楞伽阿跋多羅寶經 義疏通講

Beginning from a single question

When a scripture opens, what is the first thing we hear?

It is not the Buddha expounding the dharma; it is Mahāmati praising the Buddha. Three stanzas come singing down in refrain, and the last line of each falls upon one and the same saying: the wise grasp not being, and grasp not non-being, and yet rouse a vast mind of compassion. That saying, like a tuning-note, presses down the whole key of the Laṅkāvatāra the instant the scroll is opened. Right after it Mahāmati names himself, saying "now, with these hundred-and-eight meanings, I look up and inquire of you," and in one breath asks upward of a hundred questions; the Buddha grants him leave to answer, yet does not answer one by one, but gathers them all up as "the hundred-and-eight phrases" — phrase by phrase, all spoken in the contrasting form of "phrase-X, not-phrase-X."

Here is the strange thing: upward of a hundred matters are asked, and what is answered is a string of "not-phrases." What, in the end, does this string of "nots" cast off? And that opening line, "the wise grasp not being, and grasp not non-being, and yet rouse a vast mind of compassion" — why is it set at the very front, holding the position? See through these two places, and one has found the gate of the Laṅkāvatāra — and this gate opens straight toward Yogācāra.

The verses of praise: first take the two extremes of being and non-being apart

Look first at those three stanzas sung in refrain. The first says the world is of itself free of arising-and-ceasing, like a flower in the empty sky. Where in the empty sky is there a flower? The eyes have grown blurred, and one falsely sees a blossom hanging in the air; that flower has no place of arising and no place of ceasing. The dharmas of the world are just so — you take them to arise, solidly and really, and to cease, solidly and really, but in truth the arising-and-ceasing is only that sky-flower within a false seeing. The second says all dharmas are illusion-like, apart from mind and consciousness; the third says the world is ever like a dream, apart from annihilation and apart from permanence. Sky-flower, illusory thing, dream-realm — three similes laid one upon another, and they say one and the same thing: the dharmas are not the solidly-real that you take them to be.

Taken apart to this point, an ordinary person will slide toward the other extreme — since they are not solidly real, then let them be nothing. The verse will by no means allow it: the wise grasp not being, and grasp not non-being. Neither extreme is fallen into. And this is precisely Yogācāra's most pressing move. Yogācāra says that the dharma that arises from conditions is not sheer nothing out of the void; only, it is apart from that layer you have falsely added on top, the wholly-imputed clinging; when you take apart the "solid being" of the imputation, that does not mean sweeping away the arising-from-conditions along with it into a dead emptiness. To wipe out being into non-being is to fall into the extreme of under-affirming; to grasp the illusory as real is to fall into the extreme of over-affirming. Only when both extremes are alike left behind is there right knowledge. That the opening verse falls into neither being nor non-being is just this: the right contemplation of the middle way that is free of over-affirming and free of under-affirming — and it is the scriptural source of this whole road of Yogācāra right-knowledge contemplation.

And what is most pressing of all is that the verse does not come to rest in the ethereal emptiness of "grasping neither being nor non-being." The close of every stanza is one and the same line: and yet he rouses a vast mind of compassion. If there were only the grasping of neither being nor non-being, it would easily cool into a stagnant pool of dead water; the Laṅkāvatāra insists, precisely at this place least of all fallen into an extreme, on joining the hottest compassion. To see the dharmas as illusion-like and yet not forsake sentient beings; to realize the twin severance of being and non-being and yet let great compassion not diminish — this not-two of the one cold and the one hot is the true standing-ground of this scripture.

Nowhere any nirvāṇa: even the awakener and the awakened are cast off

After the three stanzas sung in refrain, the verse goes a step further and speaks a still weightier saying: nowhere among all dharmas is there any nirvāṇa, nor any buddha entering nirvāṇa, nor any nirvāṇa the buddha enters, apart from the awakener and the awakened.

This saying sounds appalling. How could there be no nirvāṇa, no buddha? In truth what it casts off is not the matter of nirvāṇa; what it casts off is that subject-object opposition within your mind — that "there is a nirvāṇa to be entered, there is a buddha who goes to enter it." When the common person looks at practice, he always sets it up at two ends: here there is a "me," there there is a "nirvāṇa," and I go to realize it, I go to enter it — the awakener and the awakened, the realizer and the realized, split into two opposed stumps. The verse, with the one line "apart from the awakener and the awakened," takes apart the very seam beneath those two stumps.

Put in Yogācāra's words, this is exactly the non-discrimination realized by the transformation-of-the-basis, that which is apart from the grasper and apart from the grasped. The reason you come to see an awakener and an awakened is that consciousness itself manifests as the two ends of seeing-part and seen-part, and then upon those two ends falsely reckons a subject and object; the moment one penetrates that this seeing-part and seen-part are alike the manifestation of one's own mind, the opposition of subject and object rests then and there. The Laṅkāvatāra, in the verses of praise, already points this move open: at the true arrival at that realm, there is no "me" there "entering" a "nirvāṇa." This is the scriptural source of the Yogācāra transformation-of-the-basis that is apart from subject and object, set into the verse that opens the whole scripture.

The hundred-and-eight phrases: to set up a phrase is precisely to cast it off

Having taken the verses of praise apart, turn back now and look at that string of "not-phrases," and it is no longer strange.

Mahāmati asked upward of a hundred matters, from pure mindfulness and delusion-confusion, to buddha-fields and outsiders, to the store, mentation, and consciousness, to the womb and lineage — asked to the utmost length. But the Buddha's manner of answering is past all expectation: he does not lay it out one by one, but gathers these upward-of-a-hundred matters into "the hundred-and-eight phrases," setting up phrase by phrase in the form of "phrase-X, not-phrase-X." The ancient masters saw this move through to the very bottom. Zonglei says that these hundred-and-eight phrases are precisely the asking of the four gates — the five dharmas, the three natures, the eight consciousnesses, the twofold no-self — and are the Buddha's dharma-gate of counteraction for delivering sentient beings; and that the intent of that string of "not-phrases" is to make each one break free of feeling and cast off clinging, and so all are called "not-phrases."

This phrase, "break free of feeling and cast off clinging," is the key. It turns out that to set up an "arising phrase" is not to have you acknowledge a solidly-real "arising"; to set up the "arising phrase" is at the same moment to set up the "not-arising phrase," calling on you, upon the very thought where you have just grasped "arising," to cast it off at once. Zonglei even points out that the scripture's first phrase, "not-arising phrase, arising phrase," has its word-order inverted, and ought to read "arising phrase, not-arising phrase" — upon the realm of suchness that is unarisen, sentient beings falsely rouse a view of "arising," which "arising" is of itself not-arising, and so a "not-arising phrase" is set up to cast it off. To set up is precisely in order to cast off; every phrase is a blade used up and put away on the spot.

This carries straight on into the Yogācāra gate of casting off clinging. Yogācāra says: upon the arising-from-conditions, be apart from the wholly-imputed clinging — the dependent dharma stands plainly as being, but that "real self and real dharmas" you have falsely added must be cast off then and there; it is not sweeping away the arising-from-conditions along with it, but taking the imputation apart right upon it. The manner of the hundred-and-eight phrases, "to set up a phrase is to cast it off," is the same gesture as this "cast off the imputed right upon the dependent": to hand you a name is in order that, at the very moment you acknowledge it, you may strip off the clinging that has stuck to it. And so this string of "not-phrases" is no negative denial; it is the sharpest counteraction — every phrase set up and at once cast off, cast off and thereby disclosing the wordless native-ground.

Onward Transmission

What this opening passage establishes is not some scattered single article of dharma-meaning; it is the frame of meaning of the whole Laṅkāvatāra — the four gates of the five dharmas, the three natures, the eight consciousnesses, and the twofold no-self, all gathered into that master-list, the hundred-and-eight phrases. The later Yogācāra lineage carries forward precisely these four gates. The three natures, the eight consciousnesses, and the twofold no-self, by the time they reach the Cheng Weishi Lun, the Thirty Verses, and the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, open out along one road into the three natures' imagined-dependent-truly-perfected, the eight consciousnesses' three transformations, and the twin realization of the no-self of persons and of dharmas — and the frame of meaning that these treatises set up has its source, one and all, in these four gates of the Laṅkāvatāra.

What must be said plainly is this: what those later treatises carry forward is the sense of these four gates, not a phrase-by-phrase transposing of the text of these verses of praise. What the Laṅkāvatāra sets up in this opening passage is the master-list and the contemplative gate, not the exposition of any single article of dharma; what is truly drawn into the later Yogācāra treatises word for word is this scripture's later passages that speak of the consciousnesses and the store-consciousness, not these verses of praise and the hundred-and-eight phrases. So here it is said only that they carry the sense forward without citing the text — the Laṅkāvatāra first spreads open the frame of the four gates at the opening, and the later text fills in the flesh-and-blood of the store-consciousness, and the Yogācāra treatises take over from that filling-in.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

Mahāmati's question is short — a single line: the consciousnesses, of how many kinds are their arising, their abiding, their ceasing?

He is asking how consciousness arises, abides, and ceases — as if he wanted someone to count off how many varieties the arising-and-ceasing of consciousness comes in. But what the World-Honored One answers with is the very root on which the whole Yogācāra lineage rests: consciousness is not a flat heap laid side by side, but an ocean and the waves upon it. The ocean is the store-consciousness, the waves are the consciousnesses; speak of waves apart from the ocean, and the waves have nowhere to stand; speak of the ocean apart from the waves, and the ocean shows none of its working. This passage is the root of the Laṅkāvatāra's store-consciousness doctrine — the later Yogācāra treatises take it up phrase by phrase, and even that verse of "the store-consciousness ocean and its waves" the Cheng Weishi Lun carries, seal unbroken, straight into its own text to establish the ālaya. So with this passage, the first thing is to see the ocean and the waves clearly apart.

Three kinds of consciousness: one consciousness in three roles

The World-Honored One first divides consciousness into three: the true consciousness, the manifesting consciousness, and the object-discriminating consciousness. These three are not three consciousnesses ranged abreast, but one root-consciousness in three roles, from the shallow to the deep — and this is precisely the pivot on which the ancient masters read the Laṅkā. Zonglei annotates it as clearly as could be wished: the true consciousness is the Tathāgata-womb consciousness; the manifesting consciousness is what the Tathāgata-womb has evolved into — also called the consciousness-store — where the name evolves though the substance does not; the object-discriminating consciousness is the mental faculty, the mental consciousness, and the five sense-consciousnesses together. And so the store-consciousness is "split into two" (the true consciousness and the manifesting consciousness), while the object-consciousness is "merged into one" — which is to say that "stated at length there are eight aspects" means merging the true consciousness and the manifesting consciousness into one store-consciousness, and splitting the object-discriminating consciousness into the seven evolving consciousnesses.

This single ruling opens the joint of those four words, "Tathāgata-womb store-consciousness." The Tathāgata-womb is not some pure substance standing apart from consciousness; it is right there, in the "true aspect" side of this root-consciousness. And the moment that root-consciousness "evolves" into a manifesting consciousness able to present objects, it is the consciousness-store — the substance has not changed; what changes is the aspect of it that manifests and does not manifest. Put in the language of Yogācāra, this is just the eighth consciousness: its true aspect, the side that neither arises nor ceases; its active functioning, the side that reaches out and manifests present objects — one substance, two senses. That the manifesting consciousness can manifest objects, the scripture gives a simile for: like a bright mirror holding all the color-images — the mirror does not stir, yet the myriad images appear; the store-consciousness takes no trouble, yet all the objects present themselves. As for the object-discriminating consciousness, it is the first seven consciousnesses, which reach out and grasp the manifold dusts and, perfumed from beginningless time by false imagining, arise — rising and ceasing, rising and ceasing: waves, not ocean.

The clay-lump and the atoms: why the store-consciousness cannot be made to perish

Once the ocean and the waves are told apart, a question presses in at once, and it is a mortal one: if the waves are said to cease, does the ocean cease or not?

The World-Honored One answers with the clay-lump and the atoms. A clay-lump and the atoms of dust, gold and the vessel wrought of gold — neither different, nor not-different. Say they are different: the lump is not something the atoms compose; yet it is precisely composed of them, and so they are not-different. Say they are flatly not-different: then clay-lump and atoms would have no distinction at all. The evolving consciousnesses and the store-consciousness are just such a neither-one-nor-different: if they were flatly different, the store-consciousness could not be the cause of the evolving consciousnesses; if they were flatly not-different, then the instant the evolving consciousnesses ceased, the store-consciousness ought to cease along with them — yet its own true aspect does not, in fact, perish. So this must be seen clearly: what ceases is only the "karmic aspect"; the consciousness that is the true aspect does not cease. Were even the true aspect to perish, then the store-consciousness would perish. And once the store-consciousness could perish, that would be no different at all from the outsiders' annihilation-view.

This one sentence is the dividing-line. The outsiders say, "let the objective realm cease, and the flux of consciousness ceases; and the beginningless flux ought then to be cut off" — which is to take the ocean too for a wave, and, the waves having stopped, to pronounce the water dried up. The Laṅkā insists precisely on this one move: the waves may cease, but the ocean does not; the consciousnesses may arise and cease along with the karmic aspect, but the true aspect of the store-consciousness abides constant. This "the store-consciousness does not perish" becomes, in time, the scriptural warrant for the Yogācāra's "the ālaya ever-evolves, neither cut off nor eternal" — for just because it ever-evolves without break, it does not fall into the view of annihilation; and just because it does not stay still for a single thought, it does not fall into the view of the eternal.

The store-consciousness ocean and its waves: a picture that shows you no-self flowing before your eyes

And now, at the eye of this passage, the scripture gives that simile which runs through the whole scripture.

First the prose: as a fierce wind stirs the waters of the great ocean, so the wind of the outer objective realm buffets the ocean of the mind, and the waves of consciousness go on without a break. Then it is put into verse — just as the mighty ocean-waves are stirred up by the fierce wind, the surging billows pounding the dark abyss with never a time of ceasing; the ocean of the store-consciousness abides constant, but when the wind of objects moves it, the many kinds of waves of consciousness go leaping up and arise. Zonglei says it plainly: this verse simply puts into song the sense of the foregoing line, "a fierce wind stirs the waters of the great ocean."

In this picture, three things each keep their place: the ocean is the store-consciousness, its substance constant; the wind is the objective realm, the moving condition; the waves are the consciousnesses, that rise to the wind and, having risen, fall again. Hold fast to the relation of these three, and the false views at both ends fall away together. Upon "the ocean of the store-consciousness abides constant," one is to see that it neither increases nor decreases with the rising and falling of the waves — this side does not fall into annihilation. Upon "the wind of objects moves it, the waves of consciousness without a break," one is to see that it never rests in any one place — this side does not fall into the eternal. The foolish would look beneath body and mind for a "self," and what they look for is a patch of water that stays put and does not move; but this ocean shows them exactly the opposite: night and day it does not break off, and yet not one drop of it is at a stand. Ever-flowing, therefore not annihilated; without a resting-place, therefore no self. One ocean of the store-consciousness takes those words "a continuum, and yet no self" and, right before your eyes, raises waves to show them to you.

And precisely because it so resembles a "self" — constant, subtle and deep, bearing all things — the scripture-text goes on just below to say that the ultimate limit of this subtle store-consciousness none can fathom save the Tathāgatas and the bodhisattvas abiding on the grounds; the two vehicles and the outsiders cannot sound it. So subtle as to be hard to see; and hard to see, it is easily mistaken — which is why, further on, the Buddha "does not lightly expound it for the foolish."

Onward Transmission

The store-consciousness doctrine established in this passage is taken up, one by one, by the later Yogācāra treatises — and the one that takes it up most directly is the Cheng Weishi Lun. When the treatise establishes the eighth consciousness as ever-evolving without break, it carries the very lines of the Laṅkā's store-consciousness ocean-and-waves verse straight in: as the ocean, meeting the condition of the wind, raises the manifold waves that turn in present operation without a time of interruption, so too the ocean of the store-consciousness, struck by the wind of objects, ceaselessly raises the waves of the consciousnesses that turn in present operation. This one citation joins the Laṅkā's "the store-consciousness ocean abides constant, the waves of consciousness without a break" to that line of the Thirty Verses, "ever-evolving like a torrent" — the waves the Laṅkā raised flow on into the verses of Yogācāra. Nor does it stop there: when the treatise fixes the three names mind-mentation-consciousness, it again cites the Laṅkā's gāthā — the store-consciousness is termed mind, deliberation is termed mentation, the cognizing of objects is termed consciousness — so that this passage's three, the true, the manifesting, and the object-discriminating consciousness, become in the treatise the eighth, the seventh, and the first six, the three transformations. Further down, the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, establishing the ālaya as the knowable support and setting out its store-sense, inherits this same store-consciousness sense (inheriting the sense, though it does not overtly cite the text); and the place of the eighth, the ālaya, among the eight mind-dharmas of the Hundred Dharmas rests here too.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a place to take hold

The preceding passage set up the store-consciousness ocean and its waves, seeing "consciousness" as one ocean and the waves upon it. This passage takes that up and asks: since all objects are the waves this ocean of the mind throws up, then for the one who cultivates practice, where is the first step to be taken?

The first thing the World-Honored One gives is not abstract talk but a road. If the bodhisattva would fathom "the perception of one's own mind's manifestation" — would see clearly that the whole apparatus of the grasped and the grasper, of subject and object, of false imagining, is from the first one's own mind's manifestation — then he should keep far from the crowd, far from the mundane, far from sleep, awakening of himself in the first, middle, and last watches of the night and cultivating; he should keep far from the evil-view scriptures and treatises, far from the marks of the śrāvaka and pratyekabuddha vehicles; he should penetrate the mark of the false imagining that is one's own mind's manifestation. Zonglei reads this line very exactly: all the objects before us are, one and all, nothing that goes beyond the mind; it is only that, deluded and not awake, we grasp and cling in false imagining. The so-called grasper is the grasping-subject, the grasped the grasped-object. To pass through the false and disclose the true, one should dwell alone and keep far from the mundane, be apart from all torpor and distraction, and awaken in the three watches of the night — this is the skillful-means gate of practice. The evil-view scriptures are the root of the outsiders; the emptiness-mark of the lesser vehicle is the disease of the two vehicles; only when both are left behind can one penetrate the mark of the false imagining that is one's own mind's manifestation, and turn toward the realm of the true.

So the true eye of this passage is one short saying: all is only one's own mind's manifestation. Whatever follows below — the long debate over hare-horns and ox-horns, the similes of the sudden and the gradual, the one simile of the conjurer relying on grass and wood — all speak of this single thing: peeling away, layer by layer, the illusion that "the object stands outside the mind."

The hare's horns and the ox's horns: a trick that comes up empty at both ends

The first cut of the peeling falls upon a debating-point that looks unrelated: does the hare, in the end, have horns or not?

The scripture sets out two classes of outsiders. One class, seeing that the "cause" is used up, thinks "the hare has no horns," and goes on to think "all dharmas too are just like the hare's having no horns — one and all, nothing at all" — this falls upon the extreme of "non-existence." Another class, seeing that those formed and obstructive things — the element, the guṇa, the atom and the rest — each have their distinctions, cling to these as "existent," and, turning about, think "the ox has horns" — this falls upon the extreme of "existence." The World-Honored One breaks it open in a single word: both these have fallen upon the two views; they do not understand that all is only mind-measure, and, within the false imagining of one's own mind's realm, merely increase their enjoyment and set up for themselves a fixed measure of false imagining.

The marvel is just here: "the hare has no horns" and "the ox has horns" look like one absence and one presence, like two opposed answers; yet the World-Honored One says they are in truth the same disease. Why? Because that "non-existence" of "the hare has no horns" — how does it come to be? It comes by "contemplating in mutual dependence" — it is by taking up the ox's horns for comparison that one says the hare has none; without the ox's horns as a foil, the very thought "the hare has no horns" cannot be set up at all. So this "non-existence" is not an independent non-existence of its own; it shows itself only by leaning on the shadow of an "existence." Turn it about: that "existence" of "the ox has horns" — split the ox-horn into motes of dust, and split those motes of dust again, moment by moment they do not abide — where, in the end, is a single point that is a real, solid "horn"? It too is utterly ungraspable. And so existence is ungraspable, and non-existence is ungraspable — then by which dharma, for what reason, do you say an "existence," say a "non-existence"?

This one debate, seen through the mirror of Yogācāra, reveals precisely the empty scaffolding of the imagined-and-clung-to. Upon the conditioned-arisen dharmas of the dependent, the ordinary person forcibly fastens a fixed mark of "this is existent," "that is non-existent," and this fixed mark so fastened on is just the imagined-and-clung-to — and its most fatal flaw the scripture has already pointed out for us: it is set up "by mutual dependence." Long is called long only against short, existent is called existent only against non-existent; neither extreme can be established independently of the other, and so it is seen that neither extreme is existent by its own nature — both are only shadows set up by mutual dependence upon the mind. The scripture next draws in empty space as well: the ordinary person says "form is apart from empty space," drawing a boundary between form and space; yet empty space is precisely form, and is straightway subsumed within the seed of form; when the four great elements arise, their several marks are distinct, yet they do not abide outside empty space, nor is there some empty space apart from them. Even "form" and "space," a pair that seems as fixed as heaven and earth, have their boundary drawn by false imagining. By this point the peeling knife has grown very keen: whatever you feel to be a fixed mark, "just so, plainly thus" — turn and look, and it is all set up by mutual dependence, all one's own mind's manifestation.

The sudden and the gradual: one question that draws out the two hands of the buddha-ground

The debate over the outsiders' fixed marks of existence and non-existence being done, Mahāmati asks a question that presses closer to home: this flux of one's own mind's manifestation — when the buddha purifies it away for sentient beings, is it sudden, or gradual?

This question is exceedingly well asked, for it forces out the two hands of the buddha-ground. The World-Honored One first answers a "gradual," pressing down four similes one after another: the āmra-fruit ripens gradually and not suddenly, the potter completes his vessels gradually and not suddenly, the great earth brings forth the myriad things gradually and not suddenly, a person masters music and calligraphy and painting and the arts gradually and not suddenly — so too the Tathāgata, purifying sentient beings' flux of one's own mind's manifestation, purifies gradually and not suddenly. These four similes are similes for the side of sentient beings: the beginningless habit-energy of false imagining, layer upon layer, is heaped up over ages; to cut it, to purify it, can only advance in due sequence, and there is no swallowing it whole in a single mouthful. Seen through the mirror of Yogācāra, this is precisely the meaning that the transformation of the basis has its stages — to turn away the imagined and turn to and gain the true must pass through the successive joints of equipment, applied effort, penetration, and cultivation before it reaches the ultimate. Those four words, "purified gradually, not suddenly," are the scriptural root of this whole course of stages.

Yet the World-Honored One does not stop at the "gradual." The turn of his speech gives three further similes of the "sudden": a bright mirror suddenly manifests all the markless color-images all at once, the orbs of sun and moon suddenly shine forth and display all the color-images all at once, the store consciousness suddenly discriminates and knows all the realm of one's own mind's manifestation all at once — so too the Tathāgata, purifying sentient beings' flux, suddenly manifests that markless pure realm, suddenly displays the supreme realm of inconceivable wisdom. These three similes are similes for the side of the buddha: the moment the capacity ripens, the shining use of buddha-wisdom is fulfilled and manifested all at once, like a mirror facing the myriad images, like sun and moon in mid-sky — it does not shine over things portion by portion.

And so the sudden and the gradual are not a matter of choosing one. On the side of the stations of sentient beings' cultivating-and-realizing, it is gradual — the habit-energy must be purified in due sequence; on the side of the shining of the wisdom of the buddha-fruit, it is sudden — the shining use is fulfilled all at once. The gradual has the reason of the gradual, the sudden the reason of the sudden; the two do not obstruct each other. That deft touch of bringing over the bright mirror to serve as a simile for the sudden is especially worth savoring: the very same one mirror — the preceding passage took it to be a simile for the manifesting consciousness "holding all the color-images," and here it is taken to be a simile for buddha-wisdom "suddenly manifesting the markless." The mirror is still that same mirror; one half of it shines upon false manifestation, the other half upon pure shining — it turns on whether you stand at the wave's end or at the ocean's.

The conjurer relying on grass and wood: conditioned-arising and false imagining, two faces of one thing

And now, at the last eye of this passage, the scripture gives the simile that draws the whole passage to a close — the conjurer relying on grass, wood, tile, and stone.

The World-Honored One says: by clinging to "the nature of conditioned-arising," the mark of "the nature of false imagining" is born; just as the skilled conjurer, relying on grass, wood, tile, and stone, makes the manifold conjured marks, calling forth all sorts of forms and colors of sentient beings, and also giving rise to the manifold false imaginings — yet those false imaginings in truth have no reality. Zonglei points out the joint of this simile as clearly as could be wished: the grass, wood, tile, and stone on which the conjurer relies is a simile for the nature of conditioned-arising; the sundry forms and colors conjured out are a simile for the nature of false imagining; and those false imaginings, being like the conjured marks the conjurer makes, therefore have no reality.

This one simile gathers the whole passage's "all is only one's own mind's manifestation" into a single picture. The nature of conditioned-arising is the side that arises in dependence upon conditions and manifests illusion-like — it is like the grass, wood, tile, and stone, which really do serve as the ground of the conjuring, yet are not the solid thing you take them for. The nature of false imagining is the layer of clinging that, upon these illusion-like conditioned-arisen dharmas, forcibly reckons "this is a real sentient being, a real form and color" — it is like the persons conjured out, which look distinct and vivid, yet grasp at one and there is nothing there at all. Seen through the mirror of Yogācāra, this is precisely the mutual dependence of the dependent and the imagined-and-clung-to: the imagined-and-clung-to is born in dependence upon the dependent; leave the dependent, and the imagined has nowhere to be set up; while the dependent itself is like the grass and wood in the conjurer's hand — not utterly nothing (the conjured event stands plainly before one), not really existent (the conjured person is utterly ungraspable). Turn back now and look again at that earlier debate of hare-horns and ox-horns, and it comes clear: the ordinary person's fastening of "existence" and "non-existence" upon the illusion-like conditioned-arisen is just the rising of the imagined upon the dependent; and to break his two clingings to existence and non-existence is precisely to have him, at the illusion-like place of conditioned-arising, lay down that one layer of the false imagining that reckons things real.

The scripture, after this picture, adds one further stroke on the differences among the three buddhas, bringing the words home upon "realization." The dharma-buddha is apart from the marks of the self-nature of mind and abides in the realm that is the object of the noble ones' self-realization; the transformation-buddha expounds giving, precepts, patience, effort, absorption, and insight, and causes beings to keep far from the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields; and that differentiating mark of the ultimate of noble self-realization is not a realm that the ordinary person, the two vehicles, or the outsiders, clinging to a self-mark, can reach. One saying settles it to the ground: the differentiating mark of noble self-realization is to be diligently trained in, and the view which is one's own mind's manifestation should be extinguished. The whole passage sets out from the first step of "keep far from the crowd and the mundane" and closes with the one saying "the view which is one's own mind's manifestation should be extinguished" — head and tail are from the first one single road: to see through that all is only one's own mind's manifestation, and then to extinguish, along with the rest, even this very "view that there is an object outside the mind."

Onward Transmission

The sense established in this passage is taken up by the later Yogācāra lineage with the closest continuity.

Most direct is the sense of the three natures. The nature of conditioned-arising and the nature of false imagining — the dependent and the imagined-and-clung-to — this passage argues their mutual dependence by the hare-horns and ox-horns, and figures their illusion-likeness by the conjurer's grass and wood, and so sets up the root ruling that "the imagined rises in dependence upon the dependent, and because of clinging to it as real is false, its mark being without reality." The later Yogācāra treatises' establishing of the three self-natures to gather in all dharmas is precisely an unfolding of this one sense: upon the dependent, removing the imagined-and-clung-to and realizing the truly-perfected. That verse, "the dependent nature is that which arises from the discriminating conditions," speaks of just this picture of the conjurer relying on grass and wood; that verse, "by this and that imagining, one imagines the manifold things," speaks of just that scene, in the hare-horns and ox-horns, of a false debate set up by mutual dependence.

The sense of the perception of one's own mind's manifestation is likewise carried on all the way down. The grasped and the grasper — subject and object, both one's own mind's manifestation — this is precisely the scriptural root of "consciousness-only, without object; subject-and-object are only consciousness"; and that later verse, "the discriminating and the discriminated; because of this, both are non-existent, and therefore all is consciousness-only," speaks of just this: that the twofold grasping of subject and object is from the first without a real object, being only consciousness manifesting.

The passage on the sudden and the gradual has its place of transmission too. The due sequence of "purified gradually, not suddenly" joins to the five stations of the cultivating-and-realizing of the transformation of the basis — equipment, applied effort, penetration, cultivation, and the ultimate, joint by joint, the very stages of the "gradual purifying"; while the sudden shining of the bright mirror and of sun and moon joins to the realizing-realm of the wisdom of the buddha-fruit, fulfilled all at once. The gradual cultivating and the sudden realizing proceed together without conflict — this passage has already laid ready both hands.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a question

Behind Mahāmati's question there is hidden a fear.

