Does the Eye See, or the Consciousness?

"Visible" here is a narrow, technical sense, not a loose synonym for "perceptible." It means specifically that one can point at part of it and show a difference from another part — this patch is here, that patch is there. Sound, smell, taste, and the tangible are all perfectly perceptible by their own senses, yet none of them is "visible" in this sense: you cannot point at a sound and show that one part of it is "here" and another "there" the way you can with a colour or a shape. Only visible form itself has this spatial, showable quality, which is why exactly one element out of eighteen earns the label, while the other seventeen — including several that are directly sensed every moment — are technically "invisible."

"Resistant" turns out to name three genuinely different things, and the treatise is careful not to blur them. Obstructive resistance is the plainest: two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same place, the way one hand blocks another or one stone blocks another — this is the sense the opening verse actually intends when it counts "ten" resistant elements. Object-domain resistance is a faculty's restriction to its own proper territory, and the treatise illustrates it with a small survey of animal vision quoted from another Abhidharma text, the Prajñaptiśāstra: fish see in water but not on land, humans (mostly) see on land but not in water, some creatures manage both, bats and owls see by night but not day, humans (mostly) see by day but not night, and creatures like dogs and wolves manage both. Objective-support resistance, the finest distinction of the three, is about mind and mental factors specifically: a faculty's "object-domain" is simply whatever it has the functional capacity to engage, but when a moment of mind or a mental factor actually arises by taking hold of that object, the same object is now called its "objective-support" — the same territory, named differently depending on whether we are speaking of mere capacity or of an actual act of cognition arising from it.

The zoological aside is not decoration. It exists to make a genuinely abstract point — that every cognitive faculty is restricted to operating within its own proper domain — vivid through cases any reader already half-knows from observing animals, before the discussion returns to the much more exacting distinction between a faculty's mere "domain" and mind's active "objective support."

The four cases sort dharmas by whether they have a cognitive domain, physical obstructiveness, both, or neither: the seven mind-elements and their associated mental factors have a domain but no matter to obstruct anything with; the five sense-objects and five sense-organs have both, since they are matter that also functions within a domain; and the unconditioned dharmas and mind-dissociated formations, within the dharma-element, have neither. Kumāralāta's citation — a named elder whose view the treatise records without simply adopting it as the only word on the subject — reframes resistance psychologically rather than physically: something is "resistant," on his account, whenever a mind that wants to arise is blocked by something else from doing so. It is a small but telling moment of the treatise showing its work: naming the person a definition comes from, rather than presenting every view anonymously as "the" position.

The reasoning closes a loop opened all the way back when unmanifest form was first defined. The five sense faculties and the objects of smell, taste, and touch are pure receptors and raw physical qualities — nothing about an eyeball or a patch of sourness is itself a moral act, so they are permanently neutral. Visible form and sound are different precisely because they can be a moral act: a respectful bow or a violent gesture is visible form produced by a wholesome or unwholesome mind and expressed as bodily manifestation (身表); a kind word or a cruel one is sound produced the same way and expressed as vocal manifestation (語表). It is only when colour or sound rises to the level of manifest bodily or verbal karma that it inherits the moral quality of the mind behind it — otherwise, like a rock's colour or the sound of wind, it is neutral too.

The seven mind-elements and the dharma-element are judged the same way, by what they are yoked to: a moment of mind (or a mental factor, in the dharma-element) is wholesome when paired with the three wholesome roots — non-greed, non-hatred, non-delusion — and unwholesome when paired with their opposites; cessation through discernment, already met early in this fascicle, is explicitly named wholesome outright, since it is nothing other than liberation itself. The proposed alternative definition of "neutral" — that it simply means "producing no karmic ripening" — is raised and quietly set aside, since it would wrongly force every uncontaminated dharma into the neutral category too, when uncontaminated wholesome states are not treated as merely neutral in this system.

The pattern connects directly to what was already said about the form realm: beings there have gone beyond desire for "morsel-food" (段食, ordinary chewed and swallowed food), and smell and taste exist, in this system, for no other reason than to serve that appetite — so once the appetite is gone, both the objects and their two consciousnesses drop out entirely, with nothing left for them to do. The exchange that follows is a small model of how this treatise argues: an objector presses the same logic further each time (if food-relatedness disqualifies smell and taste, shouldn't it disqualify touch too? and if touch survives because it has other uses, don't smell and taste have other uses as well?), and each reply has to find the actual asymmetry rather than simply repeating the rule. The answer that survives is functional: touch is still needed to sustain the body's own faculties and to feel contact with clothing and surroundings, uses that have nothing to do with eating, while smell and taste, once food is set aside, have simply nothing left to do.

This second scholarly view sharpens the earlier explanation: it isn't just that touch has non-food uses in general, but that a specific, refined kind of touch — pliancy (輕安, praśrabdhi, a meditative factor of bodily and mental ease) — is bound up with the deep meditative states that define life in the form realm itself, so it naturally persists there alongside seeing and hearing. Nose and tongue, meanwhile, survive not because they still smell or taste anything, but for reasons that have nothing to do with their original sensory job: a complete, well-formed body needs a nose and a tongue to look whole, and a tongue is needed to produce speech.

The debate presses one step further still — whether the form realm's nose and tongue are full functioning faculties or merely their physical, decorative bases without real sensory capability, drawing an analogy to the male organ (wholly absent in the form realm, since it serves no purpose there at all) and to a fetus that grows complete faculties even though it is destined to die before ever using them. We have summarized this final, very fine-grained volley rather than translating it line by line, since it presses a technical distinction — a faculty's mere physical basis versus its full functioning arising — well past what changes the substantive conclusion already given: nose and tongue remain in the form realm for speech and bodily completeness, even without smell and taste to sense.

The three realms now form a clean, descending sequence: the desire realm keeps all eighteen elements; the form realm drops smell, taste, and their two consciousnesses once the appetite for food is gone, but keeps a physical body and its remaining senses; the formless realm drops all ten elements of form outright, since what is left behind there is not merely food but form itself — matter of any kind. What remains is only mind: the mind element, the dharma element it takes as its object, and the mind-consciousness that arises from the two together. A being in the formless realm has no eye, no body, no shape at all — only a bare continuum of mental events, which is exactly what its highest meditative attainments (infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither-perception-nor-non-perception) are meditations on. The Chinese text goes on to press one further, narrower debate about whether the form realm's sexual characteristics survive in the same way as its nose and tongue — a fine continuation of the faculty-versus-use argument already covered rather than new doctrine, which we are not translating line by line here.

