瑜伽師地論 義疏通講 · 冊11

The Stage of What is Attained through Reflection speaks of the "wisdom born of reflection" — taking the Dharma one has heard, laying it upon the mind, and examining it over and over. But there is a right thinking and a wrong thinking: wild, scattered thinking does not count as the wisdom of reflection. These three opening aspects are precisely a map of "thinking in accordance with the Dharma." The hard points are all explained with the examples the treatise itself already holds.

〔Stage heading〕本地分中思所成地第十一之一 — Within the Basic Section, the Stage of What is Attained through Reflection, the eleventh, part one

First, a Question: Among the Three Wisdoms of Hearing, Reflection, and Cultivation, What Exactly Does This Gate of "Reflection" Do?

The wisdom of hearing takes the Dharma in and fixes it accurately in memory; the wisdom of cultivation takes the Dharma into meditative absorption and realizes it out. Wedged in between, the "wisdom of reflection" does a piece of work most easily slighted and yet most crucial — taking the Dharma one has heard and, by oneself, examining it once over on the mind, discriminating it once over, deciding it once over, discriminating until it stands firm, deciding until it no longer wavers; only then does this Dharma truly become one's own, only then can it be handed on to "cultivation."

The moment the Stage of What is Attained through Reflection opens its gate, it uses three aspects to take this piece of work apart: first, intrinsic purity (the "quality" of the reflection must be pure); second, discerning the knowable (the "object" of the reflection must be discriminated clearly); third, discerning the phenomena (the "material" of the reflection = the sūtras and the gāthās). The first two aspects are the backbone of this opening unit.

The First Aspect · Intrinsic Purity: First Grind the Knife of "Reflection" Clean

The treatise is in no hurry to teach you what to think; first it teaches you "what kind of thinking counts" — it lists nine items, each of them guarding against one kind of going astray:

One must dwell alone in a solitary place and, having settled down into quiet, deliberatively reflect (not amid bustle with scattered delusive thoughts); reflect only on "what is to be reflected upon," and not touch the locus of "what is not to be reflected upon or discussed" (not boring into a dead end, not reflecting on the inconceivable); distinguish clearly between "black speech" and "great speech" (able to tell which is not the Dharma and which is the true Dharma); rely on the meaning, not on the letter (grasp the doctrinal meaning, and not be led along by the surface of the words — this is the very lifeline of the wisdom of reflection); toward what should be confidently understood, confidently understand, and toward what should be examined with wisdom, examine with wisdom (neither blindly believing throughout, nor doubtingly demanding throughout); and then, firmly, settledly, and continuously, keep on reflecting, all the way to consummation, not in mid-course growing weary, or afraid, or drawing back.

The nine items taken together are one knife ground clean — "pure and well-purified reflection." That the Stage of Reflection gives not the object first but the quality first carries a deep intent: if the knife is not clean, whatever you cut comes out warped.

The Second Aspect · Discerning the Knowable: Discriminating "Being" from "Non-Being," One Ruler Measuring Through

Once the knife is ground, what does it cut? It cuts "the meaning that is observed." And this meaning the treatise splits in two with a single sentence: "With respect to what has phenomenal being, know the mark of being; with respect to what is not phenomenal being, know the mark of non-being" — the one who knows how to think, at the very first step, sorts out "what is there" from "what is not there," neither taking the not-there for there (that is superimposition), nor taking the there for not-there (that is denial).

How Does "Being-Phenomena" Have Being? — Five Kinds of Being-Phenomena, Discriminating True from False Layer by Layer

The treatise takes "being" apart into five kinds, and the most essential is the first, being-phenomena of the particular mark, which divides into three layers; and these three layers, the ancient masters saw at a glance, are exactly the ruler of the three natures:

• Being of the ultimate mark — the "non-posited mark" free of all verbal expression, which only supramundane knowledge can illuminate. The ancient masters judge outright: this is the perfectly-accomplished (suchness) (Kuiji says, "being of the ultimate mark means suchness itself, attained by root knowledge, the non-posited mark") 〔窺基〕.
• Being of the aspectual mark — that which is recognized only by four kinds of aspect (a name is obtainable, a referent-thing is obtainable, the name is determinate with respect to the referent-thing, it follows over without obstruction). The ancient masters judge: this is the other-dependent (Kuiji says, "being of the aspectual mark is the other-dependent nature") 〔窺基〕. He also adds a still finer ruler: "a name is obtainable" marks off the perfectly-accomplished (suchness does not follow upon names), and "a referent-thing is obtainable" marks off the wholly-imagined (the wholly-imagined self has a name but no substantial referent-thing) 〔窺基〕.
• Being of the present mark — the already-arisen, that which has causal-and-fruitional nature.

Out of a single "being-phenomena of the particular mark," the ancient masters have measured out the shadow of all three natures — perfectly-accomplished, other-dependent, and wholly-imagined. The ruler used by the Stage of Reflection to examine phenomena turns out to be the three natures — and this is exactly the astonishing thing about this gate: the three natures of Consciousness-Only make their entrance not only at the wisdom of cultivation, not only in the Cheng Weishi Lun; the very first stroke of the wisdom of reflection examining phenomena is already they.

Being-phenomena of the common mark, in turn, is the shared mark of the several phenomena, in five items from shallow to deep: category (the aggregating of the aggregates), the accomplishing of what is done (the class of wholesome phenomena drawing a beloved fruit), and then three overall marks — "all formations are impermanent," "all that is contaminated is suffering," "all phenomena are empty and without self." When the wisdom of reflection examines this far, the three seals of the Dharma are already before its eyes.

"Being-Phenomena of the Fictitious Mark" = Six Kinds of Verbal Expression: A Class in Taking Language Apart

Of the five kinds of being-phenomena, the one the treatise treats most minutely is being-phenomena of the fictitious mark — and its criterion is peculiar: it looks not at the thing but at the "speech." Wherever a place can give rise to six kinds of verbal expression, that place is "fictitiously existent." These six kinds of verbal expression are in fact a class in taking everyday language apart, watching how people use speech to "manufacture" one thing after another that is not really there:

• Corresponding to a possessor: to say "arising" one must ask "whose arising" (the arising of form, the arising of feeling) — a name stands only in dependence on a "possessor."
• Removed from this and that: things like "the door of a house," "the trees of a grove," "the ten of a hundred" — neither displaying this by this nor displaying that by that, purely speech that turns upon a fictitious mark.
• Common convention: the speech that all agree upon by custom, established in dependence on consciousness and the five omnipresent factors (the six aspects: a thing · the knowable · the pleasant-and-fine · the benefiting · verbal expression · wrong conduct). The ancient masters lay bare the pivot: of these six aspects the "self-mark that is grasped" is real, but the "common mark" is fictitious — "the fictitious means superimposition, not real-mark being" (Dunlun cites the Consciousness-Only words) 〔遁倫〕. In one sentence he has laid bare how names-and-words "superimpose" a fictitious mark upon real phenomena — and this is precisely the ground of what later Consciousness-Only calls the wholly-imagined.
• Assemblage of many phenomena: calling a heap of combined things by a single name — the inner five aggregates called "self," the combination of outer form, scent, taste, and the tangible called "house, jar, chariot, grove."
• Not [applied] throughout everything: the name "dwelling-house" turns only upon dwelling-houses, and revolves back on reaching a village; "grove" turns only upon groves, and revolves back on reaching twigs and leaves — each name has its own bound.
• The non-constant: when a jar breaks it is renamed "shard," a lump of gold beaten into a "ring or bracelet," food turned into "excrement" — the thing changes, and the name is exchanged.

Taking the six kinds of verbal expression apart one after another, the conclusion is a single sentence: whatever can be "spoken" in this way is fictitiously existent. The one who knows how to reflect is therefore not fooled by names-and-words.

One Must Also Know How to See "Non-Being"; "Being-Nature and Non-Being-Nature" Gather It All into One Net

"Non-being" too is of five kinds: the non-being of the not-yet-arisen (future formations), the non-being of the already-ceased (past formations), mutual non-being (the sort of "no horse within the ox"), ultimate non-being (conventional fictitious names, which in terms of the ultimate are all non-being), and absolute non-being (as with "the son of a barren woman" — a thing that is not there at all). Finally the treatise gathers all the foregoing discrimination into one overall net — five kinds of being-nature: the perfectly-accomplished mark, the other-dependent mark, the wholly-imagined mark (the first three are the three natures!), the distinguishing mark, and the inexpressible mark; together with the five kinds of non-being-nature that turn against them.

Among these, the inexpressible mark most repays pondering, and the treatise gives four reasons for "inexpressibility": because there is nothing (the person, with respect to the aggregates, cannot be said to be one, cannot be said to be different — whether the self of persons is one with or different from the five aggregates cannot even be broached); because of profundity (the verbally-inexpressible nature of phenomena, the Dharma-body of the Tathāgata, the field of the buddhas, whether the Tathāgata after cessation exists or not — deep to where words cannot reach); because it would draw forth nothing of meaning (what, once spoken, does not increase the meaning of the Dharma or the holy life, the Buddha, though he has realized it, does not speak); because it is the very-suchness of the mark of phenomena (suchness, with respect to the several formations, is from the outset unsayable as same or different). The one who knows how to reflect can discriminate clearly even "where one ought to shut one's mouth" — this too is the wisdom of reflection.

The Third Aspect · Discerning the Phenomena: The Material of Reflection

Having discriminated being from non-being and sharpened the knife of reflection, on what material does one reflect? The treatise marks out two classes: first, "the meaning of the sūtras" (the meaning of the discourses, treated at length in the Section on the Gathering of Events and the Bodhisattva Canon), and second, "the meaning of the gāthās" — and the meaning of the gāthās divides again into three sets: the ultimate-meaning gāthās, the intended-meaning gāthās, and the essential-meaning gāthās. These three sets are precisely the main text that 11-01, 11-02, and 11-03 will one by one take up for reflection.

The Intent of This Gate

The Stage of Reflection, at its gate, does not expound lofty doctrine; first it gives a diagram of "how to reflect": intrinsic purity sharpens the knife of reflection (rely on the meaning not the letter, not grow weary nor draw back); discerning the knowable clears up being from non-being (five being-phenomena, five non-being-phenomena — and the three marks of the particular and the five kinds of being-nature have already set up the three natures as its ruler, the six kinds of verbal expression laying bare fictitious names); discerning the phenomena draws forth the three [sets of] gāthās. The wisdom of reflection is not meditation; it is a rigorous, exacting discrimination — and the ruler of that discrimination is, from the very start, the three natures. This lays the groundwork for the ultimate-meaning reflection on the three sets of gāthās to follow.

Carrying Forward

The three marks of the particular judged as the three natures · the five kinds of being-nature → the chapter on the three natures in the Cheng Weishi Lun · the Chapter on Discriminating the Marks in the Madhyāntavibhāga; the six verbal expressions of the fictitious mark · the common convention's "superimposition, not real" → the Section on the Mark of the Knowable in the Mahāyānasaṃgraha · the ground of the wholly-imagined in the Cheng Weishi Lun; the four kinds of inexpressibility (the person inexpressible as same or different from the aggregates · the verbally-inexpressible nature of phenomena) → the Chapter on the Mark of the Ultimate Truth in the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra (the verbally-inexpressible) · the no-self of persons in the ultimate-meaning gāthās (11-01); the six aspects in dependence on the five omnipresent factors → the five omnipresent factors of the Hundred Dharmas Treatise (in this series) — the method of discriminating phenomena that the Stage of Reflection sets up, the later treatises unfold here at length.

The Stage of What is Attained through Reflection is the stage of the "wisdom born of reflection" — one takes the Dharma heard and lays it upon the mind, examining it round after round, examining it to the bottom, examining out the ultimate meaning. Of the three sets of verses here, this first set, the "Verses on the Ultimate Meaning," forty-four verses, examines the hardest pass of all: the no-self of the person (pudgala). The hard places are all taught by means of the similes the treatise itself already holds.

First, a Question: Since There Is No "Self," Then Who Is It That Performs Karma, Who Reaps Retribution, Who Is Liberated?

This is a threshold every follower of the Buddha sooner or later runs up against. The Buddha teaches no-self; yet plainly it is "I" who live out my days, plainly it is "I" who perform the karma, plainly it is "I" who undergo pain and pleasure. If there truly were no self, would not cause and effect fall away into emptiness?

The very first verse of the Verses on the Ultimate Meaning cleaves this threshold open in one stroke:

「都無有宰主及作者、受者;諸法亦無用,而用轉非無。」

tr. "There is no master, no doer, and no experiencer at all; nor do phenomena have any activity — and yet the turning of activity is not nonexistent."

In this one short verse it refutes both extremes at once. The treatise itself makes the point very clear — these forty-four verses are spoken "in dependence on the ultimate meaning of the no-self of the person," "for the sake of countering the twofold grasping at the extremes of over-affirmation and under-denial." The ancient masters put the two extremes even more plainly: "To grasp that there is a self-activity is called over-affirmation; to deny away the nature of phenomena is called under-denial" (so Kuiji's Concise Compendium and Dunlun's Notes agree).

One extreme is over-affirmation: forcibly installing, apart from or within the five aggregates, a "self" that can master, that can create, that can receive. The treatise takes it apart in three cuts: with respect to what "I" appropriate, it is called "master"; with respect to the several karmic activities, it is called "doer"; with respect to fruit and retribution, it is called "experiencer." These three, together with "phenomena, too, have no activity" (within the aggregates there is likewise no activity belonging to a self), are all blocked off — and this refutes over-affirmation.

The other extreme is under-denial: since there is no self, some slide all the way down, discarding even causal activity, and say, "everything is empty anyway, so it makes no difference what one does." The treatise at once pulls them back: "and yet the turning of activity is not nonexistent" — the turning of activity is not nonexistent; phenomena do have an intrinsic nature. And this refutes under-denial.

