Ten Kinds of False Discrimination
Skill in false discrimination requires first mapping it in full: ten kinds tracing ordinary experience from its root in the storehouse consciousness, through the objects and faculties this root gives rise to, to the two opposing currents of scripture — one badly taught, one well taught — that shape the discrimination which follows, and the wrong views and scattering that result from taking any of it as ultimately real.
The Ten Kinds of False Discrimination
云何虛妄分別？謂略有十種：一根本分別、二相分別、三相顯現分別、四相變異分別、五相顯現變異分別、六他引分別、七不如理分別、八如理分別、九執著分別、十散亂分別。
What is false discrimination? In brief, there are ten kinds: root discrimination, discrimination of the object, discrimination of the object's manifestation, discrimination of the object's transformation, discrimination of the manifestation of that transformation, discrimination induced by another, discrimination not in accordance with reason, discrimination in accordance with reason, discrimination through attachment, and scattering discrimination.
T1606 traces these ten as a single continuous unfolding, from the deepest structural root of ordinary experience out to its most superficial errors.
Root discrimination is the storehouse consciousness itself, since it is the seed of every other discrimination on this list. Discrimination of the object is the consciousness of the body, of the place one inhabits, and of what one makes use of — the very object grasped at — taking, respectively, the physical sense faculties, the surrounding world, and form and the like as its object. Discrimination of the object's manifestation is the six sense-consciousnesses together with the mental faculty, since it is these that actually manifest the very object just described. Discrimination of the object's transformation is the arising of change within that same body and the rest already named. And discrimination of the manifestation of that transformation is the manifestation of eye-consciousness and the other sense-consciousnesses as they arise, differentiated by whatever specific state of pleasure, pain, or the like happens to accompany them.
Discrimination induced by another is the collection of names, phrases, and syllables belonging to scriptural teaching, and this is itself of two kinds: teaching whose essence is badly taught doctrine and discipline, and teaching whose essence is well taught doctrine and discipline. It is the respective influence of these two currents that gives rise, in turn, to the next two kinds of discrimination: discrimination not in accordance with reason, and discrimination in accordance with reason. Discrimination through attachment is the entire class of discrimination comprehended within the sixty-two wrong views that arise from discrimination not in accordance with reason. And scattering discrimination is the discrimination that arises from discrimination in accordance with reason itself, taking the very grasping at non-existence and the like as its own characteristic mark.
Read as a sequence, these ten trace how the storehouse consciousness's own seeds give rise to an experienced world of body and object, how that world is registered by the sense-consciousnesses and undergoes its own moment-to-moment change, and how scriptural teaching — whether sound or unsound — then shapes the further discrimination built on top of this already-constructed experience, branching either into outright wrong view or into a discrimination that, though closer to correct reasoning, still scatters into subtler forms of grasping. It is this final category, scattering discrimination, that the treatise goes on to analyze into ten further kinds of its own.
Part 119 Complete
The ten kinds of false discrimination are now examined. Part 120 turns to scattering discrimination's own further tenfold division — grasping at non-existence, at existence, at exaggeration, at denigration, at sameness, at difference, at own-nature, at distinction, and at names and meanings each substituted for the other — illustrated directly through the Perfection of Wisdom scripture's own opening teaching on emptiness.
Continue to Part 120 — Scattering Discrimination, and the Perfection of Wisdom's Own Teaching →