Beyond Every Comparison

Taixu takes the word "slander" seriously here, not as rhetorical overstatement: to say the Tathāgata "has taught a teaching," treated as a fixed thing handed from a fixed teacher, misunderstands the Tathāgata so completely that it counts as a kind of defamation, however devout the intention behind it. Teaching, genuinely done, teaches nothing that could be picked up and carried away as an object — "one who teaches, teaches no teaching at all" is not a riddle but a description of what actually happens when a mind that dwells nowhere speaks.

Subhūti's title here — 慧命須菩提, "wisdom-life Subhūti" — is one Taixu pauses on: Subhūti has made the wisdom that sees beings as empty his very life, which is why his question about future faith carries real weight. The answer he receives collapses the usual distinction between buddha and being: every being already carries the same vajra-wisdom seed a buddha has fully uncovered — "beings" only in the sense that the seed has not yet flowered, "no beings" in the sense that nothing about their nature actually differs from a buddha's. Faith in a future age is possible for exactly this reason: there is no gulf to cross, only a covering to be worn through.

Taixu reads Sections 20 through 22 as one deliberate sequence, methodically clearing the three traditional avenues of karma — body, speech, and mind — of anything fixed to hold onto. The Buddha teaches through these three: walking his alms round is teaching through the body; entering concentration and speaking the dharma is teaching through speech; guiding beings to practice toward awakening is teaching through the mind. Section 20 already showed that neither the radiant reward-body nor the countless response-bodies are simply the dharma-body itself — clearing the body. Section 21 showed that no fixed teaching is ever really spoken — clearing speech. This section clears the last and subtlest of the three: even the Buddha's own awakening, the mind's own attainment, is not the least fixed thing gotten.

Subhūti's question shows he has followed the argument but still wants final confirmation, and the Buddha's double "so it is, so it is" gives it without qualification. Taixu's phrasing is blunt: if there were even a hair's breadth of something actually gained, that gain itself would disqualify the attainment from being unsurpassed — because anything gained is, by definition, a fixed possession sitting apart from everything else, and "unsurpassed" cannot mean "one fixed thing among others." It is precisely the absence of anything held onto that lets the attainment be called complete.

Having shown that nothing is gained, Taixu says the sūtra now has to answer the question that naturally follows: if nothing is gained, why practice at all? "Level, with nothing higher and nothing lower" is the hinge — the awakened nature is not increased in a sage or diminished in an ordinary being; it is the identical ground under both. Because it is level in this way, every wholesome action — the six pāramitās and everything built on them — genuinely leads toward it, provided it is practiced free of the four notions that would otherwise turn the practice back into more self-building.

The closing "wholesome teaching, no wholesome teaching, that is why it is called wholesome" is not a hedge, Taixu insists, but the same discipline applied to virtue itself: goodness has no fixed essence sitting behind the label either, only the name given to conduct that helps rather than harms. Treating "wholesome" as a fixed prize to be collected would recreate, in the register of ethics, the exact same grasping the sūtra has spent twenty-two sections dismantling everywhere else.

Taixu treats the scale of this comparison — not one treasure-filled cosmos but every Sumeru, king of mountains, across an entire billion-world universe turned into treasure — as making the same point already made twice before, in Sections 8 and 11, but sharpens exactly where the two kinds of giving actually diverge. Giving away treasure, however vast, is material giving: it plants merit alone. Taking up and passing on even four lines of this sūtra is giving of the teaching: it cultivates merit and wisdom together in the same act — 福慧雙修, as he puts it — because the giver's own understanding deepens in the explaining, and the listener receives not wealth that will be spent but a seed that grows into their own seeing. Two kinds of giving that look comparable from a distance turn out, on inspection, to belong to entirely different orders of consequence — which is why no fraction, however small, can properly express the difference between them.