Refute over-affirmation, and refute under-denial too — falling into neither extreme; this is exactly the Middle Way. No-self is not the absence of activity; it is only the absence of a "self" playing master within the activity.

Then Who Is It That Circles Round? — Only the Twelve Links, and the Aggregates, Bases, and Elements

Having refuted the self, the treatise at once fills the vacated seat:

「唯十二有支、蘊、處、界,流轉。審思此一切,眾生不可得。」

tr. "Only the twelve links of existence, the aggregates, the bases, and the elements are in circulation. Examine all of this closely, and no living being can be found."

Saṃsāra is not "a self" circling round; it is this apparatus of cause and effect — the twelve links of existence, the five aggregates, the twelve bases, the eighteen elements — circling round of itself. However closely you "examine" (the treatise says: one must observe carefully and truly by the three means of knowledge — direct perception, inference, and authoritative teaching), you will find no "living being" to serve as protagonist. The eye, with form for condition, produces the fruit that is eye-consciousness — within this stretch of cause and effect, there is simply no need for, and no finding of, a second "experiencer."

This answers the threshold posed at the outset: the one who performs karma and reaps retribution is not a "self," but the self-continuity of causal phenomena. With no doer, karma is still perfumed into seeds; with no experiencer, the fruit still matures in dependence on its cause. Lacking the "self," cause and effect become, if anything, cleaner and more coherent.

Five Similes, to See Through the Five Aggregates

To say "no-self" alone still feels abstract; so the treatise brings out five similes spoken from the Buddha's own mouth — the most famous string of teaching-tools in the whole piece:

「諸色,如聚沫;諸受,類浮泡;諸想,同陽焰;諸行,喻芭蕉;諸識,猶幻事——曰親之所說。」

tr. "The forms are like a mass of foam; the feelings are like floating bubbles; the perceptions are like a heat-shimmer; the conditioned factors are like a plantain-tree; the consciousnesses are like a conjured show — thus said the Kinsman-of-the-Sun."

"Kinsman-of-the-Sun" is He-Whose-Kin-Is-the-Sun, the Buddha (a descendant of the Sugarcane line, the Solar line). The five aggregates are matched one by one: form is like the foam gathered on the water's surface, scattering at a touch; feeling is like the water-bubbles struck up by raindrops, perishing as soon as they arise; perception is like the heat-shimmer of the open wilds (which the thirsty deer mistakes for water), sheer illusion; the conditioned factors are like a plantain-tree, peeled layer by layer to the very bottom with no solid core; consciousness is like the conjured show a magician produces, seeming to be there, empty when grasped. Once the five aggregates are seen through, the "self" has nowhere to lodge — for the self people grasp is nothing other than what they take up upon these five heaps.

Why, Though There Is Plainly No Self, Do We Nonetheless Feel There Is a Self? — The Root of the View of Self

Refuting the self is not hard; the hard thing is that this "view of self" clings extremely deep. The treatise chases it to its root — and in this one chase, within the ground of the wisdom of reflection, it chases out the very skeleton of the Consciousness-Only teaching of mind and consciousness.

The treatise asks: on what does the "view of self" arise? It arises in dependence on "the maturation of the several seeds." That which the ordinary person mistakes for the "inner self" is something "realized within oneself, without form, not to be seen" — and the ordinary person, lacking the power of discernment, takes it for the "self." Reading on with the treatise's words, this is plainly a description of the store consciousness: it is stored in the deepest place, loved and treasured (to "treasure in craving" is to appropriate it as one's own essential body), and thereby it goes, all the way, toward idle proliferation. The ancient masters point it out directly: this verse "makes plain the store consciousness — as when a pool issues forth its streams" (Dunlun and Kuiji agree), and Kuiji further cites the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra's simile of the sea and the wind, "as when the sea meets the condition of wind," to bring out the meaning.

The similes the treatise gives are equally fierce:

「諸愚夫固著,如大象溺泥。」「此池派眾流,於世流為暴;非火風日竭,唯除正法行。」

tr. "The several ordinary fools cling fast, like a great elephant sunk in the mire." "This pool issues forth the several streams; in the world it flows out as a torrent; it cannot be dried up by fire, wind, or sun, save only by the practice of the true Dharma."

The fool who grasps a self is like a great elephant mired in the bog: the more it struggles, the deeper it sinks. That store consciousness is like a deep pool, issuing forth all the streams — the eye and the other six faculties, the five destinies, the three realms — flooding out across the world into a raging river; the sun cannot dry it, the wind cannot dry it, the fire cannot dry it. The one and only thing that can exhaust it dry is "the practice of the true Dharma." (In "the pool issues forth the several streams," the character "pool": the base text reads "池 [pool]," while the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Palace editions read "地 [ground]"; take "pool," and the simile is of the store consciousness issuing streams like a deep pool; take "ground," and the simile is of it bringing forth the many waters like the great earth — the two readings stand together, and the sense is coherent either way.)

The view of self further divides into two roots: one is the "innate view of self," produced by the comprehensive grasping of the latent tendency of one's own kind, borne by everyone from birth; the other is the "discriminated view of self," which the outsiders perfume out after the fact through past habituation, through unwarranted pondering, and through hearing an untrue Dharma. The former is deep, the latter coarse; but both are uprooted only under "the practice of the true Dharma."

The Defiled Mentation: The Seventh Consciousness Makes Its Appearance within the Ground of Reflection

Following the view of self one layer further in, the treatise points out the "mechanism" that constantly grasps a self:

「染污意,恒時諸惑俱生滅。若解脫諸惑,非先,亦非後。」

tr. "The defiled mentation, ever and always, arises and perishes together with the several afflictions. If one is liberated from the several afflictions, it is not prior, nor after."

This "defiled mentation" is the seventh consciousness, the manas. It has a distinctive trait: ever and always it arises together, and perishes together, with the several afflictions (the four afflictions — delusion about self, view of self, conceit of self, and love of self) — never letting go. The ancient masters state it clearly: "this is the manas accompanied by the four afflictions, arising together and perishing together"; and at the time of liberation, "when the vajra-path arises, the defiled mentation and its four afflictions are cut off at the very same time" (Dunlun and Kuiji agree) — hence "not prior, nor after": the four afflictions ever arise together with it, so liberation is not prior to the afflictions; the four afflictions perish at the same time as it, so it is not after them either.

More important still is the further layer the treatise turns over: its purity is not "first dirty, then washed clean," not another clean mentation brought in to replace it; rather, "that which has defilement is, in its ultimate nature, pure" — its self-nature is originally pure, and it only appears defiled because the adventitious afflictions entangle it. Since there is no real "defilement to be purified," what need is there of a "purifier"? When the defilement is exhausted, that is purity; the very thing itself, as it stands, is it.

The ground of reflection is still only the second of the three wisdoms of hearing, reflection, and cultivation, and is separated from true cultivation (the Stage of What is Attained through Cultivation) by a whole stage; yet the defiled mentation, the store consciousness, the seeds, the two truths — the entire skeleton of the Consciousness-Only teaching of mind and consciousness — is already set up within these forty-four verses. This too is why this set of verses is called "the ultimate meaning."

One Is Conventional, One Is Ultimate: Only When Read on Both Levels Do They Not Clash

Reading to here, a doubt arises: you said earlier "no doer, no experiencer," and later you say "one does the deed oneself and reaps it oneself," "the mind turns in accordance with karma" — is this not self-contradiction?

The treatise resolves it by the "two truths." The ancient masters divide it very finely: "the first three lines are contemplation by the ultimate truth, the latter five lines contemplation by the conventional truth" (Dunlun and Kuiji agree). Spoken by the ultimate: there is no doer, no experiencer, not even "one who is deluded" ("though there is no one who is deluded, it is not that there is no delusion"). Spoken by the conventional: for what is produced from the many conditions, on the level of provisional naming one may perfectly well say "delusion can delude," say "the mind turns in accordance with meritorious action and the rest," say "one does the deed oneself and reaps it oneself." The two levels are not on the same plane, and so they naturally do not clash — the ultimate does not spoil the conventional's cause and effect; the conventional does not set up the ultimate's real self. This is exactly the settling-into-place of the earlier line "the turning of activity is not nonexistent."

Drawing to a Close: In Liberation, Too, There Is No "One Who Is Liberated"

At the last, the treatise carries no-self through to the very bottom, leaving not a single "self" even in nirvāṇa:

Two kinds of liberation — "the several seeds have perished, the several afflictions are exhausted" is liberation from afflictions, and "right here there is non-defilement" is liberation from the matter; the exhaustion of afflictions is "with a remaining basis," and nothing-but-the-exhaustion-of-the-masses-of-suffering (yet not being wholly without nature — the treatise deliberately guards against anyone sliding toward "annihilation") is "without a remaining basis." Yet even having reached this point, one still cannot say there is a "one who enters nirvāṇa":

「眾生名相續,及法想相中,無生死流轉,亦無涅槃者。」

tr. "In the continuity of the name 'living being,' and in the mark of the concept 'phenomenon,' there is no circling in birth-and-death, and there is likewise no one who enters nirvāṇa."

"Living being" is only a name in continuity; "phenomenon" too is only the mark of a concept; and within this name-and-mark, one finds neither a self circling in birth-and-death, nor a self realizing nirvāṇa. Saṃsāra with no one circling in saṃsāra, nirvāṇa with no one entering nirvāṇa — the no-self of the person, examined this far, is at last examined to the bottom.

This is the very purport of the Verses on the Ultimate Meaning: with a single verse's twofold refutation it stands the Middle Way firm (no-self, yet cause and effect not empty); with the five-aggregate similes it sees through what is grasped; with the defiled mentation and the store consciousness it lights up the root of the view of self; with the two truths it dissolves the contradiction; and at the last it sets down even the one who is liberated. What the ground of reflection examines, in examining the Dharma, is just this one flavor: the ultimate meaning.

Carrying Forward

The single verse's twofold refutation, countering over-affirmation and under-denial → the Middle Way of the Madhyāntavibhāga's Chapter on the Character (the departure from the two extremes); the no-self of the person and the no-self of phenomena → in one continuous line with the ascertainment of the ground of the wisdom of reflection in the Section on Ascertainment ("as for conditionally-arisen phenomena — they are phenomena without master, without doer"); the defiled mentation ever accompanied by the four afflictions, and the store consciousness treasured in craving → the Cheng Weishi Lun's chapter on the seventh, the manas, and its chapter on the store consciousness, and the eight consciousnesses among the mind-dharmas of the Hundred Dharmas treatise (this series) — the skeleton of mind and consciousness disclosed in the ground of reflection is here broadly established by the later treatises.

The second cluster of verses in the Stage of What is Attained through Reflection. Unlike the Verses on the Ultimate, which speak of the ultimate meaning of no-self, this cluster puts on another face: it is Great Brahmā who steps forward and asks the Buddha about "training." The Buddha answers with fifty verses, and lays out the whole road of discipline, concentration, and wisdom — from receiving the precepts to realizing nirvāṇa — verse by verse. The difficult places are all explained with similes the treatise itself already contains.

First, a Single Question: The Dharma Has a Thousand Gates and Ten Thousand Doors — Where Does a Beginner Set to Work?

This is exactly what Great Brahmā asks on our behalf. Coming before the Buddha, he first praises him as "one who has reached the ultimate in training and well severs the nets of doubt," and then asks three of the plainest things: What is "training"? How many kinds of training are there? How is one to train?

The Buddha's answer is clean and decisive, a skeleton of only a few words —

「學略有三種：增上戒、心、慧。」 tr. "Training, stated briefly, is of three kinds: the higher discipline, the higher mind, and the higher wisdom."

Why gather the six perfections and the myriad practices down into these three? The ancient masters lay it bare: this is the Buddha's hidden intent — "though there are the six perfections and the myriad practices, he speaks only of the three trainings, since the three trainings by their name subsume all practices" (Dunlun and Kuiji agree). The Buddha, in order to spur on those beings who "fear many undertakings and are prone to sloth," gathers all practices into a single main road that is most sparing of effort and least likely to lose the way: the distracted, settle by discipline; the mind unsettled, hold in place by concentration; the settled-but-not-yet-liberated, sever delusion by wisdom. Discipline, concentration, and wisdom — this is the whole chart of the Dharma.

Discipline: Six Branches Uphold Four Kinds of Purity

How is the higher discipline cultivated? The treatise gives six branches: abiding in pure moral discipline, guarding the discipline of individual liberation, fullness of comportment, fullness of the sphere of conduct, seeing great terror in the several small offenses, and receiving and studying the points of training. The ancient masters draw out of these six branches a beautiful structure: the first branch is "receiving" (only after one has received the precepts does one abide in them), and the latter five are "upholding"; the six branches together uphold exactly the four kinds of purity of moral discipline — guarding the discipline of individual liberation = the purity of departure, comportment and sphere of conduct = the purity of being without reproach, seeing terror in small offenses = the purity of being without breach or gap, and receiving and studying the points of training = the purity of being without error; while abiding in pure moral discipline is the root of all this (Dunlun says, "the first one is receiving, the latter five are upholding; because, in relation to upholding, it is the root, it is the basis that serves as support").

The marks of discipline the treatise gives in extreme detail (a full twenty-one verses). The most vivid is the "keeping far from the five places" — the one who has left home should not habitually go to five kinds of household: the household of a king, the household of the herald, the household of the wine-seller, the household of the courtesan, and the household of the caṇḍāla and the kaṭhina. What is the "household of the herald"? The ancient masters explain: by the law of the Western regions, when someone has committed an evil, a warder is made to march the offender through the streets proclaiming, "this man has committed such-and-such a crime" — which points to livelihoods such as sheep-slaughtering (proclaiming everywhere that sheep-slaughtering becomes an extremely grave offense, and that they mostly commit the karma of killing). Discipline, just so, one item at a time, pulls body and speech out of the environment of evil karma.

