Five Kinds of Skill, and Abiding in the Dharma

T1606 frames these five kinds of skill as answering a single practical question already posed elsewhere in the scriptures: what allows a monk to receive a teaching quickly, retain a great deal of it, retain it correctly, and never subsequently lose what has been retained? Skill in the teaching itself — simply having heard a great deal — is what allows quick reception, since one already broadly familiar with the wording picks up new passages with ease. Skill in meaning, thoroughly knowing how the higher teaching and the discipline actually characterize things, is what allows a great deal to be retained, since properly understanding the underlying categories lets many further passages be gathered in under them. Skill in wording and skill in terms together allow correct reception: knowing precisely how to explain difficult phrasing, and knowing how to use everyday terms like "I" and "mine" appropriately without being taken in by them, together ensure that what is heard is understood exactly as intended, free of distortion. And skill in the hidden intention regarding past and future is what prevents what has been retained from ever being lost, since a teaching properly received in light of what has come before naturally leads on to the deliverance still to come, one stage supporting the next without any of it becoming irrelevant along the way. Recognizing the Tathāgata's own hidden intention in this way, T1606 adds, is what allows a practitioner to grasp the teaching's genuine substance rather than its surface alone.

T1606 grounds this definition in a sūtra where the World-Honored One himself specifically addresses "a monk who abides in the Dharma," and the point of citing it is precisely to rule out a common half-measure: retaining, reciting, and expounding the teaching — genuine and necessary as these are — constitute only hearing and reflection, and a practitioner who does this alone, without ever taking up sustained meditative cultivation, has not yet attained what abiding in the Dharma actually requires. Equally, a practitioner who cultivates concentration alone, however diligently, without ever having first properly heard and reflected on the teaching being cultivated, likewise falls short. It is specifically the combination — genuine learning feeding into genuine practice, and genuine practice never treated as separable from what has been learned — that the sūtra calls abiding in the Dharma, and it is this same combination, T1606 notes, that the Buddha elsewhere summarizes simply as "not abandoning yoga," never letting go of either the learning or the disciplined practice that learning is meant to support.