Seven Mental Applications, and Naming Immeasurable Absorptions

T1606 walks through all seven as a single continuous sequence for entering the first dhyāna, generalizable to every higher attainment in turn. Discerning the mark first recognizes the desire realm's own coarse, unsettled character by contrast with the first dhyāna's stillness. Resolved understanding then moves beyond merely hearing or reflecting on this contrast, actively cultivating calm-abiding and insight focused directly on that coarse-versus-still distinction. Withdrawal is the actual severing of the strongest grade of affliction on the strength of that cultivation. Gathering joy, arising once a measure of genuine release and joy has already been tasted, deliberately cultivates further wholesome, uplifting states specifically to counter any remaining torpor or dullness. Examination periodically checks whether affliction has actually been abandoned or not, attending to whichever pure signs of progress have already arisen. The preparatory approach's culmination is the final, sustained effort that brings every remaining desire-realm affliction to a complete, if temporary, standstill. And the preparatory approach's resultant fruit is the first dhyāna's own root attainment itself, arising immediately afterward with no further gap. T1606 also draws a useful practical distinction between "coarse" and "still" marks generally: whatever realm lies below one's current level of attainment, from the desire realm up through the sphere of nothing whatsoever, is marked by heavy, unsettled suffering and a comparatively brief lifespan; whatever realm lies above is marked, correspondingly, by its opposite.

T1606 grounds the concrete result of grading in the first dhyāna's own three named heavens — the Heaven of Brahmā's Retinue, the Heaven of Brahmā's Ministers, and the Great Brahmā Heaven, already familiar from this site's Abhidharmakośa pages — mild, moderate, and intense cultivation of the very same first dhyāna respectively producing rebirth into each. Since the formless realm has no physical place at all to differentiate in this way, the same threefold cultivation instead shows up purely in the quality of the resulting rebirth itself: differences of lifespan account for "higher and lower," while differences in whether that rebirth remains partly defiled or is fully purified, and in how thoroughly the ripened result manifests, account for "inferior and superior."

T1606 cites the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures directly on this point — naming well over a hundred distinct absorptions there alone — and notes that further Mahāyāna sūtras describe the total number as genuinely immeasurable, beyond any finite count at all. This closing observation deliberately punctures any illusion that the classical, tidy scheme of four dhyānas and four formless spheres, however thoroughly analyzed across this and the preceding part, exhausts what meditative attainment actually is: the entire structural apparatus just laid out — five factors, seven mental applications, three grades — describes only the outer skeleton shared by every practitioner's path, while the specific, named absorptions a fully accomplished being can actually enter within that same skeleton are, on this treatise's own account, effectively without limit.

T1606 explains "edge-point attainment" (邊際定) as the furthest, most fully mastered form of a given dhyāna or formless sphere — cultivated specifically to bring about exceptional qualities and complete mastery over that level, and sustained all the way to its own outer limit before moving on. Together, the four aspects examined across this and the preceding part — defilement-versus-purity, structure (factor, attainment, grade, and name), and now refinement — give a genuinely complete account of the mundane path in every dimension the treatise considers relevant: what can go wrong within it, how it is internally built, how it is graded, how vast its actual scope really is, and how far any single level of it can ultimately be pushed.