Purifying Conduct, Skillful Means, and Purifying Affliction

T1606 explains the single principle underlying all five prescriptions at once: each object is specifically chosen because contemplating it directly stills the very excess it is paired against. Contemplating the body's own impurity works directly against greed's own attraction to what appears desirable. Cultivating loving-kindness toward all beings works directly against hatred's own aversion. Reflecting on how every phenomenon arises through the interplay of manifold conditions works directly against delusion, since delusion is precisely a failure to see this very interdependence. Reflecting on the many distinct elements that make up one's own body and mind works directly against arrogance, since seeing this multiplicity undercuts the sense of a single, superior self there is anything to be arrogant about. And recollecting the breath, entering and leaving in a steady, countable rhythm, works directly against a mind given to excessive discursive wandering, since it gives that very restlessness a single, simple object to keep returning to.

T1606 draws out this distinction with a concrete example: wholesome conduct produces a desirable ripened result, and unwholesome conduct produces an undesirable one — this specific correspondence, cause matched reliably to its own proper fruit, is exactly what skill in what is and is not possible discerns. Skill in dependent origination looks at the very same causal process from a different angle, focused not on which particular cause matches which particular fruit but on the more general point that arising itself is never uncaused and never produced by some arbitrary, mismatched cause — ruling out, for instance, the notion of a single controlling creator standing entirely outside the causal web. The two forms of skill thus examine the identical causal reality — nothing arises without appropriate conditions — but one focuses on the specific correspondence between a given cause and its given fruit, while the other focuses on the general principle that causation itself is neither absent nor arbitrary.

T1606 distinguishes these two halves of the definition by which path each belongs to. Contemplating a lower meditative level's own coarseness against a higher level's comparative stillness is the mundane path's own approach to purifying affliction — it is by this contrast alone that the fetters binding one to the coarser level are actually suppressed, without yet uprooting them. Contemplating suchness and the four noble truths, by contrast, is the supramundane path's own approach — suchness stated in its most concise form, the four truths stated in their fuller, expanded form — and it is only this second approach that is capable of permanently eradicating the underlying tendencies toward affliction altogether, rather than merely holding them temporarily in check.