguished. Yet because every Dharma remains within the Dharma realm, no Dharma waits outside it to be arranged. Afflictions, illness, karma, Māra, dhyāna, views, pride, Two Vehicles, and bodhisattvas can each be contemplated in the present. If one grasps that a later object may be touched only after an earlier object has been completely handled, the powerful object actually present will instead be neglected.

Contemplating illness first when ill or afflictions first when they are strong does not mean changing roads arbitrarily. It means “cultivate whichever is strong first.” Proper cultivation therefore possesses a map while also watching the road conditions. It neither denies distinctions among the ten objects nor freezes those distinctions into a single timetable.

What Exactly Do the Nine Pairs and Seven Singletons Distinguish?

Mixed and unmixed distinguish whether objects arise one by one in clear detail or several crisscross, occur together, and overlap. Complete and incomplete distinguish whether all ten are numerically present and can be examined successively as general/particular and horizontal/vertical. Levels, grades, and factors of dhyāna can reveal completeness or lack in vertical and horizontal directions. The treatise lists them repeatedly so that “complete” does not remain vague praise.

Intentional and unintentional distinguish whether an object arises from intentional cultivation or by itself without intention. Each object can form four alternatives according to Dharma, and interweaving them before and after yields thirty-six statements. Accomplished and unaccomplished no longer ask only about number; they ask whether one object is ultimately accomplished from beginning to end. If it starts and abruptly disappears, lacks grades, and remains indistinct in each part, one cannot call it accomplished merely because it “arose.”

Beneficial and nonbeneficial most directly break judgments made from names. An unwholesome Dharma may deepen clarity and stillness when it arises; a wholesome Dharma may damage stillness and illumination. There are also four situations: increasing stillness while damaging illumination, damaging stillness while increasing illumination, increasing both, and damaging both. Benefit is not automatically guaranteed by an object’s name; harm is not directly decided by its name. One must return to whether calming-and-contemplation has become clearer and stiller.

Difficult/not difficult distinguish ease or difficulty in the arising of wholesome and unwholesome objects. Lasting/not lasting distinguish an object that remains without receding from one that vanishes as it arises. Repeated/not repeated distinguish the same object arising once and stopping from arising again and again. These gates do not encourage collecting objects; they prevent mistaken acceptance and rejection. An object’s good or evil, duration, difficulty, or number of appearances cannot alone decide the conclusion. It must still be investigated by calming-and-contemplation so that mind does not stagnate.

The three obstructions and four Māras gather the ten objects again. Aggregates/sense fields and illness can be discussed as the obstruction of retribution; afflictions, views, and pride as the obstruction of affliction; karma, Māra, dhyāna, the Two Vehicles, and bodhisattvas as the obstruction of karma. The four Māras are those of aggregates, afflictions, death, and the heavenly being. “Māra” means both taking body and life and grinding down calming-and-contemplation, turning clarity dark and stillness scattered. Though names differ, what is distinguished remains how calming-and-contemplation becomes covered, blocked, and taken away.

Why Do Objects Arise, and Why Must They Not Be Judged Lightly?

The treatise locates the cause of the ten objects’ mutual arising in past and present lives. When gradual, sudden, or indeterminate seeds from the past encounter the rain of cultivation in this life, they may arise sequentially, nonsequentially, or in a mixed fashion. Whether the number cultivated in the past was complete affects whether arising in this life is complete. Whether one previously realized or only cultivated without realization bears on whether present arising is accomplished. A strong past cause can arise without awaiting present cultivation; a strong present condition waits for cultivation before arising.

Benefit and harm, duration and brevity, likewise differ according to the strength of causes and conditions and whether skillfulness or poison is mixed in. When a past cause and present condition are both skillful and dedicated toward the higher path, present arising benefits. When poison is mixed among the causes and conditions, it may harm. A weak cause is brief; a strong cause lasts. Ease or difficulty in wholesome objects corresponds to the lightness or heaviness of obstruction, while ease or difficulty in unwholesome objects corresponds to sharp or dull capacity. Some objects come to say farewell, some to make themselves known; some arise once and never recur, while others recur again and again.

Because transformations are this subtle, the treatise issues an especially weighty warning: essential oral instructions are needed; one must weigh with wisdom and not rely only on one’s own mind to judge right and wrong incorrectly. “Be circumspect, be diligent, take it seriously” does not tell one to fear every object. It prevents a temporary feeling, one mark of arising, a wholesome or unwholesome label, or personal preference from being rushed into a judgment of cultivation and realization.

Why Do the Sixteen Questions First Press Shared and Distinct?

If Dharmas are as numerous as dust and sand, why fix the objects at only ten? The treatise answers with the great earth producing many sprouts. Ten is adopted so as to be neither too broad nor too abbreviated and to make the meaning easy to understand. Ten does not compress all Dharmas into ten entities. It provides a numerical Dharma that can be distinguished, spoken, and contemplated.

