Sharpening the Faculties, and 得品 Complete

T1606 addresses this apparent tension directly. It has already been established, throughout this treatise's account of the classification of persons, that bodhisattvas as a class possess sharp faculties by lineage, in clear contrast to the dull-facultied śrāvaka and the middling-facultied pratyekabuddha already examined in Part 84. Yet the treatise still calls for sharpening the faculties from time to time, precisely because even this single sharp lineage itself contains its own internal gradation — a mild, a middling, and a sharpest grade, each drawing forth the next in succession. Sharpening the faculties, in this specific sense, does not mean converting a dull faculty into a sharp one, since a bodhisattva's faculty was never dull to begin with; it means advancing within the sharp lineage's own internal sequence, from its mildest expression to its most fully realized one.

Were this not the case, T1606 notes, every person of sharp lineage would necessarily possess faculties of a single, undifferentiated grade, and no distinction in faculty sharpness among bodhisattvas themselves would ever be observable. But such a distinction plainly is observable — some bodhisattvas manifestly display sharper faculties than others, even while all alike belong to the same sharp lineage. It is precisely this observable fact that confirms sharp faculties themselves admit of further internal differentiation, and it is cultivating this internal progression — mild sharp faculties advancing to middling sharp faculties, and middling sharp faculties advancing to the sharpest faculties of all — that constitutes this fifth and final skill.