Concentration: The Four Blissful Abidings, Settling the Mind in the Bliss of the Present Dharma

The skillful means of the higher mind (concentration) is the "four blissful abidings" — that is, the four meditative absorptions. Why are they called "blissful abidings"? The ancient masters answer crisply: "the four meditative absorptions are named the four abidings of mind; because they are a blissful abiding within the present dharma, they are named 'blissful'" — concentration is not bitter austerity, but the settling of the mind within the cool bliss of the present moment. What this passage of the treatise urges again and again is all the work of guarding concentration: ever dwelling in a place of seclusion, being neither too sunken nor too buoyant, departing from the five hindrances (craving-desire, hatred, dullness-and-sleep, agitation-and-wrongdoing, doubt), and when the mind sinks, raising up the pure and sublime mark… In a word, tuning the mind to be "capable," so that concentration can arise at all.

Wisdom: Four Modes upon Each of the Four Truths, Severing Delusion and Seeing the True

The skillful means of the higher wisdom is "upon each of the four [noble truths] there are four modes, and wisdom is ever pure" — each of the truths of suffering, origin, cessation, and path has four modes of aspect (impermanence and the rest), and wisdom is what this purified knowing illumines. And the three trainings each have their own task upon the truths: discipline is "first purified," concentration "delights in the meditative absorptions," wisdom is "skilled in the truths"; and within the truths, the truth of the path "should be given rise to," the truths of suffering and origin "should be kept far from," the truth of cessation "should be increased" — as the afflictions of the weak, middling, and strong grades are severed in sequence, the truth of cessation increases portion by portion.

How the Three Trainings Pass the Baton: Not-Shared and Necessarily-Shared

The treatise has an exquisite set of adjudicating words on the relations among the three trainings. First look at the "fruit": the four destinies — discipline accomplished draws the good destiny of humans and gods, discipline failed drops to the evil destiny, concentration draws the higher destiny of the form and formless realms, wisdom realizes the destiny of nirvāṇa; the first two destinies are to be kept far from, the latter two are to be realized. Then look at the "baton-passing":

• Discipline is "not-shared": even apart from concentration and wisdom, discipline can be established of itself (keeping the precepts already gives rise to the good destiny).
• Concentration is "not-shared": concentration can be accomplished even apart from wisdom (departing from the desire of the desire-realm and gaining purity), but it cannot be apart from discipline.
• Wisdom is "necessarily-shared": wisdom must have both discipline and concentration present to accomplish the ultimate by its own power.

The ancient masters gather it in a single line: "the first one is not-shared, the middle is not apart from the first, the highest is not apart from the two" — discipline can be cultivated alone, concentration must rely on discipline, wisdom must possess both discipline and concentration. And the one who "transcends them all" is the one-beyond-learning, the arhat. The three trainings are not three parallel segments; they are a baton-passing in which each rank bears up the next.

Why Must One Depart from Desire? — The Eight Kinds of False Discrimination and the Eight Similes

Discipline, concentration, and wisdom all circle around one thing: departing from desire. But how does sensual craving wind itself around one, step by step? The treatise takes apart eight kinds of false discrimination, like a slow-motion replay: first the "drawing-forth" (improper reflection arising toward a lovable object), then the "awakening" (the wrapping-round of craving rearing its head), the "binding through conjunction," the "marked" (grasping at pure and sublime marks and forms), the "intimate," the "delight," down to the "pressing-in" and the "utterly intimate" — a single thought of the lovable can, in this way, escalate rank by rank into a craving impossible to break. See this chain of arising clearly, and one knows that the cut must be made at the very head, at "drawing-forth."

And to make one utterly give up all heart for it, the treatise brings out a string of similes commonly known to all the world, matching each of the eight faults of sensual desires — this is the sharpest teaching implement in the whole piece:

• Sensual desires are like a dry bone — gnawed and gnawed with no flesh, they make one insatiable;
• like a soft lump of flesh — a single morsel over which many birds contend, they are shared in common by the many;
• like a torch of grass — held against the wind, it must burn the hand: they are a cause contrary to Dharma (as they start up they burn and torment);
• like a great pit of fire — drawing near, one is scorched: they increase parching craving;
• like a python or venomous snake — the worthy and holy keep far from them;
• like a thing seen in a dream — gone the moment one wakes: they swiftly head toward ruin and destruction;
• like borrowed ornaments — borrowed, they must in the end be returned: they rest upon a host of conditions;
• like fruit ripe at the tip of a tree — an overripe fruit on high, about to fall: they are the ground on which peril, death, and negligence rest.

The treatise concludes it flat and firm: "knowing sensual desires in this way, one should crave and delight in none of them" — once these eight similes are seen through, what wise one would still seek bliss upon a venomous snake or a pit of fire?

The Seven Attentions: Rank by Rank up to the Two Nirvāṇas

Finally, the wisdom-training lands upon actual practice, and the treatise lists seven attentions, which are precisely a stairway from hearing-and-reflecting to realizing the fruit: apprehending-the-aspect (hearing, reflecting, recognizing the aspect) → resolute conviction (cultivating by giving rise to resolute conviction) → seclusion (first contemplating the coarse and the calm, departing from the lower realm) → gathering joy (single-directed cultivation, severing the coarse heaviness and giving rise to gladness) → investigation (investigating amid the several marks) → the culmination of effort → the fruit of the culmination of effort. Walking this all the way through, one "is able to depart from the desire of the desire-realm, and from the desire of the form-realm, enters the direct realization of the true truths, and is able to depart from all desire," and at the last realizes the nirvāṇa within the present dharma (with-remaining-basis) and the final exhaustion of the remaining basis (without-remaining-basis) — the higher-wisdom training ultimately pure.

The Purport of This Gate

The Verses on Intent, by way of a single question from Great Brahmā, gather the Dharma into a whole chart of the three trainings of discipline, concentration, and wisdom: discipline sets up the four purities by the six branches, concentration settles the mind by the four blissful abidings, wisdom severs delusion by the four modes upon the four truths; the three trainings bear one another up rank by rank through "not-shared / necessarily-shared"; and the work of departing from desire that runs through the whole depends on seeing through the arising of the eight kinds of false discrimination and on the head-on staff-blow of the eight similes of sensual desires, ending, by the stairway of the seven attentions, at the two nirvāṇas. The one flavor of "intent" that the Stage of Reflection weighs out here is just this: to weigh the whole path of liberation into a road that can be walked through, and walked steadily.

Carrying Forward

The three higher trainings · the six-branch marks of discipline → the extended teaching of discipline in the Śrāvaka Stage (Dunlun: "expounded at length in the Śrāvaka Stage"); the four blissful abidings (the four meditative absorptions) · the seven attentions → the Stage of Meditative Equipoise (Stage 06) · the cultivation of concentration in the Śrāvaka Stage; the eight kinds of false discrimination that give rise to sensual craving → the false discrimination of the Chapter on the Marks in the Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes; the eight similes of sensual desires → the shared store of similes for the teaching on departing from desire used by the later treatises — the whole chart of discipline, concentration, and wisdom that the Verses on Intent set up, the later treatises expound at length upon this ground.

The Body-Meaning Verses are the last of the three sets of verses in the Stage of What is Attained through Reflection, and also the largest — ninety-one verses in fourteen segments, taking up the Buddha's scriptural verses one segment at a time and sifting them through. The opening first segment is but a single verse, on "do no evil"; yet do not make light of it — within this one verse lies hidden the whole road from the good destinations to nirvāṇa. The hard points are all put in words the treatise itself already carries.

First, One Question: Who Cannot Say "Do No Evil"? But to What Degree Must the "No" Reach?

The first verse is very plain: "Of all there is in body, speech, and mind — all worldly evil — do none of it; through mindfulness and clear comprehension, keep apart from all desires; do not draw near to that which can lead to fruitless suffering." It sounds like an old, worn commonplace. But the moment the treatise takes it up, it presses "do none of it" all the way to the bottom — the "no" must be clean across the three "everys":

• Every kind: the three deeds of body, speech, and mind — not one of them commits evil;
• Every cause and condition: whatever evil issues from greed, hatred, and delusion — never committed;
• Every locus: whether toward "the sentient" (living beings) or "the non-sentient" (the matters and objects that are vessels of the world), no evil is committed.

Kind, cause, and locus — three faces closing it in, with not a single loophole to slip through — this is the true weight of "do no evil." Achieve it, and the treatise says that what it cuts off is the obstacle to the "fulfillment of higher rebirth," and what it realizes is the "fulfillment of higher rebirth" (rebirth in a good destination). This is the road's first stage: first pull oneself out of the evil destinations.

The Two Layers of "Keep Apart from Desires": First Leave the Household, Then Leave the Root in the Heart

The verse's second line, "through mindfulness and clear comprehension, keep apart from desires," the treatise takes apart into two layers, tiered with great care:

The first layer · cutting off desire for objects — someone gives rise to a purified trust in the right Dharma, sees clearly that the household life is like living in a prison ("understands that the household life is cramped and confining, like a prison, and so yearns to leave it"), and thereupon forsakes the household and goes forth. But the treatise, very honestly, points out one thing: at this stage "the craving-greed for desire is not yet forever gone" — the person has left the household, yet the root of greed in his heart is still there. So cutting off "desire for objects" cuts off only that layer of household desire that belongs to the outer objects.

The second layer · cutting off desire that is affliction — this is the hard, real labor. Having gone forth, he dwells out in the wilderness and mountain forests, in an āraṇya place; against those false-discriminating greeds, he cultivates the four foundations of mindfulness; abiding in clear comprehension, keeping apart from all the hindrances, body and mind attuned and supple, capable of practice, "with ardor and skillful means" he cultivates "cutting off" and cultivates "quiescence," cultivating on until the "cutting off of desire that is affliction," until keeping apart from all desires, and even to dwelling in the first meditative absorption complete. Only at this step does he count as able, with respect to the one edge of "enjoying the pleasure of desires" — which the treatise, without the least mincing, calls "the base, mean, filthy phenomena of the ordinary being" — to cut it off and to know it.

The two layers advance one upon the other, pushing "parting from desire" from "parting in body" to "parting in heart," from the gate of going-forth to the cutting-off of the latent tendency.

"Do Not Draw Near Fruitless Suffering": The Pit on the Other Side Is Called Self-Mortification

The verse's third line, "do not draw near to what can lead to fruitless suffering," guards against a pit in the opposite direction. There are some śramaṇas and brāhmans who suppose that "if I eat a little more suffering now, I shall be liberated from suffering to come," and so practice self-mortification — pressing and cutting themselves with sufferings of many kinds, burning and tormenting themselves all over. The treatise's verdict is very cold and stern: this is "though he seeks this thing, he only sears and presses himself; as for this thing, in the end he cannot attain it — rather he gathers up all the more a great matter of harm and torment" — suffering eaten for nothing, liberation not gained, and a greater torment invited instead. So it is called "leading to fruitless suffering" (meaningless suffering). Toward this one edge of "enjoying the self-mortifying practice," the noble disciples, once they have seen it clearly, keep far away, not drawing near, not approaching, not serving it.

One Verse Gathers Up a Middle Path: Part from the Two Edges, Gain the Two Fulfillments

By the "abbreviated meaning," the treatise lays bare the skeleton of this one verse — what it speaks of is the "two kinds of fulfillment": the fulfillment of higher rebirth (the good destinations) and the fulfillment of the definite excellence (the exhaustion of craving, the parting from desire, quiescence, nirvāṇa). And what leads through to these two fulfillments is two steps:

1. Do no evil (the three "everys") → cut off the obstacle to the fulfillment of higher rebirth, realize the fulfillment of higher rebirth;
2. Definitely keep apart from "the edge of enjoying the pleasure of desires" and "the edge of enjoying the self-mortifying practice" → cut off the obstacle to the fulfillment of the definite excellence, realize the fulfillment of the definite excellence.

The second step is precisely a middle path: on one side, giving free rein to the five desires (the practice of the pleasure of desires); on the other, fruitless self-torture (the self-mortifying practice); only by parting from both edges can one walk through to nirvāṇa. The opening first verse of the Body-Meaning Verses, seeming to say only "do no evil," has at its bones already set here the "parting from the two edges" of the Buddha's turning of the Dharma-wheel — do no evil to first secure the good destinations; part from the two edges to at last realize nirvāṇa. Within one verse, two fruits and one middle path.

Carrying Forward

Parting from the two edges of "enjoying the pleasure of desires / self-mortification" (the middle path) → one line with the "keeping apart from both edges" of the three trainings in the Intent-Purport Verses (11-02); cutting off desire for objects · cutting off desire that is affliction · the four foundations of mindfulness · the first meditative absorption → the broad unfolding, in the Śrāvaka Stage, of the cutting-off-through-cultivation; the two kinds of fulfillment (higher rebirth · definite excellence) → the guiding rope of the twofold benefit in the fruit-stages of the Yogācārabhūmi and in the later treatises that issue from it — the middle path and the two fulfillments set here at the opening of the Body-Meaning Verses, the later treatises broadly unfold from this very place.

The Body-Meaning Verses, segment two: four verses. The hard places are all explained with the treatise's own words.

First, One Question: What Is a "Being Who Conceives of What-Is-to-Be-Spoken-Of"? What Does "What-Is-to-Be-Spoken-Of" Actually Point To?

The treatise's answer takes one by surprise: "what-is-to-be-spoken-of" means all conditioned phenomena — because conditioned phenomena are all subsumed under the "three kinds of the matters of speech" (the three time-paths). But the focus of this segment is to bring "what-is-to-be-spoken-of" down onto the wondrous fivefold objects of desire. Why are the desires called "what-is-to-be-spoken-of"? Because desire is not something one simply has in the present moment: an ascetic must "seek and beg it by speech," a ruler must "summon it by speech" before he can enjoy it; and as for the perils of desire, one comes to know them only "after a disciple of the Buddha has told you." The single phrase "what-is-to-be-spoken-of" lays bare the "time-biding" of the desires (that they are cashed out only by way of speech, by way of conditions, by way of merit made in a later life).