The questions that follow ask repeatedly: if each of the ten objects has its own name, why can they also share names? Aggregates and sense fields can connect through afflictions, illness, karma, Māra, dhyāna, views, pride, the Two Vehicles, and bodhisattvas. Every other name can likewise embrace other objects from the sides of cause, result, function, and inclusion. Even practitioners can share names: one who has not aroused the mind may still be called a bodhisattva; from classes of śrāvakas, persons in different objects can likewise be included together.

But sharing does not erase differences. Impermanence may be shared while its inverted marks differ; the meaning of contamination may be shared while the meaning of existence differs; the meaning of one-sidedness may be shared while that of truth differs. Aggregates, sense fields, and elements are both the basis for receiving a body and the beginning of contemplative wisdom and therefore alone have both shared and distinct meanings. The latter nine receive names according to different marks that arise and each have shared and distinct meanings separately. Although afflictions seem a cause of the body, they belong to another life in the sequence. Although illness seems a bodily basis, it does not arise constantly, and sūtras and treatises do not make it the beginning of contemplation. Neither can therefore be judged like the aggregate object.

Understanding arising within aggregates and sense fields also need not be established as another object. If the understanding is grasped, it returns according to the event to views; if it generates craving or anger, to afflictions; if it attracts illness or Māra, each is judged according to the event. If understanding arises brightly without marks of the nine objects, it remains an atmosphere of calming-and-contemplation within aggregates and sense fields. Names follow the object’s mark, not the practitioner’s urge to name an experience.

The ten objects nevertheless have distinct marks in ordered detail. The four establishments of mindfulness, empty village, and no-self separately mark aggregates, sense fields, and elements. The five methods of settling mind correspond to afflictions; eight recollections to illness; ten wholesome actions to karma; five bindings to Māra; six subtle gates to dhyāna; path factors to views; impermanence, suffering, and emptiness to pride; Four Truths and twelve links to the Two Vehicles; and six perfections to bodhisattvas. Sharing prevents the ten objects from sealing one another off; distinction prevents contemplative methods from becoming an undifferentiated mass. Both shared and distinct, and neither shared nor distinct, keep those two sides from hardening into an impasse.

If Object and Contemplation Are Nondual, Are Causal and Resultant Boundaries Erased?

The final six questions push the problem deeper. Since the five aggregates are all objects, is there a separate contemplation outside form and mind? The treatise answers that the aggregates themselves are contemplation. Unwholesome and indeterminate five aggregates may be called the object, and wholesome five aggregates contemplation. Once contemplation matures, wholesome aggregates turn into aggregates of preparatory means, then uncontaminated aggregates, then aggregates of Dharma-nature. Contemplation does not make another thing apart from the aggregates, nor are aggregates forever only obstruction.

Do aggregates of retribution also turn? The treatise answers with the purity of form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness, and prajñā, as well as a bright, fair complexion and purified six faculties. Although aggregates turn, the object of contemplation remains distinctly present. Turning does not extinguish the object; it changes the relation between object and contemplation.

The ten objects can correspond to the five divisions: arising through to a later object is advance, remaining within the first nine abiding, intentional self-maintenance protection, loss as soon as an object arises retreat, and penetration attainment. But the possibility of correlating Dharma-marks does not mean all stages can be conflated. The six identities and ten grounds have depths and shallows; distinctions of stages are not cancelled because the ten objects include one another.

If the nature of thoughts is separate and the nature of conditions likewise separate, and there are no conditions, thoughts, or number, why are the ten Dharma realms still possessed? The treatise first sets aside rare events such as Sumeru containing a mustard seed, a lotus arising from fire, and a person crossing the sea, then speaks of no mind, no thought, no one traveling, and no one arriving. The inconceivable is not merely an impossible event somehow occurring. Principle does not fall within agent and object, yet contemplative wisdom remains distinctly present.

Do the ten Dharma realms mutually possess one another in cause or result? The treatise answers that both cause and result possess one another, but causes communicate and are easy to know while results are separated and difficult to reveal. Maitrakanyaka can arouse the Buddha-mind in a hell object; an unpredicted bodhisattva who slights one already predicted can form grave offense. Ordinary and noble beings both possess five aggregates, but noble aggregates are not thereby identical to ordinary ones. A buddha possesses five eyes and five practices, but the Buddha-result cannot be explained directly through human or heavenly retribution. These examples clarify why separated results are difficult to reveal, not that results entirely fail to possess one another.

The final question asks whether one thought possesses the ten Dharma realms only when a thought is deliberately made, or spontaneously. The answer is extremely brief: Dharma-nature is originally so and is not accomplished by fabrication, like one mote of dust inherently possessing the divisions of the ten directions. Along its entire course through ten objects, nine pairs, and sixteen questions, proper cultivation does not finally divide the world into more compartments. It lets practitioners meet any object without leaving Dharma-nature, confusing cause and result, or ceasing calming-and-contemplation.

