Inexhaustible Bodhisattvas, and Fourteen Undetermined Questions

T1606 explains the ordinary pattern first: at every stage along the noble path, attaining a more excellent grade means relinquishing the lesser grade that came before it — the path belonging to the fruit already attained simply replaces the path belonging to the approach that preceded it, since the earlier path no longer manifests once its work is done. And at the very end of this sequence, once nirvāṇa without remainder is finally reached, the śrāvaka's or pratyekabuddha's own entire noble path — every stage of it, all at once — is relinquished in exactly this same total, final way, since with the cessation of further activity, none of it continues to manifest any longer.

Bodhisattvas alone are exempt from this final, total relinquishment, and T1606 explains precisely why: not because a bodhisattva's own noble path lacks this same ordinary internal structure of superseding grades, but because a bodhisattva's path was never undertaken for the sake of one's own eventual departure into a final nirvāṇa that would bring the whole path to an end. It was undertaken, from the very outset, for the sake of benefiting every sentient being until all of them, too, have reached nirvāṇa — and so long as that goal remains unfinished, nothing about the bodhisattva's own path is ever set aside in the total, final way a śrāvaka's or pratyekabuddha's own path eventually is. It is precisely this — a wholesome root and a store of merit that never reach a final point of total relinquishment — that the Inexhaustible Wisdom Sūtra and similar scriptures have in mind when they call bodhisattvas, and bodhisattvas alone, inexhaustible in wholesome roots and inexhaustible in merit.

T1606 explains that this passage refers directly to the classical fourteen undetermined questions — whether the world is eternal or not eternal, both, or neither; whether the world is finite or infinite, both, or neither; whether the self and the body are identical or different; and whether the Tathāgata exists after death, does not exist, both, or neither — questions various non-Buddhist practitioners repeatedly put to the Buddha, hoping for a definite answer one way or the other. The Buddha established all fourteen as questions he would not answer, precisely because they fail to accord with correct reasoning and yield no genuine benefit whatsoever, however they might be answered.

What kind of question, by contrast, does yield genuine benefit? T1606 answers: precisely those questions raised in connection with the four noble truths — since it is only these that fall within the scope of what genuinely deserves reflection, namely the causes and effects of defilement and of purification, the very framework this entire treatise has pursued from its own opening pages. A question about whether the world is eternal changes nothing about how suffering arises or how it is brought to an end; a question about the four truths changes everything. It is this single distinction, T1606 makes clear, that separates a question worth pursuing from one the Buddha deliberately declined to answer at all.