And so two forking roads stand out clearly: the being who does not understand "what-is-to-be-spoken-of" grasps the marks and the subsidiary features, gives rise to craving-attachment, and delights in and clings to birth in the desire-realm — and so "amasses birth-and-death"; the one who understands "what-is-to-be-spoken-of" sees the several desires as "impermanent, hollow, false, empty and without substance, deceiving the fool as a conjuring-trick does, of slight sweetness and many perils," and so renounces the household and cultivates the holy life — and, moreover, has no perverse prayer that "the holy life is cultivated for the sake of rebirth in heaven" — and so his mind is at ease, and he does not fear the reproach of others. Understanding these two words or not — this is the watershed between birth-and-death and escape.

The Root of Dispute Lies in a Single "Conceit"

The third verse speaks of "dispute." The treatise traces it to its root: dispute arises when "from a topsy-turvy view there arises conceit" — a person, relying on the three conceits "I am superior, I am equal, I am inferior," establishes himself as superior, as equal, as inferior, and thereupon they dispute with one another. How does the noble disciple not dispute? Because he "understands that all formations arise from a concurrence of conditions, and within the formations sees only the nature of phenomena (their dharma-nature)" — he will not so much as measure himself against another; how much less give rise to the conceit of views and dispute? Even if he sets forth his own tenet and overthrows the doctrines of others, it is only for the sake of the "dharma-nature" and out of compassion (with the wish that another might hear a single phrase, practice rightly, and gain ease through the long night, and that the right Dharma might long endure), not for the conceit of views or for gain and honor. This is "in the three kinds of the unmoved, equal, superior, and inferior are all gone" — unmoved, because he no longer even sets up that "self" which would want to measure high against low.

A Marvelous Simile: "Smoke" Means Craving

The last verse: "Having cut off name-and-form, craving, and conceit … the smoke stilled." Name-and-form is the five appropriating aggregates; contemplating the suffering of the five appropriating aggregates and cutting off greedy craving and self-conceit, one becomes an arhat. The most worth-savoring phrase is "the smoke stilled" — the treatise directly lays it bare: "smoke" means craving. Why the figure of smoke? "Just as the smoke of the world is the forerunner of fire, able to injure the eye-faculty"; craving is the same, "the forerunner of the fire of greed, hatred, and delusion, able to injure the wisdom-eye and to disturb the continuum of the mind." Craving is that thread of smoke that first rises before the fire of the three poisons has flared up — it first injures your wisdom-eye and draws you into meaningless discursive thought. Cut off this thread of smoke (craving), and the fire has no way to catch; this is called "the smoke stilled." By this the arhat is "unattached" (his seeking and enjoying without defilement), "without vexation" (giving or withholding, he neither hates nor covets), and "without longing" (constantly abiding in the thought of death, longing for neither goods nor life), and so, throughout all the causes-and-fruits of the world of gods and humans, he "cannot be seen at all" — nowhere is there to be found a "him" who would take on birth again within the three realms. The ancient masters add one further picture: do not go seeking after supplies like "a maddened, drunken elephant that holds up its trunk and charges straight for another's house" — a person who, harboring greedy craving, makes his way to householders' homes to seek offerings is just that drunken elephant.

The Intent of This Segment

The "Discourse" segment, by the two words "what-is-to-be-spoken-of," lights up and breaks through the time-biding and falsity of the desires: understand, and one escapes; do not understand, and it is birth-and-death; the root of dispute is conceit, the very ground of non-dispute is "seeing only the dharma-nature"; and it closes with the one simile of "the smoke (craving) stilled," gathering up into the arhat's freedom from attachment and from longing. A single thread of craving-smoke first injures the wisdom-eye — this is the one line of the whole segment most worth keeping in mind.

Carrying Forward

Understanding what-is-to-be-spoken-of (the perils of the desires and the escape from them) → segment one's "apart from the extreme of the pleasure-devoted practice of desire" (11-03-01) · the perils of the desires in the Śrāvaka Stage; seeing only the dharma-nature, and so without dispute → the no-self of the person in the Verses on the Ultimate Meaning (11-01); the smoke (craving) stilled, cutting off name-and-form, craving, and conceit → the teaching, in the later treatises, of liberation through the exhaustion of craving.

The third cluster, of five verses, is an urgent cry for rescue — a god, burned past endurance by sensual craving, comes to beg the Buddha to teach him a Dharma that "makes it still." The hard points are all told in the treatise's own words.

First, One Question: Where Was the Fire of Craving Kindled?

The god's words are heartfelt: "Overwhelmed and eclipsed by sensual craving, my mind burns everywhere." The Buddha's reply, in its very first line, points to the source of the fire: "It is because your perception is inverted that your mind is made to burn everywhere." Craving is not something forced upon one by an object; it is that "perception" has gone crooked: toward an object one ought to see as impure, one instead "casts away the mark of the impure, takes up the pure and lovely mark, and further takes up its secondary charms." The source of the fire lies in one's own taking-up of a mark. And so, to quench the fire, one must set to work on "perception" — the treatise even adds an image: the fire of craving must be "poured upon again and again" before it goes out; the counteragent must be cultivated over and over.

The Fire-Quenching Prescription: Four Contemplations of Skillful Means + One Root Contemplation

The ancient masters have laid out the prescription the Buddha sets forth with perfect clarity: the first four are "contemplations of skillful means," the last one is the "root contemplation" (Dunlun and Kuiji agree).

The contemplations of skillful means bring the fire down layer by layer:

• Holding aloof from the pure mark that draws forth craving — having seen a form in its flush, one first "draws in the faculties and does not pursue it in thought," not letting the eye stick fast to it;
• Ever settling the mind upon a single object and cultivating [the perception of] the impure — one takes up "the mark of the wholesome-and-good concentration" of the livid-bruised corpse, the skeleton, the bone-chain, fastens mindfulness and reflects upon it, and further contemplates one's own body — "hairs and nails on down to excrement and urine" — as impure of every kind, dismantling the illusion of "the pure and lovely";
• Contemplating the unlovely formations as suffering — the craving-attachment and yearning that arise from seeing a form in its flush are precisely the "truth of arising," the cause of the mass of sufferings;
• Contemplating no-self — within my own body and a woman's body "there is no self and no sentient being"; who makes use, and by whom is it made use of? There are only formations, arisen from conditions.

Yet the treatise well understands the difficulty of real practice: there are those who are "by disposition of the class in which sensual craving is fierce and full"; they have drawn in the faculties, they have cultivated [the perception of] the impure, of suffering, of no-self — and their mind is still damaged by craving. What then? One more contemplation is added — fastening mindfulness upon the body and cultivating revulsion abundantly: relying upon the impure, suffering, and no-self, one fastens mindfulness before oneself in the "foundation of mindfulness of the body," and draws near it and cultivates it over and over. Only when this is cultivated to its measure is "the present activity of the several sensual cravings cut off." But the treatise honestly notes one point: this is still only the cutting-off of the "enwrapment" (the present activity), not the cutting-off of the "latent tendency" (the seed).

To cut off the latent tendency, one must go up to the root contemplation — "cultivate [the concentration] upon the signless": not reflecting upon any mark, ever reflecting upon the signless element, diligently cultivating the concentration upon the signless, one "demolishes conceit together with its latent tendency," forever cutting off the self-conceit of the three realms to be cut off by cultivation; and only this reaches the beyond-training and realizes the "limit of suffering." The contemplations of skillful means bring down the fire of present activity; the root contemplation pulls out the root of the latent tendency.

One Balance-Sheet That Closes the Fire's Account: Five Causes for Arising, Five Causes for Extinction

The condensed meaning gathers the whole cluster into two sets of five causes, clean and crisp:

Craving arises from five causes: the perception of the pure and lovely, delighting in pleasure, the perception of a sentient being, fierce and full craving, the latent tendency not yet exhausted. Craving is extinguished by five causes: reflecting upon the impure, reflecting upon suffering, reflecting upon no-self, fastening mindfulness and revulsion, the latent tendency forever extinguished.

Each counters its counterpart one for one — where the cause of arising has "the perception of the pure and lovely," the cause of extinction has "reflecting upon the impure"; where the cause of arising has "the latent tendency not yet exhausted," the cause of extinction has "the latent tendency forever extinguished." And "stilling" too divides into two layers: by the former four causes, "the stilling of present activity" is accomplished; by the fifth cause, "the forever-cutting-off of the latent tendency, so that it does not arise in the time to come." One balance-sheet, and both the coming-road and the going-road of craving are marked out.

The Point of This Cluster

The "Craving" cluster is a real record of a counteragent applied: the source of the fire is "inverted perception" (taking up the pure and lovely mark); to quench the fire one relies on four contemplations of skillful means (drawing in the faculties / the impure / suffering-and-no-self / mindfulness of the body) to cut off present activity, and one root contemplation (the signless) to pull out the latent tendency; and it closes the account with five causes for arising and five for extinction. The fierce craver, having cultivated, is still burned — and so one must "fasten mindfulness upon the body and pour water again and again"; this is the cluster's most considerate line for real practice.

Carrying Forward

The contemplation of the impure (the livid-bruised corpse, the skeleton) and the four foundations of mindfulness → the extended exposition of cultivating contemplation in the Śrāvaka Stage; the concentration upon the signless, demolishing conceit and the latent tendency → the signless element of the Stage of Meditative Equipoise (Stage 06); the five causes for the arising and the stilling of craving → the guiding thread for the counteraction of the afflictions in the treatises that follow.

The three verses of cluster four are a single question-and-answer between a goddess and the Buddha, asking how to cross over the six "floods." The hard points are all put through words already present in the treatise, and especially through the ancient masters' waist-boat simile.

First, One Question: What Are "the Five Floods" and "the Sixth"? And How Is the Crossing Done?

The goddess asks quite concretely: "How does a monk, dwelling much [in what], cross the five floods and be about to cross the sixth?" (「云何苾芻多所住，越五暴流當度六？」) — and the treatise answers just as concretely: the floods are six — the eye-flood able to see the visible forms, the ear-flood … down to the mind-flood able to discern the phenomena. The six sense-doors are like six racing currents that sweep a person off; sentient beings are swept away by them day after day.

The knack of crossing the first five floods (from the eye to the body), the treatise sets out in two steps, exceedingly fine: the trainee who has seen the trace gives rise to no craving toward the "joy-according" form, no hatred toward the "sorrow-according" form, and toward the "equanimity-according" form rests settled in equanimity; and even if the entanglements of greed, hatred, and delusion should crop up, he "does not cling firmly, and even up to spitting them out" (「不堅著乃至變吐」) — he spits them out. In this way the entanglements do not become active and he dwells in pliancy — this is called "obtaining bodily pliancy." But the treatise at once punctures this: this has still only pressed down the "entanglement" (the active phase); the "latent tendencies" (the seeds) are not yet cut off, and so it is not yet "the mind well liberated." Only when the latent tendencies too are forever cut off is it truly called "the mind well liberated." Bodily pliancy is the cutting-off of the entanglement; the mind well liberated is the cutting-off of the latent tendencies — this step-by-step is exactly "cutting off the five lower fetters, crossing the five floods."

The Sixth Flood Is the Hardest: The Mind-Flood, Relying on Non-Doing · Non-Shaking · Mindfulness

The five floods crossed, there still remains the sixth, "the mind-flood" — the hardest. The treatise gives three medicines:

• Non-doing: toward nirvāṇa the mind gives rise to aspiration and delight, yet is "not tilted-and-shaken by the conceit of I" (「不為我慢傾動」), no longer secretly reckoning "I shall still exist in time to come, I shall be neither-perception-nor-non-perception";
• Non-shaking: not letting the mind be entangled by the higher-portion fetters, not even relishing the "tranquil concentrations" — and the treatise adds one more sense: non-shaking is just "the wholesome root of loving-kindness, of the nature of non-hatred," cultivating tranquillity (śamatha) by loving-kindness and insight (vipaśyanā) by the foundations of mindfulness;
• Mindfulness bound-fast: dwelling within the inner body contemplating the body along [its length], cutting off the higher-portion fetters one by one.

By cultivating non-doing he cuts off "the craving of arising," by cultivating non-shaking he cuts off "the craving for concentration," by cultivating mindfulness bound-fast he cuts off the higher-portion fetters — this alone is "crossing over the sixth flood." Even the greed-craving for "concentration" is to be cut off — this is a barrier that a practitioner very easily overlooks.

The Ancient Masters' Finishing Stroke: To Cross the Sea You Need a "Waist-Boat"

There is one hard-to-fathom phrase in the verse — "able to cross the vast desire-craving, and yet has not obtained the waist-boat" (「能度廣欲愛，而未得腰舟」). What is the "waist-boat"? Kuiji gives an exceedingly vivid gloss: the ancients, crossing the sea, tied a gourd or an inflated leather bag around the waist as a float — this is called the "waist-boat." The sūtra says "the axle of conscience, the waist-boat of mind" (「慚軸、意腰舟」) — conscience is like a cart's axle, the mind (consciousness) like the waist, wisdom like the boat; birth-and-death is the sea, and only by this "boat of wisdom" tied at the waist can one cross it over. What the goddess asks about is exactly those trainees who "have departed from desire-greed but have not departed from the higher greed": they have still "not obtained the waist-boat" (have not yet obtained that mind well liberated with respect to the higher-portion fetters), and so they can cross the desire-craving but cannot cross over to the higher realms. A single waist-boat simile brings the plight of "the trainee who has not yet reached the adept" fully to life.

