Like a Dream, a Bubble, a Shadow

Taixu reads this brief section as answering a worry the previous one leaves hanging: if a bodhisattva does not even receive the merit they create, how can the Buddha still be said to sit on the seat of awakening, walk his alms round, or eventually enter final nirvāṇa — all ordinary comings and goings? His answer draws the same line drawn back in Section 20, between the dharma-body and the bodies that manifest for beings' sake. The dharma-body has always been present, everywhere, needing no arrival and permitting no departure; walking, sitting, and lying down belong entirely to the response-body, taken up only as a skillful means for teaching beings who need a visible teacher in front of them.

To take those ordinary postures as the whole of what the Tathāgata is, Taixu says, is to mistake the convenient vehicle for the passenger it carries. "Coming from nowhere, going nowhere" is not a riddle about physics; it is the plainest possible description of something that was never bound by arrival or departure in the first place — which is exactly what the word "Tathāgata," the Thus-Come One, is built to name.

Taixu walks the division through to its end: grind a world down far enough, and the resulting motes can, in principle, be divided again and again until they border on empty space itself — the point past which no further division is even possible. If a mote of dust is finally empty in this way, then a world, being nothing but countless motes gathered together, is equally empty. World and dust, he says, cannot properly be called "one," and cannot properly be called "many" either — the whole is nothing apart from its parts, and the parts have nothing solid to be parts of.

He then extends the same logic outward, from one world to the dharma-body shared by every buddha of the ten directions: it cannot be said that there are many separate dharma-bodies, one per buddha, and it cannot be said there is only a single dharma-body either, as though every buddha's realization were literally the same numerical thing. His image is light meeting light — countless lamps in one room, each casting its own light, each light interpenetrating every other without one ever blocking or diminishing another. Many and one are not different, and many and one do not obstruct each other. The section's closing line is a caution as much as a conclusion: it is only ordinary, unawakened craving that insists on forcing a "one" or a "many" onto something that was never built to hold that question.

Taixu ties craving directly back to the view of a self: ordinary beings cling to things because there is, for them, an "I" they take to be doing the clinging; take that view away, and there is no subject left standing to crave anything, nor any object solid enough to be worth craving — the whole apparatus, he says, is the mind's own projection, as insubstantial as a flower reflected in a mirror or the moon reflected on water. But he catches a possible confusion here: does the Buddha's own repeated talk of "the view of a self" mean such views genuinely exist as fixed things after all? No — naming them this precisely is what proves they are empty, not what proves they are real. To speak the words is not to grant the views a fixed nature; it is only to use ordinary language to point at their absence.

The section's final move applies this same discipline to the six senses, six objects, and six kinds of consciousness all at once: see the entire net of experience as empty in just this way, and do not let even the subtlest "notion of a thing" (法相) arise in its place — because a bare, wordless intuition that "everything is empty" can itself quietly become one more fixed thing to hold onto, no different in kind from any other grasping the sūtra has already dismantled. Taixu's point is exact: the freedom this teaching offers is not exchanging one set of fixed views for another, subtler set, but no longer needing a fixed view to stand on at all.

Taixu takes each of the six similes in the sūtra's most chanted verse individually, rather than as one blurred image. A dream: vivid and entirely convincing while it lasts, entirely gone the instant one wakes. An illusion: a conjurer's trick — the audience sees objects appear that were never actually there. A bubble: sunlight catches its surface and, for a moment, it gleams like a jewel; reach for it, and there was never a jewel at all. A shadow: it exists only exactly as long as the object casting it exists, and has no substance of its own even then. Dew: it gathers in the clear stillness of early morning and is gone within the hour — never something that was going to last. And lightning: here in one instant, gone in the next, striking one place and then another, neither constant nor evenly spread. Taixu's point in listing all six rather than resting on one image is that no single simile exhausts the point — each catches conditioned existence from a slightly different angle, and together they close off any last place the mind might try to smuggle in a "but this part, at least, must be solid."

He closes his commentary on the entire sūtra with a four-line verse of his own, meant to be carried away the way the sūtra's own closing verse is: "Abiding the mind and subduing the mind; the selflessness of the person and the selflessness of things — this is called prajñā, the very cause and fruit of the Great Vehicle." Everything asked in Section 2 — how should one stand, how should one subdue the mind — and everything answered across thirty-two sections since, comes down, in his own final word, to exactly that.