The closing line on the formless realm quietly reinforces why only three elements remain there: a consciousness needs both a support and an object to arise at all, and since the formless realm has neither a physical faculty nor a physical object for any of the five sense-consciousnesses, those five simply cannot arise — not by some special exclusion rule, but because the ordinary conditions for their arising are entirely missing.

The new question then narrows sharply: of all eighteen elements, only three — mind, dharma, and mind-consciousness — are ever even capable of being uncontaminated, and only when they specifically belong to the path or the unconditioned. The other fifteen, including every physical sense-organ and every physical sense-object, are contaminated without exception, no matter the circumstance. This is a strong claim worth sitting with: matter itself, on this system, is never uncontaminated — liberation is not a property any eye, ear, or patch of colour could ever have. Only mind, and what mind takes as its object, can ever rise to that level, and even then only in the narrow case where what is grasped is specifically the path itself or an unconditioned dharma like cessation through discernment.

Applied thought (尋, vitarka) and sustained thought (伺, vicāra) are traditionally illustrated by a bell: applied thought is the initial strike that brings the mind onto its object, coarse and sudden; sustained thought is the reverberation that follows, subtler and lingering, examining what the strike brought into range. The five sense-consciousnesses always have both, simply because of how they work — reaching outward through the sense-doors to a coarse object is already, in effect, a kind of striking-and-examining, regardless of anyone's level of meditative attainment. What actually varies with practice is the mind, dharma, and mind-consciousness elements alone, and the treatise uses them to mark the very boundaries between stages of absorption: desire-realm consciousness and the first dhyāna both still strike and examine their object; a special transitional state between the first and second dhyāna has let go of the striking but still lingers in sustained examination; from the second dhyāna all the way up to the highest point of existence, both drop away entirely, leaving an absorption with no discursive activity, coarse or subtle, at all. The classification of eighteen elements has, without warning, turned into a map of the meditative path itself.

The logic is self-referential and worth working through slowly. Ask of any ordinary mental factor, in a level that "has both applied and sustained thought," whether applied and sustained thought accompany it — yes, both do, so it falls in the first category. Now ask the same question of applied thought itself: does applied thought come paired with a second instance of applied thought? No — nothing is its own accompanying duplicate — but it is genuinely accompanied by sustained thought, so applied thought itself is classed as "without applied thought, with sustained thought only." Sustained thought gets the mirror-image answer for the same reason: no second instance of itself, but genuinely accompanied by applied thought, so it is classed as "without sustained thought, with applied thought only." Dissociated dharmas, not being the kind of thing that co-arises with mental factors in this way at all, have neither. The ten elements of form need no such careful sorting: being matter, they are simply never associated with either factor, full stop.

The one-legged horse is one of the most memorable images in this fascicle, and it does real philosophical work: the five sense-consciousnesses are not literally free of all discrimination — they do have "self-nature discrimination," which turns out to be nothing more than applied thought (尋) itself, the same factor already discussed at length. But that is only one of three legs. What the five senses genuinely lack are deliberative discrimination — the mental consciousness's own discursive, judging wisdom, active only outside meditative absorption — and recollective discrimination — the mental consciousness's capacity for memory, active whether concentrated or not. Since these two are what ordinary language actually means by "discriminating" or "judging" something, calling the five senses "non-discriminating" is true in every sense that matters, even though, strictly, they retain the one weakest leg of the three.

This quietly answers a question a careful reader of Ru-Yi's other translations may already have been asking: how can a sense-consciousness register a colour or a sound at all without already having judged or interpreted it? The answer this treatise gives is that bare registration — applied thought's minimal "aiming" at an object — is not yet judgment, memory, or interpretation. Those belong entirely to the sixth consciousness, arising a moment later, exactly as fascicle 1 of the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra describes the "sudden mind" of the eye-consciousness giving way to the "seeking" and "deciding" minds of the mental consciousness that follows it.

"Having an object" turns out to be a simple, clean line: mind and mental factors take hold of something, matter and dissociated formations do not — so only the seven mind-elements and the associated half of the dharma element make the cut, and everything else is automatically "without an object" by the same logic in reverse.

"Appropriated" (執受, upātta) is the more interesting distinction, and it names something quite specific: matter that is genuinely part of a living, sentient body right now, as opposed to matter that merely resembles it. Nine elements — the seven mind-elements, the dharma element, and sound — can never be appropriated at all: mind and mental factors aren't matter to begin with, and sound, even a living being's own voice, is treated as something emitted rather than as living tissue. The other nine — the five faculties and four of the five objects (form, smell, taste, touch, but not sound) — can go either way, and the deciding line is exact: your own eye, right now, in this present moment, is appropriated; the very same eye a moment ago or a moment from now is not, because appropriation belongs only to the present. The colour of your living skin, the taste in your mouth, the smell of your own body, and the warmth felt in your hand are appropriated in exactly the same way, but only while they remain part of a functioning body in the present — the same colour once it is, say, a bruise that has healed and sloughed off, or the same taste once swallowed and gone, no longer counts.

The exceptions are the memorable part, and they match ordinary experience precisely: hair, nails, teeth, and bodily fluids like blood, saliva, urine, and mucus are all, in one sense, "inside" or attached to the living body, yet the treatise excludes every one of them from "appropriated" status. The reason becomes clear with the definition that follows: appropriation is not about location but about a two-way sympathetic bond — mind and mental factors take some matter as their basis such that harm to that matter is genuinely felt, and the mind's condition in turn affects the matter. Cut a strand of hair or trim a nail, and nothing hurts, because that tissue was never bound to the mind this way; cut living skin, and it does, because skin is. This is also, the treatise notes, the technical basis for "felt touch" in ordinary speech — a stimulus registers as pleasant or painful precisely because it lands on matter genuinely appropriated by mind, not on hair, nails, or waste products passing through or out of the body.

Only one element out of eighteen contains the four great elements directly: touch, since solidity, wetness, heat, and motion are precisely what the tangible sense feels — nowhere else are the primary elements themselves the actual content of a sense-object. Every other kind of matter, without exception, is derived: the five faculties, and visible form, sound, smell, and taste as objects, are all secondary matter built from some combination of the four elements, never the four elements appearing as such. Unmanifest karmic matter, tucked inside the dharma element, is derived in exactly the same way — a further confirmation, from a completely different angle, of what fascicle 1 established when it first defined unmanifest form as matter produced by the great elements.