An Answer-Card: The Goddess's Three Questions, the Buddha's Three Answers

The summary-of-meaning gathers this exchange into one clear correspondence: the goddess in fact asked three things — the cutting-off of the lower fetters, the means for cutting off the higher fetters, and the "well cutting-off." The Buddha answers each in turn: bodily pliancy and the mind well liberated (answering the cutting-off of the lower fetters); non-doing, mindfulness bound-fast, not-tilted-and-shaken (answering the means for cutting off the higher fetters); cultivating the concentration without applied thought (answering the well cutting-off: discerning the Dharma = that which is able to cut off, the concentration without applied thought = how the cutting-off is; the rancor / craving / dullness that are cut off are exactly the three classes of hatred / greed / delusion; well cutting-off = the final cutting-off · the far-departing cutting-off · the cutting-off of all defilement). Asked with layers, answered with correspondences.

The Point of This Cluster

The "flood" cluster is a chart for crossing the sea: the six sense-faculties are like six floods; crossing the first five is divided into two steps — "cutting off the entanglement (bodily pliancy) → cutting off the latent tendencies (the mind well liberated)"; crossing the sixth mind-flood relies on non-doing · non-shaking · mindfulness bound-fast (even the craving for concentration is cut off); and running through the whole cluster is the ancient masters' waist-boat simile of "the axle of conscience, the waist of mind, the boat of wisdom" — to cross the sea of birth-and-death, wisdom is the boat, the mind is the waist, conscience is the axle.

Carrying Forward

The six floods · the five lower / five higher fetters → the fuller exposition of the cutting-off of fetters in the Śrāvaka Stage; the concentration without applied thought · tranquillity and insight → the Stage of Meditative Equipoise (Stage 06); the waist-boat (the axle of conscience, the waist of mind, the boat of wisdom) → the simile of crossing the sea of birth-and-death in the later treatises.

Section Five, three-and-a-half verses: a deva comes bearing fear to question the Buddha. The hard points are all put in words the treatise itself already has.

First, One Question: Even a Deva "Ever Harbors Terror"?

Yes. The deva's question is thoroughly down-to-earth: "The world is ever beset by fear; sentient beings are forever wearied by it" — whether the suffering has not yet come (suffering not yet arisen) or is already upon the body (already arisen), it is all fear. The treatise takes "the world" at its widest (all the satkāya, from the desire realm up to the summit of existence), but fixes its eye on the two kinds of sentient being in the desire realm — those with pleasure and those with suffering.

The most piercing thing is the treatise's dismantling of "the world that has pleasure." You would think the person of good fortune has nothing to fear? Just the opposite — "the sentient-being world that has pleasure ever harbors terror": fearing that wealth and treasure will be seized by the king, fearing that wind or heat may break out within, fearing men or non-humans may harm and injure … the ones with pleasure spend every day with their hearts in their mouths, guarding that little pleasure; the ones with suffering are already pressed and harried by the mass of suffering. The treatise passes one settling verdict: "In the world, few have pleasure and many have suffering." And so the deva sees clean through it: the pleasure of the world that has pleasure is "not fixed and certain" (not to be relied on), and so he comes to ask the Buddha — is there, after all, a place of "certain pleasure, free of fear"?

The Buddha's Answer: There Is — but Only within the Sacred Teaching; the Outsiders' Road Cannot Reach It

The Buddha's reply is crisp: such a place is "only within the sacred teaching, not among the various outsiders." The treatise then, with two classes of outsider, makes thoroughly plain "why the outsiders cannot arrive":

• The first class: he receives precepts and restraints yet is "without wisdom, does not guard the gates of the faculties" — he cannot cut off even the desires of the present life (a little gain and honor and he gives rise to a savoring relish), let alone the desires of a later life. Precept without wisdom, the gates of the faculties unguarded: the precepts are received in vain.
• The second class is more of a pity: he coarsely knows the peril of desire and has even passed beyond the desires of present and later life, and longs for "the higher ground free of desire," even becoming free of the desire of the desire realm all the way to the sphere of nothing-whatever — yet he "raises the notion of liberation toward what is not liberation," taking the concentrations of the higher realms for liberation, and so "relinquishes the lower self-body and loves the higher self-body." The treatise's verdict is icily cool: loving and clinging to the higher ground, the upshot is that "in lives to come he is not liberated even from the lower-ground self-body — how much less the higher ground."

Both classes "lose the road" — for all their fierce and valorous diligence, they cannot attain the "place of unbroken happiness, free of fear." The root cause the treatise points to with great precision: "that outsiders' teacher does not himself so much as see or know this place — how then could he expound it at length for his disciples and the like?" — the teacher has never himself seen that place, so how is he to lead his disciples there? Therefore, in the outsiders' treatises, "there is definitely no final limit to the mass of suffering." Only the well-spoken true Dharma and Vinaya "possesses every benefit and boon, and definitely has a final limit to the mass of suffering." On this hidden intent the Buddha says: liberation is not apart from knowledge, vigor, the restraint of the faculties, and all-relinquishment.

The Deva's Four Lines of Praise: Speaking the Buddha's Rarity to the Full

Having heard the Buddha's answer, the deva rejoices and leaps for joy, and with "four kinds of unsurpassed merit" praises the Buddha, the treatise matching them one by one: "I behold — after so exceedingly long a time — a brahmin come to parinirvāṇa" praises the Buddha's being hard to appear (rare to meet across so long an age); "he has passed beyond all foes" praises the deeds that benefit others; "he has passed beyond all terrors" praises the merit of benefiting himself; "he transcends the world's craving" praises the freedom from a defiled mind. The treatise adds one further layer: the Buddha is one who is "hard to appear, hard to behold, and establishes the deeds of benefiting himself and benefiting others"; the one who beholds the Buddha is able to accomplish the great goal, and one who accomplishes the great goal, "because he is free of a defiled mind, throughout all births is likewise without the mass of faults." A question that began in fear lands, in the end, upon praise of the Buddha — for it is the Buddha alone who can truly point out that road away from fear.

The Point of This Section

The "Fear" section enters through the deva's own dread, and shines through the truth that "the pleasure of the world that has pleasure is not fixed and certain (even the fortunate are afraid)"; then, by the contrast of ill-spoken and well-spoken, it makes clear that only the well-spoken true Dharma definitely has a "final limit to the mass of suffering," while the outsiders' teacher and disciples alike suffer decline and loss (the teacher himself has not seen it, and cannot lead others there); and it closes with the four unsurpassed merits in praise of the Buddha. "The one with pleasure ever harbors terror" — this is the section's most head-on blow to worldly people.

Carrying Forward

The ill-spoken / well-spoken contrast and the final limit to the mass of suffering → the three trainings of the well-spoken true Dharma in the Intent-Purport Verses (11-02); the outsiders who seek the desires of a later life and lose the road → the first section's "leaving behind the extreme of self-mortifying practice" (11-03-01); the pleasure of the world that has pleasure being not fixed and certain → the later treatises' discourse on contemplating the truth of suffering.

The sixth section, three verses, one question and one answer. The hard spots are all explained with words the treatise itself already holds.

First, One Question: Who Can Truly "Encourage and Lead" Beings Out of Birth-and-Death?

The questioner asks five things in a single breath: who can encourage and lead the beings of the superior classes toward the good, who can disclose the path of departure, on what teacher one should rely, what dharma one should learn, and how one may come not to fear the death of the world to come. The treatise first glosses "superior classes" — namely the four superior and eminent classes of birth (brahmins, kṣatriyas, vaiśyas, śūdras, that is, the four castes of Indian society). And the word "encourage" the treatise glosses heavily: one must teach "by the Dharma, by the right, by regulation, and by guidance" for it to count as "encouraging." The ancient masters each have their fine reading of these four phrases (the readings of Master Jing, Master Tai, and Master Kuiji are set out side by side): Master Tai says that "encourage" carries four senses — by the teaching-Dharma, by declaring right cause-and-fruit, by the restraint of the precepts, and by the guidance of the three vehicles. The treatise's conclusion is flat and unbending: only the Buddha, the World-Honored One, is able to encourage by the Dharma, by the right, by regulation, and by guidance, and is able to proclaim the noble eightfold path that departs from the sufferings of the multitude; therefore the Buddha reveals of himself, "I alone am the true encourager-and-leader, the true speaker."

The Answer Lies Hidden in the "Nine Virtues": Rung by Rung, from Forsaking the Household to Buddhahood

Five asked, nine answered. On the strength of what is the Buddha qualified to encourage and lead? The treatise takes the Buddha's "qualification" apart into nine virtues, and these nine virtues, laid out in order, are precisely a ladder from the ordinary being to the Buddha:

1. Completeness in discipline — as a bodhisattva he cast away the subtle desires, forsook the household, and took up the disciplines of body and speech (the first step is keeping the precepts);
2. Completeness in wisdom — within those disciplines he inwardly and rightly reflected, contemplating that "the world suffers much hardship, birth and old age" (giving rise to the wisdom of world-weariness);
3. Perfuming and cultivating oneself — over three great incalculable eons (asaṃkhyeya) in the past he cultivated the six perfections, cultivating until "without a teacher his mind of itself inclines toward departure," and by subtle and marvelous knowledge entered into realization of conditioned arising (the long nurture of the bodhisattva path);
4. Completeness in concentration — free of the desire for the sphere of nothing-whatever, he realized the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception (reaching the summit of mundane concentration);
5. Completeness in mindfulness — relying on the superior concentration he cultivated the four foundations of mindfulness, on up to the thirty-seven factors of awakening (turning toward the supramundane);
6. Uprightness — he gave rise to the "against-the-stream" noble eightfold path, cut off the delusions-of-view, and attained "stream-entry" (the path of seeing);
7. Cutting off sorrow and burning — by the direct realization of the truths he became a "non-returner," cutting off the five lower fetters (ill-will resembling sorrow, greed resembling burning, both cut off);
8. Right mindfulness — again cultivating the foundations of mindfulness and factors of awakening, he cut off the higher fetters;
9. Liberation of mind — the higher fetters exhausted, his mind is well liberated from the "afflictive obstruction and cognitive obstruction," the two obstructions — becoming the Tathāgata, the Worthy One, the Perfectly and Fully Awakened.

The most noteworthy is the ninth virtue: the Buddha's "liberation of mind" is not a liberation from the afflictive obstruction alone, but a liberation from the "two obstructions" together — and this is exactly the dividing line between the Buddha and the arhats of the two vehicles (the arhat cuts off the afflictive obstruction; the Buddha cuts off the cognitive obstruction as well). The nine virtues bear one another up rung by rung, from the first step of keeping precepts to the loosing of both obstructions; and this is the whole answer to "who is qualified to encourage and lead": only one who has himself walked the whole road through, and has loosed even the cognitive obstruction, is fit to lead others.

The Promise to the Four Castes

This section also has a line that is very leveling: no matter which of the four castes you belong to, so long as you "delight within the noble teaching in right conduct, and, in order to realize the noble eightfold path, diligently cultivate within the three trainings," you will "surely realize the noble eightfold path and the fruit of nirvāṇa, and not fear the birth, old age, sickness, and death to come." The one who encourages and leads is the Buddha alone, yet those who receive that encouragement and leading run through all four castes — the Buddha is "the unsurpassed great teacher of gods and humans," and the door opens to all people.

The Purport of This Section

The "Classes" section, with the single question "who can encourage and lead," sets up the tenet that "only the Buddha is the true encourager-and-leader," and then, with the nine virtues (discipline → wisdom → self-perfuming → concentration → mindfulness → uprightness → cutting off sorrow → right mindfulness → liberation of mind from the two obstructions), lays out a ladder to Buddhahood; it closes with the promise, universally extended, that "the four castes, cultivating the three trainings, all realize nirvāṇa." Liberation of mind = the loosing of both obstructions — this is the section's crucial single stroke marking the difference between the Buddha's fruit and that of the two vehicles.

Carrying Forward

Liberation of mind = the good liberation from the two obstructions, afflictive and cognitive → the chapter on the two obstructions in the Cheng Weishi Lun; the self-perfuming among the nine virtues (the six perfections, the factors of awakening) → the Bodhisattva Stage (fasc. 35+); the four superior classes cultivating the three trainings → the noble eightfold path and nirvāṇa → the three trainings of the Intent-Sense Verses (11-02).

The two verses of Segment Seven are the shortest passage in the Body-Meaning Verses, one question and one answer, clean and plain. The hard points are all put in words the treatise itself already has.

First, a Question: Where Do Renown, Wealth, Fine Repute, and Good Company Come From?

These four things are what worldly people care about most. The verse asks straight out: how can one come to have renown, to have precious wealth, to have fine repute, to have kin and friends? The Buddha's answer is a clean ledger of cause and effect:

• Keeping the precepts → renown: guard the precepts well (be possessed of moral discipline and the wholesome qualities; abstain from killing and stay far from the taking of life), and the ascetics and brahmins of the ten directions all praise you, the kings and ministers and the people of the towns and cities all respect and support you — renown is what "the precepts" draw in.
• Giving → precious wealth: because in former lives you planted "deeds of merit that are acts of giving," in this life you are born into a house of great wealth, your storehouses filled to overflowing — wealth is the later return of "giving."
• Truthfulness → fine repute: not using false scales and false measures, not relying on flattery, deceit, and lying speech to make money, but earning it only by "lawful undertakings and skills," so that everyone cries "Excellent, this gentleman-scholar!" — fine repute is what "honesty" earns.
• Bestowing generously → kin and friends: having family possessions and yet "staying far from the stain of stinginess, not begrudging your goods," being willing to share with friends, companions, and kinsfolk, so that they turn around to help you, to guard and increase your wealth for you — good company is what "generosity" ties.

Four questions and four answers, each matched one to one, without a single empty word: the fruit you want is hidden in the cause you are, or are not, willing to plant.

