How One Flicker of Delusion Becomes a World

Fazang sorts the four mirrors along two crossing axes rather than treating them as an unordered list. The first pair are 自性淨 (intrinsically pure) and describe the stage while the cause is still hidden; the second pair are 離垢淨 (pure through the removal of defilement) and describe the stage once the fruit has become manifest. Independently, the first and third share an emphasis on emptiness, while the second and fourth share an emphasis on the mirror's active function — reflecting worldly appearances, or radiating outward to sentient beings. On the first mirror, he gives two distinct reasons nothing appears in it, one from each direction: 一以妄念望於真智，無覺照之功，以情執違理故 — looking from delusion toward true wisdom, delusion has no power to illuminate anything, because clinging to feeling directly contradicts principle, the way a mirror is not identical with the external object it reflects; 二以本覺望於妄法，亦無覺照功能，以妄本無故 — looking from original enlightenment toward deluded phenomena, there is likewise nothing to illuminate, because the deluded phenomena were never really there to begin with, like a healthy eye looking for a floater in clear space and finding nothing to see.

He also catches an apparent contradiction between the first mirror and the second worth noting: if nothing at all can appear in true emptiness, how can the very next mirror say that "all worldly objects appear within it in their entirety"? His answer distinguishes two different senses of appearing — 彼約依他似法，是此真心隨熏所作，無自體故，不異真如 (the second mirror concerns dependent, apparent phenomena, which are what this true mind produces under habituation, having no essence of their own and so not different from suchness) versus 此約遍計所執實法故，無可現也 (the first mirror concerns purely imagined, falsely-grasped-as-real phenomena — a self, above all — which have nowhere to appear because they were never dependently arisen at all). The distinction matters practically: the treatise is not claiming the phenomenal world disappears once delusion is seen through, only that a fictional self superimposed on that world does. On why a mirror's purity is proven, not compromised, by reflecting something dirty, Fazang adds one more line worth keeping: 如鏡明淨能現穢物，穢物現時反顯鏡淨，豈此穢物能污鏡耶 — a bright, clean mirror is able to reflect a filthy object; and the very appearance of that filth, far from soiling the mirror, is what proves the mirror clean in the first place. How could the filth it merely reflects possibly stain it?

Fazang glosses the whole nine-mark sequence — the three subtle marks plus the six coarse marks — through a single extended allegory of an eye disease, mapping each mark to one stage of the same unfolding hallucination: 本覺真如其猶淨眼，熱翳之氣如根本無明，翳與眼合動彼淨眼，業識亦爾 (original enlightenment and suchness are like a clear, healthy eye; the heat and blur of disease are like fundamental ignorance; the blur joining the eye and disturbing its clarity is exactly the karmic mark, the first of the three subtle marks). 由淨眼動故有病眼起，能見相亦爾 (the healthy eye's disturbance gives rise to the diseased eye's activity — this is the mark of the perceiving subject). 以有病眼向外觀故，即有空華妄境界現，境界相亦爾 (because the diseased eye looks outward, there falsely appears a floater in empty space — this is the mark of the perceived realm). From there the six coarse marks follow the same floater outward: 以有空華境故，令其起心分別好華惡華等，智相亦爾 (the floater's mere appearance provokes the mind to judge it a good floater or a bad one — the mark of discernment); 由此分別堅執不改，相續相亦爾 (that judgment, held onto without change, is the mark of continuity); 由執定故於違順境取捨追遣，執取相亦爾 (fixed in that judgment, one pursues what pleases and pushes away what does not — the mark of grasping); 由取相故於上復立名字…計名字相亦爾 (grasping at the mark, one then assigns it a name — the mark of conceptualizing names); 既計名取相，發動身口，攀此空華造善惡業受苦樂報，長眠生死而不能脫，皆由根本無明力也 (having conceived the name and grasped the mark, body and speech are set in motion, and one goes on creating wholesome and unwholesome karma over this same floater, sleeping long in birth-and-death, unable to wake — all of it powered by nothing more than the original force of fundamental ignorance). A single blur in a healthy eye, followed step by step, becomes an entire lifetime's worth of craving and aversion — and, Fazang's allegory insists, there was never a real floater there to begin with.

Fazang also organizes the six coarse marks into three functional pairs rather than leaving them as a flat list of six. The first pair, discernment and continuity, is the subtlest form of affliction still operating within the "differentiating" consciousness, clinging to the object and the dharma as though each were real — the level a bodhisattva already on the grounds is working to eliminate. The second pair, grasping and conceptualizing names, is the coarser affliction built on top of the first — clinging further, in a self-and-object structure — which the two vehicles' own practice is aimed at cutting through. The third pair, initiating karma and suffering bound by karma, is not a new kind of affliction at all but simply what the first two pairs produce once acted upon: karma created, and its fruit endured without freedom. Three subtle marks belong entirely to the ālayavijñāna, before subject and object have even separated out — as the *Treatise Without Signs* puts it of the karmic mark alone, 相及境界不可分別，一體無異 (mark and object-realm cannot yet be distinguished; they are one and the same, without difference). The six coarse marks belong to the "consciousness that discriminates objects" one level further out — which is why, Fazang notes, the treatise does not mention the seventh consciousness, manas, by name anywhere in this ninefold scheme: manas is already necessarily implied wherever the ālaya and the discriminating consciousness are both present, so naming it separately here would add nothing the structure does not already require.

Fazang reaches back for the identical clay-and-dust simile Part 2 already used for the two gates of the One Mind, applying it here one level further in: 染淨二法同以真如為體，真如以此二法為相 — the two dharmas, defiled and pure, share suchness as their single essence, and suchness, in turn, takes these same two dharmas as its own attributes. He is careful to note that "identity" and "difference" are not competing claims about the same thing but two separate lenses, applied to two separate targets: the identity aspect concerns 本末不覺 — original enlightenment and non-enlightenment traced back to their shared root — while a moment later he clarifies the difference aspect concerns something else again, 隨染幻差別 — the specific, varied way delusion happens to manifest in any given case. A given sentient being's particular confusion is never identical to another's in its texture, even though, traced to the root, both are exactly the same suchness wearing a different apparition.

On why seeing any color or form at all is, by this logic, already evidence of delusion rather than of realization, Fazang connects this passage directly back to the third mirror of the previous section: true wisdom's own nature — what the third mirror called 法出離鏡, the mirror of the dharma's liberation — is formless by definition, so any visible shape or color that does appear to an observer is necessarily the product of that observer's own residual defiled karma projecting an image, never wisdom's own substance showing itself directly. This is a thread the treatise will pick up explicitly several pages ahead, when it distinguishes the buddha-body ordinary beings and the two vehicles are capable of seeing from the one only advanced bodhisattvas can perceive — the same principle, that a body seen in form is already a concession to the seer's own remaining delusion, applied there to the doctrine of the buddha-bodies directly.