The World-Honored One had just been exhorting the bodhisattva to cultivate the noble wisdom of self-realization; but these words, "the noble self-realization," the śrāvaka uses too, and the outsider uses too. And so Mahāmati puts up a hand to stop him with one line: that "constant" and that "beyond-thought" of which the World-Honored One speaks, the realm of the noble resort of self-realization, the realm of the ultimate — is this not, after all, just that "constant-beyond-thought" upon the outsiders' lips? The name is identical; how is the listener to tell which is the true and which the false? Zonglei points to the intent of Mahāmati's question with great precision: the constant-beyond-thought the Tathāgata speaks of and what the outsiders speak of are the same in name, and, fearing that the student might confound the true and fall into the false, he raises it as a question. The same in name, yet different in meaning — this passage is out to draw that dividing-line clear.

And before drawing that line, the scripture does one thing first: it divides the "śrāvaka" too into two kinds. This is no digression; it is precisely the two edges of one and the same blade — first see where the śrāvaka realizes and where he clings, then see where the outsider's constant goes wrong; realization and reckoning, the true and the false, discerned all down one line.

The two marks of the śrāvaka: one is what is realized, one is what is clung to

Śrāvaka and śrāvaka, yet a difference of heaven and earth. The World-Honored One divides out two marks: one is the mark of attaining the noble differentiation of self-realization, one is the mark of clinging to intrinsic nature through false imagining of the natures. Zonglei cuts them apart at a stroke — the former is "the principle realized," the latter is "the view raised by clinging to the teaching"; though both alike are śrāvaka, their gain and loss are forever two roads.

The śrāvaka of the mark of attaining the noble differentiation of self-realization cultivates impermanence, suffering, emptiness, no-self. With respect to the true truth he is apart from craving and quieted; he has stilled the particular marks and the shared marks of the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields; his mind wins quietude and stilling, and within meditative absorption, liberation, and samādhi he realizes the noble bliss of self-realization and abides in it. This road does truly have something realized. Yet the scripture here lays down one coldest of verdicts: he is still "not apart from the habit-energy, not apart from the beyond-thought transmuting birth-and-death." Realize he did, and the bliss he had; but the root of the habit-energy is not cut off, and that subtle transmuting birth-and-death is there still. Zonglei says that what he cultivates is the "contemplation of analytic emptiness" — he analyzes the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields apart, piece by piece, and only then sees emptiness; it is not that they are empty in their very substance. This is just the śrāvaka's limit: he can break the coarse, can analyze the marks apart, but he has not touched that root-consciousness which makes the marks continue. Look at him through the mirror of Yogācāra, and he has halted at the half that is the no-self of persons and has not yet entered the no-self of dharmas; he has extinguished that fictive self, the "person," yet still takes the blue, yellow, red, and white, the hard, moist, warm, and moving of the dharmas, to have real intrinsic marks.

And so the second śrāvaka comes forth: the mark of clinging to intrinsic nature through false imagining of the natures. The great elements — blue, yellow, red, white; hard, moist, warm, moving — are not produced by contrivance, and the good teaching of before has already said so truly; yet this śrāvaka, over these dharmas, raises a false imagining of "intrinsic nature," clinging that they are really existent. What the scripture charges the bodhisattva with is this: with respect to this, know it and cast it off, conforming and entering the thought of the no-self of dharmas, extinguishing the mark-and-view of the no-self of persons, and the grounds are set up in sequence. That one word, "cast off," is the dividing-line. Look through the Yogācāra mirror: that clinging that raises "intrinsic nature" over the great elements is precisely the imagined-and-clung-to — over the dharmas that arise dependent on other things, superadding a real intrinsic nature that was never there at all. The śrāvaka halts here; the bodhisattva must turn about from here: cast off the clinging of the imagined, conform and enter the no-self of dharmas, and only then is there the setting-up of the continuum from one ground to the next. One and the same word "śrāvaka" on the face of it — one is the solid ground of what is realized, one is the dark pit of what is clung to; and this is what "the two shared distinguishing marks" would have one see clearly apart, first of all.

Two constants: the outsider's constant is reckoned, the Buddha's constant is realized

Having seen clear the śrāvaka's realizing and his clinging, come back to that question of Mahāmati's, and the Buddha's answer has its footing.

The Buddha answers with an iron finality: the outsiders' "attained-through-causal-condition" constant-beyond-thought simply cannot be established. Why? Because the outsiders' constant is not accomplished by its own mark. This one line is the pivot of the whole passage. Press on with the question after it — if that constant-beyond-thought is not accomplished by its own mark, then by what cause does it show forth its "being constant"? The outsider cannot produce one. Either they take "the impermanent" and reckon it constant: upon the non-being, the impermanence, of what is contrived, having seen it, they ponder and forcibly set it up as constant; or they take a "maker" for a cause — the Supremely-Fine, the Person, the Sovereign Lord, Time, atoms. Yet the moment it falls to a "maker's cause-mark," what is made cannot possibly be constant. This is the deadlock of the outsiders' constant: either without cause, or with a contriving cause; without cause it cannot show forth, with a contriving cause it is not constant.

The scripture here gives one keenest of similes — the hare's horn. If the outsider says his constant is "accomplished by cause-and-mark," yet the own-mark of that cause is both being and non-being (now existent now not, now here now gone), then it is the same as a hare's horn: it has only a name, one can say the two words "hare's horn," but there is not one part of real substance to point to. The outsiders' constant-beyond-thought is just such a "false imagining of words" — set up upon the lips, and on its own cause-mark simply not to be told apart. This one simile of the hare's horn, turned about, brings out just the solidity of the Buddha's constant: the Buddha's constant has cause and has mark, and is not an empty-mouthed name.

Then what sort of constant is the Buddha's? The scripture gives its own answer, and gives another simile. The ultimate constant-beyond-thought is "accomplished by the cause-mark of the ultimate · apart from being-and-non-being · having mark because it attains the mark of self-realization." It has cause — it takes the wisdom of the ultimate as cause; it has mark — it has mark by the mark of self-realization; yet it is also apart from being, apart from non-being — falling neither into being nor into non-being. Zonglei read this one line to the very bone: this ultimate is just the middle way, the true mark of reality; "apart from being" is not-being, "apart from non-being" is not-non-being, and neither being nor non-being is precisely what manifests the middle way; the middle way is beyond all opposition, and therefore constant. Look through the Yogācāra mirror, and this is just the truly-perfected that the threefold naturelessness manifests — apart from the "being" of the imagined-and-clung-to, apart too from the "non-being" of annihilation; that which, apart from the two extremes, is the middle way, is the true constant. It is not the outsiders' constant reckoned out of the void or contrived by a maker, but the constant realized in its very substance by the noble wisdom of self-realization.

The simile the scripture pairs with this constant is "uncontrived space": as with that uncontrived space, and again as with the extinction-and-cessation of nirvāṇa, therefore it is constant. Space is made by no one; it is of itself just so. The ultimate's constant is likewise: not by contrivance, not waiting on an outer cause, it is the native landscape attained by the noble wisdom of self-realization. One hare's horn, one space — the outsiders' constant is empty of all but its name, like a hare's horn; the Buddha's constant is of itself uncontrived, like space: the two similes set within one passage, and that dividing-line could not be clearer.

One sentence of the store consciousness gathers up the whole limit of the śrāvaka

At the passage's close, the scripture suddenly turns the thread back to the śrāvaka — and with one sentence points to the very root.

The śrāvakas, fearing the suffering of the false imagining of birth-and-death, seek nirvāṇa, and do not know that the difference between birth-and-death and nirvāṇa is all a false imagining of the natures, without intrinsic nature at all; they take "the resting of the future sense-faculties and their objects" to be their thought of nirvāṇa, and this — the scripture says it with great weight — "is not the noble wisdom of self-realization resorting to the store consciousness and turning." This one sentence is the landing-point of the whole passage. The śrāvaka's nirvāṇa is to let the activity of the six faculties toward their objects come to rest, taking the objects' single cessation for nirvāṇa; yet he does not know that the true transformation of the basis is the noble wisdom of self-realization resorting into that subtle store consciousness and only then turning. He has halted upon the waves of the consciousnesses, taking the waves' being leveled for arrival home, and has never resorted to that ocean out of which the waves rise.

Look through the Yogācāra mirror, and this one sentence falls straight upon the eighth consciousness. The śrāvaka's thought of nirvāṇa as body-turned-to-ash and mind-extinguished wants "the ceasing of consciousness"; yet that ever-evolving, unbroken store consciousness is precisely what does not cease along with the resting of the sense-faculties. Not resorting to the store consciousness, he does not know that this consciousness ever-evolves — and so he cannot come to the transformation of the basis, but comes only to a "resting." The scripture goes on: it is just on this account that the foolish speak of there being three vehicles, and speak of what the measure of mind resorts to as being nothing whatever; they do not know the realm that is the manifestation of the minds of the Tathāgatas of past, future, and present, and turn instead to cling to the realm outside the mind, and thereupon the wheel of birth-and-death turns on, constant and unbroken. The śrāvaka's limit, the outsider's reckoning, gather here into one sentence: both come of not knowing one's own mind's manifestation, of not resorting to that store-consciousness ocean to which the noble wisdom of self-realization resorts.

Onward Transmission

The two matters this passage establishes — that the ultimate constant is the middle way, the true mark of reality; that the śrāvaka does not resort to the store consciousness — the later Yogācāra takes up, one and the other.

The middle-way constant of the ultimate "apart from being-and-non-being" carries forward as the sense of the three natures and the threefold naturelessness: that mark of clinging to intrinsic nature through false imagining of the natures is precisely the imagined-and-clung-to; that ultimate constant manifested apart from being and apart from non-being is precisely the middle way of the truly-perfected. The Thirty Verses set up the three natures and the threefold naturelessness, saying that the imagined-and-clung-to is in the end without being, that the dependent-on-other arises like an illusion, that the truly-perfected is apart from the two extremes — and what they carry forward is just this passage's constant of "apart from being-and-non-being." That closing sentence, "not the noble wisdom of self-realization resorting to the store consciousness and turning," joins more directly still to the ever-evolving sense of the eighth consciousness: the śrāvaka seeks the ceasing of consciousness and does not know that the store consciousness ever-evolves unbroken, manifesting by contrast the Yogācāra's right sense of the store consciousness as neither cut off nor eternal, the support on which the transformation of the basis rests — and this, with what the ocean and waves of the store consciousness established in the preceding passage, is from the first one and the same ocean. At one end the discerning of the outsider's falsely-reckoned constant, at the other the discerning of the śrāvaka's nirvāṇa of resting; both discerned to the end, and what they point toward is just that true constant realized by the noble wisdom of self-realization, ever-evolving and yet the middle way. The dividing-line the Laṅkā draws here flows on to become the root standard by which Yogācāra tells the true from the false and sets up the transformation of the basis.

Starting from a question one easily turns backward

Hearing "all dharmas are non-arising," what does one first think of? Most likely this: that nothing is there at all, that everything has been emptied out, that nothing ever arose. And with that one thought, one falls straight into the very pit the scripture is about, in the next breath, to break open.

In this passage the World-Honored One opens by saying: that all dharmas are non-arising is what the Tathāgatas of the three times alike have declared. But at once he points out the ground of it — not that all dharmas "were from the first not there at all," but that all dharmas are only what one's own mind manifests; their nature is not a really-existent nature, and so they are apart from "existent-arising" and apart from "non-existent-arising" too. These two kinds of "non-arising" are parted by a hair's breadth and stand a thousand miles apart. The first is annihilation; only the second is the Buddha's teaching. The whole joint of the passage hangs on telling these two "non-arisings" clearly apart; and once they are told apart, the scriptural root of the three great matters — the Yogācāra three natures, lineage, and non-arising — is all at once laid bare in this one passage.

The hare's horn and the horse's horn: the deluded person's "non-arising" is the annihilation-view

The scripture itself gives a most cutting simile, one that shows up the deluded person's kind of "non-arising" with nowhere left to hide: all dharmas are like the hare's horns, the horse's horns.

The hare has, from the first, no horn; the horse has, from the first, no horn — the deluded person's clinging to "all natures being flatly non-arising" is just such a "never-being." He takes "non-arising" to mean "nothing at all," as one cannot find a horn on a hare's head or on a horse's head. Here the ancient master brings down a blade, and draws the line with the utmost sharpness: this is the deluded person's "unawakened false imagining," a false imagining that clings to things as intrinsic nature, and is not what the Buddha means by "non-arising." The Buddha's "non-arising" is the understanding that "arising is itself non-arising" — the dharmas may stand vividly before us, and yet their nature has never really arisen, because they are only one's own mind's manifestation.

Hold up the Yogācāra mirror to this passage, and the boundary is at once clear. The deluded person errs on two counts. First, not knowing that the object-marks are all one's own mind's manifestation, he takes the shadow for something really out there — this is the imagined-and-clung-to, and the "real object" so clung to has never had substance, like the non-being of the hare's horn. Second, not knowing that this manifested shadow, though it has no real substance, arises in dependence on conditions and appears as if truly present, he misses the dependent — which is not a flat nothingness. The deluded person either clings to the shadow of the dependent as the reality of the imagined (falling into "existence"), or else strikes out even the shadow with a single stroke (falling into "non-existence," like reckoning a hare's horn). Both ends are in error. The scripture says it flatly: the deluded person falls into the two-extreme view of "arising, abiding, and ceasing," longing with all his heart for all natures truly to have their arising; upon "existence" and "non-existence" he falsely imagines and clings — and this is not the ranging-ground of the worthy and the noble. The place of the worthy and the noble is that middle way "apart from arising as existent or non-existent." The non-being of the hare's horn is the annihilation-view; only the non-arising of "one's own mind's manifestation, the nature being no [real] nature" is right view.

The five uninterrupted lineages: the five kinds of capacity, not the five uninterrupted deeds

Having told the "non-arising" clearly apart, the scripture goes on to open five kinds of uninterrupted lineage: the three vehicles of śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, and Tathāgata, plus the indeterminate and the separate — five kinds in all.

Here one must first take apart a word easily confused. The two graphs "uninterrupted" easily bring to mind the five uninterrupted deeds, and the Uninterrupted Hell — that is the "uninterrupted" of deeds that draw down suffering. But the "uninterrupted" here means nothing of the sort. The ancient master marks it plainly: considered in itself, lineage is fundamentally without differentiation, and only through beginningless perfuming does it come to be sorted as now inner, now outer, now great, now small, now determinate, now indeterminate; and the reason it is called "uninterrupted" is that each lineage is "pure and unmixed, without interruption" — the śrāvaka is purely of the śrāvaka lineage, mixed with nothing else, and that is all. It is the uninterruptedness of "purity," not the uninterruptedness of "deeds," nor the uninterruptedness of "time." The name is the same, the sense is other; confuse them, and the whole thing turns backward.

Seen with Yogācāra eyes, these five kinds are one scriptural root of the "five natures separate" doctrine: the innate uncontaminated seeds of sentient beings differ, and so their capacities come out as five kinds, and their cultivation and realization then part ways in their fruit. The scripture writes it most vividly. The person of the śrāvaka lineage, on hearing that "the particular and shared marks of the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields can be cut off and can be known," at once grows bright with delight in every pore — what he delights in is the "analyzing of dharmas and cutting off of delusion." The person of the pratyekabuddha lineage, on hearing of "the several dependent-arisings," at once bristles in every hair and weeps and sheds tears — what answers in him is the "contemplating of conditions and letting go of clinging." The person of the Tathāgata lineage, on hearing of "one's own mind's manifestation, the inconceivable ranging-ground set up on body and possessions," is neither startled nor terrified — what he is fit to bear is "mind-only, vast and great." At one and the same session of dharma, the three capacities each raise their own answering response; the seeds being different, even the response of the pores differs. This is no partiality in the Buddha; it is that the seeds differ from the first, as a vessel receives water — the great vessel receiving much, the small receiving little.

And what, then, is the separate lineage? It is those who cling to there being a self, a person, a sentient being, a life-span, and, hugging this one "self," go seeking nirvāṇa; and the outsiders too, who cling to "all being made by a single maker" and, having seen the natures, say "this is nirvāṇa." This class the scripture judges heavily: of the right view of "the no-self of dharmas" they have no portion, and they have no liberation. Why so? The "self" that does the seeking of nirvāṇa is still firmly in place, which is to say the imagined-and-clung-to is unbroken; and while the clung-to "self" is unbroken, nirvāṇa cannot be found — it is only "framing the notion of a going-forth in a place that is not yet a going-forth." This points out precisely: three vehicles or outsiders alike, if they do not pass this one barrier of "the no-self of dharmas," then, however separate their lineage, are in the end held off by one layer.

The three natures: imagined · dependent · truly-perfected — one road from the false to the true

The foregoing establishing of non-arising and of lineage was all paving the way for this passage. Come to the three natures, and the scripture says of itself: the bodhisattva-mahāsattva should be well-versed in the three natures — the imagined nature, the dependent nature, and the truly-perfected nature. The ancient master marks it as "the very essential of this scripture"; the whole bone of the Laṅkā is here.

How are these three natures told apart? The clue the scripture gives is most exact, one graph, one sense. The imagined nature "arises from marks" — it arises from clinging upon the two layers of name-mark and thing-mark: to grasp at the name is the clinging to name; to grasp at the mark is the clinging to the thing. The dependent nature "arises upon a support and a condition" — it manifests in reliance on a support and a condition. The truly-perfected nature "is apart from name-mark and thing-mark false imagining · is won by noble wisdom" — it is that ranging-ground, apart from all the foregoing false clinging, that noble wisdom itself directly realizes. Joined together, the three are just one road: the imagined clinging by marks (having no real substance), the dependent arising by conditions (appearing as if present, yet not really existent), the truly-perfected disclosed apart from falsity (apart from the two foregoing falsehoods, the true is seen).

This is the scriptural type of the Yogācāra three natures, not off by a hair. The imagined nature is the imagined-and-clung-to: the clung-to real object and real self, like a snake falsely seen upon a rope — the snake was never there. The dependent nature is the dependent: like that length of rope, appearing as if present in reliance on cause and condition, not a flat nothingness. The truly-perfected nature is the truly-perfected: the suchness disclosed when, upon the dependent, one is far removed from the falseness of the imagined. The deluded see a snake upon the rope and are afraid (the imagined); the wise know the snake was never there and see the rope (dispelling the imagined, awakening to the dependent); ultimately one knows that the rope too is made of hemp, its very substance the true (realizing the truly-perfected). The three natures are not three separate things, but three layers of seeing — delusion and awakening — upon one and the same dharma: deluded, it is the imagined; by conditions, the dependent; awakened, the truly-perfected.

And the most crucial line of this passage, the one that most shows the Laṅkā's own colors, is the pronouncement it makes upon the truly-perfected nature: the truly-perfected nature "is the Tathāgata-womb mind." This one ruling brings two great rivers into one confluence. The truly-perfected, elsewhere, is "the suchness disclosed by the two emptinesses"; here the scripture says outright that it just is the Tathāgata-womb mind. And so the truly-perfected end of "the three natures" and the pure-mind end of "the Tathāgata-womb" flow together upon this one line. That Yogācāra can, by the three natures, subsume all dharmas without going outside a single mind, that the seeds can have some constant support to rest on — for this, "the truly-perfected nature is the Tathāgata-womb mind" is the very scriptural warrant. The preceding passage established "the store consciousness does not perish"; this passage establishes "the truly-perfected nature is the Tathāgata-womb mind" — the true-aspect side of the store consciousness and the pure side of the truly-perfected point, from the first, to this one same mind.

The twofold no-self: only when both "self" and "dharma" are seen through does the road reach its end

The three natures told, the scripture comes home to the two kinds of no-self: the no-self of persons, and the no-self of dharmas. This is no fresh doctrine started up; it is the on-the-ground work of the three natures — the imagined-and-clung-to has two, one clinging to a self of persons, one to a self of dharmas; break these two clingings, and it is just the twofold no-self.

The no-self of persons is seeing through the fact that beneath body-and-mind there is no real self. Here the scripture brings down a whole string of cutting similes, taking that "self" apart until it is clean gone. Body and mind are like the flow of a river's water, wave after wave in succession, and no one wave is the "self"; like a seed, like a lamp, like the wind, like a cloud, moment by moment turning and perishing, with never an instant standing still to be clung to as a self. Its restlessness is like a monkey's, clutching east and west and never resting; its delight in the unclean is like a fly's, gathering to a stench; its want of any contentment is like a fire in the wind, blazing higher the more it is fed; and the reason it goes on and on unceasingly, revolving without break, is that "the beginningless false and hollow habit-energy is its cause, like the wheel that draws up water" — that water-wheel, bucket after bucket, dipping up and pouring down, pouring down and dipping up, circling on without rest and yet with never a bucket at a stand upon the wheel. Ask, in that ever-turning water-wheel, which bucket is the "self," and it cannot be pointed to. This string of similes, every one, says one thing: because it is a continuum, it is not cut off; because there is no abiding, there is no self. Watch this string through, and the self of persons is broken.

The no-self of dharmas goes one layer deeper: not only is there no "self," but even these "dharmas" — the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields — have no intrinsic nature. The scripture says: awaken to the fact that the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields are from the first marks of false imagining and suchness in their own nature; they are bound by the cords of deed and craving, arise from one another turn and turn about in dependence, and are apart from particular mark and shared mark — that unreal mark of false imagining, that force of false imagining, is what the common person gives rise to, not the ranging-ground of the noble and worthy. Why so? "Mind, mentation, and mental consciousness, and the five dharmas and the natures, are from the first apart." Seen with Yogācāra eyes, this is just the no-self of dharmas running through the imagined, the dependent, and the truly-perfected: the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields, as clung-to real dharmas, have never been (dispelling the imagined); as the present functioning of dependent-arising, they are illusion-like (awakening to the dependent); their own nature being suchness, that is the truly-perfected. The bodhisattva who knows well the no-self of dharmas, the scripture says, will before long enter the "contemplation of nothing whatever" of the first ground, passing in sequence beyond the ninth ground to the Dharma-Cloud Ground, on to consecration by the buddhas' hands and the winning of the Tathāgata's sovereign dharma-body — and the whole ranking of this road is rooted in "seeing the no-self of dharmas." When the twofold no-self is broken through to the last, then the imagined-and-clung-to is empty, the dependent is illusion-like, the truly-perfected stands disclosed alone — the three natures seen through all at once. This, then, is that one line "all dharmas are non-arising," come down to the solid ground of cultivation and realization.

Onward Transmission

The three matters established in this passage are each taken up by the later Yogācāra treatises. The most direct inheritance is the doctrine of the three natures: the imagined, the dependent, and the truly-perfected natures come in later time to be fixed by the names imagined-and-clung-to, dependent, and truly-perfected; and that verse, "name, mark, and the reckoning-notion are the two marks of the imagined; right knowledge and suchness-as-such, then, are the mark of the truly-perfected," is the very scriptural type of the later three-natures verses — the imagined clinging by marks, the dependent arising by conditions, the truly-perfected apart from falsity, all the way down inherited from here. And that one line, "the truly-perfected nature is the Tathāgata-womb mind," is all the more the scriptural root for reconciling the truly-perfected with the Tathāgata-womb; when the later treatise-masters establish the truly-perfected as suchness, and yet not outside a single mind, what they inherit is just this. At the lineage end, the three vehicles and five natures opened by the five uninterrupted lineages are one scriptural warrant for the later doctrine that "the five natures are separate, the innate seeds differing"; at the non-arising end, "one's own mind's manifestation, apart from arising as existent or non-existent" is the forerunner of "consciousness-only, no [outer] object, the object not really arising."

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

Mahāmati's question asks for one thing only: that aspect of "affirmation" and "denial" — would that the World-Honored One would teach it, so that the bodhisattvas might be apart from these two-extreme evil views and swiftly realize awakening.

The question is plain, yet it points exactly at the two places where practice most easily loses its footing. Facing this world of body and mind, sentient beings have only two crooked roads: either to plant a "being" firmly in a place that was originally without it, or to sweep clean into a "nothing" what was originally not empty. The former is affirmation, the latter is denial; the one adds upward, adds until it becomes "eternalism," the other subtracts downward, subtracts until it becomes "annihilation." In answering this one question the World-Honored One first sets up the four kinds of affirmation and points out the aspect of denial, and then makes a turn — turns into "fully knowing mind, mentation, consciousness, the five dharmas, and the twofold no-self." This turn is precisely the joint at which the Laṅkā, breaking the two extremes, walks into the mind-ground of consciousness-only. So with this passage the first thing to see clearly is: where the adding is done, where the subtracting is done, and on what ground both the adding and the subtracting come to nothing.

The four kinds of affirmation: taking a thing that was without, and forcibly seeing it as with

The World-Honored One says affirmation has four: mark, view, cause, and nature. The headings are four, but the root of the disease is one — all of them are "affirming as existent what is not existent," taking what was originally without its own particular and shared mark and forcibly making upon it a view of "being." Zonglei reads this passage and cuts it to the quick: what is called affirming what is not existent is just "fundamentally without, yet forcibly making a view of being." This one phrase, "fundamentally without, forcibly set up," is the whole binding-thread of these four affirmations.

See how it adds, all the way up. The affirmation of mark is, upon the three categories — the five aggregates, the eighteen elements, the twelve sense-fields — which are without particular or shared mark, to reckon and cling that "this is just so, this is nothing other," forcibly planting a real mark upon them. The affirmation of view is, beneath these three categories, to plant yet another "self," "person," "sentient being," "life-span," "man" — body and mind are plainly no more than the gathering and scattering of dharmas, yet one insists on setting up within them a self that presides. The affirmation of cause is to take the consciousness that is originally without cause, illusion-like and non-arising, and call it a real generating-cause. The affirmation of nature is to take even space, nirvāṇa, and cessation — those things not made by any doing — and reckon that they have a real "nature." The four disease-aspects differ, and what is added differs; but the way of the adding is one: to fill a place that is empty and make it solid.

Turn the mirror of consciousness-only upon it, and this is exactly those four words, "the imagined nature." The clung-to mark is existent to feeling but not existent in principle — to the false feeling it stands there as if existent, but in principle it has nothing whatever to rest on. That the three categories are without particular or shared mark is "not existent in principle"; that one forcibly reckons them as existent, reckons a self, reckons real cause and real nature, is "existent to feeling." The Laṅkā here does not yet speak the name "the imagined nature," yet the disease it points to is exactly the first layer of falsity that consciousness-only would have one recognize: that real world you take yourself to see is a layer painted on by the false feeling of one's own mind.

Denial: seeking and not obtaining, sweeping it into an utter nothing

What was added wrongly must be gathered back; but gather too far, and one falls into another pit. This is denial.

The aspect of denial the scripture states clearly: upon that affirmed dharma one seeks it and obtains nothing whatever, and thereupon, contemplating beyond one's measure, gives rise to denial. Zonglei traces the course of this step in the mind very finely: a person seeks within the dharma he has affirmed, cannot find it, and so simply makes an "imagining of emptiness," saying it is all nothing. See — this person is not one who fails to apply effort; he too "contemplates," but his contemplating has lost its measure. Zonglei points it open by borrowing the words of another Laṅkā translation: this is "not contemplating well," being unable to understand that true emptiness is not mere emptiness, and so sweeping away the not-empty along with the rest.

This one loss consciousness-only sees most truly. To break the "fundamentally without" of the imagined nature is right; but if, following the momentum, one sweeps away too the "not-nothing" of the dependent nature and the truly-perfected nature, then one has leapt out of the pit of superimposition into the pit of denial. The former pit takes the false to be real; the latter pit takes the not-empty to be annihilated. Affirmation is to take the ocean for a patch of solid ground; denial is to pronounce even the ocean dried up — neither has seen that this world of body and mind is but one stretch of manifestation-only of one's own mind. And so, right where the four affirmations are fully told, the scripture binds it up in one line: this affirmation and this denial are both the foolish common person's not contemplating well the manifestation-only of his own mind — this is not the state of the noble and worthy. The one phrase "manifestation-only of one's own mind" points out at once the root of the disease at both extremes: it is neither an outer object really existent that can be added to, nor an annihilated nothing that can be subtracted from — it is only mind manifesting.

Hare's horn and falling hairs: the one stroke that lets both extremes fall away

The World-Honored One, in breaking these two extremes, does not rely on reasoning alone; he hands over two similes, and with one stroke pares away both ends, "being" and "non-being."