The One Stroke of the Abridged Meaning: Telling "Reverence" and "Material Gain" Apart

In the abridged meaning, the treatise gathers these four back into two heaps: "keeping the precepts, one enjoys renown" goes under the condition of reverence, and the remaining three lines (giving, truthfulness, bestowing generously) go under the condition of material gain. The ancient masters add one further, finer layer of powers at work — Dunlun says: giving is "the power of the cause," truthfulness is "the power of a person's own effort," and bestowing generously is "the power of a supporting companion." The one heap is name (people esteem you), the other is gain (wealth helps you); keeping the precepts draws "esteem," while giving, honesty, and generosity draw "gain." Tell these two heaps apart clearly and you know: if you would be esteemed by others, first keep the precepts; if you would have the wherewithal to sustain you, rely on giving, honesty, and generosity.

The Point of This Segment

The "Give" segment is the shortest, yet the most plain and useful: it reduces the renown, wealth, fine repute, and good company that worldly people pursue, one by one, to the later returns of four kinds of good conduct — precepts, giving, truthfulness, and generosity — and then draws them to a close under the two conditions of "reverence / material gain." The fruit is in the cause — this is the segment's most direct lesson for the householder. (As for one who cultivates the path, the Intention-Purport Verses have already admonished that one should "stay far from craving after material gain and reverence"; what this segment states is the principle by which good conduct draws its own return, not a teaching to chase after name and gain.)

Carrying Forward

The four kinds of good conduct (precepts, giving, truthfulness, generosity) → the two conditions of reverence / material gain (the power of the cause · the power of a person's own effort · the power of a supporting companion) → the counter-reflection of the Intention-Purport Verses' "stay far from craving after material gain and reverence" (11-02); the wholesome factors such as giving and the precepts → the wholesome mental factors of the Treatise on the Hundred Dharmas (this series).

Cluster eight, three verses, one question and one answer; what it asks is where suffering and pleasure are cut off. The hard points are all put in the spring-simile the treatise itself already has.

First, One Question: Suffering and Pleasure Never End — Where Then Is Their "Source"? How Is It Cut Off?

The verses ask it beautifully, using three images: at what does the "spring" come to rest, along what "path" does the traffic no longer pass, in what place is suffering-and-pleasure extinguished? The treatise takes them apart one by one, and the most brilliant of all is the simile of the "spring" —

"What is the spring? It is the six contact-bases." Why should the six contact-bases (the six faculties touching their objects and so making contact) be the "spring"? The treatise's picture is exceedingly vivid: a spring-pool, giving rise to water without cease, and that water in turn sustaining men, women, old and young, and the birds and beasts — so long as the spring is not dried up, the water does not stop. So too the six contact-bases: the foolish person's six faculties touch their objects day after day, "able to sustain and nourish 〔sentient beings〕, right up until the various craving-waters are not yet altogether dried up." The six contact-bases are that spring welling up "craving-water" without cease — so long as one still touches objects and grasps at their marks, craving comes gurgling forth, and suffering-and-pleasure has no end.

The "path," for its part, is of two — the affliction-path and the karma-path; the treatise points out that "path" is precisely the sense of "cause." Affliction and karma are the two causal roads along which suffering-and-pleasure flows and turns. And suffering-and-pleasure itself the treatise divides into the present life and a later life (the comfortable / uncomfortable reception conditioned by the six contact-bases; the comfortable / uncomfortable reception conditioned by the good and evil conduct that afflictions hold and maintain). One spring (the six contact-bases), two paths (affliction and karma), and what flows out is the suffering-and-pleasure of both the present and the later life.

Where Is It Truly Cut Off? — The Nirvāṇa-Realm without Remaining Basis

Where then are "the spring at rest, the path no longer passable, suffering-and-pleasure extinguished"? The verses answer without hesitation: "If at that place the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, and name-and-form are forever extinguished without remainder" — it is precisely within the nirvāṇa-realm without remaining basis. The treatise further sorts three classes of person, setting out very clearly "to what degree the cutting-off reaches":

• Ordinary beings: the spring, the path, and the suffering-and-pleasure are "one and all not lacking, nor as yet relinquished" (the common person is short of none of it);
• The learners: "lacking yet not relinquished" (the practitioner begins to have a breach, but has not yet relinquished it all);
• Those beyond learning (the arhat): the "path" and the suffering-and-pleasure yet to come are "both lacking and relinquished, and turn no more" — yet the "spring" and the suffering-and-pleasure of the present life, though also both lacking and relinquished, "by reason of the remaining basis still turn again."

This last stroke is of the utmost importance: though the arhat has cut off affliction and karma (the path) and cut off the suffering-and-pleasure of the later life, so long as this one lifetime's material body (the remaining basis) yet remains, that "spring" (the six faculties and name-and-form) still turns — and there will still be the suffering-and-pleasure of the present life. Only when this lifetime's bodily life too is relinquished (the basis without remainder) are the six bases and name-and-form "extinguished without remainder." Therefore the true "spring at rest, path cut off, suffering-and-pleasure extinguished" lies solely within the nirvāṇa-realm without remaining basis. This joins exactly to cluster two's "cutting off the craving and conceit toward name-and-form," and to the later Stage 16 / Stage 17 division of "with remaining basis / without remaining basis."

The Point of This Cluster

The "Pool" cluster, with the three questions of "spring, path, suffering-and-pleasure," points out all at once the source of suffering-and-pleasure (the six contact-bases = the spring), the causal roads (affliction and karma = the path), and the place of its thoroughgoing cutting-off (the nirvāṇa without remaining basis); then, with the difference in "lacking" and "relinquished" among the three classes of ordinary being / learner / one-beyond-learning, it marks out that even the arhat must await the basis-without-remainder before the "spring" is exhausted. The six contact-bases are a spring welling up craving-water — this is the one simile of the whole cluster most worth keeping in mind.

Carrying Forward

The six contact-bases = the spring · name-and-form forever extinguished = without remainder → cluster two, the cutting off of the craving and conceit toward name-and-form (11-03-02) · clusters four and nine, the flood (the six faculties); by reason of the remaining basis it still turns / the basis without remainder is forever extinguished → Stage 16, with remaining basis · Stage 17, the two nirvāṇa-realms without remaining basis; the affliction-path and the karma-path = cause → the two-cause teaching of the later treatises.

The five verses of cluster nine are the Body-Meaning Verses' second treatment of "the flood" (cluster four already treated it once). This time from another angle: with four things — "right trust, non-negligence, energetic effort, wisdom" — one crosses the four floods of desire, existence, view, and ignorance (avidyā). The hard points are all put through words already present in the treatise.

First, One Question: The Flood Is So Swift — On What Does One Cross It?

Verse one, with four questions and four answers, cleanly and crisply pairs off four medicines: "right trust crosses the flood; non-negligence passes over the great sea; energetic effort casts off the manifold sufferings; wisdom attains purity." The treatise grounds each one in turn, and each, moreover, serves "as support and as guide" — as a leading-of-the-way and a thing-to-rely-on:

• Right trust: having heard the true Dharma and obtained right trust, one is willing to relinquish the home life, cut off the desire-for-objects, leave home, and cut off the desire-that-is-affliction, and so "attains the concentration-stage of dispassion" — trust is the starting step; it first pulls a person up out of the desire-flood;
• Non-negligence (heedlessness): having attained concentration one yet "in the end relishes it not," but concentrates on realizing the knowledge that the taints are exhausted, and enters the direct realization of the Four Noble Truths — non-negligence is not sticking to concentration; it cuts off the two floods of existence, "form and formless," and the two floods of "ignorance and views," and so is called "passing over the great sea" (the several existences being like a great sea);
• Energetic effort: the trainee who has seen the trace, valiant and diligent, cuts off the five hindrances "from the hindrance of desire-greed on up to the hindrance of doubt" and the griefs and sufferings born of the hindrances — energetic effort is the strength that casts off suffering;
• Wisdom: after removing the five hindrances, in dependence on the "not-yet-arrived concentration," by the taintless knowledge of the four truths one reflects upon true suffering and on up to the true path, and attains "dispassion toward the three realms without remainder, the everlasting exhaustion of the taints" — wisdom is what at the last attains purity.

The summary of meaning adds one further stroke of discrimination: the ordinary being goes "first departing from desire, and thereafter the direct realization of the Noble Truths"; the trainee goes "the direct realization of the Noble Truths first, and thereafter departure from desire" — the sequence of entry differs for the ordinary and the noble, and this is a very fine observation on the path of practice-and-realization.

The Key Term of Verse Two: "Without Grasping and Without Abiding"

Verse two turns to a deeper place, and one term recurs again and again — "without grasping and without abiding." The treatise gives it two readings, both exquisite:

• Spoken of nirvāṇa: "grasping" is the affliction-"entanglement" (the active phase), "abiding" is the affliction-"latent tendency" (the seed); when entanglement and latent tendency are both absent, that is "without grasping and without abiding" — in nirvāṇa, even the active phase and the seeds of affliction are gone; there is nothing to grasp, nothing to abide in.
• Spoken of the attainment of cessation: "perception" is named grasping, "feeling" is named abiding; when perception and feeling are both extinguished, that is "without grasping and without abiding" — and this is exactly "the concentration of the cessation of perception and feeling." The treatise says, "in the present sense here, the intent takes the attainment of cessation."

A single "without grasping and without abiding" reaches upward to nirvāṇa and points downward to the attainment of cessation — when the mind arrives there, there is no longer anything to grasp onto or to come to rest upon. And to arrive there, the treatise lists one course of hard discipline: being perfect in the whole body of moral discipline (pure discipline, pure livelihood), possessed of wisdom (knowing the four truths as they really are), well settled in concentration (departure from desire, on up to the fourth meditative absorption, and neither-perception-nor-non-perception), inwardly reflecting (observing again and again at the "twenty-two loci," constantly holding up "I now change my appearance and adornment from what is customary, and put away the fair form of the worldly one" — the mark of the renunciant, raised up moment by moment), and fastened in mindfulness (in reliance on the notion of a renunciant, cultivating the four foundations of mindfulness to cut off the remaining fetters). Only when one has cultivated to "all the fetters cut off without remainder" is one "able to cross the utterly-hard-to-cross" "summit of existence" — which is not what the foolish, ordinary being can cross.

The Flood = the Four Floods, to Be Cut Off One by One

This time the treatise says outright that "the flood" is precisely the four floods: the desire-flood, the existence-flood, the view-flood, and the ignorance-flood. The earlier cluster (cluster four) spoke of the flood through the six sense-doors; this cluster speaks of it through the "four floods." The former weighs the crossing of the five lower / five higher fetters; the latter weighs the "four crossings (trust, non-negligence, effort, wisdom)" and "without grasping and without abiding." The two clusters are one mirror with two faces, carrying the discipline of crossing the flood of birth-and-death all the way from the entry (leaving home out of right trust) through to the ultimate (crossing the summit of existence, entering the attainment of cessation).

The Point of This Cluster

The "flood" cluster (the second treatment), with the four crossings of "right trust, non-negligence, energetic effort, wisdom," crosses the four floods of desire, existence, view, and ignorance, and then, with "without grasping and without abiding" (= nirvāṇa / the attainment of cessation), marks out the place of the ultimate, supported by the six matters — being perfect in the whole body of moral discipline and the rest — cultivated up to "crossing the summit of existence." Without grasping and without abiding — entanglement and latent tendency both absent, perception and feeling both extinguished — this is the deepest single line of the whole cluster.

Carrying Forward

The four floods · the four foundations of mindfulness · the twenty-two loci → the fuller exposition in the Śrāvaka Stage (Dunlun: "expounded at length below in the Śrāvaka Stage"); without grasping and without abiding = the concentration of the cessation of perception and feeling → the attainment of cessation in the Stage of Meditative Equipoise (Stage 06); right trust → non-negligence → energetic effort → wisdom → the teaching, in the later treatises, that trust is the source of the path.

Section Ten, four verses — the second time "craving" is treated (the third section already treated it once); this time what is tracked is the "cause and condition" of craving and hatred. The hard points are all put by way of the two plant similes the treatise itself already has.

First, One Question: Craving, Hatred, Gladness, Grief, Hair-on-End, Scattered Thought — Where Do They All Come Out From?

The verse asks it very concretely, and with a picture attached: why does a person come to crave and to hate, to be glad and to grieve, to have "the hairs stand on end" (frightened until the down of the body bristles), and to raise up scattered ranging thoughts, "clinging as an infant clings to its wet-nurse" (clinging to objects as a nursing baby clings to its nurse)? The treatise first lays these feelings out under "three phases," and it comes off as three portraits of those gone forth:

• The phase of the householder: meeting an agreeable object he craves, meeting a disagreeable object he hates (this is craving-and-hatred);
• The phase of one gone forth: one man conceives a fleeting faith and, without thinking it through, goes forth — only to turn back and "call to mind with longing his wealth and treasure and kin, grief winding about his heart"; another goes forth because a king pressed him, or because he feared he could not stay alive, and once gone forth grows attached to gain and honor, secretly reckoning, "with no farming and no trade I can still keep alive — what a fine thing," and so is glad and dwells at ease (this is gladness and grief);
• The phase of seclusion: the man who has truly gone forth out of right faith, dwelling alone in quiet, is instead — amid "dust and haze, the dark of night, thunder and hail, tigers and leopards, the pressing of non-humans" — frightened until the hairs of his body stand straight up, or by day raises ranging thoughts toward the fine desires and the kin of former days (this is hair-on-end and mind-ranging-in-thought).

With the three phases laid out at a stroke, the treatise casts a light that shows the mind-sickness of the practitioner at every stage down to the last hair — even the solitary pure cultivator will, at midnight, be frightened until his hair bristles, and will, by day, think of home.