"Accumulable" returns to the atomism already met in the earlier debate over whether a hand striking a drum makes one sound or two: the ten elements of form are, quite literally, clusters of countless atoms (極微) bound together, which is exactly why they can be measured, weighed, and divided into parts. The remaining eight — the six consciousnesses, the mind element, and the dharma element — are never spoken of as clusters of atoms at all, because nothing about mind is built up piece by piece the way matter is.

"Cutting" gets a precise definition worth noticing: it is not damage in general, but specifically separating a continuous mass into parts that each keep on existing independently afterward. This is exactly why the sense faculties are excluded from both roles, for two different reasons. They are not "the cut" because severing a limb does not leave behind two functioning faculties — the faculty simply ends where the body does, unlike firewood, which remains firewood on both sides of the axe's stroke. They are not "the cutter" either, because the faculties are made of "pure form" (the same refined, imperceptible matter defined back in fascicle 1's section 17) — too subtle a substance, the text says, comparing it to the light given off by a jewel, to physically cut anything at all. Ordinary gross matter can cut and be cut; the delicate matter of a living sense-organ can do neither.

Sound drops out of the whole question for a reason consistent with everything already said about it: cutting, burning, and weighing all require a persisting mass of matter to act on, and sound, arising and ceasing moment by moment with no continuous body to it, was never a candidate. The genuine disagreement that follows is worth noticing precisely because the treatise does not resolve it: one view keeps burning and weighing symmetrical with cutting — any of the four external elements can serve as agent or patient — while a stricter view insists that only fire, specifically, deserves to be called "the burner" (since burning just is what heat does), and only weight, specifically, is what a scale actually measures (not colour, smell, or taste). Rather than declare a winner, the treatise simply records both positions and moves on — one of several moments in this fascicle where a live scholarly dispute is preserved rather than papered over.

The five physical faculties are, quite literally, made of two things at once: a portion that is the direct ripened result of past karma (the sūtra citation is blunt about this — the sense-faculties you have right now are exactly what earlier karma produced), and a portion that is sustained moment to moment by food, sleep, and meditative absorption, the way any living body needs ongoing input to keep functioning. The city-wall simile is exact: the karmically-ripened part is the inner city, the precious thing actually being protected, while the nourished part is the outer wall that takes the day-to-day wear and keeps the inner part safe. One school's claim that celibate practice also "nourishes" the body is politely declined — the treatise allows that it prevents harm, but refuses to call mere harm-prevention a positive nourishment in its own right, a fine but real distinction it insists on holding.

The reasoning for excluding sound from karmic ripening is simple: unlike your eye or ear, which you did not choose and cannot switch off, speech happens when and how you decide to speak — it "turns according to one's own will," and karmic ripening, by definition, is not a matter of present choice. The objection this invites is a serious one: Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha's extraordinarily beautiful voice — one of the classical marks of a great being — is explicitly said to be a result of past good karma (specifically, of abandoning harsh speech). If sound can never be a ripened result, how can a scripture say exactly that?

The resolution preserves both claims by adding a chain of intermediate steps, spelled out in the next section: karma does not produce the beautiful voice directly as its ripened fruit. Sound is said to belong to the fifth stage of a causal transmission running from that karma — several steps removed from the karma itself, not its immediate, literal ripening. This lets the treatise keep its general rule (sound itself is never literally vipāka) while still honoring the sūtra's plain statement that good conduct produces the mark of a beautiful voice, several steps removed rather than directly.

Spelled out, the chain runs: karma ripens directly into great elements (the physical basis of the vocal organs); those ripened elements, sustained moment to moment, produce nourished great elements; those, continuing on, produce homogeneous-outflow great elements; and only this last stage, when actually struck into motion by an act of speaking, produces the sound itself. The Buddha's beautiful voice is therefore several links removed from the karma of abandoning harsh speech — real, and genuinely caused by that karma, but not its immediate ripened fruit the way an eye or ear is. This is the treatise's general method in miniature: rather than let a single word like "produced by karma" cover every case loosely, it insists on naming exactly which link in the causal chain a given effect actually occupies.

The objection tries to generalize the exact move used to exempt sound from vipāka: if being downstream of karma-produced matter disqualifies sound, shouldn't it disqualify bodily feeling too, since feeling likewise depends on a body that karma produced? The treatise refuses this outright, calling it a violation of correct principle — feeling's status as a direct ripened result is too doctrinally load-bearing to sacrifice for the sake of a tidy analogy (an unawakened being's felt pleasure and pain are, centrally, how karma's ripening is actually experienced). Sound and feeling are not parallel cases: sound genuinely runs through several extra links of transmission before it exists at all, while feeling is the ripening itself, immediate rather than several steps removed.

The closing definitions finally make precise two terms this fascicle has used all along without spelling out: "homogeneous outflow" (等流, niṣyanda) names whatever is produced by a same-kind cause or a pervasive cause — an effect that resembles its cause in kind, the way a wholesome thought tends to give rise to further wholesome thoughts of the same general character; "ripening-produced" names specifically what a ripening-cause draws forth — a genuinely different-in-kind result, the way a moral action ripens into a pleasant or painful experience unlike the action itself. And the eight mental elements are permanently excluded from "nourished" for a reason already established: nourishment by food, sleep, and meditative absorption only applies to matter built up from clustered atoms, and mind, on this system, was never built that way to begin with.

"Real substance" here is a narrower, more technical claim than it might first sound — it is not saying that ordinary matter and mind are illusory (dharmas retain their own particular characteristics, as this fascicle established long ago); it is saying that only the unconditioned is "firm and real" in the specific sense of never arising, never ceasing, and never being built up from parts the way every conditioned dharma is. Everything conditioned, however genuinely existent, is caught in the flux of arising and ceasing that this narrower sense of "real" is reserved against.

The single-moment case is the most moving point in this entire section. "The patient acceptance of the knowledge of suffering" (苦法忍, duḥkhe dharmajñāna-kṣānti) is the technical name for the very first moment of uncontaminated insight a practitioner ever has — the instant the path of seeing opens, traditionally marking entry into the stream. It earns the label "single-moment" for a precise reason: "homogeneous outflow" requires a prior moment of the same kind to flow from, and this moment, by definition, has no predecessor — nothing like it has ever occurred before in that person's mind. Every uncontaminated moment that follows it, however similar, counts as flowing from it and so no longer qualifies for this description; only the first one is, in the strictest sense, singular. A chapter that opened with an abstract division of all reality into contaminated and uncontaminated, and has spent fifty-plus sections cross-classifying matter and mind by every conceivable axis, closes this particular thread by locating, with technical precision, the exact instant a being first steps from one side of that division to the other.