The first is the horn of hare and horse. On the head of a hare or a horse there was originally no horn, yet you insist it has a horn — this horn is added out of thin air, and to add it is affirmation. But if, because it has no horn, you go on to say "even the hare and horse are not," then you have subtracted too far. The horn is without, the hare and horse are not without; the nature reckoned is just like this hare's horn: to say it is existent is a false adding, and to say that even that on which it rests is likewise without is a false subtracting. The second is the aspect of falling hairs. The eye has taken a film, and one sees strand upon strand of tangled hairs drifting down in the air; those hairs are plainly appearing before the eye, yet in truth there is no such thing. If you cling that they are really existent hairs, that is affirmation; if, because they are false, you say "even the seeing and the seen, all of it, is nothing," that is denial. The marvel of this falling-hairs simile lies just here: it appears yet is not existent — appearing right there before your eye, and yet not truly there. Neither extreme can settle upon it.

These two similes set the four words "apart from being and non-being" before the eyes for one to see. The dharma reckoned is like the fundamental non-being of the hare's horn, and so it cannot be added to as if really existent; it is like the false appearing of the falling hairs, and so it cannot be subtracted from as if utterly nothing. The reason consciousness-only sets up "the threefold naturelessness" to answer to the three natures is precisely for the sake of this one stroke: naturelessness of mark breaks the "being" you add upon the imagined; naturelessness of arising and naturelessness in the ultimate sense guard the "not-nothing" of the dependent and the true, keeping you from sweeping it all into annihilation. The hare's horn removes your eternalism, the falling hairs preserve the not-empty — one simile, a double edge, and both extremes are sent away together.

The wish-fulfilling jewel: after all is broken, the mind that can manifest

If one only breaks, on and on, a person begins to doubt: since affirmation is not-so and denial too is not-so, is not practice, in the end, an empty nothing at all? Yet it is precisely after breaking both extremes to the last that the World-Honored One turns out a great functioning — and this is the true place where this passage comes to rest: fully knowing mind, mentation, consciousness, the five dharmas, and the twofold no-self.

What is broken is the clinging of false adding and false subtracting; what is established is that mind which was, from the first, able to manifest. Since the bodhisattva fully knows this mind-mentation-consciousness — the store consciousness as mind, deliberation as mentation, the cognizing of objects as consciousness — he knows that all objective realms are but one stretch of the manifestation-only of his own mind, and so he is no longer bound by objects, but can rather raise up their functioning from mind. The scripture gives a most beautiful simile: like that wish-fulfilling jewel which mirrors forth the manifold colors. The jewel itself does not stir; according to conditions it manifests the manifold colors, universally manifesting all the buddha-fields, the great assemblies of all the Tathāgatas, and sentient beings, all within it, hearing the dharma. The bodhisattva who has realized the manifestation-only of his own mind is just like this jewel: he manifests bodies of every kind and sort, roams the buddha-fields, proclaims the Three Jewels, and manifests the buddha-body, by the manifestation-only of his own mind alone liberating sentient beings, causing all sentient beings to be apart from the views of the two extremes, "being" and "non-being."

This jewel-simile follows right upon the blade's-edge of the foregoing breaking of clinging. There, with the hare's horn and the falling hairs, was broken your falsity of "a real object outside the mind"; here, with the jewel, is shown the functioning of "the object is just mind manifesting." It is one and the same "mind-only": in the breaking, one sees that it has no real object to be added to or subtracted from; in the establishing, one sees that it can, according to conditions, manifest all things without losing its sovereignty. So to fully know mind-mentation-consciousness is not to have added yet again a real consciousness to cling to — it is fully known together with the five dharmas and the twofold no-self: the five dharmas gather in the whole of the objects contemplated, the twofold no-self sends away the whole of the self that grasps; the grasper once sent away, what is manifested is sovereign. This one "fully knowing" is the turning of the contemplation that breaks the two extremes into the wisdom that can manifest the myriad kinds.

The thirsty deer and the mirage: all the scriptural teachings are but the speech that points at the moon

After the turn into the mind-ground of consciousness-only, the scripture at its close adds one more simile, and nails the measure of the whole passage fast — even this very speech of "empty, non-arising, non-dual" is not to be clung to as real.

The World-Honored One says: this meaning of empty, non-arising, non-dual universally enters all the scriptures of all the buddhas; yet the teaching of all the scriptures is set up in discrimination according to the minds-that-hope of sentient beings, and the meaning does not, in truth, reside just in the speech. It is like the thirsty deer seeing a mirage. The sunlight steams the ground, and seen from afar it is like a stretch of rippling water; the deer, thirsting to the utmost, is certain there is water there, and rushes on with all its might, and coming near — there is not a single drop. Where is the deer's error? Its error is in reckoning and clinging that the mark of the mirage has a "water-nature" — that mark is existent (there really is a stretch of shimmering light), but the water-nature is without (there is no water there).

This simile turns the disease of the foregoing "affirmation" back upon the speech: sentient beings, reading scripture and hearing dharma, most easily reckon and cling upon the marks of the letters a real meaning, as the deer reckons and clings a water-nature upon the mirage. And so the Buddha enjoins: rely upon the meaning, and cling not to the speech. Looked at through the mirror of consciousness-only, this is still the old disease of "fundamentally without, yet forcibly set up," only this time the adding is done upon language — taking the finger that points at the moon for the moon itself. There, it broke your adding of a real object upon the three categories; here, it breaks your adding of a real meaning upon the teaching-dharma. A whole Laṅkā, from the head down to here, breaks throughout the one same hand: that hand which is forever wanting to plant a "being," by force, in an empty place.

Onward Transmission

The threefold division of mind-mentation-consciousness this passage establishes, and the sense of transcending the two extremes, the later Yogācāra treatises take up one by one. The one that takes it up most directly is that treatise which gathers Yogācāra to its consummation — when it fixes the three names mind, mentation, consciousness, it cites the Laṅkā's gāthā straight as its warrant: the store consciousness is termed mind, deliberation is termed mentation, the cognizing of objects is termed consciousness. This passage's threefold "fully knowing mind, mentation, consciousness," come into the treatise, is just the eighth store consciousness, the seventh manas, and the first six cognizing objects — the three transformations; the three names the Laṅkā here points out become the very skeleton of the consciousness-doctrine of Yogācāra. Further down, the Thirty Verses open this threefold division with the first transformation, the second transformation, and the third transformation, and the eight consciousnesses listed among the mind-dharmas of the Hundred Dharmas set out the place of these eight — all rooted in this passage's scriptural source, "fully knowing mind-mentation-consciousness."

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a hard question

Mahāmati's question is the most dangerous in the whole scripture: World-Honored One, you say the Tathāgata-womb is intrinsically pure, constantly abiding and unchanging, present within the bodies of all sentient beings — then in what, exactly, does this differ from the "divine self" the outsiders speak of? The outsiders too say there is a constant agent able to act, apart from all attributes, pervading all and never perishing; you say there is a pure, constantly-abiding Tathāgata-womb — is this not just a "self" under a changed name?

The question is aimed with terrible precision. If the Tathāgata-womb really is some pure, constant, all-pervading thing, then it and the divine self differ by a name alone. And the one thing the whole Yogācāra lineage most dreads is exactly this step: to make that root-consciousness, that Tathāgata-womb, solid into a "self." So how the World-Honored One answers this one question decides whether the Tathāgata-womb can stand inside the gate of Yogācāra at all. To see this passage clearly, first fix your eye upon this question.

The potter's one clay: the Tathāgata-womb is a gate, not a self

The World-Honored One's answer strikes down the doubt of a divine self in a single line: when I speak of the Tathāgata-womb, I am speaking of emptiness, markless­ness, wishlessness, suchness, the true limit, the dharma-nature, the dharma-body, nirvāṇa, being apart from intrinsic nature, neither arising nor ceasing, original quiescence, intrinsic nirvāṇa — this whole long string of names all speaks of the Tathāgata-womb. Zonglei, reading here, says it in a word: these are all alternative names of the Tathāgata-womb; the Buddha is dispelling words by words, speaking "self" and speaking "no-self" too, and it is not that self the outsiders solidly reckon. Apart-from-falsity is just no-self, and this is the Tathāgata-womb gate — a gate is a place one can pass through; the Tathāgata-womb is not a solid substance, it is a doorway opening onto no-self.

Then why not simply say no-self outright, why must a Tathāgata-womb be set up at all? The scripture gives its own answer: to cut off the foolish person's dread of the phrase "no self." There is a kind of being who, the moment he hears "no self," is seized with terror, taking it for annihilation, for having nothing to rely on. For this kind, the Buddha speaks of the Tathāgata-womb, the realm apart-from-false-imagining where nothing whatever is [to be found]: he gives him first a gate to rely on, then leads him to leave the view of self and enter the three gates of liberation.

And here the scripture gives a most beautiful simile — the potter's one clay. Upon a single lump of clay, the potter, by hand-labor, water, wood, the wheel, and the cord, makes vessels of every kind: bowl, jar, pot, each of a different shape, yet the clay is one and the same lump. The Tathāgata is just so: within the no-self of dharmas, apart from all marks of false imagining, by every kind of skillful means, he at times speaks of the Tathāgata-womb, at times of no-self — the words spoken differ, but the one thing spoken of is one and the same thing. The Tathāgata-womb and no-self are like the jar and the bowl, alternative names but the same clay; they are told differently according to the differing capacities of sentient beings, and it is not that there are truly two things. This one simile pulls up by the root the doubt that "the Tathāgata-womb is the same as the divine self."

Put in the language of Yogācāra, the landing-point of the Tathāgata-womb is exactly here: it is not a pure self existing apart from consciousness; it is that very apart-from-speech, nothing-whatever no-self gate. Scroll One already set up the store-consciousness — the true face of that root-consciousness is the side that neither arises nor ceases, its active functioning the side that reaches out and manifests present objects. The Tathāgata-womb speaks precisely of that "apart-from-false-imagining, nothing-whatever" side of this root-consciousness. And so it faces one way toward pure constant abiding, and the other way it opens onto no-self; the one who takes it for a "self" has seen only the pure constant abiding, and has not seen that it is at root the gate of apart-from-falsity. Out of the one same lump of clay, the outsiders have kneaded a "self," the Tathāgata a "no-self gate" — what differs is not the clay, but the hand that kneads it.

The mind-made body: that one turning that casts off mind-mentation-consciousness

Following upon the Tathāgata-womb gate, the scripture next opens the four dharmas of practice: being skilled in discerning the manifestation of one's own mind, observing that outer natures are without nature, leaving behind the view of arising-abiding-ceasing, and winning the excellent bliss of the noble wisdom of self-realization. These four dharmas, cultivated all the way up, bear at the top a single fruit — abiding on the eighth bodhisattva ground, casting off that body which is the marks of mind, mentation, mental consciousness, the five dharmas, the intrinsic natures, and the twofold no-self, and winning the mind-made body.

This one "casting off" is precisely the scriptural warrant for the Yogācāra transformation of the basis. The three names mind, mentation, and mental consciousness are just the threefold division of store-consciousness, mentation, and consciousness from Scroll One, which in the Yogācāra treatise become the three transformations — the eighth, the seventh, and the first six. What is called the transformation of the basis is not the extinguishing of these three consciousnesses and the bringing-in of some clean thing to replace them; it is, upon this very same consciousness, the turning of the defiled into the pure, the turning of consciousness into wisdom. The eighth-ground bodhisattva's winning of the forbearance of the non-arising of dharmas is exactly the pass of this one turning.

And for that name "mind-made body," the scripture gives its own simile: like the going of thought, swift and without hindrance. Thought once stirs, and even a stone wall cannot bar it; it can reach measureless leagues away — because what one has seen before, held in memory and not forgotten, flows on unbroken in one's own mind, and the body thereupon arises without hindrance. The bodhisattva's mind-made body is just so — formed by the power of the samādhi of illusion, arising all at once, all together following upon the fundamental vow held in memory, manifested to bring sentient beings to ripeness. The heart of this simile lies in those words, "following upon memory, one's own mind flowing on": the mind-made body is not another body newly made; it is the manifestation of one's own mind, arising following upon the vow. What the transformation of the basis wins is not a fruit come from outside; it is the functioning that one's own mind already holds, made manifest the instant it turns.

Speech is not the ultimate truth: the imagined, arising in reliance upon speech

Past the Tathāgata-womb gate and the transformation of the basis, the scripture turns to the second great matter — speech. Mahāmati asks again: is it "that which speaks" that is the ultimate truth, or is it "that which is spoken"?

The World-Honored One answers as with a nail driven home: that which speaks is not the ultimate truth, nor is that which is spoken the ultimate truth. Why? Because the ultimate truth is what is won by the noble wisdom of self-realization, not the realm of which false-imagining speech is aware. Speech is the arising-and-ceasing, the wavering, the turning-forth in reliance upon cause-and-condition; and whatever is a turning-forth in reliance upon cause-and-condition does not make the ultimate truth appear. Zonglei divides it clearly: that which speaks is "the teaching that expresses," that which is spoken is "the principle that is expressed," and both are not the ultimate truth; the ultimate truth is "the wonder won of oneself, the place the noble wisdom delights in," which speech cannot reach. He further marks out that speech's not making the ultimate truth appear has three reasons: first, that speech is arising-ceasing and impermanent; second, that speech has the marks of self and other; third, that speech does not understand mind-only.

This passage is to be read straight on with the three natures of Yogācāra. The scripture first sets up the four kinds of false-imagining-speech mark: mark-speech, dream-speech, the speech of clinging to the fault of false imagining, and beginningless false-imagining speech — the speech that arises from clinging to the color-mark, from recollecting a dream-realm, from recollecting a former grudge, from beginningless habit-energy. The four come by different roads, and are alike false imagining. Seen through the three natures, these four speeches are just the active functioning of the imagined: name-and-speech is set up, speech is grasped as real, and what is at root without intrinsic nature is spoken of as having it. And that ultimate truth which speech's pointing cannot reach, that apart-from-speech realm realized by the noble wisdom of self-realization, is the truly-perfected — it can only be realized, it cannot be spoken. The imagined arises in reliance upon speech, the truly-perfected is realized apart from speech: this division is the Yogācāra sense beneath that one sentence, "speech is not the ultimate truth."

The scripture puts the relation of speech and false imagining very finely too: speech and false imagining are neither different nor not-different. Were they different, false imagining should not be the cause of speech; were they not-different, the words would make no meaning appear — yet they can make it appear. This "neither different nor not-different" speaks precisely of the entanglement of name and meaning: the name arises in reliance upon false imagining, and false imagining, borrowing the name, grows the more; the two are causes of one another, and yet are not one thing. See through this layer, and one knows why "taking the meaning as the words give it" is the root of the imagined.

One mirror shows many colors: the several similes speak of one thing only

After speech, the scripture lets fly a whole long string of similes, to break the outsiders' false view that relies upon one-and-different, together-and-not-together, being-and-non-being, neither-being-nor-non-being, constant-and-inconstant. This string of similes is the densest place in the whole movement, and they all in truth speak of one and the same thing — the measure of one's own mind.

A herd of deer, seeing the spring mirage, thirst-stricken, take it for water, and rush in confusion after it, not knowing it is not water. The gandharva-city: the common fool, without wisdom, yet forms the thought of a city — though in truth there is neither a city nor no city. The whirling firebrand: a single point of fire in a whirl, yet the foolish person forms the thought of a wheel. The water-bubble resembling a maṇi-jewel: the young and foolish, without wisdom, take it for a true jewel and pursue it — though that bubble is neither a maṇi nor no maṇi. The shadow of a tree appearing in water: that shadow is neither shadow nor no-shadow, neither the shape of a tree nor no-shape-of-a-tree. And then the most crucial simile of all: the bright mirror manifests all the color-images according to conditions, while the mirror itself has no false imagining; those color-images are neither image nor no-image, yet the foolish person, upon the images manifested by his own mind, raises the clinging of "image" and "no-image."

This string of similes — their vehicles all differ: mirage, phantom-city, firebrand, water-bubble, tree-shadow, mirror-image — but the sense they show is one alone: all that is seen is the manifestation of one's own mind; and to reckon falsely, upon one's own mind's manifestation, of "one, different, constant, cut-off," is like the thirsting deer chasing the mirage, the common fool seeing the city — chasing after a thing that is from the first not there. The mirror-simile is the very eye: the mirror does not stir, yet the myriad images appear; the images appear, yet the mirror has no false imagining; but the foolish person takes the image in the mirror for real and raises every kind of clinging. This is exactly the Yogācāra scriptural warrant of "consciousness-only, no [outer] object" — the object is not outside, it is what consciousness manifests; to grasp what consciousness manifests as an outer object solidly existing is the imagined. Hold fast to this mirror, and the outsiders' many-colored false views are as images in a mirror, appearing yet not real.

Why the outsiders are trapped within it, the scripture also points out: they "do not know the measure of their own mind's manifestation." Not knowing that all is one's own mind's manifestation, they take the mark that consciousness manifests for something solidly existing outside the mind, and thereupon, upon this solid existence, divide "one, different, constant, cut-off," and the farther they divide the farther they stray, ruining themselves and ruining others. The way to break it lies not in much disputation, but in one line alone: enter the measure of one's own mind. The object is the mind's manifesting; let the clinging rest, and it is done.

The four kinds of meditation: the steps of one road going up

At the close of this movement, the scripture opens the four kinds of meditation, gathering all the contemplative practice spoken of before into a single graded stair.

The first is the meditation practiced by the foolish. The practitioners among the śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and outsiders contemplate the no-self of persons, contemplate the particular mark and shared mark of the chain of bones, contemplate impermanence, suffering, and impurity, taking the clinging to these for their head; mark upon mark, they cannot make the contemplation of "no-difference," and advancing in cultivation through the turning-forth of before and after, that "thought" is never extinguished. This layer reaches only the no-self of persons, still upon the clinging to marks, and so it is judged foolish. The second is the meditation that observes meanings: having contemplated the no-self of persons, one advances further to contemplate the no-self of dharmas, contemplating the meaning of the marks of the grounds, in due sequence advancing higher — this layer passes from the no-self of persons into the no-self of dharmas, the gate of the twofold no-self. The third is the meditation that fastens upon suchness: knowing that even the thought of the "twofold no-self" is still false imagining, one gives rise to no false imagining in the place of suchness-as-it-is — this layer sets down even the contemplating no-self-thought itself, and fastens upon suchness-as-such. The fourth is the Tathāgata's meditation: entering the Tathāgata ground, practicing the three kinds of blissful abiding that are the mark of the noble wisdom of self-realization, and accomplishing the inconceivable deeds for sentient beings.

These four meditations, seen through Yogācāra, are exactly one graded stair of the transformation of the basis: from the no-self of persons (breaking the clinging to self), to the no-self of dharmas (breaking the clinging to dharmas), to the non-arising even of the twofold-no-self-thought (grasper and grasped both stilled), to entering the Tathāgata ground and practicing the noble wisdom of self-realization (the transformation of the basis at its ultimate). The two obstructions — the affliction-obstruction and the cognitive obstruction — are purged away layer by layer along just this stair. The scripture said just before, "in order to purify away the affliction and the cognitive obstruction"; the four meditations are just the road-map for purging the two obstructions. The meditation practiced by the foolish purges the coarse part of the affliction-obstruction; the meditation that observes meanings and the meditation that fastens upon suchness gradually purge the cognitive obstruction; and the Tathāgata's meditation is the ground where the two obstructions are ultimately purged and the transformation of the basis is fully accomplished. From the one question of the Tathāgata-womb it rises, at the one stair of the four meditations it closes: the Tathāgata-womb is that gate one can realize, the four meditations the road walking into the gate.

Onward Transmission

This movement's three matters — the Tathāgata-womb apart-from-falsity and no-self, speech not the ultimate truth, the casting-off of mind-mentation-consciousness — are taken up one by one by the later Yogācāra treatises. The one that takes it up most directly is still the Cheng Weishi Lun. When the treatise fixes the three names mind, mentation, and consciousness, it cites the Laṅkā gāthā: the store-consciousness is termed mind, deliberation is termed mentation, the cognizing of objects is termed consciousness — this movement's three names of "casting off mind, mentation, mental consciousness" become in the treatise the eighth, the seventh, and the first six, the three transformations; and when the treatise sets up the eighth consciousness as ever-evolving without break, it again carries in the Laṅkā's store-consciousness-ocean-and-waves verse. This movement's "casting off mind-mentation-consciousness," and Scroll One's store-consciousness ocean-and-waves, are one and the same axis: there the substance of the store-consciousness is set up, here the turning of the store-consciousness is made plain, and joined together they are the full breadth of the Yogācāra transformation of the basis.

The move of "speech is not the ultimate truth," in turn, is joined into the frame of the three natures of Yogācāra: the imagined arises in reliance upon speech, the truly-perfected is realized apart from speech, and the five dharmas and the three intrinsic natures are all set up carrying forward this "speech does not make the ultimate truth appear." The Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, establishing the ālaya as the knowable support and making plain its store-sense, likewise carries forward this Tathāgata-womb store-consciousness sense (inheriting the sense though it does not overtly cite the text). And within the mind-dharmas of the Hundred Dharmas, the places of the eighth, the seventh, and the first six rest too upon this movement's threefold division of mind-mentation-consciousness.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

Mahāmati's question is short, as ever: this thing called nirvāṇa — of which dharma, after all, does one speak in calling it nirvāṇa?

The tone of the asking is as though he wanted someone to point out a thing to him — what is nirvāṇa? Is it some realm one can win, some place one can arrive at? But the very first line of the World-Honored One's answer bars that whole way of seeking. The habit-energy laid upon all the intrinsic natures, together with the perfumings seen by the store consciousness, mentation, and consciousness — let these all alike be transformed, and this is what is called nirvāṇa. Listen to it: he points out to you no new thing; what he points to is the two words "be transformed." Nirvāṇa is nowhere else than here, in the habit-energy of these eight consciousnesses of yours; it is not a matter of throwing the consciousnesses away and fetching in some clean fresh mind in their place, but of this same one mind, its habit-energy transformed. This one line is the eye of the whole passage, and it is the scriptural source of those two words the whole Yogācāra lineage rests on — "the transformation of the basis." So with this passage, the first thing to see clearly is one thing: what is it that transforms, and what is it that does not.

The habit-energy of all the intrinsic natures, the store-consciousness-and-mentation transformed: the transformation of the basis, not a separate winning

The World-Honored One says that nirvāṇa is "the transformation of the seen-perfumings of the store consciousness, mentation, and consciousness." These three names are just the threefold consciousness the Yogācāra sets up: the store consciousness is that root-consciousness which bears all the seeds at every moment; mentation is that reckoning consciousness which thought by thought clings to a self; and the mental consciousness, joined to the first five, is that object-cognizing consciousness which reaches out and discriminates. The birth-and-death of the common person flows out from the habit-energy of these three consciousnesses — a portion seen, a portion clung to, a portion perfumed; the seeds fall back into the store consciousness, and manifest again as active operation, and so the wheel turns. And nirvāṇa? It is just that this whole current of habit-energy has been turned about.

What matters is how this "turning" turns. The ancient master lays a most keen blade upon it here: to transform the store consciousness and the object-consciousness into the realm of the noble wisdom of self-realization — this is called nirvāṇa; yet all sentient beings are, from the first, the very mark of nirvāṇa, so where is there any further "transformation" to be had? — this is what is called the name transforms though the substance does not. These few words cut the very joint of the Yogācāra transformation of the basis clean open. What is it that transforms? The defiled-and-pure of the habit-energy, the current of the consciousness. What is it that does not transform? The substance of this one mind. It is like transforming consciousness into wisdom: not extinguishing the consciousness and giving birth to some other wisdom, but this same one consciousness, its defiled discriminating turned into pure knowing. So nirvāṇa is not a new winning that "was not before and now is" — were it a new winning, it would have to perish, would have to be lost; it is precisely because it is a "was there fundamentally and now disclosed," a removing of obstruction upon the substance and a transforming of the habit into the pure, that it neither perishes nor dies. You need not go elsewhere to seek a nirvāṇa; what you are to do is to turn about, right where it is, this mind that is at this moment giving rise to delusion and framing deeds. Turn the body, change not a single mind — this is the first word this movement speaks to one who walks the Yogācāra way.

Apart from annihilation and eternalism, neither dying nor perishing: because it ever-evolves it is not annihilated, because it is apart from the false it is not eternal

Next the World-Honored One sets up the mark of nirvāṇa: it is the realm of the noble wisdom of self-realization, apart from annihilation and apart from eternalism. How apart? Because the false imagining that takes the particular mark and the shared mark is cut off, it does not fall into the eternal; because the noble ones of the three times have all personally realized it, it does not fall into annihilation. The ancient master gathers these two lines up most exactly: apart from false disposition, therefore not eternal; disclosing the true nature, therefore not annihilated.

This move is precisely the old way the Yogācāra sees the eighth consciousness as "neither annihilated nor eternal." When the common person would seek a "self" beneath body and mind, what he seeks is nothing but one of two things: either he seeks something eternally abiding and unmoving — that is the eternalist view; or he sees it perishing thought by thought and pronounces it all cut off with nothing left over — that is the annihilationist view. But nirvāṇa falls into neither end. It is not eternal, because the false imagining that clung to the particular and shared marks is already cut through, and there is no coagulate unmoving "nature" left to grasp; it is not annihilated, because it is the actual realm the noble ones of the three times all realize together, and not an annihilated void-and-nothing. The World-Honored One adds one line more: nirvāṇa neither perishes nor dies; were it to die, it should again receive birth and continue on; were it to perish, it should fall within the conditioned. The ancient master divides it very finely here: the common person has perishing and dying; the two vehicles, entering the nirvāṇa of true emptiness, ashing the body and extinguishing knowing, seem to neither perish nor die, yet in truth still receive the birth of transmutation and still cling to the emptiness, still having a continuum and still being within the conditioned; only the Tathāgata's nirvāṇa, apart from all these marks, is truly that to which one who walks the great vehicle goes for refuge. And so "nirvāṇa" is picked out, layer by layer, from the common person's annihilation and the two vehicles' one-sided emptiness.

The two graspings: speech and things, both scattered upon "not awakening to one's own mind's manifestation"

After setting up the mark of nirvāṇa, the World-Honored One turns back to point out the root-illness of birth-and-death, saying there are two kinds of grasping at the mark of intrinsic nature: first, the grasping at the mark of the intrinsic nature of speech, which arises from the false and unreal habit-energy of speech from beginningless time; second, the grasping at the mark of the intrinsic nature of things, which arises from not awakening to what is fundamentally one's own mind's manifestation, and yet discriminating it within its apparent bounds.

These two graspings, said in the Yogācāra's words, are precisely the two faces of the imagined [nature]. The grasping at speech is a clinging to name-and-word — one hears a name and takes it that there truly is a self-nature answering to the name standing there, and so the perfuming of speech goes on and on without break. The grasping at things is a clinging to dharmas — taking the object one's own mind manifests to be a thing really existing outside the mind, and reaching out to grasp at it. The ancient master lays another blade here, and a quick one: if one comprehends that the nature of speech is empty and that all dharmas are mind-only, where is there any grasping left to speak of! — one line, "all dharmas are mind-only," and the root of the two graspings is cut through together. The reason you grasp at speech is that you do not know speech is fundamentally empty; the reason you grasp at things is that you do not awaken to the fact that the thing is fundamentally one's own mind's manifestation. This joins straight on to the sense of nirvāṇa in the preceding passage: nirvāṇa is the transformation of the store-consciousness-and-mentation, and the pivot of that transformation lies just in this turning of "not awakening" into "awakening" — awaken to "mind-only," and the grasping at speech and the grasping at things, like frost meeting the sun, melt away on the spot. So the two graspings are not two enemies to be separately countered; they are the two shadows of that one single thing, "not awakening to one's own mind's manifestation"; comprehend mind-only, and the transformation of the basis is accomplished, and nirvāṇa is disclosed.

The two kinds of spiritual power: the one mind turns of itself, and yet must be upheld by the buddha's power

Having pointed out the illness and pointed out the medicine, the World-Honored One goes on to a matter that seems to turn the topic aside but in truth holds fast to the transformation of the basis — the Tathāgata establishes the bodhisattvas by two kinds of spiritual power. First, the spiritual power whereby, in the concentration of right reception, he manifests a body to the bodhisattva and preaches the Dharma; second, the spiritual power whereby he anoints the crown of the bodhisattva with his hand. When the bodhisattva first mounts the ground, he abides in the buddha's spiritual power and enters the samādhi of Mahāyāna illumination, and the buddhas of the ten directions manifest bodies and preach the Dharma for him; advancing ground by ground, amassing roots of goodness over kalpas, in due sequence countering what is to be countered, on to the Dharma-Cloud ground, he receives the anointing of the buddhas.

