How These Qualities Are Generated

T1606 clarifies who is actually capable of generating which qualities. The four immeasurables and the first five superknowledges — every one except the exhaustion of the contaminants, already noted in Part 105 as unique to the liberated — are open even to non-Buddhist practitioners who have never taken up the Buddhist path at all, provided they have mastered the fourth dhyāna's own edge-point attainment; śrāvakas and bodhisattvas generate these same qualities on the very same basis. Every remaining quality in this catalogue — from the eight liberations through the eighteen exclusive buddha-qualities — is reserved specifically for śrāvakas, bodhisattvas, and Tathāgatas, since these depend on a degree of realization non-Buddhist practice alone cannot reach.

T1606 also names the specific skillful means by which any of these qualities is actually cultivated: taking up whatever teaching establishes a given quality and, resting on dhyāna, bringing repeated, deliberate mental attention to bear on it again and again through a concentrated mind. When generating the immeasurables, for instance, one rests on dhyāna and repeatedly reflects, through wisdom-associated mental attention, on the teaching concerning a mind joined with loving-kindness, free of resentment and enmity. When generating the superknowledges, one rests on dhyāna and repeatedly reflects, in the very same manner, on the teaching concerning transforming one body into many. This same pattern of repeated, deliberate reflection on the relevant teaching, T1606 notes, applies correspondingly to every quality in the entire catalogue.

T1606 explains this twofold distinction through what each mode actually accomplishes. Actively giving rise to a quality's own function means the noble ones, as circumstances require, actually carry out the various specific tasks that quality is meant for — severing whatever obstruction it counteracts, and the like — an active engagement whose essence is the ordinary, conventional wisdom that arises subsequently, once the supramundane path itself has already been traversed. Simply abiding in a quality's own essential nature, by contrast, means resting in the most excellent, still, non-discriminating wisdom itself — an objectless, boundless dwelling in present happiness, whose essence is the supramundane wisdom directly. Every quality in this entire catalogue, T1606 notes, can be understood through this same twofold lens: at times actively deployed to accomplish some specific task in the world, and at times simply present as the settled, non-discriminating condition of a mind that has already realized what these qualities themselves ultimately point toward.