Why Persons Are Provisionally Established

T1606 identifies the relationship between these two divisions directly: the classification of persons concerns the one who actually realizes the path, while the classification of direct realization concerns what is actually realized. Attainment, in other words, always has this twofold structure — a subject who attains and a content that is attained — and 得品 addresses each in turn, persons first and then the various forms direct realization itself takes.

Before cataloguing the specific classifications of persons, T1606 pauses to address a question this treatise's own Yogācāra framework makes unavoidable: given that a "person" has already been shown, in earlier parts of this treatise, to be no more than a conventional designation rather than an ultimately real entity, why does the treatise nonetheless proceed to classify persons at such length? T1606 answers with four distinct reasons a person is provisionally established despite lacking ultimate reality.

First, for ease of speech: without some single, unified provisional entity holding together the countless distinct forms, feelings, and other constituents that make up a given continuum, ordinary activities of speech — calling someone by name, describing their coming and going — would become impossibly cumbersome. Second, in accordance with the world: ordinary beings do not, for the most part, frame their speech around the bare dharmas alone but around the notion of a person, and the noble ones, in order to teach effectively within the world as it actually speaks and thinks, must adopt this same convenient convention. Third, to remove fear: beings who have not yet penetrated the profound nature of dependent origination would, if told bluntly that no self exists among all sentient beings without any further qualification, react with fear and refuse to accept genuine instruction — the provisional person allows the deeper teaching to be approached gradually rather than all at once. And fourth, to display the specific qualities and faults each being does or does not yet possess: were the treatise to speak only of the defiled and purified characteristics of the dharmas themselves, with no provisional person to differentiate one continuum from another, it would become impossible to specify that a particular fault has or has not yet been overcome, or that a particular quality has or has not yet been realized, in this or that specific case. It is for these four reasons together, T1606 concludes, that the treatise proceeds to establish and classify persons in careful detail, all the while holding that no such person is, in the end, ultimately real.

These seven distinctions, taken together, sort every person the treatise will go on to name along seven independent axes at once — which affliction dominates one's temperament, which of the three vehicles one is bound for, how far the provisions for the path have already been accumulated, whether one proceeds by faith or by direct engagement with the teaching, which specific fruit of the path has been reached, which of the three realms of existence one belongs to, and which stage of bodhisattva practice one occupies. The remainder of this stretch of the treatise works through each of these seven in turn, in the same order given here, before assembling them into the extended catalogue of named persons — from the ordinary being still driven by greed or hatred, through every stage of noble attainment, to the bodhisattva already established on the higher grounds.