Here one line must be asked: nirvāṇa being the transformation of the basis of one's own mind, and what is turned being one's own habit-energy, why must the buddha's spiritual power still be added? The ancient master answers most to the point: by the buddha's spiritual power one is enabled to behold the buddha, and yet it also takes the roots of goodness of the bodhisattva's samādhi, the two answering as one, before one can enter this samādhi of illumination. This one line strikes precisely the measure by which the Yogācāra speaks of causes-and-conditions: one's own roots of goodness are the cause, the intimate; the buddha's spiritual power is the augmenting condition, the aid; neither may be lacking. The beginning-mind bodhisattva, his power-in-the-path not yet full, if he did not rely upon the buddha's power to uphold him, would not only be unable to advance to the Tathāgata-ground, but unable even to keep far from the realms of the śrāvaka and of Māra. And so "turning the body" is not a shutting of the door and turning by one's own force alone — the defiled habit within the store consciousness is too deep and too fine, and one's own force upholding one's own force often has its moment of failing to hold; the buddha's spiritual power is just that augmenting condition which comes from without to lend you a hand, and yet does not walk the road for you. The transformation of the basis is, in the end, your own mind's turning; the buddha's power only makes this one mind of yours able to turn, and able to turn steadily.

For this the World-Honored One sets up a most moving simile: the Dharma-Cloud-ground bodhisattva receiving the anointing is just like the sovereign wheel-turning king, or Śakra the lord of the gods, anointing the crown of a prince and conferring the position. The prince, having received the anointing, succeeds to the royal position; the bodhisattva, having received the buddha's anointing of his crown with the hand, succeeds to the buddha's position. This one anointing is not the adding of some outer thing to you; it is the sealing-witness that this one mind of yours has already turned to the ground of succeeding to the buddha — and still it is that same line, the name transforms though the substance does not: even the succession to the position is only the disclosing of the buddha-nature you fundamentally possess, not the coming-in of some changed status.

Onward Transmission

The sense of nirvāṇa, the sense of the two graspings, and the sense of the establishing by spiritual power set up in this passage are taken up, one by one, by the later Yogācāra treatises. When the treatises establish the transformation of the basis, and establish the nirvāṇa of no-abiding, what they rest upon is just this doctrine that "the transformation of the store-consciousness-and-mentation is nirvāṇa, the name transforms though the substance does not" — nirvāṇa is no separate dharma, but what is disclosed when the ālaya and the rest of the consciousnesses transform from defiled to pure, and this passage is its scriptural source; that line of the Thirty Verses, "because the two coarse-and-heavy [obstructions] are cast off, one straightway realizes the transformation of the basis" — what is cast off is precisely the habit-energy within this passage's store-consciousness-and-mentation, and what is turned is precisely the one mind this passage speaks of. The two graspings at intrinsic nature become, in the treatises, the two faces of the imagined [nature]; and "if one comprehends that all dharmas are mind-only, the graspings are empty" is just that clinging which the threefold naturelessness and the contemplation of consciousness-only are to cut off. As for the two kinds of spiritual power, it joins to the sequence of the bodhisattva's ten grounds and the augmenting-condition sense of the upholding by the buddha's power — countering ground by ground what is to be countered, on to the anointing of the Dharma-Cloud ground, is precisely the practice-mark of the Yogācāra bodhisattva-path's ground-by-ground transformation of the basis and gradual cutting-off of the two obstructions.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a pressing question

Mahāmati's question, this time, comes with a cutting edge. He says: the World-Honored One teaches dependent origination, speaking only of cause and of condition, but has never Himself laid bare the reason of it; yet the outsiders too speak of cause and condition — they say things arise from the Supremely-Fine, from the Sovereign Lord, from Time, from the atom. Now if both sides are speaking of "cause" and "condition," then the World-Honored One's "ignorance conditions the formations, on to old-age-and-death" — does it not look, to an onlooker, like a causeless teaching? And there is worse: the World-Honored One sets up "this being, that is," and also says "observing the cause, there is the thing; observing the thing, there is the cause" — the cause being established in dependence on the thing, and the thing in dependence on the cause. Trace it back and forth like this, and does one not sink into the mire of jumbled causal conditions, endless and without limit?

The question is put with great precision. It drives dependent origination into a dead corner: either fall into the outsiders' "some cause set apart," or fall into one's own "endless regress." And the World-Honored One's answer cuts off both ends with a single sentence — and that sentence is the very root of the whole Yogācāra lineage's sense of dependent origination.

Grasper and grasped are without nature: dependent origination is not outside, but in one's own mind's manifestation

The World-Honored One answers with a clean stroke: when I say "this being, that is," I say that the grasper and the grasped are alike without real nature — there is only the awakening to one's own mind's manifestation. If one clings to grasper and grasped, and does not awaken that this was one's own mind's manifestation, taking the outer realm to be a being or a non-being, only then does one have the fault Mahāmati fears — and that is not the dependent origination I state.

The joint of this answer lies wholly in the ten words: grasper and grasped are without nature, awakening to one's own mind's manifestation. The ancient masters, reading the Laṅkā, set their blade in right here. Zonglei points the two words "this" and "that" as concretely as could be: "this" is the six faculties; "that" is the six dusts; faculties and dusts, resting upon one another, arise — this is the very sense of "this being, that is." And the reason one can say "grasper and grasped are without nature" is that one has understood that dharmas born of causes-and-conditions are but one's own mind's manifestation, and that within them there is no real grasper and no real grasped.

Follow this one blade down, and Mahāmati's dilemma dissolves of itself. The outsiders' "some cause set apart" errs by lodging the cause outside the mind — Supremely-Fine or atom, each of them a real substance set up apart from mind. The dread of an "endless regress" errs in the same place: so long as cause and thing are both taken as realities outside the mind, they chase each other in an endless demand. And the World-Honored One draws the whole line of dependent origination back into one's own mind: grasper and grasped are of themselves without real nature, and dependent origination is only a this-being-and-that-is upon one's own mind's manifestation — faculties and dusts resting upon one another, as a mirror manifests images, the mirror unmoving while the image of itself presents. The object not being outside, the thing chased after falls away, and the difficulty of the jumbled and the endless does not arise of itself. Turn a mirror upon it, and this is just "consciousness-only, without object · grasper and grasped both dispelled": the grasped object is unreal, the grasping consciousness too does not stand alone; the imagined is here doubly dispelled, and dependent origination is given back its own true face as the dependent nature.

Mahāmati will not let go, and presses a step further: is it not that speech has real nature, that there is therefore the nature of all dharmas? The World-Honored One picks up, offhand, a hare's horn and a tortoise's hair — the world plainly speaks these names, yet they are neither being nor non-being; they are speech and nothing more. He points, further, to the Fragrance-Accumulated world and the land of Samantabhadra, where by a mere gaze the bodhisattvas are brought to the forbearance of the unborn dharma — when did that lean upon speech? He points, again, to the gnats and midges, worms and ants, who have no speech and yet each accomplishes its own business. This whole string breaks the clinging to "there being the nature of dharmas because speech has nature": speech is a fashioned mark, not the place where the real nature of a dharma resides.

The deluding confusion is itself the constant: one water, four seeings — the noble and the common observe alike and apprehend differently

Next Mahāmati asks about the word "constant": that word "constant" — on what is it stated?

The World-Honored One's answer confounds expectation: it is stated for the sake of the deluding confusion. And it is right upon this deluding confusion that the noble ones too alike manifest, and yet are not distorted. What is the deluding confusion? The scripture itself gives a string of similes: the spring heat-shimmer, the whirling firebrand-wheel, the falling hairs seen by a diseased eye, the mirage-like gandharva-city, illusion, dream, the image in a mirror — these are the distorted seeing of the world, not what the clear-sighted take, and yet they are not un-manifest.

The whole weight of this string of similes rests in the eight words: not what the clear-sighted see, and yet not un-manifest. The heat-shimmer is not water, yet it plainly wavers before the eyes; the firebrand-wheel is no wheel, yet it plainly spins into a ring. It is not utterly nothing — not the sheer nothing-at-all of a tortoise's hair or a hare's horn; and it is not really something — not the real realm the clear-sighted acknowledge. The deluding confusion hangs just here, between neither-being and neither-non-being. Zonglei points it plainly: these seven similes are just the simile for the distortion of the deluding confusion, the common person in delusion taking the non-existent for the real.

And the scripture adds a keener simile still: the Ganges. One and the same river-water — the hungry ghosts, by the obstruction of their deeds, see it as pus and blood or do not see it at all, while the other destinies see it as water. As regards "the hungry ghosts see it or see it not," it has no fixed nature of deluding confusion; as regards "it manifests to the other destinies," it is again not wholly without nature. One water manifesting differently according to deeds — this stages the four words "apart from nature and non-nature" right before the eyes.

The question is thereby driven to its tightest point: given a deluding confusion such as this, why is it said to be "constant"? The World-Honored One answers: because mark and mark do not perish. The sundry marks of the deluding confusion do not perish along with the mark of false imagining, and so the deluding confusion is said to be constant. This "constant" is not the sort of constant the common person clings to — a stopped, unmoving abiding; on the contrary, it is the marks — themselves changing with deeds, moment by moment unlike — whose "mark and mark do not perish" that is named the constant. Turn upon it the mirror of Yogācāra: one water, four seeings, the seeing-of-pus and the seeing-of-water each following its deeds — this is the present activity of the dependent nature following conditions; the common person's false reckoning of one fixedly-existent or fixedly-non-existent water upon it — this is the imagined; and the noble one's being, upon it, apart from distortion and non-distortion, understanding it as apart from nature and non-nature — this is the truly-perfected manifesting upon the dependent. One and the same deluding confusion, the noble and the common observe alike and apprehend differently — the noble one does not see some other thing, but only does not give rise, upon it, to distorted clinging.

And it is upon just this point that the scripture goes on to carve, out of "one and the same deluding confusion," the divide of the three vehicles and the one common lineage: to cling upon the particular and shared mark is the śrāvaka lineage; to cling upon the particular and shared mark without contemplating is the pratyekabuddha lineage; to awaken to one's own mind's manifestation, to know the outer nature as without nature, and to give rise to no mark of false imagining, is the buddha-vehicle lineage; to give rise to the thought of deluding confusion upon the sundry thing-marks is the foolish common person's lineage. The four lineages are not four deluding confusions, but the one same deluding confusion, divided by the differing rising of the mind. And at that point where no false imagining is given rise to, the noble ones' mind, mentation, and mental consciousness turn past that intrinsic nature which is the habit-energy, and this is named "suchness" — and so it is said that suchness is apart from mind, apart from thought, apart from all thought. This one turning is precisely what Yogācāra calls the transformation of the basis: not that discernment is extinguished and a real set up apart, but that, right upon this consciousness, the imagined clinging is cast off, and the truly-perfected suchness is turned forth.

Mahāmati asks again: is that deluding confusion, then, a being or a non-being? The World-Honored One answers: it is illusion-like, with no mark that can be clung to. Were the deluding confusion truly to have a real mark that could be clung to, then the nature clung to could not be extinguished, and dependent origination would fall into the outsiders' "dharmas are born from causes-and-conditions." And again: if the deluding confusion is illusion-like, does it not then become a cause for the other delusions? The World-Honored One answers with great fineness: the illusion is not the cause of delusion, because it is of itself without false imagining and gives rise to no fault; the illusion is born from the place of brightness where the illusionist plies his craft, not from one's own false imagining, the place of fault-laden habit-energy — this is only the deluding confusion and clinging within the mind of the foolish, and no matter of the noble and sagely. This division sunders "illusion" and "false imagining" clean apart: the illusion is without false imagining, and so is pure and faultless; the fault of the deluding confusion lies not in the illusion, but in the common person's clinging upon the illusion.

Illusion-like: unreal and swiftly perishing like lightning

Following on from "illusion-like," the scripture asks a further layer: when all dharmas are said to be illusion-like, on what point are they taken to resemble illusion?

Mahāmati's doubt is fine: if it be taking the resemblance of clinging to "the manifold marks of illusion," then some dharmas would not be illusion-like — for the manifold marks of form have no single thing that is their cause, no single cause that makes form manifest as though illusion-like. The World-Honored One corrects it with great precision: it is not taking that resemblance of clinging to the marks of illusion. All dharmas are illusion-like in that one takes their being "unreal, swiftly perishing like lightning."

And so the scripture picks out the brightest simile in this whole span — the lightning-flash. Just as a lightning-flash manifests in an instant and, having manifested, at once ruins and perishes, too swift for even the foolish to catch sight of it. So it is with every nature: contemplated upon one's own false imagining, upon the particular and shared mark, it is all without nature, and one ought not to cling upon the present marks of form. This lightning-simile goes a layer beyond the earlier heat-shimmer and firebrand-wheel: those figured the neither-being-nor-non-being of the deluding confusion, while the lightning figures the swift perishing of instantaneous arising-and-ceasing. It wrenches "illusion-like" off the resemblance-sense of "how like a piece of conjuring is it" and onto the real sense of "in an instant it perishes, contemplated it is without nature." Turn on it the mirror of Yogācāra: what is called "contemplated as without nature · not clinging upon the present marks of form" is precisely the double dispelling of the imagined upon the marks of form; and what is called "swiftly perishing like lightning" is precisely the true face of the dependent, arising and ceasing moment by moment, not resting for an instant.

Mahāmati seizes hold of a seeming contradiction and presses on: the World-Honored One says "all natures are unborn," and also says "illusion-like" — unborn is not-arising, illusion-like is a vivid manifesting; do the earlier and the later not clash? The World-Honored One answers with all thoroughness: arising and non-arising are but the awakening to one's own mind's manifestation; being and non-being are "the outer nature is without nature," and thereupon "the unborn" is made manifest. I say "unborn" in order to break the outsiders' "fruit born within a cause"; I say a "nature" in order to take in birth-and-death, to break the view of annihilation, to teach my disciples that there are deeds and a place of receiving birth; I say "the intrinsic mark of illusion and dream" in order to make one leave behind the clinging to intrinsic mark, no longer to give rise to hope upon the marks — so as to teach one to see all dharmas at the place of the real, which real seeing is just the giving-rise to one's own mind's manifestation. This answer gathers "unborn" and "illusion-like" into the two faces of one sense: saying "unborn" fends off the outsiders' real arising; saying "illusion-like" fends off the common person's real being; the one fending-off-arising and the one fending-off-being come alike home to one's own mind's manifestation — how should they contradict? Gather it in the words of Yogācāra: the unborn is precisely one face of the threefold naturelessness — the naturelessness of mark fends off the imagined mark, the naturelessness of arising fends off the real arising of the dependent, the naturelessness of the ultimate makes manifest the word-parted truly-perfected; and illusion-likeness is the vivid provisional manifesting of the dependent. The unborn and the illusion-like are, from the first, the one-bodied two-saying of the three natures and the threefold naturelessness.

The name-body, the sentence-body, the form-body: the word-trap is the boat that ferries meaning across, the elephant sunk in mire is the sickness of clutching the trap

At the last the scripture turns to a matter that looks plain and yet runs through the whole span: the name-body, the sentence-body, the form-body.

The bodhisattva who observes the name-body, sentence-body, and form-body well thereupon enters into meaning, sentence, and form-body, and swiftly wins awakening, awakening himself and awakening others. What is the name-body? Naming set up in dependence on a thing — that is the name-body. What is the sentence-body? Within the sentence, a body of meaning, its intrinsic nature settled and ultimate — that is the sentence-body. What is the form-body? That which displays name and sentence — that is the form-body, and it refers also to long and short, high and low. By "name" one calls those four aggregates that are without form, and so one says name; because the particular mark is made manifest, one says form.

These three bodies the ancient masters read through and through. Zonglei judges them the "three provisional designations" — over against the one real of the "utterance," name, sentence, and form are but a threefold provisional setting-up: the name expresses its intrinsic nature, as one but says the names "eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind"; the sentence expresses its differentiation, as one says the eye has the buddha-eye, the dharma-eye, the wisdom-eye, and the manifold differences; the form (the letter) is just the graph, being that on which the former two rest. This one-real-and-three-provisional, joined together, is the expressing teaching-body — the boat and raft that ferries a person over to that far shore of meaning. And Yogācāra sets up name-body, sentence-body, and letter-body among the dharmas-not-concomitant-with-mind, fixing this expressing teaching a definite place: the name expresses the intrinsic nature, the sentence expresses the differentiation, the letter is that on which the two rest. The sense of the name-body, sentence-body, and form-body that the Laṅkā gives rise to here, the Yogācāra treatise takes up along just these three folds.

But the scripture straightway, with a single verse, points out the place of sickness: the name-body and the sentence-body and the differences of the form-body — the foolish common person gives rise to clinging upon them, like a great elephant sunk in deep mire, sinking the more it struggles. This simile is used with great weight. The boat is for crossing the river; clutch the boat and let it not go, and one does not cross the river at all; the name-body, sentence-body, and form-body are of themselves a trap for entering meaning, and yet the common person clings to the differences of the expressing as real, clinging everywhere upon name, upon sentence, upon form, and so, like a giant elephant sunk in mire, cannot draw himself out. Turn on it the mirror of Yogācāra to the bottom: this is just the present activity of the imagined upon the terms of speech — taking the provisionally-set-up mark of the expressing as a real dharma. Not so the one who observes well: he borrows the trap of the name-body, sentence-body, and form-body to ferry across to the meaning expressed, winning the trap and yet not clutching the trap, entering into meaning, sentence, and form-body and swiftly winning awakening. The self-same three bodies: cling to them, and it is the elephant sunk in mire; observe them, and it is the swift winning of awakening — the whole divide lying in a single "clinging" and "not-clinging."

As for the "four modes of exposition" and the "all dharmas are unborn-and-unperishing, impermanent and yet constant" that the later text carries along, these too are still the residual momentum of this one same axis: to take in beings by the four modes of exposition, apart from the view of one, other, both, and not-both, is not to fall into the two extremes of speech; to say all dharmas are impermanent, because the arising of marks is of an impermanent nature, and to say all dharmas are constant, because the arising of marks is of an unborn nature — this very impermanence is itself the constant. This sentence is of one flavor with the earlier "the deluding confusion is itself the constant, mark and mark do not perish": it is not to set up some other constant apart from the impermanent, but to see, in the very arising of the impermanent mark, that face of it which is the unborn nature, and to name it the constant.

Onward Transmission

The four senses this span sets up — dependent origination as but one's own mind's manifestation, the deluding confusion is itself the constant, illusion-like swift perishing, the name-body-sentence-body-and-form-body — all come home to the single axis of "awakening to one's own mind's manifestation," and the later Yogācāra lineage takes up each of them.

The one taken up most concretely is the sense of the name-body, sentence-body, and form-body. When Zonglei annotates this span of the Laṅkā, he cites the Yogācāra's three expressing dharmas: the name expresses intrinsic nature, the sentence expresses differentiation, and the letter is the graph on which both depend. This joins the Laṅkā's teaching to the name-, sentence-, and letter-bodies among the dharmas not concomitant with mind. "Grasper and grasped are without nature, awakening to one's own mind's manifestation" can be cross-read with consciousness-only; "non-arising and illusion-likeness do not conflict" can be cross-read with the three natures and threefold naturelessness. The Cheng Weishi Lun explicitly quotes the Ru Laṅqie three times, but none quotes this span; the relation here is doctrinal cross-reading, not textual citation.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

Mahāmati's question here is put in careful sequence: what, after all, is the śrotāpanna? How do such ones differ from one another, and what mark do they share? Following that thread on, by what skillful-means mark are the once-returner, the non-returner, and the arhat each established? These are the fruit-stations, rank upon rank, along the two-vehicle path — and they look, at first glance, very far off from "mind-only." Yet the World-Honored One, by the time his answer is done, gathers this whole ladder of the śrāvaka into a single sentence: to surpass the meditations, the four immeasurables, and the formless realm, there is one road and one only — to leave behind the measure of one's own mind's manifestation. The four fruits, the meditations, all of them, do not pass beyond this one measure of what one's own mind manifests.

And so the frame of this passage grows clear. The first half divides off, station by station, the four fruits, the three fetters, the four elements, the five aggregates, as though it were purely a matter of the śrāvaka's dharma-marks; but the second half, with its one line — "leave behind the measure of one's own mind's manifestation," "the ceasing of the consciousness of false imagining is called nirvāṇa," "when the mental consciousness ceases the seven consciousnesses cease" — takes the whole of that first half up and sets it down within the mind-ocean of Yogācāra. This is where the Laṅkāvatāra shows its hand at its finest — it does not set up a separate greater vehicle to press down upon the lesser; rather, right at every place where the śrāvaka cuts off and wins, it points out that underneath all of it there was, from the first, one ocean of the store-consciousness. So to read this passage is to watch, all the way through, how it turns "what was cut off" back into "what consciousness was manifesting."

The three fetters and the view of self: what is cut off is no outer thing, but the mind's own reckoning

Look first at the three fetters the śrotāpanna cuts off — the view of self, doubt, and the clinging to observances. Among these three, the view of self is the root, and it is the brightest place in this passage for the eye of Yogācāra.

The scripture opens the view of self into two kinds: the innate view of self, and the view of self by false imagining. How does the view of self by false imagining arise? It arises by resting upon the dependent nature and giving rise to the many kinds of false-imagined intrinsic nature, and clinging to them. Hold this sentence up to the mirror of Yogācāra, and its vein runs clear at once: the dependent nature is just that one side of things — that all dharmas appear leaning upon causes and resting upon conditions; the foolish one, not knowing that this appearing is from the first one's own mind's manifestation, instead clings upon that dependent arising a really-existing "self." And this one act of clinging is the imagined nature. The scripture pronounces its own verdict: what is thus imagined is neither existent, nor non-existent, nor both — it has, from the first, no real mark at all. Which is to say: the imagined "self" is, in its very substance, simply not to be found; it is not that there was first a self and then it was cut off, but that it never was, and was only painted into being by false imagining.

And here the scripture gives this passage its first living simile. It does not speak abstractly of "no intrinsic nature"; it points at the ground on a scorching day and says: there the shimmer wavers, and far off the deer sees it, takes it for water in good earnest, and runs headlong to drink. In the shimmer there is not one drop of water; the deer's thirst, the deer's running, are all a "water" its own mind has pieced together upon the spot. The view of self by false imagining is exactly this: the so-called "self" is that pool of shimmer-water the mind pieces together upon the mark of dependent arising; and when the śrotāpanna cuts off the view of self, what he cuts off is not the removing of some outer thing, but the shining-through, by the wisdom of the no-self of persons, of that beginningless ignorant clinging that took the shimmer for water. Once the deer sees clearly that it is not water, the thirsting notion dies of itself — and the scripture goes straight on to say, "greed no longer arises." This is the very reason: let the mind that took the false for real come to rest, and the greed that chased the false has nowhere to start.

The innate view of self lies a layer deeper: it waits upon no discriminating construction, but is a "self"-illusion born together with us and turning of its own accord — seeing that one's own body and others' bodies, the four aggregates, are from the first without form-mark, and yet, of its own motion, clinging to them as self. This portion is subdued and cut only at the path of cultivation and deeper still; here the scripture points it to "without form-mark," "turn and turn about being causes," "the four elements not gathering," and has thereby already directed it back to that consciousness-substance which one's own mind manifests and which flows on moment by moment. Zonglei, reading these three fetters, judges them as plainly as could be: the three fetters are precisely what the first fruit cuts off, no more than the abridged-and-full opening and folding of the eighty-eight proclivities of the view-delusions — one stroke, and the dense multitude of the numbered delusions-to-be-cut is gathered home to this one place: what is cut off is only the mind's own false reckoning.

The four elements and derived form: in the ultimate truth, the four elements are from the first unborn

Further down, the scripture turns to the four elements and derived form — earth, water, fire, and wind, and the form the four elements derive. This section, looked at with the eye of the world, is nothing but an account of how matter is put together; yet the scripture, the moment it opens its mouth, turns it over: as to the ultimate truth, the four elements are unborn.

How can they be unborn? The bodhisattva, examining on in this way, awakens to it: those bounds of "name, mark, and false imagining" were, from the first, one and all the bounds of one's own mind's manifestation, and outer objects are without intrinsic nature — this is just "the bounds of the false imagining of one's own mind's manifestation." This one sentence is the joint of the whole. The scripture then traces the four elements back one by one: the false-imagining great element of the moist gives rise to the water-element; the false-imagining great element of the capable gives rise to the fire-element; the false-imagining great element of the wafting gives rise to the wind-element; the false-imagining great element of the cutting-off of form gives rise to the earth-element. Look — over the head of every one of these elements stands set the phrase "false imagining." Water, fire, wind, earth look like four fixed and solid real things, but the Laṅkāvatāra points out plainly: they are all born of "false-imagining great elements," and traced to their root are the bounds of one's own mind's manifestation. Zonglei says the thing through here: it is not that the four elements are flatly denied; it is only that their being-without-mark is to be made plain, and so it is said "unborn"; trace the arising of the four elements, and it too is the bounds of one's own mind's manifestation — and having understood all dharmas to be only mind, the arising of the four elements is that very moment penetrated.

This is one ready-made scriptural warrant for the Yogācāra sense of "only one's own mind's manifestation, outer natures without intrinsic nature." The common person takes form-dharmas for really existent outside the mind, taking the four elements for outer objects as the deer takes the shimmer for water; the bodhisattva, at the very place of the four elements' non-arising, sees their nature apart from the four propositions, apart from self and what belongs to self — not knocking the four elements away, but knocking away this one reckoning, that "the four elements are really existent outside the mind." The outsiders would insist on setting up a really-existent "mark of the four elements and derived form" outside; and the scripture cuts it off straight: that is the outsiders' false imagining, not what I teach. What is cut off is still that same one thing — the topsy-turvy taking of one's own mind's manifestation for a thing outside the mind.

The aggregates apart from number: space was never numerable

Then come the five aggregates — form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness. Here the scripture gives, again, a fine simile: space.

The foolish one, looking at space, can never help but say "one space" — as though space were a thing one might tally off by number. But what bound has space, what portioning? It was from the first past the mark of number and apart from number; say "one," and you have already fixed upon it a boundary it never had. The five aggregates are just so: they surpass the mark of number, are apart from number, apart from being-a-nature and not-being-a-nature, apart from the four propositions; that "five"-fold "aggregate"-number is what the foolish one's speech sets up, and is not the real realm the noble and worthy see.

This one simile, with the lightest touch, dissolves away that view of real dharmas by which the two vehicles "analyze form into aggregates and number the aggregates as five." How does the noble one see the five aggregates? The scripture says: as illusion-like color-images of the many kinds, apart from the setting-up of different-and-not-different; and again as the shadow in a dream, the body of a person in a dream. In the dream there is plainly a body, plainly a shadow — can you call it "other than the dream"? It is just what the dreaming mind manifests, and was never outside the dream. To the noble one, the five aggregates are likewise, all one flavour of illusory form that one's own mind manifests; say "five," say "different" or "not-different," it is all a setting-up in accord with speech, and, in its very substance, apart. Let this contemplation be accomplished, and the view of the no-self of dharmas is made pure; the scripture says that thereby one enters the immovable ground, wins the mind-made body and the samādhi of illusion — so that to "extinguish" the five aggregates is not to snuff them out, but to shine through that layer of false reckoning by which they were taken as "the mark of number really existent," as when one wakes from a dream and the dream-realm dissolves of itself.

The outsiders' four nirvāṇas and the nirvāṇa the Buddha teaches: the watershed is at "consciousness"

Now, at the very eye of this passage, the scripture holds up the outsiders' four kinds of nirvāṇa and the nirvāṇa the Buddha sets up, and sets the two face to face.

The outsiders' four nirvāṇas differ in name and mark, but the root of the sickness is one. Zonglei points it out cleanly: nirvāṇa is a fruit, and a fruit is won by a cause; the outsiders' cause being already deviant, the fruit too is not upright; and traced to the very bottom, the outsiders' nirvāṇa never parts from a single "divine self." They cling, some to a nature, some to a mark, some to an awareness, some to the utter cutting-off of the aggregates, as nirvāṇa — but it is nothing other than, outside of arising-and-ceasing, setting up separately some permanent, unchanging "self" that bears all things, and making it their place of rest. This "divine self," said to the end, is just that falsely-mistaken false-imagining consciousness — constant, subtle and deep, seeming to bear the myriad dharmas; when the common person searches for a "self," it is exactly this that he searches for.

The nirvāṇa the Buddha teaches is but one sentence: when the consciousness of false imagining has ceased, that is called nirvāṇa. Zonglei's reading here shows its keenest edge: it is precisely by "the ceasing of the consciousness of false imagining" that the Buddha counters and refutes the outsiders' "divine self" — the divine self is just the false-imagining consciousness, and when consciousness ceases, that thing that was taken for "self" has, that very moment, nothing to cling to, and nirvāṇa is shown right there. This one sentence turns nirvāṇa clean about, off the road of "there being separately some permanent place to abide in" and onto "the ceasing-away of the consciousness of false imagining and discrimination." Held to the mirror of Yogācāra: this is one root scriptural warrant for transforming consciousness into wisdom, for the ceasing of consciousness as nirvāṇa — not the snuffing-out of some true mind, but the ceasing-away of that flux of false, universally-imputing, discriminating consciousness.

And so the Buddha next answers Mahāmati's question about "establishing the eight consciousnesses," and points out the very inside of this "consciousness": the mental consciousness, clinging in segments upon the objective realm, gives rise to habit-energy, nurtures the store consciousness, arises together with the mentation, and takes the clinging to self and what belongs to self for its cause. This chain is just the general sense of the eight consciousnesses — the eighth, the store consciousness, bearing all at every moment; the seventh, the mentation, clinging to it as self; the first six, discriminating and cognizing objects. And the "divine self" the outsiders take is exactly this store consciousness, clung by the mentation into a "self"-mark.