Through the Eye of the Fuxing

Zhanran first judges the entire passage as concluding the preceding and generating the following. The preceding six layers together accomplish wondrous understanding, and here practice is established on the basis of understanding. Correct practice means that ten Dharmas unite to form the vehicle and are regulated and investigated within every object. Gains and losses in persons and Dharmas then proceed first through cultivating oneself and later transforming others, first attainment and later loss. The opening similes are therefore not scattered exhortations but the complete introduction to proper cultivation.

The individual correlations of oil/flame and eyes/feet, and which among the four similes reveals calming or contemplation, are all expressly judged in the Fuxing; the treatise itself gathers them under mutual support of practice and understanding. Zhanran also reads “darkness itself becoming clear, scattering itself becoming still” as the general outline for stilling and illuminating the nine objects. Although he separately explains vajra-contemplation as the work of understanding and powerful feet as the virtue of practice, the text’s intent remains their mutual support.

Where the treatise abbreviates “open calming-and-contemplation into ten,” Zhanran supplies “open what calming-and-contemplation contemplates into ten.” From principle the substance is one; from phenomena the objects are ten. Because the aggregate object possesses both present manifestation and scriptural basis, it must stand first; the remaining nine await arising. At “the five aggregates combine with the four elements,” he expressly records a suspected error and proposes that it should read “aggregates combine with the four divisions.” This is the commentator’s textual doubt; the wording of the base text must still be preserved unchanged.

The ten objects have a sequence of arising at the level of textual presentation, but no fixed sequence in their mutual arising. In explaining the nine pairs and seven singletons, Zhanran clarifies that the seven singletons are the three obstructions and four Māras joined as the final pair. He further limits the Dharma, cultivation, and arising of sequential/nonsequential to distinguishing marks generated by past habituation; they do not import the three modes of calming-and-contemplation cultivated in the present into this passage. Crisscrossing, simultaneous, and overlapping respectively mean mutual interchange, like kinds arising together, and arising one after another. Complete/incomplete concerns only number, while accomplished/unaccomplished separately asks whether the substance of one object has both beginning and end.

Benefit and harm likewise have conditions. One must examine the weight of the object from past habituation and the purity or mixture of present contemplative power. If, once an object arises, contemplation is no longer cultivated and one relies upon the object to attain something by itself, original benefit can become harm. Gathering the ten objects under the three obstructions follows convenience of name and the predominance of a particular obstruction; it does not mean each object possesses only one. Māra includes both meanings of taking away and grinding-distortion. As for how object-marks are judged, Zhanran returns to the treatise’s warning concerning oral instructions: when one’s own path-wisdom and Dharma-eye are insufficient, one must rely upon teaching-texts and predecessors and must not use ordinary feeling to judge lightly and mislead later people.

There are sixteen rounds of private analysis. The first ten accomplish the four alternatives of shared and distinct. The six beginning with “the five aggregates are all objects” concentrate on accomplishing the inconceivable meaning. That mind within the four mental aggregates can itself become contemplation clarifies the identity of object and wisdom. That aggregates of retribution also turn clarifies that the faculties produced can turn with contemplation. The five divisions and ten objects can correspond, but stages of practice cannot be forced into correspondence.

Within the shared/distinct questions and answers, the Fuxing uses the aggregate object’s two meanings—basis of body and beginning of contemplation—to explain why it alone is both shared and distinct. Afflictions belong to a cause in a past life, while illness does not arise constantly, and they therefore cannot be judged the same way. When understanding arises among aggregates and sense fields without marks of the other nine objects, it remains the aggregate object. If it is lucid and ungrasped, it is only the atmosphere just before entry into contemplative practice. The ten objects’ ordered distinction is established according to the different treatments used for each; their divisions do not disappear because they can share and include one another.

On the question of “markless yet marked, contemplative wisdom distinctly present,” Zhanran first distinguishes an explanation of inconceivability based only on rare events as still incomplete, then clarifies object and wisdom from the nature of one thought and function arising in accord with principle. This step is the commentator’s explicit judgment. The treatise’s own answer stops with no mind, no thought, no one traveling, no one arriving, and principle surpassing phenomena. The two layers must not be combined into one original statement.

In the final two questions, Zhanran explains “causes shared, results separated” more strictly. One thought as causal mind possessing ten is easy to understand; the result of each realm also individually possesses ten without becoming confused or intermixed with the others. In “Dharma-nature is naturally so,” “naturally so” is another name for “by nature.” This is neither external fabrication nor a merely vague claim about contemplating mind, but contemplation of what is inherently possessed. Thus every judgment of Zhanran illuminates a joint after the treatise’s question and answer; none is rewritten as wording Zhiyi himself stated verbatim.