A Name Used to Erase Names

Fazang's gloss on "one mind, two gates" makes explicit what Part 1's reading note already anticipated: 一心者，謂一如來藏心含於二義 — the one mind is the one tathāgatagarbha-mind, containing two aspects within it. One is 約體絕相義 — the aspect of essence cut off from all marks — which is the suchness gate: "非染非淨，非生非滅，不動不轉，平等一味，性無差別，眾生即涅槃，不待滅也，凡夫彌勒同一際也" (not defiled, not pure, not arising, not ceasing, unmoving, unchanging, one uniform taste, a nature without distinction — sentient beings already are nirvāṇa, with no further cessation to wait for; an ordinary person and Maitreya himself share the identical limit). The other is 隨緣起滅義 — the aspect of arising and ceasing in dependence on conditions — which is the arising-and-ceasing gate. Fazang then makes a move worth sitting with: even the unmoving aspect, he says, belongs within the arising-and-ceasing gate too, "只由不動能成染淨，是故不動亦在動門" — it is only because it does not move that it is able to bring about both defilement and purity, and for that very reason the unmoving belongs inside the moving gate as well. The two gates are not a wall between the unconditioned and the conditioned; the unconditioned is what makes the conditioned possible from the inside.

On why each gate can "include the whole of all dharmas," Fazang reaches for the same simile twice, once per gate: the suchness gate is "染淨通相" (the shared, generic mark running through both defilement and purity), so that everything defiled or pure is already an instance of it — "如微塵是瓦器通相，通相之外無別瓦器，瓦器皆為微塵所攝" (just as dust is the generic substance of every clay vessel; apart from that generic substance there is no separate vessel, so every vessel is already included within the dust). The arising-and-ceasing gate, conversely, is 染淨別相 — the particular, differentiated mark — but since it is nothing other than suchness combined with conditions, "諸法既無異體，還攝真如門也，以瓦器收微塵等" (since the resulting dharmas have no separate essence of their own, this gate in turn includes the suchness gate — as the vessel, in its own way, gathers up the dust). Dust and vessel include each other completely, from opposite directions; that, for Fazang, is what "not separate" (不相離) actually means.

Fazang reads this short exchange as marking the boundary between a preliminary practice and the real thing. "Knowing" that speech and thought have no real speaker or thinker, while one is still, in fact, speaking and thinking — 雖在於彼言念等中，觀此念等常無能所，雖未能離念，而順於無念 (still caught up in speech and thought of this kind, yet observing that this very speech and thought never really has a subject or object; not yet able to leave thought behind, but already according with no-thought) — this he calls 方便觀, the expedient contemplation. Only when this observation, sustained long enough, actually leaves thought behind and touches the principle of no-thought itself does it become 正觀, the correct contemplation proper — which is what the answer means by "gaining entry" (得入). He is careful to keep the two from collapsing into each other: according-with is not yet entry, but neither is it nothing; it is the only door entry has.

Fazang also flags the danger this passage is built to avoid on both sides at once. To think "there is no speaker, no thinker" and stop there risks nihilism — the extinction of speech and thought altogether, 斷見. To go on speaking and thinking exactly as before, unexamined, risks the opposite error, 常見, mistaking the ordinary flow of discursive mind for something solid and continuous. "於一念間離此二見，見此無二之法，故能稱順中道，隨順法性也" — in a single moment of mind, apart from both these views, to see this dharma of non-duality: that alone is what properly accords with the middle way, and with the nature of dharmas itself. The instruction is not to stop thinking, but to keep thinking while no longer believing in the thinker.

Fazang catches a grammatical trap in the phrase 如實空 before a reader can fall into it: "此以如實之中空無妄染故，云如實空，非謂如實自空" — this means empty within reality, of false defilement; it does not mean that reality itself is empty. He marks it explicitly as a 依主釋, a "belonging-to" compound: not "the real is empty" but "the emptiness that belongs to the real" — emptiness of defilement, not emptiness of suchness itself. For "not empty," he distinguishes two senses in turn: 異妄無體故云有自體 (unlike falsehood, which has no essence of its own, suchness does have its own essence) and 異恒沙有漏煩惱故云具足無漏性功德 (unlike the afflictions numerous as the sands of the Ganges, it is complete with immaculate qualities). He backs both with citation — the Mahāyānasaṃgraha on the four inherent virtues (常樂我淨, permanence, bliss, self, and purity, already possessed rather than newly acquired), and a verse from the Buddha-Nature Treatise: "由客塵空故，與法界相離；無上法不空，與法界相隨" — because the guest-dust of affliction is empty, it stands apart from the dharma-realm; because the unsurpassed dharma is not empty, it accompanies the dharma-realm wherever it goes. Emptiness removes what was never really there; non-emptiness names what was never really absent.

The cascading tetralemma — not existence, not non-existence, not neither, not both; not oneness, not difference, not neither, not both — Fazang reads as a step-by-step disarming of an imagined interlocutor who keeps trying to relocate the same error at a higher level. 惑者云: hearing "not existence," the interlocutor assumes this means non-existence — corrected by "not non-existence" either. Hearing both denials, he next assumes the treatise is asserting some third, intermediate position, "both are being denied together" — corrected by "not both together" as well. Each new negation is aimed at foreclosing the specific way the previous negation was just about to be turned back into another positive claim; the pattern, on Fazang's reading, is not decoration but a trap deliberately re-set at every level a subtle reification could reappear. He cross-references the same structure in the Śataśāstravaipulya, whose own verse states the method directly: 有非有俱非，一非一雙泯，隨次而配屬，智者達非真 — existence, non-existence, both, neither; oneness, non-oneness, both together erased; matched in sequence, term by term — the wise understand that not one of these is ultimately true.