Even Form Is Momentary

T1606 unpacks each of the six proofs in turn. Being "appropriated by mind" means the body is held together, moment by moment, by a momentary mind's own continuous act of appropriation — since that appropriating mind is itself momentary, what it appropriates must perish and be renewed at the same rate. "Sharing mind's own safety and danger" points to the plain fact that a body decays the instant consciousness withdraws from it, showing body and mind rise and fall together, moment for moment. "Altering in step with mind" is simply the visible fact that the body changes as the mind passes through pain, pleasure, craving, and hatred. "Serving as mind's own support" reasons that whatever a momentary thing depends on must itself be equally momentary, the way fire depends on momentarily-consumed fuel. "Being produced through mind's own dominant power" reasons from cause to effect: since the very causes and conditions that produce form are themselves momentary, form itself, as their product, cannot be anything but momentary too. And "freely transformed by an accomplished mind's mastery" points to an advanced meditator's demonstrated capacity to reshape form at will, moment by moment, through the power of resolve alone — a capacity that would make no sense if form were not already, at every moment, freshly arising and freshly ceasing, available to be reshaped.

T1606 also flags the final, more general argument as decisive on its own: whatever a thing's ultimate fate at its very last moment turns out to be — dissolution, decay — that same fate, on close examination, is already present at every earlier moment too, simply too subtle to notice; and since nothing that has genuinely arisen needs to wait for some further destructive cause to eventually make it perish (its own arising already guarantees its eventual ceasing), the only consistent conclusion is that form, like mind, is dissolving and being renewed continuously, not merely at the single dramatic moment anyone happens to notice its final breakdown.

T1606 illustrates this with concrete examples: a dried lump of clay contains only the earth element; that same clay, once wetted, contains earth and water together; heated, it contains earth, water, and fire together — the specific mixture of elements actually present in a given cluster of matter varies case by case, not fixed by any rule that every physical object must always contain all four elements equally. The same applies to constructed form: light alone is a case of a single constructed form; sound together with fragrant, wind-borne smoke is a case of two; and so on, following the same fitting logic in every case.

The treatise's own answer to "why posit atoms at all, if they have no genuine substance?" identifies two distinct pedagogical purposes at once. First, ordinary perception habitually experiences a table, a body, or a mountain as a single, solid, unified thing — "one combined whole" — and progressively analyzing that whole down toward its ever-finer, ultimately merely conceptual limit is a direct method for dismantling that habitual sense of solidity, which in turn helps loosen the deeper habit of imagining a unified "self" taking up rebirth from moment to moment. Second, and more radically, once analysis has been carried all the way down to a limit that turns out to have no genuine substance of its own at all, the practitioner is brought to realize that form in general — not merely this or that particular composite object, but physical form as such — was never genuinely, substantially real to begin with, a realization the treatise explicitly identifies as the entry point into the doctrine of consciousness-only. The atom, on this account, is less a claim about physics than a meditative instrument: a rung on a ladder that is itself dissolved once the climb is complete.