The Hundred-Gate Analysis Begins

T1606 explains why every single category from here through the end of this chapter is probed with exactly the same three questions — what is it, how much falls under it, and for what purpose is it examined — rather than just stated outright: this fixed pattern is designed to sever two specific kinds of ignorance and one specific tendency at once. The "what is it" question severs ignorance about the category's own defining mark; the "how much" question severs ignorance about the actual scope of things it covers; and the "for what purpose" question, whose answer is always some particular way of clinging to a self, severs the tendency to superimpose something onto reality that was never there. This three-part method repeats, unchanged, across every remaining category in this chapter — dozens of times — so this note applies throughout, not just here.

T1606 clarifies with a contrast: apprehending blue, or a body's own particular touch-sensation, requires no prior grasp of the word "blue" or "touch" — the object is simply, directly cognized, which is what "not depending on language" means. Apprehending something like "a vase," by contrast, requires already knowing the concept "vase" and its associated features (color, shape, and the rest) before the composite object can be recognized as such at all — this dependence on prior conceptual and linguistic scaffolding is what "nominal existence" means. The striking result — that literally everything can be truthfully described both ways, depending on which aspect of it is being apprehended — is exactly the treatise's point: nothing is exclusively one or the other, which already undercuts any attempt to locate a fixed, "really existent" self anywhere within the aggregates.

T1606 glosses "conventional existence" as anything capable of giving rise to defilement when taken as an object, and "ultimate existence" as anything capable of yielding purification — and then makes an important move: everything whatsoever counts as ultimately existent too, because no dharma is ever separate from suchness (真如), and suchness itself — the absence of self in all things — is genuinely, ultimately real. This is not a contradiction with calling the same things "conventionally existent" a moment earlier: the very same aggregate can be an object of defiled clinging when misapprehended, and an object of purifying insight when correctly apprehended for what it actually is — nothing here changes about the object itself, only how it is taken.

T1606 identifies the thirteen technical kinds of knowledge named here with the standard classical list: knowledge born of hearing, born of reflection, and born of mundane cultivation correspond to "resolved-conviction," "reasoning," and "undistracted" knowledge respectively; ultimate knowledge is direct realization; knowledge of another's mind is exactly what its name says; knowledge of dharmas is called "initial" because it is the very first to arise regarding any of the four noble truths; and inferential knowledge is called "subsequent" because it arises only after knowledge of dharmas has already occurred. The final six — revulsion, non-arising, no further birth, knowledge itself, the ultimate, and the great purpose — correspond to knowledge of suffering, its origin, its cessation, its path, the two knowledges that close out an arhat's realization (that afflictions are exhausted and will never arise again), and the distinctly Mahāyāna knowledge whose "great purpose" is benefiting both oneself and others together.

T1606 maps this list onto specific features of consciousness itself: "non-discriminating" names the five sense-consciousnesses, "discriminating" names mental consciousness; "cause" is the ālayavijñāna, "active occurrence" is every other consciousness that depends on it. Most striking is T1606's list of seven specific things about consciousness that are genuinely hard to grasp and therefore called "subtle": how an ever-present background awareness of one's surroundings operates without any deliberate discrimination at all; how a single dharma can present many different aspects at once; how several consciousnesses can arise together, each somehow discriminating its own distinct object without interference; how a mind bound by affliction can shift, in a single instant, into a mind free of that same affliction; how a habitual trace, left behind by a completed action, is neither simply identical with mind nor something existing entirely apart from it; how the karmic imprint from one lifetime can, at the exact moment consciousness dims toward death, redirect a continuum into an entirely different form of rebirth; and how an arhat's mind, having exhausted every trace of past conditioned activity, can still be said to continue functioning at all. Each of these, T1606 says, resists easy explanation — which is exactly why they count as "subtle distinctions" within what consciousness discriminates.

T1606 matches each of the six terms to one of the six classical supernormal powers: transformation is the power of psychic mastery, freely manifesting or altering things at will; hearing at will is the divine ear, hearing sounds across every destiny; entering another's mental activity is knowledge of others' minds; coming is recollection of former lives, tracing what has already occurred; going is the divine eye, seeing what is yet to occur in future rebirths; and liberation is the power of exhausting contaminants, knowing the means to freedom from all three realms. T1606 closes with a small but important qualification on "everything whatsoever falls within this reach": strictly, only the last three of the six powers — mind-reading, past-life recollection, and the divine eye — actually range over every possible object without restriction; the reach of the remaining three is comparatively more limited.