Two Similes That Say the Whole of Craving's "Shared Condition" and "Particular Condition"

The treatise then uses two exceedingly vivid plant similes to tell how craving and hatred are born and how they bind:

The first simile · the nyagrodha tree (the banyan) — this tells of the "moisture-born and the self-born." "Moisture" is the water of craving, and it is the "shared condition": craving, hatred, and all the afflictions are born only by being moistened by this one pool of craving-water. "Self" is the seed-nature, element by element and severally distinct, of which "craving and hatred come first, ranging thought after," and it is the "particular condition." The ancient masters bring the growing-habit of the banyan to life: the banyan grows from a single seed; its branches grow large, hang down and enter the ground, and there put forth many trees; a bird that has carried off a seed and dropped it into a forking hollow can put forth yet again — "out of a single root-tree are born many trees." What they rely on is one and the same pool of water (the shared condition), each springing from its own seed (the particular condition). Just so is craving-and-hatred: moistened by one and the same craving-water, each comes up out of its own seed, roots interlacing into a whole forest.

The second simile · the māluvā vine (the creeper) — this tells of the "several binding to the several desires." How do craving, hatred, and ranging thought bind a person? The treatise says, "as the māluvā vine twines about the trees of a forest": the trees of the forest are the six kinds of "several desire" (the desires of household affairs, the desires of making a living, the desires of past-and-future, the remaining afflictive desires, the false craving of dust-and-night, the ranging thought of the daytime), and craving is like the creeper, binding these six desires each fast, one by one. A single banyan tells "how craving is born," a single creeper tells "how craving binds" — birth and binding, the two plant similes tell it plain as day.

How Is It Untied? — Come to Know "the Conditioned-Born Is Impermanent," and at That Very Moment Vomit It Forth

The last line of the verse gives the way out: "Come to know its cause and condition, and once arisen it may straightway be removed and extinguished." The treatise makes it good very crisply: if a śramaṇa or brahmin comes to know, as it really is, the cause and condition of craving-and-hatred, and comes further to know that "phenomena born of the assembly of conditions are impermanent," then "whatever arises he gives rise to no craving-attachment toward it, but straightway casts it off, vomits it forth, cuts it off" — parted from the craving of the two realms of form and formlessness he crosses "the flood of existence," parted from the craving of desire he crosses "the flood of desire," and once crossed he never falls back. See through it — that the vine is only a vine, the water only water, all of it conditioned-born and impermanent — and the binding, at that very moment, loosens.

The Point of This Section

The "Craving" section (its second round) uses the "three phases" (householder / gone-forth / seclusion) to light up the portrait of craving, hatred, gladness, grief, hair-on-end, and ranging thought; then, with the nyagrodha tree (the shared condition of moistening craving / the particular condition of one's own seed), it tells craving's "birth," and with the māluvā vine (the binding of the forest), it tells craving's "binding"; and it closes, with "come to know the conditioned-born is impermanent → cast off and vomit forth," by telling craving's "untying." A single banyan tree, a single creeper — these are the two liveliest teaching-props in the whole section.

Carrying Forward

The shared condition of moistening craving / the particular condition of the seed → the Consciousness-Only doctrine of seeds (the principle of shared and particular conditions); the six kinds of several desire · ranging thought → set forth at length in the Śrāvaka Stage; coming to know the conditioned-born is impermanent → vomiting it forth and crossing the flood → the counteragent for craving in Section Three (11-03-03) · the four floods of Section Nine (11-03-09).

Cluster eleven, five verses. The hard points are all put in words the treatise itself already carries.

First, One Question: Whom Does "Brahmin" Really Name?

This cluster does something very fine: it takes the word "brahmin" — which originally names India's highest caste — back out of the hand of bloodline and restores it to practice-and-realization. The treatise first sets out the "brahmin of the worldly convention" — those brahmins of caste who style themselves "true brahmins." They too are vigorous, they too cut down sleep and cultivate meditative stillness, they too cut off the desire for affairs and the desire that is affliction; but the pity is that they "reckon the brahma-world to be the utmost final goal," and with single mind long to be born up in the Brahmā heaven. The treatise's verdict is cold: he "does not seek the existence of desire" (he does not covet the human desires), yet he still "longs for the brahma-world" (he still clings to the existence of the Brahmā heaven) — the goal is mistaken, and however vigorous he is he reaches only the Brahmā heaven, never liberation.

And so the Buddha, "in reliance upon the ultimate truth," redefines the brahmin: "If a brahmin, having done what is to be done, must yet again and again do more, and has yet some further, surpassing thing that ought to be done, know that this is not a true brahmin; if he has realized what ought to be done, has ascended beyond the shore of all satkāya, and rests settled upon the dry land, know that this is a true brahmin." In a word, the true brahmin is not measured by which caste you were born into, but by whether your "work-to-be-done is already accomplished" — whether or not you have crossed beyond that shore of "satkāya" (the existing body). Trainee and one-beyond-training alike can be brahmins of this kind.

How Does One "Reach the Far Shore"? — Tranquillity Plies with the Feet, Insight Plies with the Hands

The treatise next divides the "trainee" into two, the not-yet-desire-freed and the already-desire-freed, and gives an exceedingly vivid picture of crossing a river:

The not-yet-desire-freed trainee has still "not obtained the very bottom, not reached the far shore," because two things are not yet complete: the surpassing inner tranquillity (śamatha, calm) is not obtained; the insight (vipaśyanā, contemplation) of superior wisdom is not purified. What is to be done? "He mounts the buoyant float that is the noble path as it has been obtained" — he binds the noble path already obtained to his body as a float, and then: so as to realize tranquillity, he applies vigor "plying as if with the feet"; so as to purify insight, he applies vigor "plying as if with the hands." Hands and feet stroking together, he crosses the river as he goes. Stroking his way to "freedom from the desire of the desire realm" is "like obtaining the very bottom" (his feet have touched the riverbed); stroking his way to "the realization of arhatship" is "like reaching the far shore."

The already-desire-freed trainee has obtained both tranquillity and insight, and has left only "advancing to cut off the higher fetters"; at this point it is "not with all the bodily parts" (he need no longer stroke hard with hands and feet together). When he has truly crossed over, has become an arhat, and is "with his work-to-be-done accomplished, apart from toilsome exertion," he is called "dwelling upon the dry land, having reached the far shore" — he has come up onto the bank, and need stroke no more.

This figure of "the buoyant float, plying with feet and hands, the very bottom and the far shore" is of one lineage with cluster four's "waist-boat" and cluster nine's "great sea"; the Yogācārabhūmi, in speaking of crossing the flood of birth-and-death, turns again and again to water-figures, and this time it points out especially that only the twin-yoking of tranquillity (feet) and insight (hands) can drive the stroke.

Three True Brahmins, Three Names

The treatise finally divides the ultimate-truth brahmin into three kinds (two trainees, one one-beyond-training), each with a name: the one-beyond-training who has reached the far shore is named "one who has forever exhausted the contaminants"; the not-yet-desire-freed one, vigorous with fierce effort, is named "one who has obtained constant application"; the already-desire-freed one, who has obtained the very bottom, is named "one who has obtained the meditative absorptions" (he has cut off the lower fetters, and cut off the sorrow and burning of greed, ill-will). The one who has forever exhausted the contaminants goes further: he "has forever cut off the afflictions to be cut off by cultivation, has well cultivated the four foundations of mindfulness, and dwells ever in right mindfulness and in liberation of mind." The three names mark out an upward slope from "constant application" through "obtaining the meditative absorptions" to "forever exhausting the contaminants" — and the sign of reaching the top is just this: "he does not, having done, do again and again; he has no surpassing thing that ought to be done." There is no longer any "next thing that still must be done" — this alone is called the true brahmin whose "work-to-be-done is already accomplished."

The Point of This Cluster

The "Brahmin" cluster takes "brahmin" back from caste and restores it to practice-and-realization: the worldly brahmin reckons the brahma-world final (the goal mistaken); the ultimate-truth brahmin is measured by "work-to-be-done accomplished, having crossed beyond the satkāya shore" (trainee and one-beyond-training alike). To cross the river depends on the twin-yoking of tranquillity (the feet) and insight (the hands); freedom from the desire of the desire realm is like obtaining the very bottom, realizing arhatship is like reaching the far shore. The true brahmin is not born, but cultivated — it counts only at the moment the work-to-be-done is accomplished.

Carrying Forward

The twin-yoking of tranquillity and insight · the buoyant float, the very bottom, the far shore → the tranquillity-and-insight of the Stage of Meditative Equipoise (Stage 06) · the flood-crossing figures of clusters four and nine; the ultimate-truth brahmin's work-to-be-done accomplished · liberation of mind → the three trainings of the Intent-Purport Verses (11-02) · the doctrine of the four fruits in the later treatises that issue from this.

Segment Twelve, five verses — the most singular of all: it is the World-Honored One's "self-narration" of his own crooked road on the path. The hard points are all told in words the treatise itself already has.

First, a Question: How Does the Buddha Answer the Question Left at the End of Segment Eleven?

At the end of Segment Eleven, the deva asked the bhikṣu, question upon question: "Being like what, do you — with nothing to cling to, nothing to abide in — already cross the torrent?" This segment, the World-Honored One answers by his own lived experience — a thing extremely rare among the verses: it is the Buddha coming forth in person to teach, laying open for people the crooked road he himself once walked.

The verse is very short, yet it descends layer upon layer: "Just as I toiled, so and so was I feeble; just as I was feeble, so and so did I halt; just as I halted, so and so was I carried adrift." — The more I 〔vainly〕 toiled, the more feeble I grew; the more feeble, the more I came to a halt; the more I halted, the more I was carried adrift and drowned. The treatise matches these four words, one by one, onto the Buddha's own history on the path:

• Toilsome labor = the Buddha's "six years of austerity" of former days, that "valiant vigor comprised under non-means" (fierce exertion pointed in the wrong direction; the ancient masters say outright it was "vainly making toilsome labor," suffering hardship for nothing);
• Growing feeble = practicing a wrong means, so that wholesome dharmas fall away instead;
• Coming to a halt = knowing they had fallen away, and so stopping that set of wrong means;
• Being carried adrift and drowned = having stopped, then going off to seek out another teacher — running to "Uddaka, Āḷāra" (the two outsider teachers he relied on after leaving home, one teaching the concentration of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, one the concentration of nothing-whatever), following along and observing at their places of wrong grasping, and being carried off, in the end, by the concentrative states.

A crooked road — "austerity spent for nothing → falling away → stopping → then bowing to the wrong teacher" — the Buddha says without the least concealment: this is a road I walked in person.

The Turning at the Seat of Awakening: Letting Go of Toilsome Labor, and Instead "Growing No More Feeble"

The latter half of the verse is the side of light: "O deva! Just as I let go of toilsome labor, so and so did I grow no more feeble." The treatise points out that the turning came exactly beneath the tree of awakening — the World-Honored One "seated on the seat of awakening, cast away every valiant vigor comprised under non-means," and only then did wholesome dharmas grow. The wondrous thing is the line that follows: the wholesome dharmas having grown, he "gave rise to no complacency, took no leisure to halt," but rather searched onward and onward for what was more surpassing and subtle; and it was precisely because of this non-complacency that he "sought out no further outsider teacher, but, with no teacher, spontaneously cultivated the thirty-seven factors of awakening, realized supreme, right, and full awakening, and is named the Greatly Awakened One."

Hidden here is the deepest lesson of the whole segment: the problem was never "vigor" itself, but vigor that is "non-means" (wrong in direction, wrong in method). Fierce exertion in the wrong direction (toilsome labor) only grows the more feeble the harder it is driven; only by letting it go, and seeking the right Dharma without complacency, does one walk through to great awakening. The Buddha draws the dividing line between "austerity is of no benefit" and "the right effort of the middle way" and tells it out plainly through his own life-story — and this answers, too, Segment One's "keep clear of the extreme of self-mortifying austerity."

Two Sets of "Four Lines": Crossing the Torrent, and Guarding the Attainment of Cessation

The treatise adds two further sets of contrasts, telling through the whole mechanism of "drifting" and "crossing":

• Nirvāṇa, no reliance and no abiding · the four causes: the one unable to cross the torrent is one who slides all the way down "relying on the applied thought of greedy relishing → indolence → abiding in the portion of an ordinary being → going along with the stream of birth-and-death and being carried adrift"; by the four causes reversed, one is able to cross.
• The attainment of the cessation of perception and feeling · the four lines: even one who has attained "the attainment of cessation," if he "abides in heedlessness, abiding much in perception and feeling and not much in the cessation of perception and feeling," will also fall away from the attainment of cessation, and sink back to the cause for arising in a lower ground.

Both sets speak the one same principle: what is attained can still fall away; let the direction slacken by a hair, and one drifts. Even the Buddha walked a crooked road; even the attainment of cessation can fall away — and so "no complacency, no heedlessness" is the very key to not drifting.

The Point of This Segment

The "Toilsome Labor" segment is the Buddha's self-narration: the "non-means vigor" of six years of austerity bought only growing feeble, halting, and drifting (bowing to the wrong teachers Uddaka and Āḷāra); only at the seat of awakening, letting go of toilsome labor and seeking the right Dharma without complacency, did he — with no teacher, spontaneously — realize great awakening; and then, with "the four causes for crossing the torrent" and "the four lines of falling away from the attainment of cessation," he bears out that "let the direction err / slacken, and one drifts." Vigor pointed in the wrong direction is called toilsome labor — this is the one line of the whole segment, and it is what the Buddha realized in person.

Carrying Forward

Non-means austerity = toilsome labor · letting it go realizes great awakening → Segment One, keep clear of the extreme of self-mortifying austerity (11-03-01) · the middle way; falling away from the attainment of the cessation of perception and feeling → the Stage of Meditative Equipoise (Stage 06), the attainment of cessation; with no teacher, spontaneously cultivating the factors of awakening → the Bodhisattva Stage (fasc. 35+); going along with the stream of birth-and-death and being carried adrift → Segments Nine and Eleven, crossing the flood.

Section thirteen is three verses, and again the heavenly maiden poses the question. The hard points are all handled with the treatise's own words.

First, One Question: A Person Who Dwells Alone in the Forested Hills and Makes No Friends — Is He Not Too Solitary-and-Aloof, With Some Design of His Own?