This question only makes sense once several earlier sections are held together at once: a developing embryo in the desire realm forms its eye faculty gradually, before it can see anything, so the organ is gained well before the consciousness ever fires — one case of "singly." A being who dies formless and is reborn at the second dhyāna or higher regains an eye faculty (formless beings have none at all, as section 7 established) without necessarily gaining active eye-consciousness there, since the higher levels of absorption do not routinely exercise ordinary sight — another case of "singly," in the opposite direction. The reverse also occurs: a being already dwelling at those higher levels can, on occasion, have eye-consciousness manifest without this counting as newly gaining the eye element, since the organ was already there; and when such a being is later reborn at a lower stage, active eye-consciousness resumes without needing to be freshly "gained" as an element either. Only a being crossing the widest possible gap — from the formless realm, which has no body at all, directly into the desire realm or the first dhyāna, both of which fully and immediately exercise the senses — gains both the organ and its active consciousness in the very same transition. We have translated this passage closely to the Chinese; the exact mechanics of eye-consciousness "manifesting" at the higher levels of absorption are a finer point of Abhidharma cosmology than this fascicle spells out in full, and readers wanting the complete technical account should look to the treatise's later, dedicated discussion of rebirth and the realms.

This introduces a distinction Abhidharma keeps carefully separate: "attainment" (得, prāpti) is the specific event of newly acquiring something, while "possession" (成就, samanvāgama) is simply the ongoing state of currently having it, which can persist quietly without any new attainment happening in this moment. The four cases sort beings by whether they currently possess the eye faculty, the eye-consciousness, both, or neither — matching the earlier cosmology precisely: those absorbed at the second dhyāna and above generally possess the organ without the consciousness being active; an early embryo or a blinded person in the desire realm possesses the potential for sight without the organ itself; an ordinary desire-realm being with working eyes, or a higher-level being at the exact moment sight does occur there, possesses both.

The closing line is worth noticing for what it does rather than what it says: having walked through the full method once for the eye and eye-consciousness, the treatise simply instructs the reader to apply the identical reasoning to the eye element paired with the form element, and to eye-consciousness paired with the form element, without spelling out either case explicitly. This is a real pedagogical choice this fascicle makes more than once — teach the pattern thoroughly on one worked example, then trust the reader to extend it, rather than mechanically repeating the same four-case analysis for every possible pair among the eighteen elements.

The treatise catches its own terminology in a trap and then climbs out of it in real time. "Internal" naturally suggests "belonging to a self" — but Buddhism's most basic teaching is that no such self exists, so the objection writes itself: without a self, what could "internal" possibly be relative to? The answer is not to abandon the word but to relocate what it depends on. Two sūtras are set side by side deliberately: one says taming the self leads to heaven, the other says taming the mind leads to happiness — proof, on this reading, that "self" in ordinary Buddhist teaching is simply a convenient, provisional stand-in for "mind," never a claim that a real, separate self exists. Once that substitution is made, "internal" and "external" fall into place without needing a self at all: the six faculties are "internal" simply because they are mind's own intimate, proximate support, and the six objects are "external" simply because they are what mind reaches toward from a distance. The geography is real; the self it seems to imply is not.

This directly defends the doctrine the school takes its very name from: Sarvāstivāda, "the teaching that everything exists" — specifically, that every dharma exists across past, present, and future, not merely in a fleeting present moment. Section 31's account of the mind element (the same six consciousnesses, named "mind" only in their just-past phase) invites a worry: if manas is specifically the past phase of a consciousness, does that mean the mind element is confined to the past tense while the consciousness-elements themselves are confined to present and future — carving up one whole into three separately-timed pieces? The reply insists this is not so: any of the six consciousnesses, whether presently arising, yet to arise, or having just passed, never stops belonging to the consciousness-elements simply by also, in its just-past phase, counting as the mind element. A second, tighter argument closes the case: since a dharma's defining character is supposed to hold steady across all three times, it cannot be that present and future consciousnesses simply lack "mind" character while the past instance has it — the character must be there all along, or the very premise of three-time existence collapses. Nothing is lost, split off, or reassigned to a different temporal box — which is exactly what the school's foundational claim requires.

"Same-class" names a dharma actually functioning as the object of its matching consciousness right now — an eye actively seeing, a sound actively heard; "counterpart-class" names the same kind of dharma simply present without that engagement — an eye during dreamless sleep, matter no consciousness happens to be taking as its object at the moment. Seventeen of the eighteen elements have both kinds of instance, since nothing guarantees that every eye or every patch of colour is, at any given time, actually being seen.

The dharma element is the single exception, and the argument for why is elegant: a first moment of noble insight, contemplating all dharmas as without self, can take literally anything as its object except its own present self and whatever arises together with it in that same instant — a mind cannot observe itself in the very act of observing. But a second, following moment of mind can then take that first moment (including its own essence and co-arising factors) as its object in turn. Between any two consecutive moments, nothing is left out: every possible object gets covered by one moment or the other. Since this is always true of any moment whatsoever, no instance of the dharma element ever permanently escapes being an object of mind — which is exactly why, alone among the eighteen elements, it is said to be same-class without exception, never merely "counterpart-class."

The core definition is refreshingly plain after the previous section's subtlety: a dharma is "same-class" exactly when it does its job — an eye that has seen, sees, or will see counts as a functioning eye, full stop; anything falling short of that is "counterpart-class." What follows is one of the few places in this fascicle where two competing scholarly traditions are named outright rather than left as an anonymous "some say": the Kashmir Vaibhāṣikas count four kinds of non-seeing eye (already stopped, presently stopped, will exist but never see, or never even destined to arise), while an unnamed group of "masters of the West" split that last category further, distinguishing an eye-dharma that could in principle still connect to a consciousness from one with no connection to any consciousness whatsoever, arriving at five kinds instead of four.

This geographic labeling is not incidental colour — Kashmir and the "Western" regions (roughly Gandhāra and the lands beyond) were real, distinct centres of Sarvāstivāda scholarship with documented disagreements on points exactly like this one, and this treatise, itself often read as broadly sympathetic to Kashmir's Vaibhāṣika orthodoxy, still records the rival position without erasing it. The same fourfold pattern is then extended to the object side as well: form counts as "same-class" only when actually, currently, or someday seen by an eye, with the identical four-way breakdown of failure to be seen.

