Determination Through Hidden Meaning

T1606 explains this verse as concealing a precise teaching on the deep mechanism of continued rebirth, mapped element by element onto its shocking surface language. Craving is the "father," since it is craving that actively drives one onward into a new existence, generating the process the way a father generates offspring. Karma is the "mother," since it is karma that actually gives birth to that new existence, nurturing it into being the way a mother carries a child. Together these two plant habitual seeds that keep the appropriating consciousness — the very consciousness that clings to and takes up a new existence — flowing on without interruption. Attachment to rules and rituals, and attachment to views, are the "two learned ones," since these are what a being caught in this flow mistakenly reveres as the very source of purity, exactly as the world reveres its own learned brahmins. And the appropriating consciousness's own supporting sense fields — the very "realm and its retinue" it depends on and takes as its object — are what must, together with everything already named, be permanently severed. One who has genuinely and permanently cut off every one of these — craving, karma, the two false refuges, and the very sense fields that sustain continued rebirth — is the one this verse truly calls pure, not a literal killer of father, mother, or king.

T1606 explains this verse as taking four kinds of ordinary worldly baseness — base conduct of mind, of body, of speech, and of livelihood — and transforming each, word for word, into the very opposite: a mark of the highest attainment. "Faithless" ordinarily names one who disbelieves in future lives and the fruits of action, a genuine baseness of mind — but here it is transformed to mean one who no longer needs mere faith at all, since liberation's own knowledge and vision is now directly, personally realized. "Ungrateful" ordinarily names one who disregards a debt of past kindness, a genuine baseness of mind as well — but here it means one who correctly recognizes that nirvāṇa itself owes nothing to anything conditioned, since only conditioned things can properly be called a debt of kindness in the first place. "Having severed every hidden opening, leaving no room to enter" ordinarily evokes a thief breaking through a wall in secret, a baseness of body — but here it means one who has permanently severed the very afflictions that would otherwise give rise to a further, continuing existence. And "forever eating what others have vomited" ordinarily evokes the lowest imaginable means of subsistence, a baseness of livelihood — but here it means one who, while still making use of life's ordinary requisites to sustain the body for the time being, no longer takes any genuine delight in continued life or wealth at all, using them the way one might use something already discarded by others, without attachment. Read this way, the verse's four scandalous-sounding lines each name a specific, genuine excellence — direct realization, correct recognition of what actually constitutes a debt, permanent severing of affliction, and complete non-attachment to worldly sustenance — concealed beneath language that, taken literally, would describe the lowest of persons rather than the highest.

T1606 notes that this same verse has already been examined once before, in Part 81's account of the four hidden implications, where its meaning was unpacked in full: firmness directed toward what is not itself fixed or agitated, an inversion that is itself correct because it reverses the four ordinary inversions of permanence, pleasure, self, and purity, and an affliction that names not defilement but the genuine exhaustion of sustained, diligent effort. Here, T1606 adds only its underlying essence: this describes bodhisattvas who, resting on concentration, realize supreme awakening specifically through the path of seeing and the path of cultivation together — the very same two paths that have structured this treatise's own account of the noble path from its earliest pages.