Original Enlightenment, Discovered in Four Stages

The Chinese source here reads 阿梨耶識, Paramārtha's own transliteration of ālayavijñāna, rather than the 阿賴耶識 spelling Xuánzàng's school later made standard and that this site uses for the same consciousness elsewhere. Fazang notes the translation-history directly: 梁朝真諦三藏訓名翻為無沒識，今時奘法師就義翻為藏識 — the Liang-dynasty Paramārtha rendered the name by sound as "the not-lost consciousness," while the present-day Master Xuánzàng renders it by meaning as "the storehouse consciousness." "無沒" (not-lost) and "藏" (storehouse) are, on his reading, one meaning under two names: the storing is what a sentient being's misperception — mistaking a mind that does not, in fact, hold onto its own fixed nature for something that does — turns into a first-person "I." Once that same misperception is corrected, he adds, the name ālayavijñāna itself simply lapses; there is no further storehouse left to name once nothing is being hoarded.

On "neither one nor different," Fazang works through the logic in three steps rather than asserting it. Not different, first, because the tathāgatagarbha and the seven active consciousnesses are, in the end, the same water taking different shapes — 以本從末 (tracing the derivative back to its source), 攝末同本 (gathering the derivative back into identity with the source), and 本末平等 (the equality of source and derivative) are three distinct arguments for the same conclusion, the last of them citing the Laṅkāvatāra directly: 唯真不生，單妄不成，真妄和合方有所為 — the true alone does not give rise to anything, the false alone accomplishes nothing; only the conjoining of the true and the false has any effect. Not one, second, because the Laṅkāvatāra itself distinguishes them just as sharply: 如來藏者不在阿梨耶中，是故七識有生有滅，如來藏者不生不滅 — the tathāgatagarbha is not located within the ālaya; the seven consciousnesses have both arising and ceasing, while the tathāgatagarbha has neither. Fazang resolves the apparent tension with a foursquare figure worth keeping in hand for the pages ahead: the tathāgatagarbha alone is like water's wetness; the seven active consciousnesses alone are like waves; the ālayavijñāna itself, holding both, is like the sea containing both stillness and motion; and deluded grasping, which is neither simply arising-and-ceasing nor simply not, is like the force of the wind itself, which is neither the water nor the wave.

Fazang catches the circularity built into "original" and "actualized" and insists it is not a flaw: 以始即同本，以至心源時始覺即同本覺無二相故 — "original" is only called original in relation to "actualized," and once actualized enlightenment truly reaches the source of mind, the two are no longer two things at all. The naming is scaffolding, not a permanent distinction: 本覺之名在生滅門中，非真如門也 — the very term "original enlightenment" belongs only to the arising-and-ceasing gate, where a contrast with the unawakened still needs stating; within the suchness gate itself, where nothing is opposed to anything, the word has no work left to do and simply drops away.

The four stages — an ordinary person merely suppressing a bad impulse, the two vehicles and beginning bodhisattvas seeing through the mark of change, dharma-body bodhisattvas seeing through the mark of abiding, and a bodhisattva at the very end of the path seeing through the first stirring of mind itself — Fazang is careful to say are not four literal moments inside one instant of thought: 非約一剎那心明四相也，此中文意將四相麁細配以寄顯返流四位 — the four marks are being used to display, at four degrees of coarseness, the four stages of the path turning back against the stream, not to describe four phases within a single flicker of mind. He then supplies a cross-reference this site will keep returning to on the next page: the coldest, most refined of the four — the "arising" mark — is exactly what the treatise will next call the karmic mark, first of the three subtle marks; the two "abiding" marks correspond to the second and third subtle-and-coarse marks; the two "changing" marks correspond to the fourth and fifth coarse marks; and the "ceasing" mark is the sixth and last. Original enlightenment and non-enlightenment, in other words, are not two separate teachings — they are the same fourfold map, read once from the perspective of what is gradually uncovered, and read again, starting on the next page, from the perspective of what gradually accumulates.

Fazang reads the sea-and-wind simile here as a deliberate refinement of the same image the treatise used a few lines earlier for the ālayavijñāna itself, now mapped attribute for attribute: 水之動是風相，動之濕是水相，以水舉體動故水不離於風相，無動而非濕故動不離於水相 — the water's motion is the wind's own mark, while the wetness within that motion is the water's own mark; since the water moves with its entire being, the water is never apart from the wind's mark, and since there is no motion that is not simultaneously wet, motion is never apart from the water's mark. Applied back to mind: ignorance can never be found as some third thing separate from mind's own movement, and mind's stillness — its wisdom-nature — can never be found as separate from the very stirring that seems to obscure it. This is why he insists the mark of ignorance can neither be destroyed nor fail to be destroyed: what is destroyed, when practice bears fruit, is only the motion, exactly as a calmed sea loses its waves without losing a single drop of water.

On why 不思議業相, "inconceivable activity," is described as beginningless even though it plainly depends on wisdom being purified first, Fazang offers two resolutions rather than picking one. The first: a single instant of a buddha's perfect wisdom responds to all three periods of time at once, so its scope of response, like its scope of knowledge, has no starting point to name. The second, more direct: once ignorance is exhausted, actualized enlightenment simply is original enlightenment — and original enlightenment has, by definition, been benefiting sentient beings since beginningless time; actualized enlightenment inherits that beginninglessness the moment it becomes indistinguishable from what it always already was. Either way, the point of calling this activity 不思議, inconceivable, is the same: it operates "隨根自然相應…而不作意" — spontaneously corresponding to whatever a being's faculties call for, without ever forming the intention to do so, the way a bell rings for whoever strikes it without first deciding to ring.