論議品 Begins: The Six Meanings

These seven together form the treatise's own closing methodology chapter — not further doctrine to be learned, but the actual toolkit for correctly interpreting scripture and conducting formal discourse about it, the very skills a teacher of this Abhidharma would need to put everything already covered in this treatise to productive use in debate and exposition.

T1606 briefly glosses each fivefold or threefold set. Among the causes: the cause of generation is the four conditions already examined earlier in this treatise, which actually produce conditioned phenomena; the cause of continuation is what determines the specific sequence in which one dharma gives way to the next, as ignorance conditions formations in the twelve links; the cause of accomplishment is whatever, through direct perception or valid inference, establishes some previously unclear meaning as now understood.

Among the fruits: the ripened fruit is exemplified by the storehouse consciousness itself; the fruit of the same kind flowing forth is a later wholesome state arising from an earlier wholesome state of the same continuum; the dominant fruit is the physical world produced by the combined power of all sentient beings' shared karma; the fruit of active exertion is an ordinary product of labor, like a harvested crop; and the fruit of freedom from bondage is the permanent cessation of an underlying tendency through the power of the noble path.

Among the modes of association: association through aggregation is exemplified by wood and stone gathered together in a house; association through underlying persistence is exemplified by a dormant tendency, which is said to be "associated" with its corresponding affliction even while that affliction is not currently active, simply because the tendency remains present as its cause; association through interconnection is exemplified by relatives connected to one another across a lineage; association through a given phase is exemplified by a specific stretch of experience, such as pleasant feeling, described as "associated" with pleasure for as long as that phase continues; and association through transformation is exemplified by an adventitious affliction actually becoming active, at which point it is said to be "associated" with the corresponding root affliction it manifests.

And among the modes of operation: the mode of characteristic marks is the three conditioned characteristics of arising and the rest, each operating according to its own distinct mark; the mode of abiding is a supported dharma continuing to operate within its own supporting basis; the mode of distortion is a defiled dharma failing to operate in accordance with reality; the mode of non-distortion is a purified dharma operating exactly in accordance with reality; and the mode of differentiation is every conditioned phenomenon operating differently according to whether it belongs to the past, future, or present, and to the internal or the external.