The great ocean and its waves: ever-flowing, therefore not cut off; without a resting-place, therefore no self

What is this ocean of consciousness like? At the close of this passage, the scripture brings out once more that simile which runs through the whole scripture — the ocean-waves.

That store consciousness whose body-mark is not destroyed clings upon the objects manifested by one's own mind, arising by the clinging-and-massing of mind, turn and turn about being causes. It is just like the ocean-waves, blown by the wind of the objects one's own mind manifests, now arising and now ceasing. The verse says it more waking still: as, when the great flow of the water is exhausted, the waves rise no more, so, when the mental consciousness ceases, the many kinds of consciousness arise no more.

In this picture, three things each keep their place: the ocean is the store consciousness, abiding at every moment; the wind is the objective realm, the moving condition; the waves are the seven evolving consciousnesses, that rise to the wind and, having risen, fall. Hold these three in view, and the wrong views at both ends fall away together. The outsiders set up a divine self — which is to look upon this ocean as a slab of water halted and unmoving, and take it for "self"; but this ocean shows you exactly otherwise — its water flows without break, its waves never rest, not one drop of it is at a stand. Ever-flowing, and so it does not fall into annihilation; without a resting-place, and so it is not that permanent divine self. "The ceasing of the consciousness of false imagining is called nirvāṇa" — what ceases is that wave of consciousness that rose to the wind and was taken for self; let the flow of the water be exhausted, and the waves do not rise of themselves — not the seeking-out of some other permanent ocean to abide in, but the very topsy-turviness of this unresting flux of consciousness coming to rest. The three fetters the four fruits cut off, the meditations they leave behind, told to their very depth, are all upon this one ocean, the setting-down, layer by layer, of that one thought that "takes the wave for self."

Onward Transmission

The sense established in this passage — "only the measure of one's own mind's manifestation gathers the two-vehicle fruits," "the ceasing of the consciousness of false imagining is called nirvāṇa," "when the mental consciousness ceases the seven consciousnesses cease" — the later Yogācāra treatises take up one by one. The one that takes it up most directly is the treatise that establishes the eight consciousnesses as ever-evolving: it fixes the three names mind-mentation-consciousness by taking the Laṅkā's gāthā — the store consciousness is termed mind, deliberation is termed mentation, the cognizing of objects is termed consciousness; and this passage's three-fold question-and-answer of the store consciousness, the mentation, and the mental consciousness becomes, in the treatise, the three transformations of the eighth, the seventh, and the first six. It establishes the eighth consciousness as ever-evolving without break, and carries in, seal unbroken, the Laṅkā's ocean-and-waves simile — as the ocean, meeting the condition of the wind, raises the waves without break, so too the ocean of the store consciousness, struck by the wind of objects, ceaselessly raises the waves of consciousness; and the waves the Laṅkā raised here flow on into that line, "ever-evolving like a torrent." Further down, the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, establishing the ālaya as the knowable support and making plain its store-sense, inherits too this store-consciousness sense (inheriting the sense, though it does not separately cite the text); and the place of the eighth, the ālaya, among the eight mind-dharmas of the Hundred Dharmas rests here as well.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a question that presses hard

Mahāmati asks it point-blank: since the World-Honored One is, in the end, only the one vehicle, why does he always speak of three — śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva — and just will not say the one vehicle outright?

The question looks as though it asks only about a "gateway of teaching," but it presses to the root. If in the end there is only the one vehicle, are the three vehicles not then a provisional word, a skillful means? Yet the Buddha's answer does not circle round on "provisional and real." It points, plainly and concretely, to a single fact: it is not that the Buddha is hiding the one vehicle and will not give it — it is that the persons of the two vehicles still carry three things unfinished within them, and so that one vehicle is more than they can, at this moment, take up. These three the passage names in a single breath: the karmic habit-energy of the afflictive obstruction is not cut off; they do not awaken to the no-self of dharmas; they do not escape the birth-and-death of segments. Read on down these three lines, and the whole framework of the Yogācāra lineage — the two obstructions, the twofold no-self, the two kinds of birth-and-death — stands up within this one passage. So this passage is not about the gateway of teaching; it is about "where a practitioner still falls short of the Buddha."

The first thing unfinished: the present activity cut off, the habit-energy still there

Look first at the first line: the karmic habit-energy of the afflictive obstruction is not cut off.

Here two layers must be told apart. It is not that the persons of the two vehicles have cut off nothing of the afflictions — they have cut off the present activity of the afflictions; the coarse delusions of craving and anger that flare up in the moment, these the sages have indeed subdued and cut off. But when the affliction's present activity is cut off, there remains a further layer of "habit-energy": like incense carried out of a room, whose lingering scent yet clings to the walls; like a long-closed jar emptied out, whose smell yet perfumes the air. This residual perfuming is not the affliction itself, but the trace the affliction has perfumed in — so fine that the two vehicles' insight cannot reach to it, nor need it reach; for so long as they are out of the birth-and-death of segments, that is enough for their own individual release.

Hold this line up to the mirror of Yogācāra, and it shows exactly the dividing of the "two obstructions." The afflictive obstruction obstructs release; and there is a subtler one, the cognitive obstruction, that obstructs the wisdom that knows all things. What the two vehicles take as their object of counteraction is the afflictive obstruction alone, and that only to the layer of present activity; the cognitive obstruction, and the karmic habit-energy that lies beneath the afflictive obstruction, they leave wholly untouched. This is the source of that old Yogācāra saying: the two vehicles cut off the afflictive obstruction, but not the cognitive obstruction. This passage's line, "the habit-energy is not cut off," is precisely the scriptural ground for that saying. So long as the habit-energy is not exhausted, the wisdom that knows every kind is a day from full, and the inconceivable sovereignty of the buddha-ground is more than one can take up — and this is the first real reason for "not speaking the one vehicle," and not that the Buddha is stingy with the dharma.

The second and third: only half a "self" broken, only half a death escaped

The second line: they do not awaken to the no-self of dharmas.

The "self" is of two layers. One is the self of persons — taking the body-and-mind that is the coming-together of the five aggregates and clinging to it as a real self; this layer the two vehicles break, realizing the no-self of persons, and so are able to win escape. But there is a further, subtler layer, the self of dharmas — taking those "dharmas" that make up body-mind-and-world, whether form or mind, and clinging to each as having its own real substance; this layer the two vehicles do not break. Zonglei says it flatly: the two vehicles break the clinging to a person, but not the clinging to dharmas, and so it is said of them that "they do not awaken to the no-self of dharmas." They stand within "no-self," but in truth have stepped only halfway in: on the side of persons it is emptied, but on the side of dharmas it still stands there, solid and real. And the reason Yogācāra sets up the three natures and the threefold naturelessness is precisely to empty out this latter half as well — that the imagined nature is utterly without being, that the dependent nature is illusion-like, that the truly-perfected is thereby made manifest: this is what it is to awaken to the no-self of dharmas. Half a no-self will not bear the weight of the one vehicle.

The third line: they do not escape the birth-and-death of segments.

Birth-and-death, too, is of two layers. One is the birth-and-death of segments — a life of a set span and shape, receiving its recompense according to the deed, this life finished and another taken up; and it is just this layer that the two vehicles escape. But there is a further layer, the birth-and-death of transformation — the bodhisattva who turns his mind, casting off the coarse body, by the power of vow and the power of wisdom taking on that subtle support which shifts and changes thought by thought, until buddhahood is reached and it is spent at last; and this layer the two vehicles have not so much as touched the edge of. Zonglei points it out, following on: though they have cut off the body of afflictions that summons the segments, what they dwell in is still the segments, not yet the transformation. So "they do not escape the birth-and-death of segments" does not mean they are still turning in the wheel and suffering; it means the birth-and-death they have finished is only that coarse, segmented layer, and that deeper layer — the birth-and-death of transformation, which can be turned only by the fine counteraction of the clinging to dharmas and the cognitive obstruction — is still far from them. Read the three lines together: the habit-energy unexhausted, the clinging to dharmas unbroken, the transformation untouched — this is exactly that whole stretch of road the Yogācāra marks between "the utmost fruit of the two vehicles" and "the buddha-ground." The Buddha does not speak the one vehicle because to speak the one vehicle to a person standing here is to bid one still on the road to take the halfway mark for the terminus.

Two pictures: the driftwood and the drunken man

Once the doctrine has been said this far, what is most full of compassion in this passage is that it does not stop at the judging. It paints the person of the two vehicles two portraits — one his mark at this moment, one the road of his turning back hereafter.

First the driftwood. The scripture says: just as a piece of driftwood on the sea is forever turned about by the waves, so too the foolish śrāvaka is buffeted by the wind of "marks." This picture is seen through only when held up together with that ocean of the store-consciousness of the earlier scroll. There, the store-consciousness is the sea, the objective realm is the wind, the consciousnesses are the waves; here, the śrāvaka is just that one piece of driftwood on the sea's face. He too is upon this ocean of consciousness, he too is blown by the wind of the objective realm — only he has not recognized that this sea is his own mind's manifestation, and so he drifts with the wind of marks wherever it carries him, unable to be his own master. Put in the language of Yogācāra: not understanding that the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only, he is turned by marks. One piece of driftwood carries, upon it, just those four words, "not yet awakened to the no-self of dharmas" — it does not sink, yet neither can it go of itself to the far shore; it turns and turns there in the waves.

Then the drunken man. The scripture says: just as one deeply drunk awakens only when the wine has worn away, so too is that dharma of his awakening — awakening, he wins the Buddha's supreme body. This picture paints not a mark but a turning-point. Once the two vehicles are out of the segments, they relish the joy of samādhi, abide at ease in the uncontaminated realm, and can abide so, unawakened, through long aeons — like a man drunk to the ground, sunk in stupor, taking himself for safe and sound. Yet the scripture goes straight on to say: he turns back no more. This line is the crucial one — he is drunk, but he will not drink himself to death there; the wine of that samādhi-joy has, at the last, its day of wearing away. The wine worn off, the man awake, this waking is no return to where he stood before — it is "winning the Buddha's supreme body." Drunk, is to relish the samādhi; awake, is what the scripture-text says: the fault of the arisen afflictions cut off, awakened to the no-self of dharmas, and of the relished joy of samādhi it is known to be without intrinsic nature — the three things unfinished, here one by one finished. So the picture of the drunken man paints the whole arc of turning the mind toward the great vehicle: from the sinking, to the waking, to the going toward the Tathāgata's dharma-body. The first picture, the driftwood, tells where he is trapped at this moment; the second, the drunken man, points to where he wakes toward hereafter.

Onward Transmission

The judgment established in this passage — the two obstructions, the twofold no-self, the two kinds of birth-and-death, ending, by the habit-energy cut off, awakening to the no-self of dharmas, and entering the uncontaminated realm, in the turning toward the Tathāgata's dharma-body — the later Yogācāra treatises take up, one by one, in its meaning. Where the treatises judge that the two vehicles cut off the afflictive obstruction but not the cognitive obstruction, judge the twofold no-self of persons and dharmas, judge the two kinds of birth-and-death of segments and transformation, and judge that the mind-turning bodhisattva subdues and cuts off the habit-energy and turns the basis toward the dharma-body — every line cleaves to this passage's threefold judgment: the passage, upon the scripture, establishes their "what is not yet cut off, not yet awakened to, not yet escaped," and the treatises open this out into the fine judging of the stages of cultivation-and-realization. As for that line, "so too is that dharma of his awakening — he wins the Buddha's supreme body" — the fruit toward which the two vehicles go when drunkenness turns to waking becomes, in the Yogācāra, those two words, the transformation of the basis: turning the basis that is affliction and winning the great nirvāṇa, turning the basis that is the knowable and winning the great awakening. This passage's one stretch of prose and one set of verses says to the full "why the three vehicles are not ultimate, why the one vehicle belongs to the Tathāgata alone," and thereby lays down, upon the scripture, the very root of that whole later doctrine of turning the basis toward buddhahood.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement's noble wisdom of self-realization may be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and this passage cannot be declared the unique ground of Patriarchal Chan.

Beginning from a saying that runs against the grain

In this passage the Buddha says three things, and each of them sounds, on first hearing, decidedly out of the ordinary.

The first: that a bodhisattva can win three kinds of "mind-made body" — a body that comes to be at the wish of the mind, and does not arise from the essence-and-blood of father and mother. The second: that a man may commit crimes as grave as the five deeds of immediate retribution and yet "not enter the hell of no reprieve." The third, and strangest of all: that the Buddha says of himself that from the night he won awakening to the night he entered nirvāṇa, in between he "did not speak one word" — a buddha who taught the dharma for forty-nine years, insisting that he never spoke a single word.

Three sayings; and if you take each of them at the letter and hear them apart, each sounds more preposterous than the last. But string them together, and you find that they point to one and the same thing: body, deed, and dharma — every one of them, at the ultimate, is not "out there," but in one's own mind; and the ultimate of that mind is apart from speech. This passage is precisely a summons to take the three things — "body," "deed," "dharma" — and draw them, one by one, back into one's own mind to look at them. Put in the language of Yogācāra, this is a passage that teaches "the transformation of the basis" and "the intrinsic nature apart from speech."

The mind-made body: a body brought about by the transformation of the basis

Take the body first.

The body of an ordinary being is dragged into being by deed and by craving, made of the four great elements, received joint by joint and requited stretch by stretch, with no say in the matter of its own. But the mind-made body the scripture speaks of is not like this — it "comes to be at the will's wish": the mind's wish so much as stirs, and the body appears with it. Where does such a body come from? The scripture gives the key in four words: "body and mind are transformed." It is not that a new body is exchanged for the old one outside it; it is that this same body-and-mind has had its basis turned. This is just what Yogācāra means by "the transformation of the basis": not that the defiled dharmas are carted off and the pure dharmas carted in, but that the one same dependent nature, in delusion, manifests a birth-and-death body, and, in awakening, manifests a mind-made body. Let the basis but turn, and the body alters with it.

The scripture ranges the three mind-made bodies from the shallow to the deep by station. The one belonging to the third, fourth, and fifth grounds is called the samādhi-bliss-of-right-reception mind-made body — in meditative absorption one "abides in the ocean of the mind, and the mark of the consciousness that raises the waves no longer arises." This line follows straight on from the ocean of the store-consciousness of the earlier passage: before, the waves of consciousness went leaping up without a break, following the wind of objects; here, the waves have subsided, the surface of the ocean has fallen still, and the practitioner "knows the objective realm manifested by his own mind to be with or without intrinsic nature" — knows that the realm he faces is in truth his own mind's manifestation, without a fixed nature of its own, and so no longer chases the waves. The one belonging to the eighth ground is called the mind-made body of awakening-to-the-intrinsic-nature-of-dharmas — and here the scripture strings together four similes at once: like an illusion, like a dream, like the moon in water, like the image in a mirror. These four things have one point in common: they present themselves plainly before you, and yet are utterly without substance; reach into the water for that moon and you cannot take hold of it, and yet there it is, clear as clear, shining. The body won by the eighth-ground bodhisattva is just such a thing — "not made and not something made, yet as though made and something made." Say it is made? No, it is illusion-like and unreal. Say it is not made? Yet it is furnished in full with color-marks, swift according to one's wish, adorned as with a marvelous flower, able to enter at will into all the buddha-fields. Manifest yet not real, not real yet manifest — this is precisely the body that is won only when one has penetrated "the intrinsic nature of dharmas," penetrated the fact that all dharmas are but one's own mind's manifestation, illusion-like and yet existent. The last kind, the mind-made body born-of-its-kind-and-free-of-contrivance, is one that has awakened to all the buddha-dharmas and taken as its object the bliss won through its own condition, reaching the station of contrivance-free practice, coming to be spontaneously, without so much as an act of attention needing to be raised.

Ranged out, the three bodies are one road of the transformation of the basis, from the shallow to the deep: from the stilling of the waves in meditative absorption, to the transformation of body and mind through contemplating dharmas as illusion-like, to the spontaneity of contrivance-free practice. Zonglei points it precisely in one line: these three bodies are "the path by which the bodhisattva of the pervasive teaching practices for himself and transforms others," and the Tathāgata tells it to all, unasked — for it is what one who walks the bodhisattva path cannot but know. Not knowing this road, one would take the mind-made body for some marvel of spiritual power and covet it; knowing it, one sees that it is nothing but the working that naturally arises once "one's own mind's manifestation" has been seen through to the bottom and the basis turned to the bottom.

The five deeds of immediate retribution: reading five outer crimes as five inward cuttings-off

Take the deed next.

The five deeds of immediate retribution — the killing of father, the killing of mother, the harming of an arhat, the wrecking of the assembly, the drawing of blood from the Buddha's body — are the five gravest deadly crimes in the discipline; commit them, and one must fall into the hell of no interval. On this point Zonglei is not in the least equivocal: "the five deeds of immediate retribution are the very extreme of evil deadliness; whoever does these deeds must undergo the retribution of the hell of no interval." How, then, does the Buddha come to say that there is one who commits the five deeds of immediate retribution and yet does not enter the hell?

The key lies in the manner of the Buddha's answer. Zonglei points it out: the Buddha "first lists the names according to the deeds, then attests and expounds them in terms of the dharma" — he first sets out the five names according to their outward form, then explains them over again, one by one, in terms of the inner dharma. And so every "outer crime" is read as an "inward cutting-off." The mother is that "craving" which summons future existence and arises together with delight and desire; the father is that "ignorance" which drives one into the settlement of the six sense-fields — to cut off these two roots of birth-and-death, craving and ignorance, is called "the killing of father and mother." Those latent fetters that do not presently function, yet, like a rat-poison, are bound at last to break out — to cut them off utterly within all dharmas is called "the harming of an arhat." The five aggregates, of marks that differ each from each, joined and heaped together — to cut off this heap is called "the wrecking of the assembly." And the most perilous line comes at the end: "not awakening to the outer particular-and-shared marks — there being but the sevenfold body of consciousness that is one's own mind's manifestation — and, with the unstained right knowledge that breaks false imagining by way of the three gates of liberation, cutting off utterly those seven kinds of consciousness that are the Buddha" — to cut off those seven evolving consciousnesses that fail to awaken to the outer objects and take them for real things outside the mind is called "the drawing of blood from the Buddha's body."

The most worth pondering thing in this passage is why "consciousness" should be called "Buddha." Because the ordinary being's deepest grasping is to take this consciousness that can cognize for a true, constant, indestructible "self," and take it for a "Buddha" one may go to for refuge; and Yogācāra is bent on cutting precisely this grasping — the seven evolving consciousnesses are the dependent nature, are one's own mind's manifestation, and are not some real Buddha existing apart, outside the mind. Only when this grasping-at-consciousness-as-Buddha is cut off is there a true "drawing of blood from the Buddha's body." So the whole set of five deeds of immediate retribution, read inwardly, is exactly a picture of the Yogācāra cutting-off of the two obstructions: cutting off craving and ignorance (the root of the affliction-obstruction), cutting off the fetters (the latencies), cutting off the grasping-at-the-aggregates (the view of a real self in the perishable), cutting off the view of the seven consciousnesses as real (the grasping-at-a-self-in-dharmas, the cognitive obstruction). Zonglei's one verdict is the best of it: "though the names follow the deadly deeds, the dharma is in truth only conformable." The names are deadly; the sense of the dharma is conformable — conformable to the right path of cutting off delusion along the measure that is one's own mind's manifestation.

What matters is that this inner reading is not a letting-off of the outer crimes with a light hand. The scripture at once sets up an "outer immediate-retribution" and draws the line plainly: one who has truly done the outer five deeds of immediate retribution wins, within the three gates of liberation, "not one of those like-of-immediate-retribution dharmas." The "immediate-retribution" of the inner reading cuts off delusion; the "immediate-retribution" of the outer doing wins the hell. The two are not to be confused. The Laṅkā's turning of the five deeds of immediate retribution into the inner dharma is not an acquittal for the one who kills his father, but a pointing-out for the one who cultivates: what you truly need to cut off "without interval" is those five roots within the mind.

Not one word spoken: the dharma is the abiding one, and the Buddha has only walked into that ancient city

Take the dharma last — and this is the eye of the whole passage.

The Buddha says of himself that in one night he won awakening and in one night he entered nirvāṇa, and in between did not speak one word. Zonglei points out that this question follows on from the "four samenesses" — the foregoing said that the Buddha is of the same letter, the same speech, the same dharma, the same body as the buddhas of the three times, and all of that still "trenches on verbal telling," still stands on the plane of speech; and so Mahāmati presses one line further: did he, then, speak or not? The Buddha answers with two dharmas: the dharma won through one's own condition, and the abiding dharma.

Take first "the dharma won through one's own condition." What the Buddha has realized is "apart from the false imagining of speech, apart from the two tendencies of the letter" — it lies, of itself, in the place where speech and the letter cannot reach. This is just what Yogācāra means by "the intrinsic nature apart from speech": the truly-perfected, the ultimate truth, is apart from all that expresses and all that is expressed; whatever falls to verbal telling is already the shadow of the imagined-and-clung-to, and not that "won-of-itself" realm itself. So, as regards "what is realized," there is in truth not one word that can be spoken — not that the Buddha is unwilling to speak, but that the realm is of itself beyond the reach of speech.

Take next "the abiding dharma," and here the scripture gives two similes, both superb. One is the nature of gold and silver: the hardness of gold, the nature of silver, are theirs from the first, not something smelted into being by anyone; and the constant abiding of the dharma-realm is just so — "whether a Tathāgata comes into the world or comes not into the world, the dharma-realm abides constant." The other is the more telling still — the ancient city in the wilderness: a man walking in the wild sees, far off, a level, old road leading to an ancient city, and, following it, enters the city and takes his ease in its blisses. The Buddha asks Mahāmati: this road, this city, these blisses within the city — did this man make them himself? Mahāmati answers: no. This one exchange of question and answer says "not one word spoken" clean through: the dharma-realm is like that ancient city, there of itself from the first; the Buddha is like that traveler, who only discovered the old road and walked in. The city is not of his building, the road is not of his making, the bliss is not of his contriving — he has only "realized-and-entered," not "created." Zonglei points it plainly: the abiding dharma is "the dharma of the intrinsic virtue realized by the former buddhas," like the hardness of gold, "not gained by smelting."

One "cultivation" and one "abiding," put together, come round full. The won-through-one's-own-condition is the "cultivated virtue of one's own realization" — what practice personally realizes; the abiding dharma is the "intrinsic virtue one already possesses" — the dharma-nature that is thus of itself. Zonglei's one line gathers it up most finely: "cultivation and nature are of one suchness, both apart from speech." What you realize by your cultivation is precisely that which was there from the first; and that which was there from the first is of itself beyond the reach of speech. So "there is no dharma that can be spoken — this is what is the Buddha's speaking" — precisely because there is not one word that can be spoken, this "not speaking" is itself the Buddha's true speaking of the dharma. To gather it up in Yogācāra: this is precisely the two faces of the truly-perfected nature — it is the suchness that is intrinsically-so and already there (the abiding), and it is the realm that noble wisdom personally realizes (the won-of-itself); and since suchness is apart from speech, and the root-knowledge that realizes suchness is apart from speech, from one night to one night, in between, not one word is spoken.

Onward Transmission

The three matters of this passage are each taken up by the later Yogācāra.

The mind-made body, brought about by "the transformation of body and mind," is carried forward by the transformed birth-and-death and the mind-formed body that the Cheng Weishi Lun makes plain — the body a bodhisattva sustains by the power of his stainless vows, of a working past fathoming, coming to be at the will's wish; and that sense of "the transformation of the basis," the turning of the defiled basis into the pure basis, is the very tenet to which the whole of Yogācāra comes home — a Thirty Verses that reaches its landing-place only in those two last words, "the transformation of the basis." The inner reading of the five deeds of immediate retribution, which judges the cutting-off of delusion into the cutting-off of craving, of ignorance, of the fetters, of the grasping-at-the-aggregates, of the grasping-at-consciousness — answers straight to the Yogācāra sequence of cutting off the two obstructions of the afflictions and the knowable; and the passage on "the Buddha's knowing-and-awakening" makes it more explicit still: to awaken to the twofold no-self of persons and dharmas, to understand the two obstructions, to be apart from the two deaths, to cut off the two afflictions — these words are all but the very outline of the Yogācāra ground of fruition. As for "the dharma won through one's own condition is apart from speech" and "the abiding dharma abides constant," the one joins at its head to the Yogācāra truly-perfected's intrinsic nature apart from speech, the other joins to suchness the unconditioned in its intrinsically-so constant abiding — the realized-apart-from-speech is the won-of-itself, the depended-on-and-constant is the abiding, and the two are of themselves the one body's two faces of the truly-perfected nature.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

Mahāmati's questions here come thick and close: first he asks the mark of realization-mastery, then unreal false imagining, then speech and meaning, then wisdom and consciousness, and last the outsiders' nine kinds of transformation. Five questions come one after another, as if each were about its own separate matter. Yet string them together, and what he asks is in truth a single thing — how realization is to be realized; how teaching is to be taught; and how the mind that has been ruined by being spoken about is to be turned back.

This passage is a section in which the Laṅkā parts self-realization and the teaching into two roads, and then turns consciousness into wisdom. Hold fast to these two roads and this one turning, and the transformation of the basis to which Yogācāra returns is right before your eyes.

Two masteries: one road walking inward, one road speaking outward

Answering the mark of realization-mastery, the World-Honored One first sets up a pair: every practitioner has two kinds of mastery — realization-mastery and teaching-mastery.

Realization-mastery is "taking as one's object the mark of one's own attained supreme advance, being far removed from the false imagining of speech, words, and letters, going toward the particular mark of the outflow-free realm and the ground of self-awakening." This line must be read slowly: what it takes as its object is one's own attained supreme advance, not something that comes from outside; what it is far removed from is the false imagining of speech, words, and letters; what it goes toward is the particular mark of the outflow-free realm, the ground of self-awakening. In a word: one's own inner realization, apart from verbal expression. The ancient masters read this line through to the very bottom; Zonglei says realization-mastery is just the mark of the supreme self-realization, is "relying on the teaching to ponder and cultivate, winning the meaning and forgetting the words, apart from the discrimination of letters" — first relying on the teaching to ponder and to cultivate, and cultivating until "the meaning is won and the words forgotten," when the words have been laid down, and only then does the mark of that self-realization appear.

And teaching-mastery? It is "expounding the nine kinds of teaching in their manifold forms, apart from 'different and not-different, being and non-being,' by skillful means, teaching the Dharma in accord with sentient beings." This is to take what has been realized and speak it out by way of the manifold teachings, in accord with the capacities of sentient beings, leading them to deliverance.

So the two roads stand clear: one is the road walking inward — self-realization, not falling into verbal expression; one is the road speaking outward — the teaching, set forth to suit the occasion. Held up to the mirror of Yogācāra, this is just the twin tracks of realization and teaching: what is realized is the intrinsic nature apart from speech, that division of light by which the self-witnessing knows its own object; what can be spoken is the verbal teaching set up to accord with another. The realizing wisdom does not fall into speech, and the verbal teaching is not identical with realization — if this one distinction be not set up, a man will take teaching-mastery for realization-mastery, mistaking a heap of names he has heard for something he himself has realized. And so the World-Honored One must first cleave these two roads apart.

Speech and meaning: the lamp is not the color, yet the color appears by way of the lamp

Once realization and teaching have been cleft apart, the next question presses hard on its heels: if meaning is apart from speech, then are "speech" and "meaning" one, or different? If one, then meaning could not be apart from speech; if different, then what use is there in teaching at all?

The World-Honored One gives this passage's first fine simile — a lamp lighting up color.

The bodhisattva contemplates speech and meaning as "neither different nor not-different." Why neither different? Because meaning is apart from every mark of false imagining and mark of speech; speech is not identical with meaning. And why neither not-different? Because "meaning is not made clear except by way of speech, and it is by way of speech that one enters into meaning, as a lamp lights up color" — the lamp is not the color it lights up, yet the color must depend on the lamp to be made to appear. So too with speech: speech is not meaning, yet meaning must be made clear by way of speech, entered by way of speech.

This simile lights up the very joint of the preceding section, "realization-mastery, teaching-mastery." Meaning is the realization-mastery side — self-realization, apart from speech; speech is the teaching-mastery side — the teaching, capable of expression. The lamp is not the color, yet the color appears by way of the lamp, just as speech is not meaning, yet meaning is entered by way of speech. So teaching-mastery is not spoken in vain: it is like a lamp, whose light is not the color on the wall, yet to see that color clearly you must still depend on this one lamp. Said in the language of Yogācāra, every verbal teaching is a designation set up upon the dependent; you cannot take the designation for the intrinsic nature, nor, because it is a designation, throw it away — abolish speech and there is no way to enter the meaning, cling to speech and you lose the meaning instead, and the thread between the two is just these words, "a lamp lighting up color."

