Eight Reasons, and the Mind That Holds All Things

Fazang reads these three stanzas as homage paid in strict order to the Three Jewels, and he is explicit that the second stanza is not a fourth object of refuge alongside the Buddha — it is what the Buddha's own body actually consists of, read as the Dharma Jewel. "彼身體相" ("that body's own essence and attributes"), he writes, "顯佛與法不相離" — shows that the Buddha and the Dharma are not separate things. The essence (體) and attributes (相) named here are exactly the "greatness of essence" and "greatness of attributes" the treatise will name again, formally, a few paragraphs later in the doctrine-in-outline section below; the homage verse and the doctrinal statement are naming the same two things, once devotionally and once analytically. The closing phrase, 如實修行等, he restricts deliberately: this is homage not to the ordinary monastic community but specifically to bodhisattvas who have already reached the grounds (地上菩薩), "as證理起行名如實修" — because it is only they who have realized principle and given rise to practice accordingly that this phrase properly describes.

On the opening word itself, Fazang glosses 歸命 ("I take refuge," literally "I turn my life over") two ways at once: 歸 as "turning toward," and 命 as either the reader's own life — staking what one values most on the Three Jewels — or the Buddha's own teaching-command, obeyed. He also pauses on why the treatise uses 歸命 rather than the more common 稽首 ("I bow my head"): citing the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, he notes that in some sūtras the four heavenly king Vaiśravaṇa is said to "take refuge in" (歸命) Śākyamuni but merely "bow to" (稽首) other buddhas — and resolves the apparent slight by explaining that of the three modes of homage (body, speech, and mind), 稽首 belongs to the body alone while 歸命 belongs to the mind, and mind is the heaviest of the three.

Fazang treats the eight causes as more than a devotional list — he reads each one, apart from the first, as a forward pointer to a specific later passage of the treatise, and laying his cross-references out together turns this paragraph into a table of contents in miniature. The second cause, explaining "the Tathāgata's root meaning," he ties to the whole of the doctrine-in-outline section below together with the "revealing the true meaning" and "countering wrong attachments" chapters still to come — because it is there that the treatise explains the single mind with its two gates, "即是如來所說法門之根本" ("precisely the root of the gate of teaching the Tathāgata expounded"). The third cause points ahead to "distinguishing the stages of the path bodhisattvas advance toward," the fourth to the four kinds of faith and five practices with which the cultivation-of-faith part will open. The remaining four — dissolving karmic hindrance, cultivating calming-and-contemplation, single-minded recollection of a buddha, and exhortation to practice — Fazang maps one-for-one onto four specific paragraphs still inside the cultivation-of-faith part: repentance practice for the heavy-karma beginner, the calming-and-contemplation chapter proper, the closing paragraph recommending rebirth in a pure land, and the final part on the benefits of upholding the treatise. Nothing in the eightfold list, on this reading, is filler; each clause is a promissory note the treatise pays off later.

On the opening line's phrase 摩訶衍信根 ("the root of faith in the Mahāyāna"), Fazang glosses 根 ("root") with two distinct senses that will matter again once the cultivation-of-faith part defines faith formally: 能持義, the capacity to hold what has been gained without losing it, and 生後義, the capacity to advance further from where one stands. He then sets faith (信) and root (根) against each other in a fourfold analysis: there is faith without root — belief merely taken on someone else's word; there is root without faith — the other faculties, such as the root of wisdom, that are not themselves faith; there is both faith and root together — the settled understanding this treatise is written to produce; and there is neither — every other dharma. Faith that has become a root, in other words, is not simply believing something; it is belief that has stabilized into a capacity that cannot be lost and that keeps generating further practice — which is exactly the distinction the "part on cultivating the practice of faith," several pages ahead, will spend its first paragraphs formalizing.

Fazang's gloss on the three words "謂眾生心" ("means the mind of sentient beings") is the hinge on which his entire commentary turns, so it is worth quoting closely: 出其法體，謂如來藏心含和合不和合二門 — "this brings out the essence of the dharma: namely, the tathāgatagarbha-mind, which contains within it both a conjoined and an unconjoined gate." The two gates the treatise names two pages ahead — mind-as-suchness and mind-as-arising-and-ceasing — are not, on Fazang's reading, added to "the mind of sentient beings" from outside; that one phrase already implies both, because it names the mind specifically as it exists for beings still caught in the conjoined condition, rather than as it exists for a buddha, "在佛地，則無和合義" — at the stage of buddhahood, there is no more conjoined aspect left to speak of, only suchness. The whole architecture the next several pages will unfold — two gates, three greatnesses, one mind — is already compressed into this single three-character phrase.

Fazang also catches a grammatical asymmetry in the passage that a fast reading slides past: the suchness gate "即示" the essence of the Mahāyāna (directly, identically shows it), while the arising-and-ceasing gate merely "能示" its essence, attributes, and function (is able to show them). He explains the difference is not stylistic. Suchness is "不起門" — the gate of non-arising — and stands in no relation of "showing" apart from being identical with what it shows, hence 即. Arising-and-ceasing is "起動門" — the gate of arising and motion — where what is shown (defiled and pure phenomena) is distinct from what does the showing, so a real relation of demonstration exists, hence 能. This is also, on his reading, why the essence-attributes-function triad gets attributed formally to the arising-and-ceasing gate rather than the suchness gate: 起含不起，故起中具三大 — arising already contains non-arising within it, so it is within the arising gate that all three greatnesses can be fully shown at once. On 相大 specifically, he adds a compact cross-reference worth keeping in mind for later pages: it names 二種如來藏中不空之義 — the not-empty aspect within the tathāgatagarbha's twofold nature — a distinction the treatise itself will not make explicit until the "revealing the true meaning" chapter several pages ahead defines suchness as both empty and not-empty.