The heavenly maiden's doubt is very worldly, and very pointed: You have come alone to the forest hermitage, sat still, and even cast away precious wealth — is it that you seek something else? Or is it that you wish to spy out a fiefdom, to scheme for some rank? How is it you make not a single friend? — This is to read "keeping apart and dwelling alone" as "solitary-and-aloof," as "scheming."

The Buddha's answer is but one line, yet it lays the whole attainment bare: "得義、心寂靜，摧妙色魔軍；我獨處思惟，受最勝安樂，故不與人交。" tr. "I have attained the matter and my heart is at peace; I have crushed the demon-army of alluring fine form. I dwell alone and reflect, and there receive the most excellent ease — and so I do not consort with others." It is not solitary-and-aloof: it is to have already "attained the matter," the heart already at peace, so that dwelling alone one receives, on the contrary, the most excellent ease — however good a friend may be, none can match this joy of inward realization.

What Is It That "Attaining the Matter" Attains? — Two Kinds of Matter

The treatise takes "attaining the matter" apart into two kinds, each of great weight:

• The matter of the śramaṇa-fruit: one has realized the śramaṇa-fruit, and "transcends all the great suffering of birth-and-death," "subdues the demon-army of lovely, alluring form" — here there is a crisp simile, which names the seduction of the desire-objects the "demon-army of fine form": once the śramaṇa-fruit is attained, this army is crushed;
• The matter of the noble supernormal powers: one realizes the eight liberations, reflects in stillness, dwells at ease in the present state, and dwelling alone receives excellent ease.

The intent of this section's verse, the treatise says, "is to set forth the matter of the noble supernormal powers" — and the road to accomplishing the noble supernormal powers is to "cultivate by the skillful means of the ten totalities": one cultivates the concentration on the totalities to purity and completeness, one's liberation too turns to become pure and bright-and-clear, and only then are the noble supernormal powers accomplished. The one who accomplishes them will himself know that "my matter is accomplished," and the matter of the śramaṇa-fruit is likewise brought to fulfillment — he is a "true śramaṇa." The pure joy of dwelling alone comes about just in this way.

True Peace Against False Peace: The Difference Lies in "Whether or Not One Sees the Four Truths"

The deepest stroke of this section is the discernment of "true peace against false peace." The treatise says: the one who has attained the matter deeply cultivates disgust-and-censure toward "those who seek wealth," and sees the towns and their comings-and-goings through and through — he "knows the origin, the danger, the escape, and the practice that tends toward escape," and the ancient masters point out that this is precisely the four truths: the "origin" is arising (the cause and condition that gives rise to desire), the "danger" is suffering (impermanent, manifold suffering, changing and decaying), the "escape" is cessation (the subduing of desire-and-greed), and the "practice that tends toward escape" is the path (the noble eightfold path).

Conversely, the one who does not see the four truths (who does not see their origin, on down to not seeing the practice that tends toward escape) is unable to feel disgust-and-censure toward wealth and society, circulates among them, and yet fancies of himself that "my heart has attained peace"; worse still, he even turns about and slanders the "inward peace" of the one who has truly realized the absorption of the eight liberations. The treatise's verdict is very clear: such a person "is not capable of seeing it well, knowing it well, examining it well, penetrating it well" — because he simply has not seen the four truths, his "peace" is false. The condensed sense cuts this cleanly: those who enjoy the joy of desire, and those who delight in mixed abiding, are none of them the inward peace of the ultimate truth; only one who has realized the absorption of the eight liberations and departed from all the relish of craving is the inward peace of the ultimate truth.

The Intent of This Section

The "What Is Attained" section vindicates "dwelling alone": it is not being solitary-and-aloof with some design, but to have already attained the matter (the matter of the śramaṇa-fruit, transcending birth-and-death, subduing the demon-army of fine form / the matter of the noble supernormal powers, realizing the eight liberations), the heart at peace, dwelling alone and receiving excellent ease; and then, by "whether or not one sees the four truths," it discerns true peace from false — only one who has realized the absorption of the eight liberations and departed from the relish of craving is the inward peace of the ultimate truth. The joy of dwelling alone is the joy that comes after the demon-army has been subdued and the four truths have been seen — this is the section's most affirmative answer to "keeping apart from the crowd."

Carrying Forward

The eight liberations · the ten totalities · dwelling at ease in the present state → the Stage of Meditative Equipoise (Stage 06); knowing the origin / danger / escape / practice-that-tends = the four truths → the four-truths direct realization of section nine (11-03-09) · the four aspects each of the four truths in the Intent-Meaning Verses (11-02); the inward peace of the ultimate truth → the teaching of the equal holding of concentration and wisdom in the later treatises.

Cluster fourteen is the great tail-piece of the Body-Meaning Verses, and of the whole set of Reflection-Stage verses besides: forty-four verses and a half, divided into twenty-seven sub-sections, "and because it sets forth and displays the profound principle, it is named the Discourse." It is like a condensed anthology of the whole Dharma, telling off one by one, topic by topic, impermanence, karma and its fruit, discipline and wisdom, mind and consciousness, the arhat, nirvāṇa. For the sub-section-by-sub-section rendering into plain language, see the 〈Vernacular〉; here we take up only a few of the main veins and bring them to life. The hard points are all put in figures the treatise itself already carries.

An Opening Verse That Sets the Key of the Whole Cluster: "All Formations Are Impermanent"

The Discourse cluster begins with one of the most famous of all verses: "All formations are impermanent, subject to the law of arising and ceasing; because they arise and cease, their stilling is bliss." The treatise fixes "formations" upon the "grasping aggregates," and then takes the three times to break impermanence down fine: the past aggregates, already perished — this is impermanence; the future aggregates, capable of arising — these have the property of arising; the present aggregates, subject to perishing — these have the property of ceasing; and the forever-exhausting of the causes of future aggregates is just that "stilling." And the reason this "stilling" is "bliss" is twofold — the ceasing of all the causes of suffering (ease in the present life) and liberation from all the sufferings to come. Under this one verse the treatise, in a single breath, matches on right view, full comprehension, dependent origination, the two truths of suffering and its cessation, and the three gates of liberation — emptiness, wishlessness, and the markless — as if to tell you: the whole of the Dharma grows up out of this one glimpse, "seeing impermanence." The twenty-seven sub-sections are just this one glimpse unfolded, layer upon layer.

A Closing Verse That Answers the Opening's "Do No Evil": The Common Precept of the Seven Buddhas

By the time we reach sub-section 20, there is again a verse that everyone can recite by heart: "Do no manner of evil, uphold and practice all that is good, tame and subdue one's own mind — this is the holy teaching of the buddhas." This is precisely the distant echo of the Body-Meaning Verses' very first cluster, "do no evil" — head and tail on a single line. The treatise brings it down onto the three trainings: it closes with "upholding the good in three respects" (abiding in śīla → the superior mind and superior wisdom that arise upon it → knowing and seeing as they truly are) and "subduing the mind in three respects" (knowing as it truly is → disgust and dread → freedom from defilement → liberation), and marks the one line "not held in common with others" — this is the holy teaching of the buddhas; the outsider teachings have it not. From the "do no evil" of the opening to the "do no manner of evil" here, the verses have drawn a full circle.

The Deepest Vein of All: The Mind-Consciousness through the Three Times (the Consciousness-Only Landing-Point of the Reflection Stage)

Within the Discourse cluster, the passage of heaviest weight, and the most Consciousness-Only, is the view of "mind, mentation, and consciousness" through the three times — sub-section 11, "the sixth, the sovereign superior," and sub-section 24, "the mind travels far, travels alone, is bodiless, sleeps in a cave." The treatise says plainly that mind is mentation and is consciousness, and then, with four terms, marks out the three times:

• "Travels far" = the past consciousness: with measureless self-substances and causes turning one upon another; though there is no agent, yet it flows on through birth-and-death; and the prior limit cannot be known.
• "Travels alone · bodiless" = the present consciousness: turning one at a time, with no second companion-mind, and all the seed-minds not manifesting at once; and because "the substance of the mind's intrinsic-nature defilement is not established as real," it is therefore "bodiless."
• "Sleeps in a cave" = the future consciousness: dwelling in the four stations of consciousness, having the latent proclivities, and capable of arising and coming-and-going hereafter.

The most crucial stroke lies in the summary of the sense: the mind is "for a long time in the past defiled, without an agent; in the present, in each instant, intrinsically pure; in the future, defiled or pure according to heedlessness or heedfulness." — intrinsically pure, defiled by adventitious dust: this is the very same backbone of the mind-consciousness that the Ultimate-Meaning Verses gave in "the defiled mentation is by nature pure," standing forth once more here at the great tail-piece of the verses. When the Reflection Stage examines phenomena, it examines, in the very end, still this: the defilement and purity, through the three times, of this single moment of mind.

Two Ways of Seeing the Buddha: The Tathāgata's Dharma-Body (sub-section 10)

Sub-section 10 — "If one measures me by form, or seeks me by voice and sound, held fast by desire and greed, that one cannot know me" — is a discernment of "what really counts as truly seeing the Buddha." The treatise says: those who "measure" the Buddha only by the thirty-two marks, by the divine eye, by the fleshly eye, are all "led along by another's voice and sound," and are not to be relied on (drawing near an unwholesome person, hearing the wrong Dharma, one turns about and slanders the Buddha). Only one who has gained the noble eye of wisdom, and inwardly realizes and understands the "Tathāgata's Dharma-body," "with certainty" sees the Buddha (not led along by others' doctrines, and with certainty believing and receiving the Three Jewels). In a word: to see the Tathāgata in the conventional way is not certain; to see the Tathāgata in the ultimate way alone is certain — seeing the Buddha lies not in form and sound, but in the inwardly-realized eye of wisdom.

A String of Similes for Seeing Through the Desires, and Maitreya's Question

The Discourse cluster is the place in the whole set of verses where similes are densest, nearly one simile to a sub-section: the turtle drawing in its shell (gathering the applied thoughts into concentration · sub-section 13), the chick breaking its shell to be born (the body of form, the body of name · sub-section 14), the "city of the mind" built up of bone, sinew, and flesh (occupied and held by greed, hatred, and pride · sub-section 12), the bird flying through the empty sky and leaving no track (the desires with no place to abide · sub-section 16), the head of the venomous snake (the relish and craving of the desires · sub-section 26), the topped palmyra tree (the desires forever cut off, never to arise again), the lotus leaf on which no water-drop clings (the sorrow and suffering of decay do not adhere to the pure consciousness) — each of them a teaching-tool that brings alive "the desires are empty and false; the mind alone can be tamed."

And sub-section 25 especially deserves a note: that passage of question-and-answer, "mindfulness-and-wisdom together with name-and-form … if the consciousnesses forever cease, herein is the forever-ceasing exhausted," the treatise marks as a verse that was "asked by Ajita in the Pārāyaṇa Sūtra" — and the ancient masters point out directly that "Ajita is Ajita the Invincible, another name for Maitreya." In other words: this Yogācārabhūmi, spoken by the bodhisattva Maitreya, at the great tail-piece of the Reflection Stage cites a verse that Maitreya himself, in that former day, put as a question to the Buddha — the one who speaks the teaching and the one who asked the question here seal one another across the ages.

Closing on a "Verse of the Worthy and Good": No Longing for the Past

Of the twenty-seven sub-sections, the Discourse cluster ends on a "verse of the worthy and good": "For the past have no longing, do not yearn after the future, and among the phenomena of the present contemplate all round, everywhere." The treatise matches this with the "cultivation of the holy life in five respects" (renouncing the household life without turning back in longing; not yearning after future formations; rightly contemplating the five aggregates as impermanent, suffering, and not-self, and not grasping at what is "mine"; the growth of the two provisions, which no king can seize away; the merit of nirvāṇa, which no affliction can shake), and then sets down a line of the utmost weight: to cultivate thus, "even for a single day and a single night, is to be worthy and good, foremost among the worthy and good, surpassing all the rest of the holy life whatsoever." — Not longing for the past, not seeking the future, but only, in the very present, contemplating all round impermanence and not-self — even for but a single day and night, this surpasses all the rest whatsoever. The verses of the Reflection Stage come to rest upon just this worthiness-and-goodness of "living in the present, contemplating phenomena as not-self."

The Point of This Cluster

The "Discourse" cluster is the summation of the Body-Meaning Verses, and of the three sets of Reflection-Stage verses besides: beginning with "all formations are impermanent" and ending with "no longing for the past," passing midway through the common precept of the seven buddhas (echoing the first cluster's "do no evil"), the mind-consciousness through the three times (the Consciousness-Only landing-point of "intrinsically pure, defiled by adventitious dust"), the Tathāgata's Dharma-body (seeing the Buddha in the ultimate way), and Maitreya's question (speaker and questioner sealing one another across the ages) — its twenty-seven topics like a miniature anthology of the whole Dharma. See impermanence, subdue this mind, live in the present — this is the last word that the whole cluster, and the whole set of the three Ultimate-Meaning, Intent-Purport, and Body-Meaning Verses together, leaves to the one who practices reflection.

Carrying Forward

All formations are impermanent · the grasping aggregates through the three times · the mind-consciousness intrinsically pure, defiled by adventitious dust → the Ultimate-Meaning Verses' "the defiled mentation is by nature pure" (11-01) · the Cheng Weishi Lun on mind, mentation, and consciousness; the seven-buddhas' common precept "do no manner of evil" → the Body-Meaning Verses' first cluster "do no evil" (11-03-01), head and tail mirroring one another; the Tathāgata's Dharma-body (seeing the Buddha in the ultimate way) → the Cheng Weishi Lun's chapter on the Dharma-body; Maitreya's (Ajita's) question → the self-citation of the bodhisattva Maitreya, the speaker of this very treatise; the similes of the turtle's shell / birth-from-the-egg / the city of the mind / the venomous snake's head → the treasury of similes for the teaching on freedom from the desires in the treatises that later issue from this.