Wisdom and consciousness: the one amasses, the other lays down

Once speech and meaning are seen through, the most urgent question arrives: how is this mind, ruined by being spoken of and imagined, to be turned from "consciousness" into "wisdom"?

The World-Honored One divides wisdom into three: mundane wisdom, supramundane wisdom, and supreme-supramundane wisdom. Mundane wisdom is the outsiders and common fools clinging to being and non-being; supramundane wisdom is the two vehicles fallen into a longing for the particular and shared mark; supreme-supramundane wisdom alone is "the buddhas and bodhisattvas contemplating the dharma of nothing-whatever, seeing it unborn and unceasing, apart from the class of being and non-being, entering the ground of the Tathāgata, the no-self of persons and of dharmas." The three wisdoms rise one higher than the last, and only at "entering the ground of the Tathāgata · the no-self of persons and of dharmas" is the pinnacle reached.

And how are consciousness and wisdom told apart? The World-Honored One gives one flat and unbending word: that which arises and ceases is consciousness, that which neither arises nor ceases is wisdom. He judges it layer upon layer: that which falls into the mark and into being-and-non-being is consciousness, that which transcends being-and-non-being is wisdom; that which has nourishing-and-growth is consciousness, that which has no nourishing-and-growth is wisdom; that which has "attaining" is consciousness, that which has no "attaining" is wisdom.

This distinction the ancient masters read with the keenest edge. Zonglei glosses that line "amassing the deeds is consciousness" as sharp as could be: "taking up means the seizing, amassing means the summoning-together; setting the faculty against the dust and thereby giving rise to grasping-clinging, raising good and evil deeds and summoning together birth-and-death — this is called consciousness; that which can understand the faculty and the dust as cut off from all relation, self and thing both forgotten, giving rise to no grasping-clinging, is named wisdom." Consciousness is the mind that sets the faculty against the dust, gives rise to grasping-clinging, makes good and evil deeds, and summons together birth-and-death; wisdom is the mind that understands the faculty and the dust as being of themselves cut off from all relation, self and thing both forgotten, no longer grasping-clinging. It is the very same mind: grasping-clinging, it is consciousness; laid down, it is wisdom. And Zonglei's last word pierces it through: "having won the dharma of no-deliberation, one then transforms consciousness into wisdom."

This one line is the scriptural source of those words of Yogācāra, "transforming consciousness into wisdom." Consciousness is consciousness because it "amasses" — thought after thought reaching out, thought after thought summoning together, falling within arising-and-ceasing; wisdom is wisdom because it "does not amass" — no longer reaching out and grasping, and so no longer falling into arising-and-ceasing. What the transformation of the basis transforms is nothing else: it is just the transforming of this "amassing" consciousness into the "not-amassing" wisdom; the resting of that mind which reaches out, makes deeds, and summons together birth-and-death into the mind of self-and-thing-both-forgotten, giving rise to no grasping-clinging. When the Thirty Verses at the last says "casting off the two coarse encumbrances, winning the transformation of the basis," it speaks of just this one resting, this one turning.

And what is the wisdom thus won like? The World-Honored One gives this passage's most beautiful simile — the moon in water. "The realm of the noble wisdom of self-attainment neither goes out nor comes in, and so it is like the moon in water." The moon in the water is neither out beyond the water nor in within it; say it is there, and you cannot lay hold of it; say it is not, and plainly it appears. So too the noble wisdom of self-realization: it does not fall into the mark of "going out and coming in" — it is not that a wisdom comes in from outside, nor that a wisdom goes out from within; the marks of the going-and-coming of grasper and grasped are all at rest, and only that one round of not-going-out, not-coming-in brightness remains. This is just the realm of realization-mastery's "going toward self-awakening, blazing forth in radiance" — realization, once it reaches the place of neither-going-out-nor-coming-in, is real realization at last.

The nine kinds of transformation: gold beaten into vessels, the nature of the gold never transformed

The last question returns to the root of the sickness at the very start: why do the outsiders go wrong? The World-Honored One takes up the outsiders' "doctrine of the nine kinds of transformation" to refute.

The outsiders set up nine kinds of transformation — of shape-and-place, of mark, of cause, of completion, of view, of intrinsic nature, of the manifesting of conditions, of the manifesting of what is done, and of the thing — all of them speaking of "how one thing becomes another thing," and giving rise thereby to the manifold doctrines of "being-and-non-being-arising." To refute it, the World-Honored One uses a simile once more, and uses it with the utmost skill — gold transformed into vessels.

"For instance, as gold is transformed into the manifold vessels, so there is the manifold shape-and-place made to appear, yet the intrinsic nature of the gold is not transformed." Beat gold into rings, into bracelets, into necklaces — the shapes differ, every one of them, yet when did the nature of the gold ever transform by a hair's breadth? The outsiders stare at that "shape-and-place appearing differently" and say that the "nature" has really transformed, that some thing has really been born, that some thing has really perished; not knowing that what transforms is only the shape and mark, while the gold-substance abides unmoved, just as it is. The World-Honored One adds a further simile — "like the ripening of milk into curds, of fruit into wine": milk becoming curds, fruit brewing into wine, seem to "turn" by degrees into something else, yet this too is only what one's own mind reckons; there is no real "nature" there turning at all.

Refuted to the bottom, it falls back onto that one summarizing word: "there too is no transformation at all; whether being or non-being, it is one's own mind's manifestation, and the outer nature is no-nature." So-called transformation, say it "is" or say it "is not," is all one's own mind's manifestation; the outer "nature" is in truth no-nature. And the last simile gathers it up clean — "there is no dharma at all that arises or ceases, as one sees the arising of color in an illusion or a dream": what dharma is there truly arising, truly ceasing? Like the color seen arising in a dream, appearing clear and distinct, yet without a single thread of real arising, real ceasing.

Held up to the mirror of Yogācāra, this refutation is lit clean to the bottom. The outsiders' error is that they take "one's own mind's manifestation" for "the outer object existent of itself," and so, upon that self-existent object, set up arising-and-ceasing, set up transformation. The gold simile refutes exactly this: shape-and-place (the image-division) transforms, the nature of the gold (the substance of consciousness) does not — grasp a real "nature" upon the image-division, arising and ceasing and transforming, and you become the outsiders' nine-transformations view; know that this image-division is of itself one's own mind's manifestation, that the outer object is from the first not existent, and those two words "transformation" fall empty on the instant. This is the right contemplation of "the manifestation of mind-only, the outer object not real" — it is not the object that transforms, it is the mind that manifests; it is not the dharma that arises and ceases, it is the false imagining that rises and falls. The nine kinds of transformation refute nine kinds of clinging to "the outer object existent of itself," and return them all to the one same tract of "the measure of one's own mind's manifestation."

Onward Transmission

The three matters this passage establishes — the self-realization-apart-from-speech of realization-mastery, the transforming of consciousness into wisdom of wisdom-and-consciousness, and the refutation-of-the-outer, disclosing-of-mind-only of the nine transformations — the later Yogācāra treatises take up one by one.

What is taken up most importantly is that "transforming of consciousness into wisdom." This passage's sense of "that which arises and ceases is consciousness, that which neither arises nor ceases is wisdom" and "transforming consciousness into wisdom" is precisely the root of the later doctrine of the awakening of the four wisdoms; and that line of the Thirty Verses, "wisdom made supreme, casting off the two coarse encumbrances, winning the transformation of the basis," inherits just this one turning — consciousness resting into wisdom, which is that to which the transformation of the basis returns. This much must be made plain: where the later Yogācāra treatises overtly cite the Laṅkā, they cite the store-consciousness ocean-and-waves and the mind-mentation-consciousness gāthā of Scroll One; this passage's text on wisdom-and-consciousness, realization-mastery, and the nine transformations the treatises inherit in sense but do not overtly cite — it is what is inherited in sense, not what is cited in text, and this measure must be seen clearly, and not mistakenly linked.

Further down, this passage's "consciousness" is the eight consciousnesses, and the "insight" on which "wisdom" rests is the object-specific insight; brought to the placement of the Hundred Dharmas, they are the opening-out of the eight consciousnesses among the mind-dharmas and the object-specific insight among the mental factors. And the twin tracks of realization-mastery's "self-realization apart from speech" and teaching-mastery's "the teaching in accord with the occasion" are the scriptural source of the very pair, the Yogācāra "intrinsic nature apart from speech" and "designation by borrowed name."

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Returned to the bottom, it is still that lamp, that round moon in water: meaning is entered by way of speech, yet speech is not meaning; wisdom is turned from consciousness, yet consciousness is not wisdom — hold fast to this one thread of "neither different nor not-different," and realization and teaching are two that do not obstruct each other, and the heart of this passage is in your hand.

Beginning from a single question

What Mahāmati asks here is the continuum and liberation: how it is that all dharmas run on in a continuum, and how one is liberated out of that continuum.

The question is plain, but the answer is of the gravest weight. For the bondage that a foolish common person undergoes his whole life long comes down, in the end, to just one thing — a continuum. Thought continues on into thought, deed into deed, destiny into destiny, and so there is birth and there is death, revolving without break. In answering this passage, the World-Honored One first sets out at length the eleven kinds of clinging-continuum, pointing out one by one how the foolish common person "clings upon the meaning as it is spoken"; then he turns a layer deeper and says that "within that reality there is, in truth, no continuum and no non-continuum either"; and only at the last does he gather it up into the cause of the three kinds of continuum, the cutting-off of the threefold union, and the threefold liberation. Read straight through, this passage in fact takes that rope called "the continuum" and shows it to you whole — from the tying of the knot, to the seeing-through, to the untying.

To look at this rope, one must first recognize who it was that knotted it.

This rope is a thread you spun yourself

The scripture gives an intimate simile: the false imagining of the foolish common person is like the silkworm making its cocoon — with the thread of false imagining it binds itself, and binds others too.

This one simile is the eye of the whole passage. It first says one thing outright: the bondage of the continuum is not something laid upon you from without; it is spun out by the false imagining of your own mind, and wound around by it too. No one binds the silkworm; it merely spins its thread mouthful by mouthful, and spinning on and on it seals itself inside the cocoon. So too the foolish common person: he clings upon "the meaning as it is spoken" — say "being," and he grasps a being; say "non-being," and he grasps a non-being; say arising, say ceasing, say vehicle, say ground, and every word he takes for a real thing and reaches out to attach himself to; grasp one phrase and he winds one loop, and so the clinging to mark, the clinging to condition, the clinging to being-and-non-being — eleven kinds of clinging bind on layer over layer, and the cocoon is made.

Held up to the mirror of Yogācāra, this simile shows the more clearly. This "clinging upon the meaning as it is spoken" is precisely the imagined nature that is universally-reckoned — a thing without intrinsic nature, grasped as real according to name and word. The silkworm's thread is not a rope that was there to begin with; it is spun out by the silkworm on the spot. Just so, the continuum of the imagined nature is not some "self" that was there to begin with, running on in a continuum; it is reckoned into being by false imagining on the spot. That is why the verse says: the false imagining that is not real is what is called the mark of the continuum. The mark of the continuum has for its substance the imagined nature — put more plainly, just that one portion which is universally-reckoned. Fix your gaze on this one line, and the bones of this passage stand up.

Here the ancient master brings down a blade. Zonglei says: to be not-knowing regarding all dharmas, and to grasp and cling according to words, is like the silkworm weaving its net, binding itself and binding others too, with never a break — and all of it because of not-contemplating. This blade falls on those three words, not-contemplating. The reason the cocoon binds ever tighter is not that the thread is so strong; it is that the silkworm never once looks back at what it is doing. And the reason the continuum does not break off is not that the continuum is so real; it is that false imagining never once contemplates itself as-it-is.

The rope was empty all along

Having recognized that the rope is a thread spun by oneself, the scripture at once turns and says a still harder thing: within that reality there is, in truth, no continuum and no non-continuity either.

This turn must be watched closely. It does not mean "first there is a continuum, and then it is cut off." It means: one sees all dharmas to be of themselves quiescent, and that false imagining does not arise at all, and so this pair of marks, continuity and non-continuity, has nowhere to be set up at all. The bodhisattva sees all dharmas quiescent — and quiescence is not the pressing-still of something that was moving; it is the awakening to the fact that the being and non-being of the outer object were only one's own mind's manifestation, of itself nothing whatever. Following along in the observation of the measure of one's own mind's manifestation, being and non-being alike, all natures are without mark; and the moment one sees that the continuum is of itself quiescent, the marks of continuity and non-continuity alike are not to be found.

Then the scripture adds a further line: within that reality there is likewise nothing bound and nothing liberated; it is those who have fallen into "not awakening to it as-it-is" who have bondage and liberation. Why? Because within the being and non-being of all dharmas there is no sentient being to be found. This one line empties out those two words, "liberation," as well — you supposed there was a "bound self" waiting to be untied, yet in the ultimate sense not even that sentient being is to be found: who then is bound, and who liberated?

The mirror of Yogācāra, held to this point, shows the layer that is the threefold naturelessness. The continuum belongs to the imagined, and the imagined is without intrinsic nature; hence the mark is said to be of itself quiescent. Bondage-and-liberation are provisional names set up with reference to the deluded feeling; on the side of the real that is the truly-perfected, one is apart from being, apart from non-being, nothing bound and nothing liberated. The previous section was still speaking of the silkworm binding itself; this section tells you that the thread, the cocoon — looked at in the ultimate sense — were of no real substance at all: the false, and there is this one bout of self-binding; the real, and even this one bout is not to be found. This turn takes "cutting off the continuum" from "putting one's force to cutting off a real thing" and turns it into "seeing as-it-is that it was without reality all along."

Where the three strands come from, and where the one blade cuts

Turning back down from this layer of self-quiescence, the scripture comes once more to rest on the plane of events, and points out just which strands this rope is twisted of, and on which stroke it is cut.

First it points out where they come from: the foolish common person has three kinds of continuum — greed, hatred, delusion, plus craving for the future, arising together with delight-and-craving. The three poisons are the cause, running on into the five destinies the fruit. Zonglei's ruling is clean and clear: greed-hatred-delusion are the cause of the continuum, the five destinies are the fruit of the continuum; by a past cause the present fruit is formed, and the present again makes itself a cause to draw on the recompense of the future, and so the three times run on in a continuum, link locking into link. What is called "craving for the future" is craving for the pleasing fruit-recompense of the life to come, arising together with delight-and-craving — and this one strand is the most fatal, for it stretches the rope on and on toward the future, so that destiny joins to destiny and runs on into the five destinies. Let the three poisons once be extinguished, and one is apart from the five destinies; the cause extinguished, the fruit extinguished — this is the continuum cut off.

Then it points out where the cut is: when the three conditions in their union together make the contriving that clings, the continuum of consciousness arises without break; where there is clinging there is the continuum, and let this condition and this consciousness be cut off and the threefold liberation seen, and all continuity does not arise. Zonglei says that this threefold union of conditions is the outsiders' false reckoning of the union of the three conditions of faculty, dust, and self, whereupon the consciousnesses arise in continuum one after another; once there is clinging, the continuum is without break, and if one understands the three conditions, is apart from all clinging, and sees the threefold liberation, the continuum right there does not arise. And here is the one line that matters most — Zonglei says: this threefold liberation is liberation pure by nature, liberation pure in fullness, and liberation pure by skillful means; to understand the three conditions is right there itself the threefold liberation, and there is not, apart from the three conditions, some further liberation.

This one line answers exactly to the Yogācāra sense of the transformation of the basis. Consciousness, depending on the threefold union of conditions, plus clinging, arises in continuum without break — this is to say that the continuum of consciousness is born of causes and conditions, and not that there is some real self or real dharma abiding there of itself in a continuum; where there is clinging the continuum arises, where clinging is cut off the continuum does not arise, the whole of it hanging on that one portion which is universally-reckoned. So what "cutting off the continuum" cuts off is not consciousness itself; it cuts off that false clinging that reaches out to the three conditions and clings. Let the false clinging once part, and the ocean of consciousness is still that same ocean of consciousness — only it no longer throws up the waves of birth-and-death. The transformation of the basis is not the changing of one thing for another; it is, right upon this one stretch of consciousness, the turning of the defiled into the pure — even as the threefold liberation is not apart from the three conditions, so the transformation of the basis is not apart from this consciousness. Zonglei's phrase, "there is not some further liberation apart" — those few words cut off at the root the notion that "liberation is to be sought somewhere else."

And so, back to the silkworm. The cocoon was spun and bound by the thread of oneself, and to cut the cocoon is likewise upon this one thread — not to go looking outside for a pair of shears, but to turn back and contemplate one thing as-it-is: this thread was from the first false imagining, and false imagining is from the first without intrinsic nature. One contemplation, and the thread is spun no more; the thread spun no more, the cocoon opens of itself. The verse's last line, "does not contemplate the continuum," said the other way about is the very gate of liberation: be willing to contemplate, and the net is cut off.

Onward Transmission

The sense established in this passage — "consciousness depends on causes and conditions for its continuum, and seeing the threefold liberation the continuum does not arise" — is inherited, one by one, by the later Yogācāra treatises.

Inherited most closely of all are these two places: the continuum of consciousness, and the transformation of the basis. The scripture says that consciousness, depending on the threefold union of conditions, arises in continuum without break — and this is precisely one of the scriptural sources of the later Yogācāra "the consciousnesses depend on causes and conditions and continue on thought by thought, and are not naturally eternal": the eighth consciousness ever-evolving like a flowing stream, the first seven arising according to condition, none of them straying beyond this line of reasoning — "causes and conditions, then continuity; clinging, then no break." The scripture says that seeing the threefold liberation the continuum does not arise, and that to cut off the continuum is to cut off the cause of the revolving — and this again is that on which the sense of the transformation of the basis rests: what the transformation of the basis cuts off, the two obstructions of the afflictive and the cognitive, is precisely this clinging-continuum that arises by reaching out to the threefold union; that the continuum is cut off and yet consciousness is not cut off is exactly of a piece with "the basis is transformed and yet the true aspect of the store consciousness does not perish." And the line that the mark of the continuum is just the false imagining that is not real, and that knowing the real as-it-is cuts off the net of the continuum — this falls more directly still upon the three natures: the continuum belongs to the imagined, the real belongs to the truly-perfected, and to dispel the false and disclose the real is just to cut off the net of the continuum; the later Yogācāra teaching of the three natures and the threefold naturelessness finds in this passage a scriptural warrant.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a hard place

All along, the scripture has been teaching "all dharmas are non-arising," and teaching it with such force; yet here the Buddha suddenly turns back and lays a prohibition upon the bodhisattva: this "all dharmas are non-arising" — you are not permitted to set it up as a thesis.

This is enough to leave one dumbstruck. Having just said that all dharmas are non-arising, how can one not even say, not even set up, "all dharmas are non-arising"? Are the words just given taken back again in the very next breath?

To see this move clearly, one must first tell two things apart: one is the matter of "non-arising" itself, the other is the matter of "making non-arising into a thesis." What the Buddha demolishes, from first to last, is only the latter, never the former. And this one distinction is precisely the eye of this whole passage — it forces us to draw an absolute line between "what consciousness-only manifests" and "the setting-up of a thesis on the tongue": whatever can be framed into a correlative thesis, whatever can be carried off to dispute with the outsiders, is already no longer that realm which the noble wisdom of self-realization realizes.

Non-arising is not to be set up as a thesis: because the moment it falls into word and thought it goes askew

The Buddha's line of reasoning the ancient masters put with the utmost plainness: all dharmas non-arising is the sense in which "word and thought are alike cut off" — said to the very end, both the saying and the said fall still. But the instant you set it up as a "thesis," a thesis must have a subject, a correlate, a proving and a proved; and thereupon this "word and thought alike cut off" falls, then and there, into word and into thought. To speak it is already to falsify it — how much more to set it up solemnly as a thesis? An outsider sets up a "non-arising thesis," and precisely from this thesis grows branch and grows leaf, the more it is set up the further astray — and so the Buddha says: one should set up no such thesis.

Seen with the Yogācāra eye, this demolition cuts very deep. "All dharmas are non-arising, dharmas are without intrinsic nature" — if this saying is set up as an annihilatory view that "all is nothing whatever," then it falls into the first of the doubts Fazang names: hearing ultimate emptiness, one clings to there being no cause-and-fruit. But the Buddha's non-arising was never this. It is that one portion of naturelessness that is the imagined — upon the illusion-like image that is the dependent, you forcibly install a really-existent intrinsic nature, and this installed nature was from the first not there, and so it is called non-arising, called without intrinsic nature; while that illusion-like, dream-like dependent image is, between appearing and not-appearing, vividly present. So the Buddha at once gives the right teaching: do not set up non-arising as a thesis; rather, "say that all dharmas are like illusion, like a dream." Illusion-like — only so are both ends kept safe: truly without intrinsic nature, and so it does not fall into existence; vividly appearing, and so it does not fall into non-existence. This is exactly the middle way the threefold naturelessness means to guard: naturelessness is no negation-into-nothing, illusion-like is no really-existent.

And it is just because at the ultimate point word and thought are alike cut off that this passage's verse turns again and again upon a single simile to point it out: like an eye harmed with cataract that falsely sees a strand of hovering hairs in the empty air. The hovering hairs were never there; the diseased eye itself manifests them. The intrinsic nature of a dharma was never there; the false mind itself reckons it. If you take "here there are no hovering hairs" and set it up as a thesis to contend with people, what is contended over is still an affair inside the diseased eye. What the Buddha wants is to heal that eye — awaken to its being one's own mind's manifestation, and the mark of the hovering hairs, without any labor of demolishing, empties of itself.

Take great care not to habituate to worldly discourse: a single dragon can argue Śakra down

Once "non-arising is no thesis that can be set up" has been told apart, a question presses in at once from below: ought the bodhisattva, then, to go and study the world's many disputations? The Buddha had plainly said before that worldly discourse must not be drawn near, that to habituate to it is to seize only craving and not to seize the right dharma — why so?

The Buddha tells a most vivid old tale. Śakra, lord of the devas, understood the many disputations well and himself composed a science of sound; and a disciple of a worldly-discourse outsider changed himself into the form of a dragon, went straight up to the palace of Śakra's heaven, set up a thesis and disputed with Śakra, pacting that the loser should cut off his head to atone — and in the end this disciple, using Śakra's own method of disputation, argued Śakra down, broke his thousand-spoked precious wheel, and only then came back to the human world.

This dragon is the point. The dreadfulness of worldly discourse lies not in its shallowness but exactly in its ornament and adornment, its edge and its keenness — keen enough that "even a beast" can, with all sorts of phrases and flavors, delude the devas and asuras into clinging fast to the two views of arising-and-ceasing — how much more a man. It moves people, it wins over people, and yet from first to last it "teaches only the realm of bodily awareness," never getting past that ring of the six faculties and six dusts, never entering the true ground of self-mastery. So the Buddha's caution is not a fear of losing; it is a fear that such a skill draws a man ever deeper into the two extremes, away from the great vehicle.

Then does the Buddha himself, teaching measureless verbal doctrine for the many devas and men, not likewise become worldly discourse? Just so Mahāmati asks back. And the Buddha's answer, in a single sentence, draws the boundary clear: I do not teach worldly discourse, and there is no coming or going; I teach only "not-coming, not-going." What is called coming is running toward a gathering and being born; what is called going is dispersing and being ruined; not-coming, not-going is just not-arising, not-ceasing. Look at the outsiders' worldly discourse: whether they say eternal or annihilated, say one or different, say made or not-made, say there is this world and another world — that whole long string of questions the Buddha judges, one and all, to be worldly discourse, because there is not one of them that is not spinning upon the ground of "the outer objective realm being really existent," not one that does not fall into the two extremes. But what the Buddha teaches stands at another place: not clinging to the existence or non-existence of the outer nature, but seeing right at the place of one's own mind's manifestation; the false imagining of the two extremes cannot budge it. This is the watershed between Yogācāra and worldly discourse — worldly discourse reaches outward and clutches, Yogācāra turns the light back upon the measure of one's own mind's manifestation; reach outward and clutch, and arising-and-ceasing, going-and-coming, teem in confusion; turn the light back, and mark and objective realm are of no existent nature, false imagining does not arise, and then and there it is the three liberations of emptiness, marklessness, and wishlessness.

And so the brahmin presses further: is there, in the world, after all, such a thing as a "non-worldly-discourse"? The Buddha answers point-blank: there is — only it is not the kind that you have. What is non-worldly-discourse? — false imagining not arising, awakening to existence and non-existence as alike one's own mind's manifestation; false imagining not arising, then one does not take in the outer dust; false imagining forever stilled — this at last is called non-worldly-discourse. This one sentence is the very bone of the whole of Yogācāra: apart from grasper and grasped, turning back to the measure of one's own mind's manifestation, the twofold grasping does not arise. What worldly discourse seizes is craving; what this dharma seizes is — being well able to awaken to the measure of one's own mind's manifestation, seeing the twofold no-self of persons and dharmas, being apart from mind, mentation, and mental consciousness, gaining the wisdom-consecration of all the buddhas. The one binds outward, the other turns the light back and unbinds; the parting of craving and dharma lies only in that one turning-round of "awakening to one's own mind's manifestation."

The outsiders' several nirvāṇas: a mirror that shows the twofold grasping reflected

At the very end of this passage, Mahāmati asks the most crucial question of all: this "nirvāṇa" that is spoken of — what kind of dharma, in the end, is it that is called nirvāṇa? — for the outsiders each raise a different thought of nirvāṇa, and their teachings run wild.

The Buddha does not first set up his own nirvāṇa; he first spreads open the outsiders' nirvāṇa-thoughts, one kind and one kind, for you to see: some make the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields cease utterly, and, as with a lamp gone out and a seed spoiled, take that stillness for nirvāṇa; some take going from this quarter to that, the thought of the objective realm ceasing as the wind is stilled, for nirvāṇa; some take the ruin of the seeing of grasp-and-grasped for nirvāṇa; some, dreading what has a mark, forcibly see a marklessness and cling in love to it; some cling to an "existent nature that is not ruined"; some reckon "self, person, sentient being, and life-span, and all dharmas, ruined"; some set up a maker — a "primordial-obscure, an intrinsic nature, a Person, the guṇas"; some say merit is exhausted, or the afflictions exhausted, or say it is wisdom; some serve the Sovereign Lord as the maker of birth-and-death; some reckon Time to be the maker; some awaken to the twenty-five principles; some cling to an existent nature, cling to a non-nature, cling to a knowing of nature-and-non-nature — reckonings of all sorts, each making its own doctrine.

This whole long string, the Buddha does not go and dispute one by one; he lays down only a single overall judgment: all such [things] as these fall, one and all, into the two extremes and form the thought of nirvāṇa; and within them there is in truth no arising at all, no ceasing. Take them one by one and shine wisdom upon them, and they "set up nothing at all" — like the coming-and-going of the false mind, drifting and racing and flowing, there is in it all not one that truly attains nirvāṇa.

Where do the outsiders go wrong? They go wrong in that all of them point outward and identify some "thing" as nirvāṇa — pointing now to a realm of utter cessation, now to an unruinable nature, now to a maker. They have not turned back to look: all that is pointed at and identified is wholly the shadow manifested by their own mind's false imagining. And so, when the Buddha draws to a close, he gives the right teaching: the nirvāṇa I teach is to be well able to awaken to the measure of one's own mind's manifestation, not clinging to the outer nature, apart from the four alternatives, [so that] grasper and grasped are alike unfindable; knowing the twofold no-self, apart from the two afflictions, cleansing away the two obstructions, forever apart from the two deaths, reaching that Tathāgata-ground — this at last is named nirvāṇa. This whole course is precisely the Yogācāra transformation of the basis: it is not the snuffing-out of some thing, but the turning of that consciousness which grasps outward and, deluded, [takes things] for really existent, into the wisdom that is not deluded as to one's own mind's manifestation; the basis once transformed, the two obstructions cleansed to the end, this is the great parinirvāṇa. A variant translation puts it more trenchantly still — not knowing that to realize the realm of one's own wisdom, transforming the store consciousness that is the basis, is the great nirvāṇa. What is transformed is the store consciousness; what is gained is nirvāṇa; and all those "nirvāṇas" the outsiders sought by reaching outward fall, every one, outside this single "transformation of the basis."

And what gathers up this whole passage is that mirror. The verse at the passage's end says: just as an image in a mirror, though it appears is not real; upon the mirror of the false-imagining mind the foolish yet see there being grasp-and-grasped, the two; not recognizing mind and condition, they raise the two false imaginings, [but] understanding mind and the objective realm, false imagining does not arise. The outsiders' twenty-odd nirvāṇas are, in the last reckoning, all images inside the mirror of the mind — appearing yet not existent; the foolish take the shadow for real, and would go on to divide out of the shadow a realizer and a realized nirvāṇa. Understand that this one mirror is just one's own mind, and within the mirror there were from the first no two; false imagining does not arise of itself; and at that moment, without seeking another nirvāṇa, right at the place where false imagining does not arise, it is.