The generalization makes sense once "same-class" is remembered as a status of the faculty itself, not of any one encounter: an eye that is currently a genuinely functioning eye is a functioning eye with respect to everything visible, not just the one thing it happens to be looking at right now — so same-class status, once it holds for one object, automatically holds for all.

The closing etymology finally explains a word this fascicle has used all along without unpacking it: "class" (分, bhāga) names the very intersection of faculty, object, and consciousness — the three coming together to produce contact (觸, the same universal mental factor already introduced in the discussion of the aggregates). To "share the same class" is to share in that same three-way convergence; a faculty and object that genuinely meet consciousness this way are, in the fullest sense, of one class together.

The pattern is stark and clean: fifteen of the eighteen elements — all of matter, plus the five sense-consciousnesses — can only ever be worked on gradually, through cultivation, never eliminated in one stroke of insight. Only the three elements bound up with the mental consciousness (mind, dharma, mind-consciousness) can be cut off by seeing at all, and even there, only a very specific set qualifies: the eighty-eight latent afflictions — the classical Sarvāstivāda count of intellectually-produced afflictions across the four noble truths and three realms — along with whatever arises together with them and their attainment. Everything else contaminated waits for cultivation; everything uncontaminated needs no cutting off at all, since it was never an affliction to begin with. This is the technical machinery behind section 21's single unrepeatable moment: the instant of first uncontaminated insight is precisely what cuts off the eighty-eight all at once, opening the path of seeing, while the path of cultivation that follows works through everything else gradually, moment by moment, for as long as it takes.

Both candidates feel, intuitively, like exactly what a first insight should demolish — yet the treatise shows each one fails for a different technical reason, matching the two exclusions already named in the verse. "The state of being an ordinary worldling" (異生性, everything that makes someone not yet a noble one) sounds like the very definition of what stream-entry overturns, but it is classified as morally neutral and undefiled in its own right — not itself an affliction, just a status marker — and the proof offered is sharp: even a being who has already gone far beyond ordinary craving through meditative attainment, or one who has cut off their own wholesome roots entirely, can still technically "possess" this same neutral status, showing it isn't bound up with affliction the way the eighty-eight are. Bad karmic deeds of body and speech fail for the other listed reason: they are matter, "form not born from the six" consciousnesses in the technical sense meant here, and matter, as section 29 already established, is never cut off by seeing under any circumstances — only ever by cultivation, however contrary to the path it may be in spirit.

This single line is the real test behind everything in sections 29–30: "cut off by seeing" applies only to what arises directly out of misapprehending the four noble truths — the intellectually-produced wrong views and afflictions that a first moment of correct insight demolishes all at once. Ordinary-worldling status and karmic action of body and speech may be deeply at odds with the path in spirit, but neither is itself a direct product of that specific delusion, so neither qualifies, however tempting the intuition that they should.

This is one of the most heavily debated claims in the entire treatise, and the root verse states the more surprising position bluntly: it is the physical eye itself that sees, not the eye-consciousness that arises in dependence on it. The argument given here is almost architectural — if the eye-consciousness itself were the one doing the seeing, a physical obstruction like a wall placed between the eye and an object ought not to matter, since consciousness is not itself a physical thing that a wall could block. But a wall obviously does block sight completely. The traditional reply on behalf of this verse is that what actually blocks sight is the eye's own physical line of access to its object — so it must be the eye's own function, not the consciousness's, that a wall interrupts.

Worth flagging honestly: this "the eye sees" position (根見家) is not the last word even within this treatise. Vasubandhu's own more Sautrāntika-leaning sympathies famously push back against it elsewhere, arguing instead that it is consciousness, not the inert organ, that actually cognizes anything at all — an organ by itself does not "see" any more than a mirror does. This fascicle presents the position the root verse states and the reasoning offered for it; readers should expect this exact question to resurface, argued from the other side, later in the treatise.

The "eye sees" side's account has a genuine weakness, and the objection names it precisely: if mere physical resistance were what blocked sight, then crystal, beryl, mica, and water — all perfectly solid, resistant substances — ought to block sight exactly as a wall does, since they are equally "resistant" in the technical sense already defined back in section 2. But they plainly do not; one sees straight through them. Something other than resistance must be doing the real work.

The "consciousness sees" side's answer is the more sophisticated of the two, and strikingly close to how vision actually works: what matters is not whether the eye's object is technically "resistant," but whether light reaches it unobstructed. A wall blocks light entirely, so consciousness cannot arise; crystal, water, and the like let light straight through, so consciousness arises normally despite being technically solid matter in the way. This single variable — light, not resistance — explains both puzzle cases at once, which is exactly why it is offered as the better account. The closing move is worth noticing too: rather than deny the sūtras' plain statement that "the eye sees," this side reinterprets it as ordinary loose speech, crediting the support (the eye) with what its dependent (consciousness) actually does — the same move ordinary language makes when it says a key "opens" a door rather than a person using a key.

The parallel with the eye is exact and deliberate: manas — "mind," the just-past phase of a consciousness already defined back in fascicle 1's section 31 — cannot itself be doing any cognizing, since a dharma that has already passed does not perform a fresh act. The actual cognizing belongs to the mind-consciousness, its dependent; the sūtra's phrase "mind cognizes" is the same kind of shorthand as "the eye sees," crediting a support with an action really performed by what leans on it.

"The bed speaks" is the analogy doing the real persuasive work, and it earns its place: nobody hearing this phrase in ordinary speech thinks the furniture itself has started talking — everyone understands at once that it means the person sitting on the bed is speaking. Once a reader accepts that everyday convention without a second thought, accepting the same convention behind "the eye sees" and "the mind cognizes" costs nothing further. This is the second time in as many sections that this fascicle resolves an apparent scriptural literalism by pointing to a linguistic habit everyone already uses without noticing.

The scriptural citations tighten the argument on the "consciousness sees" side: calling the eye a "gateway... for seeing" only makes sense if the gateway and the seeing are two different things, not one and the same. The objection about needing a separate "seer" behind "the eye sees" is dismissed by pointing to a principle already accepted without controversy elsewhere: nobody demands a separate metaphysical "discerner" standing behind consciousness's own discerning — the discerning simply is what consciousness does — so demanding a separate "seer" behind seeing is an inconsistent double standard.

The bell analogy then opens a genuinely different, third possibility, one that lets both camps be partly right: eye-consciousness is what actually sees, full stop, but the eye, as its indispensable support, can also legitimately be called "able to see" in a secondary sense — exactly as a struck bell is credited with "ringing" even though, strictly, the ringing is the sound produced by the striking. This is not a compromise for its own sake; it is a recognition that ordinary and scriptural language often credits a support with an action performed through it, without this being an error, as long as everyone understands which sense is meant.

