Five Stages of Bodhisattva Practice, and 建立補特伽羅 Complete

T1606 clarifies how these five stages actually overlap with, rather than simply repeat, the ten bodhisattva grounds. The bodhisattva of resolute conviction occupies the ground of resolute conviction that precedes the ten grounds proper — abiding within the bodhisattva lineage from the very first arousal of the great vow toward awakening, yet not having entered even the first ground, and so not yet possessing any genuine supramundane realization gained through direct inner experience. The bodhisattva of superior aspiration is simply any bodhisattva who has entered any of the ten grounds at all, now possessing that genuine supramundane realization the first stage still lacks. The remaining three stages then subdivide this same span of the ten grounds by an entirely different criterion — how effortful the practice still is. Bodhisattvas on the first six grounds still practice with signs mixed in, since even genuinely joyful practice at this stage remains interrupted by the arising of conceptual characteristics. The bodhisattva on the seventh ground, Traveling Far, has advanced to the point of being able, through deliberate effort exercised at will, to keep such signs from arising at all — hence "free of signs," though still requiring some degree of exertion to achieve this. And bodhisattvas on the eighth, ninth, and tenth grounds have gone one step further still, having attained a thoroughly matured, non-discriminating wisdom that no longer requires any exertion whatsoever to remain free of such signs — activity now entirely effortless.

T1606 explains what makes this sudden path genuinely distinct from the gradual path already examined at such length across Parts 87 through 89: "grade by grade" here means that the practitioner severs every one of the nine graded levels of affliction across all three realms — from the very coarsest down to the very subtlest — in a single unbroken sweep, in the same total, undifferentiated manner the path of seeing itself already severs affliction, rather than through the mundane path's own gradual, level-by-level suppression realm by realm. T1606 cites the Sūtra of the Fingertip in support: gathering everything belonging to form and the remaining aggregates — past, future, or present, far or near, all of it without exception — into a single undivided mass, and then contemplating that entire mass at once as impermanent and as suffering, admits no intermediate stopping points. Because this single sweeping contemplation leaves no natural place to pause partway through, only the very first fruit and the very last fruit — stream-entry and arhatship — can actually be established for it; the second and third fruits, once-returning and non-returning, mark specific partial degrees of severing that this undivided contemplation simply never passes through as distinct, nameable stages. It is for this same reason, T1606 notes, that a scripture elsewhere places arhatship immediately after stream-entry with nothing named in between, describing exactly this sudden path. And should death intervene before the task can be brought to completion in this present life, the very same vow that first set this whole course in motion is what draws such a person back into the desire realm to complete it — appearing, like the pratyekabuddha already examined in Part 84, in an age without a living buddha, and there swiftly bringing the interrupted task to its final conclusion.