Onward Transmission

The three senses this passage establishes are taken up, one by one, by the Yogācāra treatises of the after-time. That "all dharmas non-arising, dharmas without intrinsic nature" is not permitted to be set up as an annihilatory thesis carries forward into the Thirty Verses' "upon these three natures the threefold naturelessness is set up" — the naturelessness of mark, the naturelessness of arising, the naturelessness of ultimate meaning are exactly what guards that middle way of "non-arising is no negation-into-nothing, illusion-like is no really-existent"; the Buddha's not setting up non-arising as a thesis, and the treatise's not setting up the threefold naturelessness as an annihilation, are of one loom. That "being well able to awaken to one's own mind's manifestation, apart from the grasp-and-grasped two" carries forward into the Yogācāra lineage's right sense of "consciousness-only, without objects, apart from grasper and grasped"; worldly discourse reaches outward and clutches while the Buddha turns the light back upon the measure of his own mind's manifestation, and by the time this reaches the treatises it becomes the turning-the-light-back work of "what consciousness takes as object is only what consciousness manifests." And that "apart from the four alternatives, transforming the basis that is the store consciousness, cleansing the two obstructions and gaining nirvāṇa" carries forward into the fruit of the twofold transformation of the basis — all those nirvāṇas the outsiders point at by reaching outward fall outside the transformation of the basis; only in transforming that deludedly-grasping store consciousness into wisdom is there the true nirvāṇa; and the Thirty Verses' closing "the blissful body of liberation, this the untainted realm, inconceivable, good and constant" sings just this one turning.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

Mahāmati's question is like a hand laid on a seam in the World-Honored One's own words: you say in the scriptures "neither arising nor ceasing," and you also say that "neither arising nor ceasing is another name for the Tathāgata" — so which is it? Is it because dharmas are, at root, without nature, empty and with nothing there, that you strain out a phrase, "neither arising nor ceasing"? Or is it that these four words, "neither arising nor ceasing," are just another name of the Tathāgata?

The question looks as if it were forcing the World-Honored One to choose one of two answers; but what it really strikes at is the most treacherous shoal in the whole Laṅkāvatāra: this phrase "neither arising nor ceasing," one step off and it is annihilation, one step true and it is the true substance. The common fool, hearing "neither arising nor ceasing," reaches most readily for this reading — since it does not arise, then it is nothing, empty, void of a single thing. This passage is the World-Honored One's blocking-off of the road most easily slid down: neither arising nor ceasing is not "nothing"; it is the Tathāgata.

Not without nature: first block off the road of "nothing"

The World-Honored One's answer, in its very first line, overturns Mahāmati's presupposition: "I say that the Tathāgata is not without nature." — Neither-arising-nor-ceasing does not dismiss the Tathāgata into an emptiness. It is not that "neither arising nor ceasing" can gather up and swallow all dharmas; nor that the Tathāgata waits upon some condition, once gathered, to be neither-arising-nor-ceasing; still less is it a phrase void of meaning. This one line, "not without nature," is the fixed lodestar of the whole passage.

Held up to the mirror of Yogācāra, this stroke stands out the more plainly. What Yogācāra guards against most in discerning emptiness is precisely that "wrongly-grasped emptiness" — hearing suchness, hearing the truly-perfected, as some hollow nothing empty of all. Suchness's "neither arising nor ceasing" was never another name for "nothing at all"; it is that truly-perfected substance itself, apart from the imagined, apart from the mark of arising and ceasing. It does not arise, because it is of itself not the conditioned mark that causes-and-conditions fabricate; it does not cease, because it is of itself not what causes-and-conditions can ruin. This "neither arising nor ceasing" is full, not empty. The World-Honored One here first sets up "not without nature," and the Yogācāra rejecting, later on, of a suchness that would be "neither cut off nor non-being, not dismissed into emptiness" walks this very same life-vein — what the mirror reflects and what the scripture sets up are one.

Then where is the fool's error? Just here: he reads this "neither arising nor ceasing" as "without nature" — as this passage itself points out further on: "concerning neither arising nor ceasing, they frame a thought of without nature." Taking unarising for a cut-off, taking unceasing for a void, and by a single thought's slip the living true substance is read as a dead nothing. This is exactly that one taste of wrongly-grasped emptiness that Yogācāra grinds its teeth to reject.

One thing with many names: the names change by the thousand, and that "he" has not stirred

Having blocked off "nothing," the World-Honored One at once gives the "being" — but this "being" does not fall into words; he raises it only by a simile.

Just as Śakra, one lord of the heavens, has yet the names Indra, Śakra, Puraṃdara, and all the various things of the world — which one is not a single thing with many names? Yet however many the names, it is not that, the names being many, there are truly so many distinct substances; nor is it that it has no self-nature at all. The World-Honored One then draws the simile round upon himself: I, in this Sahā world that can be endured, have three asaṃkhyeya hundred-thousand names — Tathāgata, the All-Knowing, Buddha, World-Rescuer, Self-Awakened, Guide, Sage, the Moon, the Sun, the True Limit, Suchness, Nirvāṇa, the Constant — and the fools every one of them hear and can pronounce, yet not one of them understands: these hundreds and thousands of names all speak of one and the same "he."

The blade's edge of this simile the ancient masters have whetted bright for us. Zonglei points it through in a line: it should read "neither arising nor ceasing is the meaning of unarising: unarising and yet arising, and so all the other names of the dharma-body issue from this." That is to say, "unarising" is not a dead-still non-motion, but "unarising and yet arising" — precisely because its substance does not arise, it can bring forth all things; the other names of the dharma-body, a thousand strands and ten thousand, traced to their root, all flow out of this one "meaning of unarising." And so, though the names be three asaṃkhyeya hundred-thousand, the meaning is only one.

Turned to the mirror of Yogācāra, this is just suchness's meaning of "one taste." Suchness does not, because you call it suchness in this world, call it the reality-limit in that, or by another name call it dharma-nature, turn out so many distinct suchnesses. The name-mark is the level of the imagined-and-clung — the false name that the discriminating mind sets up and posits; but that truly-perfected substance which the names point to does not increase or decrease with the increase or decrease of the false name. The names have a thousand distinctions; the substance has no second taste. This passage, with one Śakra's many names, plays out for you directly this thing: "the names differ while the meaning is one, the marks are many while the substance is not-two."

The moon in water: pervading all things, yet neither going out nor coming in

Next the World-Honored One pushes this "many names, one substance" to its furthest reach, and changes to a simile emptier still and more airy: these three asaṃkhyeya hundred-thousand names neither increase nor decrease; this world, and the other worlds, know me one and all, as the moon in water, which neither goes out nor comes in.

The moon in water — its wonder lies in that "neither going out nor coming in." The moon mirrors itself in a thousand rivers and ten thousand waters, and each of the thousand rivers has its one orb of moon; yet when did that moon ever truly bore its way into the water? When the water dries, when did the moon ever truly withdraw itself out of the water? It pervades and appears in all waters, while in itself there is not a thread of going-out or coming-in, not a hair's increase or decrease. Zonglei parts the two layers of this simile clearly: the moon is a simile for the response-body, the water a simile for the minds of sentient beings — the Tathāgata's names pervade and mirror in all the mind-waters of sentient beings, while the Tathāgata's substance does not move or shake. "Whichever single name is raised takes in all the names of dharmas": appearing in many places, it does not increase for appearing many times; appearing in one place, it does not decrease for appearing few — and this is "in the many it does not increase, in the one it does not decrease."

This side, reflected into Yogācāra, is just suchness's meaning of "without increase, without decrease." Suchness pervades all dharmas, pervades all stations; in the common it does not decrease, in the noble it does not increase; it is like that moon in water, printing itself everywhere upon the mind-waters manifested by all consciousness, while its own substance is apart from increase and decrease, apart from going-out and coming-in. The fool stumbles precisely here: he would gouge out, from beneath his own body and mind, a solid, real "self" able to come and to go, to increase and to decrease; yet this simile points him just the opposite way — that which pervades and appears in all things is precisely without going-out or coming-in, without increase or decrease. The more you would seize a substance that moves, the less you can seize this one orb of unmoving moon.

Framing a thought of "without nature" upon "neither arising nor ceasing": how the fool reads the living as dead

The simile set up, the World-Honored One turns back and cuts open the fool's root-sickness with one stroke.

The fool too reveres, too makes offerings; what ruins him is that he "is not skilled in understanding the sense and drift of the phrases, does not tell the names apart, does not penetrate through of himself." He does not understand that these hundreds and thousands of names differ in name while one in meaning; he only clings fast to the sayings and textual phrases; and so, hearing "neither arising nor ceasing," he takes it for a cut-off and a nothing — "concerning neither arising nor ceasing, he frames a thought of without nature." This one line is the pivot of the whole passage: the very same phrase "neither arising nor ceasing," the wise reads out of it the Tathāgata's true substance, the fool reads out of it a stretch of nothing. The difference is not in the scripture-text; it is in the mind that reads the scripture — the one penetrates through of himself and returns to the ultimate, the other clings to the saying and gives rise to a reading as the words go.

This sickness, Yogācāra sees with peculiar truth. The fool's sickness is to take the imagined-and-clung name-word for the real, to take the meaning by the name, to take the finger for the moon; he halts upon this finger of "saying," and can nevermore see the orb of moon the finger points to. That string of similes the World-Honored One gives next, layer upon layer, is all a drawing-out of this thorn: the Tathāgata's speaking of dharma is of itself apart from the letter, not speaking a single word, not answering with a single word — not that he does not speak, but that the meaning conveyed does not of itself fall into the letter; the fool, though, is like a man pointing at a thing with a finger who only stares fixedly at the finger and cannot get the real meaning it points to. And again, as an infant should eat cooked food and, eating raw, would go mad; concerning "neither arising nor ceasing," if one does not skillfully cultivate skillful means, but seizes it raw and whole, it is like raw food harming the man. This whole run of similes says, line upon line, one thing: one is to see, through the finger of the name-word, the meaning it points to; to become apart from the mark of saying, and realize the true substance. This is exactly Yogācāra's road of the transformation of the basis — "rely on the meaning, not the word; send away the imagined and realize the truly-perfected" — the name-word is a boat to be borrowed, not a shore to be clutched.

Unlike the outsiders: they say "neither arising nor ceasing" alike, but the one falls into the categories, the other is apart from them

Mahāmati will not let go, and again, bearing the Buddha's awesome spirit, presses the sharpest question of all: this "neither arising nor ceasing" you speak of — what is wonderful in it? The "cause" the outsiders set up is also neither-arising-nor-ceasing; the outsiders say atoms, the Supremely-Fine, the Sovereign, the four great elements are constant, indestructible — they too, name after name, say "neither arising nor ceasing." Where, in the end, do you differ from the outsiders? If there is no difference, then are not the outsiders too all buddhas?

The World-Honored One's answer splits open the bone of the two "neither-arising-nor-ceasings": the outsiders' neither-arising-nor-ceasing first fixes upon a "nature, a self-nature," and upon that solidly-real thing gets a mark of "unarising, unchanging" — they stand on the "being" category and speak of neither-arising-nor-ceasing. My neither-arising-nor-ceasing, though, is "apart from the categories of being and non-being": it falls neither into "possessed of nature" nor into "without nature"; it appears like the various illusions and dreams, and so is not a hollow nothing without nature; and the form so appearing has no self-nature-mark to be clutched, and so is not a solidly-real "possessed of nature." The outsiders' unarising is a hugging fast of a lump of real substance and not letting go; the Buddha's unarising is the setting-down, together, of both the substance one would hug and the emptiness-view that dismisses it into nothing.

This one cut, the mirror of Yogācāra reflects at its brightest. What the outsiders fall into is the imagined-and-clung — upon the illusory mark of the dependent, they falsely cling to a constant, unchanging real self and real dharma, and then hang on it a tag, "neither arising nor ceasing." What the Buddha sets up is the sending-away of the imagined, the seeing of the dependent as-illusion, the realizing of the truly-perfected apart from words. That gandharva-city simile the World-Honored One gives next plays out just this stroke: as with the gandharva-city illusorily appearing in the air, as with a conjured-up man, merchants come and go within the city, going in and coming out, and the fool takes it that there truly is a going-in and coming-out, whereas in truth there is none who goes out, none who comes in — it is only false imagining. The fool's falsely-raised "neither arising nor ceasing" is just this too — upon an illusory mark he hangs a real arising-and-ceasing, or a real neither-arising-nor-ceasing, and both ends are false imagining. But the Buddha only awakens that these are all the measure of his own mind's manifestation, and false imagining does not arise, and the world's affairs are at rest for good. Seeing one and the same illusory city, the fool sees that there really are people coming and going, the sage sees that the whole city is from the first empty — the true and false of "neither arising nor ceasing" divide upon this single glance.

And so the World-Honored One rests it on a phrase driven home like a nail: "markless seeing is superior." That which clings to a mark and sees upon a mark is the very cause of taking birth, and so is not superior; only "markless" — false imagining not arising, not rising and not ceasing — this alone is nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is to see according to that true meaning, apart from the former false imagining and the mind and mental factors, and to realize the Tathāgata's noble wisdom of self-realization. This one line is just the landing-place of Yogācāra's "transformation of the basis": turning away the imagined's mark-seeing, turning and gaining the truly-perfected's marklessness; the suchness apart from words is not sought upon a mark, but realized only where false imagining is stilled.

Onward Transmission

The "neither arising nor ceasing is just another name for the Tathāgata · the mind-made dharma-body is not without nature" that this passage establishes is the taproot of the whole Tathāgata-womb line, and the suchness meaning inherited by the later Yogācāra treatises is largely taken up out of just such "neither arising nor ceasing" scripture-sentences. The setting-up of suchness as "truly-perfected, neither arising nor ceasing, one taste without increase or decrease" inherits precisely this passage's road of "not without nature, the names differ while the meaning is one, neither increasing nor decreasing, like the moon in water that neither goes out nor comes in"; and the measure by which Yogācāra rejects "wrongly-grasped emptiness, neither cut off nor non-being" inherits precisely this passage's stroke of "framing a thought of without nature upon neither arising nor ceasing is a mistake." As for "the mind-made dharma-body is the Buddha's ultimate alone, not the province of those below the seventh abode," the later Yogācāra judging that the Tathāgata-womb's true substance only a Buddha, together with a Buddha, can exhaust is likewise the aftertrace of this one line.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

This passage is a run of four questions from Mahāmati, strung one after another: the outsiders, every one of them, speak of "impermanence," and the Buddha too speaks of "all conditioned things are impermanent" — are these two "impermanences" the same or not? In the sequence of entering the attainment of cessation, where do the two vehicles and the bodhisattva differ? Is the Tathāgata, in the end, eternal or impermanent? And since the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields are without a self, who then is it that arises, who that ceases?

The four questions look like separate matters, but one thread runs through them: how are eternal and impermanent, arising and ceasing, to be established? The outsiders guess at the two extremes; the two vehicles mistake the mark of cessation for the resting-place; the question about the Tathāgata asks why he is neither eternal nor impermanent. The last answer states that the Tathāgata-womb is the cause of good and non-good and, when perfumed by beginningless false and harmful habit-energy, is named the consciousness-store, evolving with the seven consciousnesses like ocean-waves. The condition of perfuming is decisive.

Read through the mirror of consciousness-only, this passage can be cross-read with the eighth consciousness. Yet the mirror must preserve the scripture's own line: the Tathāgata-womb is intrinsically pure and adventitiously covered; only under beginningless defiling perfuming is it named the consciousness-store. The ālaya teaching can illuminate perfuming, continuity, and transformation of the basis, but it cannot replace this conditioned naming.

Where the outsiders' seven kinds of impermanence go wrong

Take the first question first. The outsiders speak of impermanence, and speak it in seven fashions: made-and-then-cast-off is impermanence, the perishing of shape is impermanence, form itself is impermanence, form in its transforming is impermanence, "being" is impermanence, "being and non-being" is impermanence, "the non-arising of all dharmas" is impermanence. Seven fashions, each sounding unlike the others, and the Buddha settles them in a single judgment: none of these seven is my dharma.

Where do they go wrong? The scripture itself hands over the knife. Say what they will, the outsiders are all turning about upon one thing, "the four great elements and derived form" — either the four elements perish, or the shape-and-place perishes, or form transforms and perishes. But the scripture asks back, with a turn of the hand: the intrinsic nature of the four elements is in truth unattainable, is unarising — so this "perishing" of yours, whose perishing is it? Gold is wrought into a vessel, and the look of the vessel is changed; has the substance of the gold perished? Only "the place of the ornament perishes." When fire burns the four elements, the particular marks of the four elements are not burned. The outsiders mistake the arising-and-ceasing on the side of "mark" for an annihilation on the side of "substance," and so either they fall into the self-contradiction that even "impermanence" is impermanent, or they fall into the two ends of eternal-and-annihilated with their "four elements abide constant."

Weigh it on the scale of consciousness-only and it is at once plain: the root of the outsiders' sickness is that they do not know "there is only one's own mind's manifestation." They set up outside the mind a really-existent "nature," and then ask whether this really-existent nature is eternal or impermanent — the question is wrong from its very root. The three realms are but subtle mind; there was never a really-existent form-dharma outside the mind, standing there for you to judge eternal or judge impermanent. And so when the Buddha says his own dharma is "neither eternal nor impermanent," it is not that he adds one more account to range beside the seven, but that he changes the whole ground of the argument: he does not argue eternal-or-impermanent upon "outer nature," but only awakens upon "one's own mind's manifestation." Outer nature being not decisively fixed, the quarrel over eternal-and-impermanent is pulled up by its root. This "neither eternal nor impermanent" is precisely where the threefold naturelessness does its work: the waves of the dependent consciousnesses arise and cease in the instant, and you cannot call them "eternal"; the truly-perfected consciousness-substance, suchness unmoving, and you cannot call it "impermanent"; while that imagined "nature really-existent outside the mind" was from the first no thing at all — where is there any talk of eternal or impermanent for it? The outsiders' seven kinds of impermanence all come to grief at this one step, of taking the imagined for the really-existent.

In the attainment of cessation, the two vehicles and the bodhisattva differ by a single word, "own"

The second question asks the sequence of the attainment of cessation. This question is a weighty one, for the attainment of cessation is a realm reached at the very depth of practice; take a wrong step here, and one takes "cessation" for the ultimate.

The scripture parts the stations finely: the sixth-ground bodhisattva and the two vehicles can both enter the cessation-attainment; the seventh ground is in attainment thought after thought, apart from the mark of the intrinsic nature of all natures; reaching the eighth ground, the marks of the false imagining of mind, mentation, and mental consciousness all cease. To look at this single stretch, the two vehicles and the bodhisattva seem to walk one and the same road. But the scripture draws a line at the eighth ground — reaching the same eighth ground, the two vehicles and the bodhisattva "own" it differently. The two vehicles, made drunk by that gate of the bliss of the samādhi of cessation, form upon this "cessation" the thought of "nirvāṇa," taking themselves to have come home; the bodhisattva, by the pity of his fundamental vow and the accomplishment of great compassion, sees this bliss of cessation and yet does not take up the thought of nirvāṇa — rather he turns his body about and comes back, "setting up the expedients of the Buddha-dharma, that those who have not won may win."

The scripture gives a superb simile: as a person crosses the water by expedient in a dream, and wakes before he has crossed. The two vehicles are just that person crossing the river in a dream — within the bliss of the attainment of cessation he takes himself to be, step by step, crossing over toward nirvāṇa, when in truth he is within a dream; the only difference is that the bodhisattva has woken. And having woken, he looks back and reflects: was that crossing of the river just now right or wrong? Neither right nor wrong — for that river, that crossing, were from the first the doing of mind, mentation, and mental consciousness within a dream, and for one who has won the forbearance of the non-arising of dharmas, within the first meaning there is from the first no sequential continuity to be found.

This difference consciousness-only calls "the transformation of the basis." What the two vehicles cease is the "mark" — they make the mark of grasper-and-grasped cease, and hold down the present activity for a time, but they have not stirred the seeds of the false habit-energy within the store consciousness, and so what has been held down by that "cessation" will arise again; the consciousness-store has never truly turned. The bodhisattva does not seek his resting-place upon the "mark of cessation"; he awakens to the measure of his own mind, sees all dharmas to be like an illusion, and so he can, at the very root of the store consciousness, turn the defiled into the pure — and this is the transformation of the basis that turns out the two obstructions by the root, not the quiescence that presses down the present activity for a while. Entering one and the same attainment of cessation, the one owns it as a terminus, the other uses it as an expedient; the whole difference is this single word, "own," and in the space between this one owning and this one using lies the very watershed of the two vehicles' nirvāṇa and the bodhisattva's transformation of the basis.

Is the Tathāgata eternal or impermanent: the question is wrongly put

The third question asks straight at the crown: is the Tathāgata, in the end, eternal, or impermanent?

To this the Buddha answers cleanly: neither eternal nor impermanent — for both ends have a fault. Say "eternal," and one drops into the outsiders' rut of "a maker as lord, doing nothing and yet eternal"; say "impermanent," and does the Tathāgata not then become a thing made like a pot or a garment, cut off when the aggregates perish? But the scripture at once adds a weighty word: the Tathāgata has yet another "constancy" — the wisdom won without interval is constant, therefore the Tathāgata is constant. This "constancy" is not the outsiders' constancy of doing-nothing-and-being-lord, not the constancy of empty space blank and inert, not the constancy of a hare's horn or a horse's horn that never arises; it is the wisdom the Tathāgata realizes, without interval, decisively fixed in abiding, perfumed by insight, constant and thus.

Here the measure of consciousness-only is most to be seen. The outsiders ask "eternal-or-impermanent" upon a "really-existent thing that is made" — all that is made is impermanent, and were the Tathāgata too a thing made, he would of course be impermanent; but the Tathāgata precisely is not a made thing perfumed forth by the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields. "The Tathāgata is not born of unreal false thought" — he is the one exception to all the false imagining of the three realms. And so this "constancy" is the constancy that the transformation of the basis makes manifest: the false habit-energy within the ālaya turned out to the last, the noble wisdom of self-realization made manifest no longer arises and ceases with talk-and-discrimination — "if the awakening of discrimination ceases, one is apart from the foolish view of eternal-and-impermanent." The very point lies in that last sentence: so long as one is still turning about upon "talk-and-discrimination," one cannot escape the fault of "eternal-and-impermanent"; the one quiescent and possessed of insight is forever apart from that very pair of names, "eternal-and-impermanent," and is not perfumed by it. Plainly, then, the Tathāgata's constancy is not a choosing of the "eternal" side within eternal-and-impermanent, but a standing altogether outside this pair of relative names — and this is just the scene of the fruit-ground, not-two and quiescent, the two obstructions forever apart.

One store holding good and evil, one ocean raising a body of waves

The four questions have driven, at the last, to a final question — and driven out the heart of this whole passage: since the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields are without a self, who is it that arises, who that ceases?

The Buddha's answer rests upon a single sentence — "the Tathāgata's womb is the cause of good and non-good, able to pervadingly bring forth the births of all destinies." The text immediately adds its qualification: "perfumed by beginningless false and harmful habit-energy, it is named the consciousness-store." This does not flatten the two terms into unconditional identity. It first speaks intrinsic purity and then conditioned naming under defiling perfuming; both layers must remain visible.

The scripture gives a string of similes, and every simile shines upon this one store.

First the actor-simile: the Tathāgata-womb can pervadingly bring forth the births of all destinies, just as an actor (a player) manifests all sorts of roles, apart from self and what belongs to self. The player this hour acts a king, the next acts a beggar; the roles are exchanged and exchanged again — in which of the roles is there a real "self"? The rising and sinking of the destinies, the coming and going of the six paths, are all the play this one store manifests, and in the play there is no maker to be found. The outsiders will have it that there is a "maker" outside the play — like a spectator who insists that the king on the stage is really a king. In the verse the simile turns a layer deeper: mind is the lead actor, mentation is like the one who sings the accompaniment, the five consciousnesses are its companions — even this mind you take for the one in charge, the master, is no more than the lead singer in this play; the seventh consciousness sings the second, the first five are the partners, and that "false imagining" is the spectator looking on at the side at this troupe of players, watching rapt. The eight consciousnesses are one troupe of players, self-acting and self-watching, and in the end they take the false for true.

Then the body-of-ocean-waves simile this passage establishes on its own: the consciousness-store "gives rise to the ground of ignorance-abiding, and together with the seven consciousnesses, like a body of ocean-waves, ever arises without break." This simile shares its purport with that "store-consciousness ocean, the wind of objects" at the head of the scripture — one sheet of ocean bears a thousandfold of waves, the ocean is the consciousness-store, the waves are the seven consciousnesses, and though the waves arise and cease, the ocean is never cut off. And the marvel is in the next sentence: it is "apart from the fault of impermanence, apart from the doctrine of a self, its intrinsic nature undefiled, ultimately pure." This ocean ever arises without break, and so does not fall into annihilation; yet it is also thought after thought not-abiding, not one drop at a stand, and so is not that constant-and-unmoving "self." The foolish grope beneath body and mind for a "self," and grope out a patch of dead water; this ocean, on the contrary, runs night and day without being seen to break. Ever-evolving, and so not annihilated; without a resting-place, and so no self — that "neither eternal nor impermanent" spoken in the earlier refuting of the outsiders' seven kinds of impermanence here at last comes down to its solid place: this one store is the very body of that "neither eternal nor impermanent."

Then the āmalaka-fruit-in-the-palm simile: this Tathāgata-womb consciousness-store, the two vehicles look at with the thought of the mind, and, it being covered over by the guest-dust, to their sight it is still impure; the Tathāgata looks at it, and it is "clear as looking at an āmalaka fruit in the palm," distinct and complete. One and the same fruit — laid in another's hand it cannot be seen true, laid in the Tathāgata's palm it is taken in at a single glance; the difference is not in the fruit but in the wisdom that observes. This is just the difference before and after the transformation of the basis: before the basis is transformed, the consciousness-store is covered by the two obstructions, storing itself and unable to see itself clear; the basis once transformed complete, the noble wisdom of self-realization is present, and this one store is manifest in the palm.

Last, the scripture, fearing lest men mistake it, adds one more simile of the pointing-at-the-moon: "as a fool, seeing the finger point at the moon, looks at the finger and not at the moon, so one who clings to names does not see my truth." The Tathāgata-womb, the consciousness-store — the manifold names are the finger that points at the moon; if you take the finger for the moon, and bite fast to these few names-and-marks, "the Tathāgata-womb," "the consciousness-store," and will not let go, you fail on the contrary to see the truth they point to. And so the Buddha enjoins: with respect to this one store, "train diligently and study, do not, having merely heard and been aware, form the thought that this is enough" — to have heard it, and taken oneself to understand it, and so to think it in hand, is precisely to look at the finger and not at the moon.

Onward Transmission

This movement's statement that the Tathāgata-womb, under beginningless harmful perfuming, is named the consciousness-store and evolves with the seven consciousnesses like ocean-waves can be cross-read with later Yogācāra. The Cheng Weishi Lun explicitly cites the Laṅkā three times, but none cites this movement; its ocean-and-waves and mind-mentation-consciousness passages illuminate continuity and the three names, while its mind-only citation belongs to another context. The Thirty Verses' "ever-evolving like a torrent" and the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha's ālaya as the knowable support likewise provide doctrinal cross-readings, not proof of direct citation or unconditional identity.

Chan reception sources must remain stratified. Jingjue T2837 records Bodhidharma telling Huike to practice in reliance on the four-scroll Laṅkā and thereby attain deliverance〔T85n2837 1284c24–25〕; Daoxuan T2060 records entrustment of the four-scroll Laṅkā〔T50n2060 0552b20–22〕. The formula "it may seal the mind" belongs to the Song preface〔T16n0670 0479c10–13〕. This movement may therefore be read within later Chan reception, but the Song formula cannot be backfilled into Tang sources and the movement cannot be declared Patriarchal Chan’s unique foundation.

Beginning from a single question

Mahāmati's question here has a large appetite: the five dharmas, the natures, consciousness, the twofold no-self — what, at bottom, is the "ultimate mark of the discrimination" of these four? What he wants is not some piecemeal explanation, but a single net that can take in all the buddha-dharmas — so that the bodhisattva, upon the grounds, stage by stage, may hold this net to discriminate the dharmas, and walk all the way to the ground of the Tathāgata's self-realization.

And the answer the World-Honored One gives is exactly such a net, in five words only: name, appearance, discrimination, right knowledge, suchness. The marvel is that within these five words there lies hidden a watershed. The first three — name, appearance, discrimination — are the deluded side of the common person; the latter two — right knowledge, suchness — are the awakened side of the sages. It is one and the same five dharmas: awaken to them, and they are throughout the mark of awakening; do not awaken to them, and they are throughout the mark of delusion. The dharmas themselves have no fixed nature of their own; delusion and awakening turn wholly upon whose mind they fall in. The ancient master puts this line as flatly as could be: the dharmas have no nature of their own, delusion and awakening lie in the person. This whole passage of scripture takes these five words and, with them, draws out at once the coming and going of the common and the holy, the divide between birth-and-death and nirvāṇa.