The reply does not reach for a deep metaphysical distinction between "seeing" and "cognizing" to block the over-extension — it appeals to plain usage instead, backed by the Mahāvibhāṣā's own authority: people simply do not say "the eye cognizes," they say "the eye sees," and that settled linguistic fact is treated as reason enough. The sun comparison drives the point home: we say the sun "makes daytime," crediting it with an effect it is deeply involved in producing, without extending that same crediting habit to every other effect sunlight happens to cause. Language picks its conventional shorthand unevenly, and the treatise is content to let that unevenness stand rather than force it into a tidier system than ordinary speech actually has.

Every earlier position in this long debate — the eye sees, consciousness sees, both in different senses — shared one assumption: that some single thing must be the genuine agent of seeing, with everything else merely instrumental. The Sautrāntika masters reject the assumption itself. On their account, what actually exists is only a causal process — conditions such as space, the eye, and visible form coming together to produce eye-consciousness as their effect — and asking "which of these is the real seer, and which the thing seen" imposes an agent-and-action grammar onto a process that, strictly, has neither. Ordinary phrases like "the eye sees" are kept, but demoted to convenient fictions, adopted only because that is how ordinary people talk, never mistaken for descriptions of how things ultimately are. The citation from the Buddha is chosen precisely for this purpose: a warning against treating any culture's or dialect's words — including the very technical vocabulary this treatise has spent dozens of sections building — as more real than the dharmas those words are only ever pointing at.

The treatise does not let this dissolve the practical question entirely, though: it immediately notes that the Kashmir Vaibhāṣika school continues to speak, quite deliberately, of each of the six faculties performing its own proper function — eye seeing, ear hearing, and so on — which sets up the next, delightfully concrete puzzle this fascicle takes up: when a single form is seen, is it seen with one eye, or with two?

After the Sautrāntika masters just finished warning against clinging to words as though they described ultimate reality, the treatise turns around and answers a question about eyes with the plainest possible appeal to ordinary experience: open both eyes and things look clearer than with one closed, so sometimes both are genuinely involved together. No further metaphysics is invoked — the "great Abhidharma masters" settle this one the way anyone would, by simply noticing what happens. It is a fitting, almost wry close to one of the longest and most technical debates in the whole fascicle: for every question this dense about what a faculty ultimately is, there remains a simpler, everyday fact sitting right underneath it.

The double-moon test is a real, easily reproduced phenomenon — gently pressing one open eye while the other stays open genuinely produces doubled vision, while pressing a closed eye does nothing, because there is no second image being contributed for the first to interfere with. This is offered as clean evidence that both eyes are actively involved in ordinary seeing, not just one at a time.

But this raises an obvious worry: if there are two separate eyes, shouldn't there be two separate eye-consciousnesses, one per organ, rather than one unified experience? The answer draws directly on a fact already established about matter versus mind: physical things obstruct each other because they occupy determinate positions in space and cannot share one place — this is exactly what "resistance" meant back in section 2. Consciousness has no location in that sense at all, so nothing about having two physical supports forces it to split into two separate portions. One eye-consciousness, arising in dependence on two organs at once, is no more paradoxical than one thought depending on more than one condition.

The eye and ear turn out to need distance, not proximity — a genuinely counterintuitive fact stated here with a vivid, easily-verified example: eye ointment applied directly onto the eyeball cannot be seen at all, precisely because it has no distance from the eye to be seen across, even though it is about as close as anything could possibly get. The same holds for the ear: sound pressed directly against it is not heard as sound in the normal way. This groups the eye, ear, and mind together as "distance" faculties, setting them apart from the nose, tongue, and body, which the verse's second half identifies as needing the opposite — direct contact with their object to sense it at all, exactly as one would expect from smell, taste, and touch.

The first point is a clean piece of indirect evidence: Buddhist meditation cultivates a "divine eye" and "divine ear" — supernormal, far-reaching sight and hearing — but never a comparably cultivated "divine nose." That asymmetry only makes sense if eye and ear are already, by nature, distance-senses capable of being extended further, while smell remains a contact-sense no amount of cultivation turns into something else.

The magnet is the real payoff, and it is a genuinely elegant piece of reasoning: a magnet plainly attracts iron without touching it, proving that "acting without contact" is an entirely ordinary, unmysterious kind of causation — yet no one expects a magnet to pull in every piece of iron in the world regardless of distance, since its influence still has a natural, limited range. "Requires no contact" and "has unlimited reach" are simply different claims, and the objection had quietly assumed they were the same. The mirror-image challenge closes the case symmetrically: anyone tempted to think the eye needs contact after all runs straight into the eye-medicine problem already raised — an object placed directly on the eye is exactly what cannot be seen, which a contact-requirement can't explain at all.

The generalizing move is a graceful way to close the magnet discussion: having a natural limit is not something peculiar that needs explaining away for the eye and ear — even the plain contact senses do not register literally everything touching them, so limits are just an ordinary feature of any sense faculty, distance-based or not. The mind is set aside on entirely different grounds: being immaterial, the very concept of physical "contact" simply does not apply to it, so it cannot be sorted into either camp in the first place.

The ear gets a genuine complication rather than a tidy answer: while the general rule groups it with the eye as a distance sense, someone points out that a sound arising directly within one's own ear can still be heard — a real exception the treatise records rather than smooths over. This closes the whole distance-versus-contact question with the same intellectual honesty seen throughout this fascicle: the clean threefold division (eye/ear/mind at a distance, nose/tongue/body by contact) is basically right, but not perfectly tidy at the edges, and the text says so rather than pretending otherwise.

This is the treatise reaching its deepest, most abstract point of physics — asking not whether ordinary objects touch, but whether the truly partless building blocks of matter itself can touch at all. Vasumitra's worry is a real paradox: if two atoms genuinely made contact, something about that contact ought to persist stably, yet atoms are supposed to be momentary. The Bhadanta's answer dissolves the paradox by denying the premise: atoms never literally touch in the first place; "touching" is simply the conventional name given to two atoms standing at zero distance from each other, with nothing between them, not a claim that their surfaces genuinely meet. Vasubandhu's own explicit preference for this view — a rare, unmistakable authorial judgment rather than a bare report of positions — is worth noticing; it fits the same pattern already seen in the "who really sees" debate, where his sympathies lean toward the more analytically careful, less literal-minded reading.

