What Apprehends the Dharma, and the Four Kinds of Objects

T1606 traces this basis through a natural sequence of three stages, each one taking over as the previous one recedes. When the teaching is actually being delivered, it is another person's own act of communicating — hearing a teacher's living voice — that directly serves as the basis for the mind and mental factors engaging with it. Once that moment of hearing has passed, recollection becomes the basis instead, as what was heard is repeatedly called back to mind. And later still, once recollection itself is no longer being actively exercised, the habitual imprint left behind by that repeated recollection becomes the basis on which the teaching's content continues to appear to the mind, even without any deliberate act of remembering — the imprint alone now strong enough to make the teaching present again as if it were still being recalled.

T1606 distinguishes the first two of these four by which kind of mental application — resolute conviction or genuine reality — actually generates them. The object accompanied by discrimination belongs to a wholly mundane mode of mental application, one still working through resolute conviction rather than direct seeing; the object free of discrimination belongs instead to a wholly supramundane mode, together with whatever subsequently arises from it, actually engaging reality as it is rather than through conviction alone. The object at the limit of actual things is called this specifically because it names the two outer bounds of everything knowable at once: its sheer extent, comprehended through the aggregates, elements, and sense fields that establish just how much there is to know in the first place, and its true nature, comprehended through the four truths' sixteen aspects, the summary formulas of impermanence and the rest, and the three gates of liberation, each a different lens onto that same single reality. And the object of accomplished activity is transformation of basis itself — inconceivable, T1606 notes, precisely because it lies beyond the reach of any object still accompanied by discrimination to fully capture.

T1606 spells out exactly which of the sixteen fall under each of the three gates of liberation. Emptiness comprehends two: the aspects of emptiness and of no-self, since both directly negate any substantial self to be found. Wishlessness comprehends six: impermanence, suffering, cause, origination, arising, and condition — the four aspects belonging to the truths of suffering and origination together with the two additional aspects of cause and condition that also fall under origination — since a practitioner who has truly seen these six aspects has nothing left in the three realms still worth wishing for. And signlessness comprehends the remaining eight: the four aspects of cessation and the four aspects of the path, since a mind that has realized cessation and the path is no longer able to grasp at any of the ordinary characteristic-marks that discrimination usually traffics in. Taken together, these three gates simply reorganize the very same sixteen aspects already established across the four truths, now sorted by which specific kind of grasping — a self, a wish, or a sign — each aspect is capable of releasing.