Name and appearance: a net one weaves for oneself and then is wrapped in

Look first at how the deluded side comes to be. The scripture gives a picture as vivid as could be. The foolish cling to worldly name and appearance and drift and scatter after the mind, and so fall into the view of "I" and "mine," longing for and clinging to that lovely form; one clings, and is at once covered by not-knowing, giving rise to defiled attachment; one grows attached, and the deeds wrought by greed and hatred pile up layer upon layer; and when they have piled up, one is bound fast by one's own false imagining — like a silkworm spinning silk to make a cocoon, wrapping itself round and round within — and falls into the great ocean of birth-and-death, in the wilderness of the destinies turning like the well-wheel drawing water, round and never resting.

This picture of the cocoon and the well-wheel is exactly the look of it when, in Yogācāra terms, the imagined nature and the dependent nature are wound into one tangle. What is "appearance"? The scripture defines it as clearly as could be: what the eye-consciousness beholds is called form; what the ear-, nose-, tongue-, body-, and mind-consciousnesses behold is called sound, scent, taste, touch, and dharma — this is appearance. What is "false imagining"? The setting up of every sort of name and the displaying of every sort of appearance, just as with those names-and-appearances "elephant, horse, chariot, foot-soldier, man, woman," forced on and then taken as decisively-not-otherwise — this is false imagining. See it clearly: appearance is the object the consciousness has transformed and manifested; false imagining is, upon this object, to fix a name again and to grasp it as real. The object is from the first one's own mind's manifestation, yet it is taken for a thing really outside the mind, to be reached for, to be grasped, name by name and appearance by appearance, flowing on — and this whole stretch of flowing-on is just the knot the imagined-grasping ties upon the dependent-arising. Why does the silkworm spin its cocoon? The silk is spun from itself. What binds the common person? The false imagining that binds him is likewise raised from himself. This is why the scripture pierces it through in a single line: all this is like an illusion, like a mirage-deer of the shimmering air, like the moon in water, from the first apart from "I" and "mine," born all of one's own mind's false imagining, and not born from a Sovereign Lord, from Time, or from atoms — the net that binds you, you wove yourself, and so only you can unravel it.

Right knowledge and suchness: seeing name and appearance as a passing guest

How, then, does one come out of the net? The scripture does not teach one to "destroy" name and appearance; what it teaches is to put on a different pair of eyes to look at name and appearance — and this turns to the awakened side.

What is "right knowledge"? The scripture gives an exceedingly light simile: right knowledge is to see that name and appearance are alike unfindable, like a passing guest. The guest who passes comes but a moment and is gone; you cannot detain him, nor need you fall into dispute over him. Name and appearance are just so — not to be smashed to pieces, but to be seen through as "unfindable": they appear a moment in consciousness, not to be grasped and held. The ancient master, following out this simile, points to the joint: to seek right knowledge, one need only awaken to name and appearance as unreal, like a passing guest — the discriminating mind not arising, apart from annihilation and eternalism, and so not falling into the realm of the common and the lesser. The measure here is of the utmost moment: right knowledge does not fashion yet another realm of "no-name-and-appearance" to counter "there-being-name-and-appearance" — that would still be turning round upon name and appearance. It is, in the very moment name and appearance present themselves, to see them as neither being nor non-being, like a guest come but a moment — and this one seeing, said in the language of Yogācāra, is precisely non-conceptual knowledge illumining the dependent as illusion-like and the imagined as from-the-first empty.

What is "suchness"? The scripture goes on: the bodhisattva, by this right knowledge, does not set up name and appearance, and yet it is not that he does not set them up; forsaking the two views of "setting-up" and "disparagement," he understands that name and appearance are from the first unborn — this is suchness. Neither-set-up nor not-set-up is exactly the forsaking of the two extremes of being and non-being: neither falling into the setting-up of "there-really-being name-and-appearance," nor falling into the disparagement of "there-being-nothing-at-all"; and thereupon name and appearance do not arise, and suchness presents itself. Set against Yogācāra, this is the truly-perfected — not that there is some further thing called "suchness" set out to one side, but that, the imagined once dispelled and the dependent seen as illusion-like, the reality that is of-itself-from-the-first-unborn shows forth. And so the scripture says "by not-winning one wins": just because there is not one thing to be won, is it called true winning. The ancient master says the bodhisattva, upon this "by not-winning one wins," ascends the Ground of Joy — and this is the first step of the transformation of the basis coming to ground: turning from the topsy-turvy of the imagined toward the presenting of the truly-perfected.

Here the two sides, deluded and awakened, of the five dharmas join into one road of the transformation of the basis. The scripture then matches the three natures in, plainly and openly: name and appearance are the imagined nature; the mind and mental factors born in dependence on false imagining arise together at one time, like the sun and its light together — this is the dependent nature; right knowledge and suchness, being indestructible, are the perfected nature. The three natures entering the five dharmas fit thread for thread — name-and-appearance is the imagined, the sun-and-light-together is the dependent, right-knowledge-and-suchness is the truly-perfected. This is no forced overlay of a later hand; the scripture itself matched them so; and that Yogācāra reads all dharmas by the three natures and the threefold naturelessness has its wellspring right here. And that simile "like the sun and its light together" is likewise the aptest picture for the Yogācāra teaching of the dependent: the mind-king and the mental factors are never a case of one-first-then-another, but are like the sun and its light, arising together and not forsaking one another — you cannot say sun-first-then-light. What the dependent "depends" on is exactly such a condition, co-temporal in its arising and not-forsaking one another.

The Ganges sands: a simile that is not for counting a number

The scripture, coming this far, and Mahāmati abruptly turns out a question that looks unrelated: the World-Honored One has said the buddhas of the past are as many as the Ganges sands, and so too the future and the present — is this to be received according to the number of the words, or is there another meaning?

The World-Honored One's answer, at the first word, blocks off the road of "number": do not receive it according to the words — the number of the buddhas of the three times is not so countable as "the Ganges sands." Then why still use the Ganges sands as a simile? — the marvel is that the Buddha turns to a different angle in using this simile. What the Ganges sands can liken is not "the many," but that one "nature" of the sand: let the fishes, turtles, lions, elephants, horses, men, and beasts come and trample them back and forth, and the sands never form a single thought "these trouble and disturb me" — their nature pure, without any defilement; let the aeon-fire at its end burn and consume all the earth, and the sand as earth-element does not forsake its own nature, for what burns is only the fire-cause, and the earth in truth is not burnt; its radiance is without measure, its increase and decrease unknowable; it flows along with the water, and yet is not without water. In all this long train there is not one line about "how many"; line by line it is telling of that one virtue of the Tathāgata's dharma-body: still and unmoving, yet untroubled; unburnt by the aeon-fire, and constant and indestructible; shining everywhere to ripen, and without limit; ripening sentient beings, and neither increasing nor decreasing; flowing along with nirvāṇa, yet not flowing away and perishing.

This is exactly the eye by which Yogācāra reads "the Tathāgata's dharma-body": the dharma-body is not a body-dharma. The scripture itself so defines it — a body-dharma has its wearing-away, the Tathāgata's dharma-body is not a body-dharma, and so, press the Ganges sands and no oil can be got, press the Tathāgata and no "perishing" can be pressed out of him. This side has the same underlayer as that subtle store-consciousness "ever-evolving and not cut off" of the foregoing: ever, therefore indestructible, and not falling into annihilation; flowing-along and not flowing-away, therefore not resting, and not falling into the eternal. The foolish, reading "the buddhas as the Ganges sands," will only go counting how many buddhas there are; but the World-Honored One, by this handful of sand, points out to you a dharma-body that passes beyond what the world can look up to, and cannot be likened by mind, mentation, and the mental consciousness. As for that word "a buddha is hard to meet, like the udumbara-flower," the scripture settles this too all in one: that is said by way of expedient, to the idle disposition, in order to spur them to diligence; the Tathāgata in truth may all be seen in the world, and is not truly like the utterly-unseen udumbara — this is an expedient word suited to the disposition, not the definitive sense. To read the scripture and take the expedient word for the definitive sense is to fall back again into the old road of "receiving it just as it is said."

The momentary and the six perfections: one and the same measure, carried to the end

The latter half — the mark of momentary perishing and the threefold [division] of the six perfections — is still this measure of the five dharmas' delusion and awakening, carried to the fine grain and to the reach of practice.

The passage on the momentary judges with the utmost fineness: the seven consciousnesses do not undergo the round, do not receive suffering and pleasure, are not a cause of nirvāṇa; only the habit-energy of the consciousness co-arisen of the Tathāgata-womb (the store-consciousness) and mentation is momentary, while that outflow-free habit-energy is not momentary. The foolish cling to a doctrine of the "momentary," and so take the annihilation-view to ruin the unconditioned dharma — and this again is the imagined-grasping at its work, grasping "thought after thought flowing on" into "all things cut off." The scripture then uses gold, the diamond, and the buddha-relics as simile: they have won a rare and special nature, and though weighed through aeons do not diminish; and if within the unbroken continuum there were truly a momentary that could perish, then a sage ought not to remain a sage — yet the sage has never been not a sage. This one simile props up both sides at once, "the conditioned, thought after thought momentary" and "the outflow-free, ever and indestructible": what flows on is the outflowing habit-energy, what is indestructible is that unconditioned, outflow-free side.

The six perfections too are, by this same measure, divided into three tiers. The mundane perfection is the giving, morality, patience, and the rest cultivated by grasping-and-clinging with "I" and "mine," craving-relish for form, sound, scent, taste, and touch, and what it accomplishes is no more than the common person's spiritual penetrations and rebirth in the Brahmā-heaven — this is cultivation with the imagined unbroken. The supramundane perfection is the six perfections practiced by the two vehicles fallen into the "grasping-and-receiving of nirvāṇa," craving-relish for the bliss of their own nirvāṇa — this is cultivation with the self-grasping subdued but the dharma-grasping yet remaining. As for the supreme-supramundane perfection, the scripture defines it most clearly of all: it is to have awakened to the fact that the measure of one's own mind's manifested false imagining is from the first the grasped, and to have awakened to "one's own mind splitting in two (grasper and grasped)," and so to cultivate with no false imagining arising — in giving, not clinging to giver or given; in morality, patience, and vigor, no false imagining arising; in meditation, all false imagining ceased and yet not falling into the two vehicles' nirvāṇa; in wisdom, understanding one's own mind's false imagining as without nature, not falling into the two extremes, and turning the body into the excellent and indestructible. See it clearly: the divide of these three tiers lies not in the items of practice (it is the same six perfections), but in "whether false imagining arises or not, whether grasper and grasped are split or not" — precisely that watershed which has run through this whole passage from beginning to end: to cultivate falling in upon name-and-appearance-and-false-imagining is the mundane; subdued but not exhausted is the supramundane; grasper and grasped both dissolved and right knowledge presenting itself, cultivating so — this alone is the supreme-supreme. This net of the five dharmas, gathering to here, has taken in even how the bodhisattva is to cultivate.

Onward Transmission

The sense established in this passage, that "five names gather up all dharmas," is the most vital framework of the whole later Yogācāra lineage. The five dharmas (name, appearance, false imagining, right knowledge, suchness), the three natures, the eight consciousnesses, the twofold no-self — the four totalized into the five, the five gathering up all the buddha-dharmas — this net, taken up later by the Thirty Verses, becomes the three natures of imagined, dependent, and truly-perfected, together with the threefold naturelessness of mark, arising, and the ultimate; this passage's name-and-appearance is the imagined, its sun-and-light-together is the dependent, its right-knowledge-and-suchness is the truly-perfected — each of these the scriptural source of those verses on the three natures. The Mahāyāna-saṃgraha gathers up the marks of all the knowable by the three natures, and gathers up the cause-and-fruit of entering by the six perfections, inheriting likewise the guideline of this passage's three-natures-entering-the-five-dharmas and its six-perfections-divided-in-three. And that side of the subtle Tathāgata-womb "ever-evolving and not cut off," of the dharma-body "not a body-dharma and indestructible," when it came to the Cheng Weishi Lun's establishing of the eighth consciousness as "neither cut off nor eternal, ever-evolving like a torrent," became the underlayer of one and the same kind of sense — inheriting its sense, though not necessarily citing its text word for word. The Hundred Dharmas gathers all dharmas into the five stations, and the manner of that gathering-up issues from the same spring as this totalizing by five names. One Laṅkā, in this passage, has said flat out that "all the buddha-dharmas enter into the five dharmas"; and the Yogācāra treatises, taking over these five words, unfold the dharma-marks of the Mahāyāna along the whole length of the road. One and the same net: before, it is the scripture; after, it is the treatises; and what they gather is one and the same field of dharma.

Beginning from a hard question

Mahāmati's question here is put with no courtesy at all. He ranges out, one by one, the very things the World-Honored One is wont to say, and forces from them a contradiction. You give the arhat his prophecy and say he shall become a buddha, in no way different from a bodhisattva; yet you also say that no sentient being enters, as to the dharma, into nirvāṇa — then who is it, in the end, that walks through to the buddha-path? You say that from your attainment of buddhahood to your parinirvāṇa you never spoke a single word, that the Tathāgata dwells ever in concentration, without deliberating and without examining; then how do you come to say a thing so fine-drawn as "consciousness is a mark that perishes moment by moment, evolving on in succession"? You say the Tathāgata has won omniscient knowledge; then why are there vajra-holding warriors in attendance, why does he show forth the works of Māra, why does he suffer the slander of the empty bowl — all these obstructions of evil karma? In a word: if the Tathāgata is truly perfect, from where do these "imperfect" marks come?

The question looks like fault-finding, but it strikes at the very root of the buddha-body. To untie it, one must first see "buddha" in two layers. The World-Honored One's answer takes hold precisely here: the one who prophesies the arhat's buddhahood is not the dharma-buddha prophesying, it is the transformation-buddha; and the one attended, showing Māra, suffering slander, is not the true Tathāgata either, but the transformation-buddha. Once the true buddha and the transformation-buddha are told apart, the whole board of contradictions falls away. And this telling-apart is just where the scriptural source of the Yogācāra doctrine of the buddha-bodies lies — so we borrow the mirror of Yogācāra to light up the threefold sense of this passage: how the two obstructions are cut off severally, how the two deaths are left behind, how that Tathāgata-womb is at once the cause of birth-and-death and the cause of nirvāṇa.

The first: the obstruction to knowledge and the obstruction of the afflictions, and why they are cut off severally

The World-Honored One says it plainly: to say the arhat and the bodhisattva are "no different" is to say so at one point only — they alike cut off the obstruction of the afflictions and alike win the one taste of liberation; it is not that the obstruction to knowledge, too, is alike cut off. This one sentence draws the line between the two vehicles and the buddha sharp and clear.

The obstruction of the afflictions is cut off by first practising the seeing of the no-self of persons. When, within body and mind, you can find no "self" that presides, greed, hatred, and delusion lose the ground they stood on, and so the present activity of the seven consciousnesses is cut off and the perfuming stored in consciousness ceases too — this is as far as the two vehicles can reach, and the one taste of the liberation from birth-and-death is here. The obstruction to knowledge is otherwise. It is cut off only by seeing the no-self of dharmas — by seeing, upon all dharmas, that they are without own-nature, supreme and purified; and this the two vehicles never set their minds to, and the bodhisattva alone drives to the bottom.

Light it up with the mirror of Yogācāra, and these two obstructions are just what the later treatises establish as "the obstruction of the afflictions" and "the obstruction to the knowable" — the one obstructing liberation, the other obstructing awakening; cut off the first and one issues from birth-and-death, cut off the second and one accomplishes the buddha-knowledge. Zonglei points it beautifully: knowledge is fundamentally what breaks the delusions, and the delusions are the twofold clinging to person and to dharma; but if you give rise, upon knowledge itself, to a further clinging, then that knowledge turns instead into an obstruction. This one line lays bare why the obstruction to knowledge is an obstruction: it is not that knowledge is itself an obstruction, it is that the sticking to knowledge becomes the obstruction. The two vehicles, having realized the emptiness of persons, take it that they have reached the end, and this one fine clinging upon dharmas they do not break — this is precisely "knowledge becoming an obstruction." And so the buddha and the two vehicles alike cut off one obstruction, while the buddha alone cuts off one obstruction more — this is no contest of high and low, it is the difference of the thorough and the not-yet-thorough. The scripture here sets the line firm, and the later Yogācāra teaching of the "two obstructions" runs, blood and vein, from this place.

The second: leaving behind the two kinds of death, and what that dharma abiding from the origin is

Right upon this the scripture draws out a sentence of the greatest weight: because there is a dharma abiding from the very origin, the earlier limit and the later limit are alike without own-nature.

There is a dharma abiding from the origin, and so neither the earlier limit nor the later can be said to have real own-nature. It is just because there is this abiding ground beneath that the Tathāgata can, by the inexhaustible original vow — though without deliberating and without examining — yet expound the wondrous dharma. Here one must not slip past: that he can expound the dharma without deliberating or examining rests on its being what right knowledge manifests and right mindfulness holds unforgetting. And this is the very thread laid down for the transformation-buddha to come — the true Tathāgata abides unmoving, and the one who expounds the dharma is the transformed working that right knowledge manifests.

And when the perfuming of the four grounds of abiding — desire, form, existence, view — and of the ground of ignorance is once cut off, the two afflictions are exhausted, and thereupon one "leaves behind the two kinds of death." These "two kinds of death" the scripture only names and does not unfold; light them up with the mirror of Yogācāra, and they are birth-and-death by allotted portion and birth-and-death by transformation — the coarse, allotted body the two vehicles leave behind on cutting off the obstruction of the afflictions; the fine, transforming body exhausted only on cutting off the obstruction to the knowable, on becoming a buddha. Two obstructions against two deaths, the cutting of the obstruction being just the leaving-behind of the death; the scripture's one line — the two afflictions cut off, the two deaths left behind, the twofold no-self awakened to, the two obstructions cut off — strings the four, obstruction, death, no-self, awakening, upon a single thread. And this strung line is the scriptural source of the very framework of the Yogācāra path of stages.

The weighty thing is that "dharma abiding from the origin." It is the ground on which the leaving-behind of the two deaths rests — for without some abiding, unborn-and-unceasing dharma to lean on, "leaving death behind" would have no place to stand. What is this abiding ground? The next passage unveils it of itself.

That Tathāgata-womb, at once the cause of birth-and-death and the cause of nirvāṇa

The scripture then speaks the deepest sentence of the whole passage: the Tathāgata-womb is the cause of birth-and-death, and of nirvāṇa, of pain and of pleasure.

One and the same Tathāgata-womb is the cause of birth-and-death and the cause of nirvāṇa; the cause of pain and the cause of pleasure. This sounds like a self-contradiction — how can one thing be at once the cause of both the defiled and the pure? Yet this is the very marrow of the Laṅkā's problem of cross-reading the Tathāgata-womb and the consciousness-store, and just why it "empties and confounds the mind," beyond the foolish common person's awakening.

Light it up with the mirror of Yogācāra. The preceding passage first says that the Tathāgata-womb, when perfumed by beginningless false and harmful habit-energy, is named the consciousness-store; this movement then says that the Tathāgata-womb is the cause of birth-and-death and nirvāṇa, pain and pleasure. Read together, the store-consciousness name depends on the condition of perfuming: following defiled conditions, there are birth-and-death and pain; following pure conditions, the course turns toward nirvāṇa and pleasure. This is a conditioned reconciliation. It neither cuts the two into wholly unrelated things nor erases the perfuming condition and makes them unconditionally identical. Scroll One's store-consciousness-ocean-and-waves simile may be cross-read here: the ocean figures the store consciousness, objects are like wind, and the consciousnesses are like waves. It clarifies the store consciousness evolving together with the active consciousnesses, but does not cancel this movement's distinction between intrinsic purity and adventitious perfuming. The two passages illuminate one another because one support can disclose the two courses of defilement and purity—not because the whole relation can be reduced to "the Tathāgata-womb simply is the store consciousness."

And the seven consciousnesses — mind, mentation, mental consciousness, together with the eye-consciousness and the rest — once the moment-by-moment cause of their perfuming is left behind, and even the one good and undefiled portion is left behind, no longer evolve in birth-and-death. The waves are stilled. But the ocean is not stilled. This turns again to the one move of Scroll One: what ceases is the wave of the karmic aspect that is these seven consciousnesses; the true aspect of the store consciousness does not cease. Were even the store consciousness to cease, that would be no different from the outsiders' annihilation-view. And so in the latter part the scripture adds one further cut: the foolish, resting on the ceasing of the seven consciousnesses, give rise to the annihilation-view (taking the ocean too for a wave, and, the waves having stopped, pronouncing the water dried up); not awakening to the store consciousness, they give rise to the eternalist view (taking the waves for the ocean, and clinging to some constantly abiding self) — both ends are astray. Only when one sees the store consciousness ever-evolving and not cut off, without a resting-place and yet no self, do the two views of annihilation and eternity fall away together. This "neither cut off nor eternal" is just the scriptural warrant for the later Yogācāra establishing of the eighth consciousness as "ever-evolving like a torrent."

The potter's wheel: how the transformation-buddha can expound the dharma and not lose the true

Back, now, to the pivot that unties the knot — the true buddha and the transformation-buddha. The scripture gives a living figure: the transformation-buddha expounds the dharma "following the marks made by the workings of sentient beings, as a potter's wheel [turns out its vessels]."

The potter's wheel is of itself no fixed thing; it turns out a jar, turns out a bowl, following the potter's hand and the vessel wanted, manifesting as it is worked. So too the transformation-buddha's expounding: he manifests his body and his teaching following the marks that sentient beings make — whatever their capacity draws forth, that he manifests: prophesying, showing Māra, suffering slander, all within this "responding-and-manifesting according to the occasion." And so all those contradictions of Mahāmati's at the outset fall wholly to the transformation-buddha's side: what the vajra-holding warriors guard is the transformation-buddha, what shows the obstructions of evil karma is the transformation-buddha — these are all expedient marks manifested following the marks of sentient beings, and touch not the true Tathāgata at all.

And the true Tathāgata? He is "apart from all that the sense-faculties can measure." The whole apparatus of measurer-and-measured, the sense-faculties of common persons, of the two vehicles, of outsiders — in him is wholly extinguished; he wins the abiding in the bliss of the present dharma, wins the unhindered forbearance of the knowledge of the dharma, his merit-dharma-body ever together with concentration — where should there be any need of vajra-holding warriors to guard him? Zonglei's judgment here is of the clearest: the true buddha does not fall into the aggregates, elements, and sense-fields, abides constant in knowledge-and-cutting-off, and so needs no guarding; the transformation-buddha responds and manifests according to the occasion, is not born of actual karma, and so requires no guarding — both buddhas need no guarding, yet it is a needing-no-guarding of two kinds. Light it up with the mirror of Yogācāra, and this dividing of the true and the transformation is just the parting of the body of self-enjoyment and the transformation-body in the later doctrine of the buddha-bodies: the one the inwardly-realized body of one's own awakening, apart from all that the sense-faculties can measure; the other the transformed and working body that responds to capacity and manifests, following the marks that sentient beings make. The Laṅkā here sets the line between the two buddhas firm, and Mahāmati's bosomful of contradictions thaws clean away — those "imperfect" marks were, from the first, an affair of the transformed working, and never touched the true Tathāgata at all.

Turning from the doctrine of consciousness onto the knife's edge: one taste of meat

Mahāmati then changes his theme and asks in verse: for the bodhisattva who seeks the buddha-path, how are wine, meat, and onions to be regarded?

This turn seems to begin another passage, but blood and vein it is joined to the first. The first part spoke of "seeing" — seeing the two obstructions, the two deaths, the true and the transformation, and the Tathāgata-womb named in this movement; the latter part speaks of "practice" — this seeing is to come down onto the most intimate of things, a single mouthful of food. Just above, it said of the Tathāgata: "Because he goes with great compassion for his forerunner, regarding all sentient beings as though they were his only child"; and this regarding-as-an-only-child is the very root of abstaining from meat. So abstaining from meat is no solitary precept standing off by itself; it is where the foregoing sense of the Tathāgata-womb as cause and the sense of great compassion walk down onto the knife's edge, of necessity. That sentient beings have been, turn upon turn, one another's six kinds of kin is the scripture's own statement about their revolving through conditions; the meat in your bowl today, how do you know it was not, in a former time, your father, mother, or brother? Because one is to hold them as kin, this one mouthful will not go down.

The Buddha ranges out at large the reasons one should not eat meat, one clasped to the next: because they have been the six kinds of kin in turn; because the butcher sells it mixed past telling apart; because it grows from an unclean semen-and-blood source; because sentient beings smelling the scent are struck with terror; because it keeps the kindly mind from arising in the one who practises; because it keeps the spells from being accomplished; because the slayer, seeing the shape, gives rise to a clinging to the relish … down to the weightiest move of all — the breaking of the three kinds of pure meat.

The three kinds of pure meat: closing the last expedient gate too

Within the śrāvaka precepts there is, from of old, the permitting of "the three kinds of pure meat": meat not seen killed for oneself, not heard killed for oneself, not suspected killed for oneself — such meat may be eaten. This is an expedient gate. The Laṅkā means, precisely here, to close it.

The scripture's reasoning is of the sharpest: nor is there any "not-taught, not-sought, not-thought-of" and yet coming to have fish and meat. Where in the world is there a piece of fish or meat that no one was ever taught to kill, no one ever sought to buy, no one ever gave rise to the thought of? The money with which you buy the meat is itself that net. And the scripture gives the figure right here: the foolish meat-eating sentient beings "make of money a net to catch the meat." Though you do not take the knife in your own hand, this one buying of yours sets going that whole slaughter and trade; money and goods are as a net, and cast down but once, the sentient beings that fly in the air and walk the land and dwell in the water are all drawn into it. The buyer, the slayer — the two alike do evil karma. This being so, the so-called "three pure" — not seen, not heard, not suspected — simply cannot stand: so long as there is one who eats, there is one who kills; so long as there is money to buy, the killing-karma falls upon the buyer's head. "If there is no teaching, thinking, or seeking, then there is no such thing as the three kinds of pure meat" — turned about, since there is not in the whole world one piece of meat truly without teaching, seeking, or thinking, the three kinds of pure meat is an empty name. And so the Buddha sets down the last, settling word: the former barring of five kinds and restraint of ten was a gradual expedient; but now, in this scripture, for all kinds and at all times, taking away the [former] expedients, all is cut off entire. The expedient gates are closed one by one, and here in the Laṅkā the last of them is closed.

The birth-story of King Siṃha-saudāsa of the past is just the iron proof of why this gate must be closed. A king craved the relish of meat, and ate the manifold kinds of meat, and his clinging to the relish deepened until he came at last to eating men, and in the end all revolted and he lost his kingdom. The fault of eating meat lies not in the smallness of a single meal, but in this: that the clinging to the relish turns and grows, grows until you cannot stay it yourself. This one affair of a king plays the four words "eating meat gives rise to the manifold faults" out before you, and bloodily.

Onward Transmission

The senses this whole passage establishes may be cross-read with the later Yogācāra treatises. The two obstructions of the first part the treatises unfold into the obstruction of the afflictions and the obstruction to the knowable, the one obstructing birth-and-death, the other obstructing awakening; the leaving-behind of the two deaths the treatises unfold into the two kinds of birth-and-death, by allotted portion and by transformation; the true and the transformation buddhas the treatises establish as the body of self-enjoyment and the transformation-body. That Tathāgata-womb, "the cause of the pain and pleasure of birth-and-death and of nirvāṇa," must be read together with movement 17's statement that it is "named the consciousness-store" when perfumed before it can illuminate one scriptural line toward the treatises' ālaya as the support of defilement and purity. The treatises do not here cite this passage phrase by phrase; one may therefore speak of inherited sense and cross-illumination, but not rewrite movement 19 as directly establishing the ālaya. As for the verse of the store-consciousness ocean and waves and the gāthā of mind-mentation-consciousness, cited by the treatises in clarifying the eighth consciousness, those issue from Scroll One and form a more direct line of onward transmission for the store-consciousness sense.

The abstaining from meat of the latter part forms another road. The Buddha in the closing verse says the thing out to the last: in the Hastikakṣya and the Mahāmegha, in the Aṅgulimālika, and in this Laṅkā, I have in every one restrained and cut off meat — the Buddha with his own mouth placing this scripture into the roster of the scriptures in which he restrains and cuts off meat. This one line is one of the root scriptural sources of the Han-transmitted Mahāyāna precept of the vegetarian discipline. One taste of the flesh of sentient beings cuts off the two roads, compassion and liberation. Seeing and practice, in this one passage, close into one affair: see sentient beings being in turn the six kinds of kin, and this one mouthful of meat of itself will not go down; let this one mouthful not go down, and only then does the kindly mind stand firm, and only then is the buddha-path walked through.