The supporting argument is genuinely elegant: if the space between adjacent atoms is truly empty, nothing "solid" sits there to stop them collapsing into one another — so their staying apart at all, resistant and distinct, only makes sense if "touching" was never a literal merging to begin with. And the point about spatial parts sharpens the paradox precisely: an atom with parts could touch another part-to-part in an intelligible way, but a truly partless, dimensionless atom touching another partless atom is exactly the kind of contact that cannot coherently be pictured as contact at all — which is exactly why the Bhadanta's "provisional label, not literal event" reading is offered as the way through.

The whirling-firebrand comparison names a real and vivid illusion — spin a burning torch fast enough and it looks like a solid ring of fire, when really it is one point of flame moving through many positions in rapid succession. The question is whether ordinary large-scale seeing works the same way: does the eye only ever take in something exactly its own tiny atomic size, with the appearance of a whole mountain being stitched together the way the ring of fire is? For the three contact faculties — nose, tongue, body — the treatise gives a clean, strict answer with no such illusion involved: the faculty's own atomic scale and the object's atomic scale must match exactly, one to one, for a nose-consciousness or the like to arise at all. This leaves the more interesting case — the eye and ear, which plainly do register mountains and thunderclaps far larger than themselves — as the very question the next section takes up.

The puzzle from the previous section resolves cleanly by simply not generalizing the contact faculties' strict rule: nose, tongue, and body need exact atomic correspondence, but the eye and ear were never bound by that requirement at all — they take in a hair's tip, a mountain, or a grape with equal ease, no illusion of rapid succession required to explain the mountain case. The three examples are nicely graded (smaller than, larger than, and equal to some implicit reference), covering the full range plainly. The mind is dismissed from this whole question for the simplest possible reason: having no matter, no obstruction, and no location, it has no size at all to be measured against anything — the question "how big a mind-object can the mind take in" does not even arise for the same reason "how big a shadow does an idea cast" does not.

These are genuinely charming images for describing matter that, by this treatise's own account, no eye can ever see — the "pure form" faculties are imperceptible, yet the tradition still pictures their shape concretely: a tiny transparent ball for the eye, a coiled strip of birch-bark for the ear canal, a pair of fingernail-shaped patches for the nose, a half-moon for the tongue (with one tiny untouched spot), and, uniquely, a shape that exactly follows the whole body for the body faculty — the only one of the five that is coextensive with its owner rather than confined to one small organ.

The eye and tongue's flexible same-class/counterpart-class status (sections 26–28, now applied down at the atomic level) contrasts sharply with an unconditional claim about the body: not even the most extreme conceivable stimulus — total immersion in the fiercest hell-fire — ever activates every single atom of the body faculty at once. Some portion always remains merely present, uninvolved, no matter how intense the sensation. The reason given generalizes into a genuine principle of this whole atomistic system, tying together several threads from across this fascicle: no isolated atom, whether of a faculty or an object, is ever by itself sufficient to produce a sense-consciousness — perception is always the work of accumulated clusters (the "accumulable" matter first defined in section 14), never a single indivisible point acting alone. The remark that total simultaneous activation would destroy the body reads almost like a safety principle built into the system: perception has to stay partial and localized, or the whole structure it depends on could not hold together.

The atom's invisibility is a quiet callback: since perception always requires an accumulated cluster, a single atom, whatever it's made of, is as unseeable as it is unable to produce any consciousness alone.

The main question reaches back to the mind element's definition from fascicle 1's sections 29–31: manas is, by nature, always the immediately-past moment of a consciousness, so mind-consciousness's support is never simultaneous with it — it is always exactly one step behind. The five physical senses work differently: the eye typically exists at the very same time as the eye-consciousness it supports, a genuinely different temporal relationship from manas's strictly-past role. The verse's careful wording ("may be simultaneous") leaves room for an exception the prose flags but does not yet unpack — that the five senses' support can, in some circumstances, also be past rather than simultaneous, a refinement the text is clearly building toward completing next.

The apparent tension from the previous section dissolves once "support" is recognized as never singular: every sense-consciousness has two supports operating together, not one or the other by turns. The eye is eye-consciousness's own, unique, simultaneous support; manas — the just-past moment of any of the six consciousnesses — is a support shared in common by all five senses alike, always past. Both are present at once for every act of seeing, hearing, and so on.

The fourfold analysis then separates two causal notions this fascicle has used somewhat interchangeably until now: "support" (āśraya, what a consciousness leans on to arise) and "immediately-antecedent condition" (samanantara-pratyaya, one of the four classical conditions, naming what must immediately cease for a next moment to arise at all). The eye has the first property without the second, since it doesn't need to cease for eye-consciousness to arise. The just-ceased associated mental factors have the second without the first — necessary antecedents, but not supports as such. Only the past mind faculty has genuinely both properties together, which is exactly why it earns the double role manas has carried since fascicle 1's section 29: it is simultaneously what a consciousness leans on and what had to cease for that consciousness's moment to open up at all.

Mind-consciousness collapses the fourfold pattern down to a simple one-way relation, and the reason traces straight back to section 48: unlike the eye, which is eye-consciousness's simultaneous support and not itself an immediately-antecedent condition, mind-consciousness has no such simultaneous faculty at all. Its only support is manas, the just-past moment of consciousness — which, by its very definition as "immediately-ceased," is automatically also an immediately-antecedent condition. So for mind-consciousness, support always implies condition; there is no case of a support that fails to be a condition, the way the co-arising eye did for eye-consciousness.

What survives is only the reverse asymmetry: the mental factors that arise together with the immediately-past mind and cease along with it are, like manas itself, immediately-antecedent conditions for the next moment of mind-consciousness — but they are not what mind-consciousness is said to "lean on." Only manas carries that specific role. Hence one case is missing entirely (support without condition), and two of the original four collapse into one (support that is also condition), leaving just the two possibilities the text states.

The argument is a simple correlation test: cataracts or failing eyesight dull what is seen even when the object itself is unchanged, while a healthy eye sees the same object sharply. Vary the faculty and the resulting consciousness visibly varies with it; vary the object instead, and consciousness does not track that change in the same way. Whatever consciousness's quality co-varies with earns the name "support" — and by this test, it is always the faculty, never the object.

This is a case of Abhidharma reasoning from function to name: "support" (āśraya) is not an arbitrary label but is meant to track the condition consciousness actually depends on for its own character. The test set up here — does the effect vary when this cause varies? — will resurface in the next section as part of a second, related naming question.

