Why the Vast Teachings Are Called the Bodhisattva's Basket

T1606 devotes an extended discussion to unpacking each of these ten headings in turn for all six transcendent practices — generosity, discipline, patience, diligence, meditative concentration, and wisdom — worked out in genuinely exhaustive detail. Only the first of the ten is worth carrying forward briefly here, since it settles a question this treatise's own compact language leaves open: why exactly six, no more and no fewer? T1606's answer is that the six sort cleanly into two groups matching the two dimensions of the bodhisattva path. Generosity, discipline, and patience are the means to an excellent rebirth — generosity yielding great wealth, discipline yielding a body born into honor, and patience yielding a wide circle of devoted followers. Diligence, concentration, and wisdom are the means to decisive spiritual progress itself — diligence sustaining the effort to cultivate wholesome qualities, concentration actually subduing the afflictions, and wisdom permanently uprooting their underlying tendencies. Together, the six are exactly what is needed for a bodhisattva to remain in saṃsāra without being bound by it and to approach nirvāṇa without settling into it — the very definition, elsewhere in this treatise's Yogācāra corpus, of the non-abiding nirvāṇa unique to the Mahāyāna path.

T1606 explains this brief line as a case of the fruit lending its own name to the cause: the vast teachings are what actually leads to omniscience, and omniscience — the most vast and profound fruit there is — passes its own quality of vastness and profundity back onto the very teaching that produces it. It is precisely because what these teachings ultimately yield is this most far-reaching of all attainments that the teachings themselves are singled out, among the twelve genres, as vast and profound in their own right.

T1606 unpacks each cause of fear in turn: lacking the bodhisattva lineage's own underlying nature, one's mind simply remains too limited to hold genuine conviction in the face of teachings this vast, and fear is the natural result; even a being who does possess that lineage may not yet have planted the specific wholesome roots — a genuine vow toward supreme awakening among them — needed to actually appreciate what is being taught; and even one who has planted such roots may still fall in with companions who disparage the Mahāyāna, and fear grows from that harmful influence in turn. As for those who believe but still cling literally: T1606 offers the treatise's own example — hearing that all dharmas are said to be utterly without own-nature, such a person concludes outright that the nature and characteristics of every dharma simply do not exist at all, mistaking a scripture whose meaning is not fully explicit for one whose meaning is. It is precisely this literal misreading, T1606 notes, that the Buddha addresses in the Great Dharma Mirror Sūtra, where he warns that bodhisattvas who grasp at words rather than reasoning correctly about the Dharma give rise to twenty-eight distinct wrong views.