Five Marks of Skill in the Dharma, and 法品 Complete

T1606 explains that these five marks are not five independent qualities but a structured set, resting on the two familiar praised qualities of calm-abiding and insight together with the fruit their combination produces. The first two marks belong to calm-abiding's own praised quality: the first, since calm-abiding's continuous, uninterrupted pliancy — moment after moment growing more refined — is precisely what steadily dissolves the very basis of coarse heaviness itself; the second, since calm-abiding's resolute, penetrating vision, seeing every teaching as ultimately of a single undifferentiated flavor, is what allows one to set aside the many distinct conceptual notions of aggregates, elements, and the rest, and thereby taste the Dharma's own genuine delight. The next two marks belong to insight's own praised quality: the third, since insight's uninterrupted, unforgetting discernment illuminates the immeasurable, non-discriminating teachings through the power of recollection; the fourth, since the very images that transformation of basis leaves behind remain continuously present, without discrimination and without any further exertion required to sustain them. And the fifth mark belongs to the fruit both qualities together produce: the dharma-body itself, attained through the permanent severing of the cognitive obstruction and the transformation of basis this severing brings about — called complete at the tenth ground, and fully accomplished only at the ground of buddhahood itself. These five causes, T1606 adds, correspond to five distinct kinds of cultivation and their five distinct fruits: cultivation that stills characteristics, that unites them, that removes signs altogether, that requires no further exertion, and that transforms them at their very root.

This closing question deliberately returns to a point already raised in Part 78: since both baskets ultimately flow from the same single source — the Tathāgata's own dharma-body — why should reverence shown to one generate incomparably vaster merit than reverence shown to the other? The treatise's answer rests entirely on scope, not on origin. The śrāvaka basket leads a practitioner to their own personal liberation alone; the bodhisattva basket, by contrast, is oriented from the very outset toward the benefit and happiness of every sentient being without exception, aims at nothing less than the great purpose of complete and unsurpassed awakening, and is itself the very wellspring from which the buddha's own immeasurable qualities are generated. Reverence offered to a teaching is, in effect, reverence offered to everything that teaching makes possible — and it is because the bodhisattva basket makes possible an entire path oriented toward every being's welfare, rather than one being's own, that honoring it generates merit correspondingly without measure.