Two reasons combine here, and the verse names both: "that" points back to the previous section's finding that the faculty is what consciousness varies with, so it already qualifies as "support"; the new element is "exclusive cause" (不共因, roughly asādhāraṇa-hetu here in a loose, functional sense rather than the technical causal category of that name) — this eye supports only this stream's eye-consciousness, one faculty to one consciousness, uniquely. A form, by contrast, is common property: the very same visible form can be seen by another person's eye-consciousness, and can also be taken as an object by mind-consciousness, one's own or someone else's. The object is shared across many possible knowers; the faculty is not.

The drum and the barley sprout make the logic vivid with everyday naming habits. A drumbeat could be described by naming the drumstick, the drumhead's skin, or the air that carries the sound — but ordinary language picks out the drum itself, because striking the drum is the one factor most proximate and unique to producing that sound. A sprout could be named for the soil, the water, or the sunlight it needed to grow — but it is called a "barley sprout," after the seed, because the seed is what is exclusively and distinctively its own cause. Consciousness is named the same way: not after whatever happens to be involved, but after the one condition that belongs to it alone.

This is Abhidharma working method at its most exhaustive: rather than assert the governing rule outright, the treatise walks through every logically possible pairing of body, eye, form, and consciousness across the desire realm and the four dhyānas, then explicitly leaves the remaining cases ("one should reason through...") for the reader to complete by the same pattern. Two constraints are already visible beneath the arithmetic: the eye is never of a lower realm than the body that bears it, and the resulting form and consciousness are never of a higher realm than the eye itself. A dhyāna-refined eye can look downward and perceive a coarser, lower-realm form, but a coarser eye can never perceive upward into a more refined realm's object.

The underlying picture is the standard Sarvāstivāda cosmology of nine levels — the desire realm, the four dhyānas of the form realm, and the four formless attainments above them — through which a being's physical faculties, and the objects and consciousnesses tied to them, can be distributed unevenly depending on what has been cultivated through meditation. The next section states the whole pattern directly, compressed into a single verse.

"Five realms" names the desire realm plus the four dhyānas of the form realm — the range within which physical sense faculties and their objects can exist at all. Within that range, eye-consciousness (and, by the parallel drawn here, ear-consciousness) is narrower still, confined to only the desire realm and the first dhyāna; standard Abhidharma doctrine holds that none of the five sense-consciousnesses operate in the second dhyāna and above, where only mind-consciousness continues.

The asymmetry is directional, not arbitrary: a faculty refined through dhyāna attainment can reach downward to perceive a coarser realm's object, but a coarser faculty can never reach upward into a more refined realm it has not attained. That is why the eye can equal or exceed the body's realm but never fall below it, while form and consciousness can equal or fall below the eye's realm but never exceed it — the direction of possible "reach" only ever points downward from what has been cultivated.

The nose, tongue, and body faculties are simpler than the eye and ear because, in Abhidharma doctrine, only sight and hearing operate at a distance and can therefore be "refined" through dhyāna attainment to reach beyond their own realm; smell, taste, and touch require direct contact and so stay locked to a single realm throughout. Body-consciousness's "same or lower" rule is a direct echo of eye-consciousness's own restriction to the desire realm and first dhyāna from section 54: a being born in one of the upper three dhyānas still has a physical touch-faculty of that realm, but since body-consciousness itself cannot arise there, it manifests instead at the first dhyāna — the highest level at which any of the five sense-consciousnesses can occur.

The mind element's total flexibility follows from the same doctrine seen from its other side: mind-consciousness alone continues into the four formless attainments, where no physical body, faculty, or sense-consciousness exists at all. That is why the treatise says the body is capped at five realms while mind, mind-consciousness, and the dharma object range through all nine — desire realm, four dhyānas, and four formless attainments together. With that, this long excursus into how the senses relate across cosmological realms closes, and the treatise explicitly signals its return to the main analysis of the eighteen elements.

The five external sense fields — form, sound, smell, taste, touch — are each the dedicated object of their own sense-consciousness, and can additionally be cognized by mind-consciousness, which alone can take any of the six kinds of objects; hence "known by two." The remaining thirteen elements — the six faculties, the six consciousness-elements themselves, and the dharma element — are not objects any physical sense-consciousness can directly cognize, since a sense-consciousness only ever cognizes its own designated external object, never another faculty, another consciousness, or an abstract dharma. So these thirteen are known only by mind-consciousness, the sole consciousness general enough to reach them.

The permanence verdict is stark: among all eighteen elements, not one is wholly permanent. The single exception carved out is the specific unconditioned portion within the dharma element — space and the two kinds of cessation, discussed near fascicle 1's own close — while everything else, in every one of the eighteen elements, including the rest of the dharma element's own conditioned mental factors, is impermanent.

The twenty-two faculties fall into recognizable groups: the six familiar sense-and-mind faculties; two sex faculties; the life faculty, the force sustaining a lifespan; five feeling faculties (pleasure, pain, joy, distress, equanimity); five spiritual faculties (faith, diligence, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom); and three "pure" faculties tied to the successive stages of realizing the noble truths. This treatise will spend considerable space explaining each one's specific function in the sections ahead.

The small textual note here is worth catching: ordinary sutras list the six sense fields in the fixed order eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind — matching the standard six internal sense-fields. Abhidharma masters deliberately break that pattern in this specific list of twenty-two, moving the mind faculty out of its usual sixth slot to sit right after the life faculty instead. The reason given is precise: unlike the five physical senses, the mind faculty in this scheme is defined by having an object of its own, which aligns it more naturally with the faculties that follow — sex, life — than with the group of five physical senses that precede it.

The twenty-two faculties sort into three groups here. The five physical faculties map directly onto their own identically named elements — no surprise there. The mind faculty is unusual: rather than corresponding narrowly to just "the mind element," it is said to correspond to all seven mind-elements together — the six consciousness-elements plus manas — because, as this fascicle's predecessor established, "mind faculty" in the broadest sense is really just whichever of the six consciousnesses has most recently occurred, so the whole seven-part group collectively constitutes it. Everything else — life, the five feelings, the five spiritual faculties, and a portion of the three pure faculties — being mental factors or a life-force rather than a faculty or consciousness itself, falls under the dharma element, the catch-all element where such abstract dharmas belong. The female and male faculties get a special note of their own: physically, they are classified as a portion of the body element, a point the treatise promises to unpack further later.

Finally, by elimination: the five external sense fields, and whatever portion of the dharma element is not accounted for above, are simply not faculties at all, in their essential nature. With this, fascicle 2's true content is complete.