Teaching Sorted by What People Cling To

若見眾生戀著妻子，我為說法，令其捨離生死愛染，起大悲心，於一切眾生平等無二 — if I see beings clinging in love to wife and children, I teach them the dharma so that they cast off the love and defilement of birth-and-death, give rise to the mind of great compassion, and are equal and undivided toward all beings. The remedy is the longest of the five and it is not what a reader expecting monastic advice would predict. Nobody is told to leave anyone. What is prescribed is 大悲心 and 平等無二 — the same warmth, extended until it has no inside and no outside. The attachment is not removed; its boundary is.

戀著父母、兄弟、姊妹 … 得預諸佛菩薩清淨眾會 — clinging in love to father and mother, brothers and sisters … gaining a place in the pure assemblies of all the buddhas and bodhisattvas. The same move, made more briefly. A person too attached to their family is given a larger one. 得預, to gain a place in, is the language of being admitted to a gathering, and the cure for loving a small circle is being let into a bigger circle rather than being told the small one is worthless.

染著境界 … 得入如來境界 — defiled by and attached to sense-domains … entering the tathāgata's domain. The same word 境界 stands on both sides of the clause. What is wrong is not that they are absorbed in a domain but which domain, and the sentence fixes the fault by changing the object while leaving the absorption exactly where it was. This is the pattern of the whole list, stated at its most compact.

Six perfections are named in this stretch — 忍, 精進, 禪, 般若, 力, 智: patience, vigour, meditation, wisdom, power and knowledge. Of the standard ten, four are absent from the whole passage: 施 giving, 戒 discipline, 方便 skilful means and 願 vows, none of which appears here as a 波羅蜜. The six that are named share something the four missing ones do not. Each of them answers a specific defect — anger, indolence, distraction, ignorance, feebleness, folly — and the list is organised by what is wrong with a person rather than by the shape of the path.

若見眾生住自利行，我為說法，令其發起利益一切諸眾生願 — if I see beings abiding in practices that benefit only themselves, I teach them the dharma so that they give rise to the vow of benefiting every being. This clause sits among the perfections without being one. Self-benefit is treated here exactly like anger and indolence, as a condition to be diagnosed and corrected — not as a lesser path honourably chosen, but as a fault of scale, sitting in a list between a lowly intent and a feeble will.

入見稠林 — entered the thicket of views. The image is old and exact: opinions as undergrowth one walks into and cannot see out of. Note that the remedy given is not a better view. It is 出離稠林黑暗, getting out of the thicket and the darkness — the only remedy in this whole stretch that names no attainment at all, and simply asks that the person be somewhere else.

色相不具 … 形容醜陋 … 色相麁惡 — bodily form incomplete, appearance ugly, bodily form coarse and ill-favoured. Three consecutive clauses about being unattractive, which is remarkable given where this pilgrimage has just been. The whole of fascicle seventy turned on a city ruined by pride in its own looks, cured by a bodhisattva who arrived better-looking. Here the same sūtra, one fascicle later, treats ugliness as a real affliction deserving a remedy, and hands out a buddha's body three times running. It has no quarrel with beauty. Its quarrel was only ever with what the proud did with theirs.

The middle of those three is the odd one. For incomplete form and for coarse form the remedy is 色身, a form-body; for 形容醜陋, ugly appearance, it is 法身, a dharma-body. The two neighbours are answered in kind and this one is answered in another currency altogether. The sūtra offers no reason, and it would be reading too much in to supply one — but it is the clause where the remedy stops matching the complaint.

若見眾生貧窮所苦，我為說法，令得菩薩功德寶藏 — if I see beings afflicted by poverty, I teach them the dharma so that they gain the bodhisattva's jewel-treasury of merit. The clause is honest about its own limits. What a night-spirit has to give a poor person is a teaching, and what the teaching produces is a treasury of merit rather than of money. Nothing here pretends the two are the same thing, and the verb remains 我為說法, I teach them the dharma, exactly as it is for anger and for ignorance.