No Self, No Attainment — Restated

Taixu marks this as the sūtra folding back on its own opening: Subhūti asks, almost word for word, the very question he asked in Section 2, and the Buddha's answer now gathers everything argued since into a single reply. The vow to liberate every being still stands, exactly as vowed — what has changed is that the beings liberated are understood to liberate themselves, by their own nature, so there was never a separate bodhisattva standing outside them doing the liberating. The instant a bodhisattva thinks "I liberate," a self appears to do the liberating and a being appears to be liberated — and self, person, being, and lifespan return together, all four at once, exactly as Section 3 already showed.

Taixu's gloss on "Tathāgata" here is his fullest in the whole fascicle: it means the suchness of all things — reality just as it is, undisturbed, equal without favoring any one appearance over another, resting at neither extreme and not even lodging in some middle point between them. This is why Dīpaṃkara's prediction could only be given because there was no fixed teaching to attain — a fixed attainment would mean a fixed attainer, and a fixed attainer is exactly the self a buddha has none of. His summary of the sūtra's stubborn "neither substantial nor empty": to call the attainment real cannot be said as simply true, and to call it empty cannot be said as simply true either — attained without an attainer, real without being graspable, precisely what the word "Tathāgata" is there to name.

Taixu walks through the five eyes as five widening circles of vision, each folded into the next: the physical eye, the ordinary human eye, so limited that a sheet of paper is enough to block it entirely; the heavenly eye, gained by rebirth in the heavens or by deep meditation, which sees far and passes through solid obstruction; the wisdom eye, held by śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas, which sees every being as empty — the four elements and five aggregates only, like flowers reflected in a mirror or the moon reflected in water; the dharma eye, held by bodhisattvas, which sees further still, that every single thing arises from conditions and has no nature of its own, so that "one is all, and all is one," moving through every phenomenon without obstruction; and the buddha eye, which holds all four at once and sees every realm — human, heavenly, arhat, bodhisattva — in a single instant, without gap or excess. A bodhisattva has four of the five; even an arhat with supernormal powers holds only three, and cannot see three different realms in one glance the way a buddha does.

The famous line that follows — no mind of the past, present, or future can be grasped — Taixu reads as the direct conclusion of having five eyes rather than none: the Tathāgata knows every being's every thought precisely because he sees that none of those thoughts is a fixed, locatable thing to begin with. A past thought has already gone; a present thought never stays still long enough to be caught; a future thought has not yet arrived. Ordinary beings mistake this passing procession for something solid and call it "my mind" — which is exactly why the sūtra calls all of it "no mind at all, that is why it is called mind." Knowing a mind that has nowhere to be pinned down is not a lesser kind of knowing; for the Tathāgata, it is the only kind that is actually complete.

Taixu treats this brief exchange as a deliberate compression of everything the sūtra has already said about giving, now stated as a single, symmetrical principle: if merit were a fixed, substantial thing, the Buddha would never call it "great," because anything fixed is, by definition, bounded and comparable — great next to some things, small next to others. It is exactly because merit has no fixed nature of its own that it can be called boundless without contradiction. Attainment and non-attainment, he notes, are equal here: merit that is genuinely "gotten" this way was never gotten as a possession, and this absence of getting is itself what makes the getting immeasurable — the same single point the sūtra has now approached from giving, from the four fruits, from bodily marks, and from the Tathāgata's own awakening, each time landing in the identical place.

Taixu reads this exchange as distinguishing two of the Buddha's three traditional bodies from the third. The "perfectly formed body" is the reward-body — the thirty-two marks and eighty fine characteristics, the resplendent physical form earned by countless lifetimes of practice. The "perfectly formed marks" point to the response-body — the countless different forms a buddha manifests, endlessly varied, to meet whatever a particular being needs in order to be reached and taught. Neither is the formless dharma-body itself, yet neither is separate from it either: the reward-body is not apart from the dharma-body, but it is not simply identical to it — hence "a perfectly formed body is no perfectly formed body, that is why it is called a perfectly formed body," and the same for the response-body's marks.

Taixu's summary phrase for the relation among all three bodies is deliberately paradoxical: "neither one nor different, and yet also one and also different — form that is no form, and no form that is form." A student who fixes on the radiant, marked body as the whole of what the Buddha is has mistaken the reflection for the moon; a student who denies the radiant body has any value at all has mistaken the absence of a fixed essence for the absence of any manifestation whatsoever. The teaching holds both without collapsing into either — exactly the same shape as "form is emptiness, emptiness is form," now applied to the Buddha's own body rather than to the world at large.