Seeing Truly, and Rare Faith

The question follows naturally from Section 4, Taixu notes: if a bodhisattva gives without dwelling on any mark at all, how then does a buddha come to possess the thirty-two auspicious marks and eighty fine characteristics that scripture describes so carefully? Subhūti — who by this point has already grasped that every appearance of Buddha, bodhisattva, or being is just an image cast by his own discriminating mind — answers without hesitation: those bodily marks are themselves only the temporary, composite appearance of the four elements and five aggregates come together; they are no fixed "bodily mark" at all.

Taixu presses on what it means to really see this, not merely recite it, with the story of the poet-official Su Dongpo, who once wrote a verse boasting that his mind stood "unmoved by the eight winds" — praise and blame, gain and loss — and sent it across the river to his friend, the Chan master Foyin. Foyin wrote back a single dismissive word. Furious, Su Dongpo rushed across the river to confront him — at which Foyin only smiled: "unmoved by the eight winds, and blown across the river by one word?" Reciting "all marks are empty and false" is easy; seeing it "as principle demands" (如理) is what the section's own title names, and it is a different thing entirely. Only when marks are seen through this way — not merely denied in words — does the Tathāgata's true dharma-body, which no physical mark could ever picture, actually appear.

Taixu reads "five hundred years after" against the traditional three ages of the teaching — five hundred years of the true dharma, five hundred of the semblance dharma — placing real faith in this sūtra deep into the harder, later age, when it would seem least likely to arise. That someone could, in that age, hear even a fragment and trust it completely is proof, he says, of good roots planted across countless past buddhas, not just this one lifetime's practice. His example is the Sixth Chan Patriarch, Huineng: an illiterate woodcutter who overheard a single line of this very sūtra recited in a marketplace and felt his own "vajra seed" awaken on the spot. Someone without roots already laid down could hear the Buddha teach this in person and still not truly understand it; someone with those roots can wake from a single overheard phrase, lifetimes later.

The second half turns to the danger on the far side of faith: clinging to the teaching itself as a fixed possession is still clinging. Taixu explains this with the classic raft: a man fleeing bandits builds a raft from wooden planks, crosses the river on it, and — reaching the other shore — leaves the raft behind rather than carrying it on his back. The teaching gets you across; hauling it around afterward as a trophy misses the entire point of having crossed. And "letting go of the raft" doesn't mean holding onto its opposite instead — the sūtra is equally firm that clinging to non-teaching, treating negation itself as the prize, is the same error wearing a different mask. Huineng put the destination plainly: "every teaching flows through, every teaching is complete, and yet not one single teaching is grasped — this is called the supreme vehicle."

If bodily marks cannot show the Tathāgata, Taixu asks, then what of the awakening the Buddha attained beneath the tree, and the teaching he has been giving ever since — are those not fixed, real things? Subhūti's answer holds the line: awakening itself has no shape language could pin down, and neither does anything the Buddha says about it. Taixu's reasoning is precise — if the Tathāgata's teaching could be said and grasped as a fixed object, the listener's mind would have somewhere to land and would keep spinning thought around it; a teaching that lands nowhere is the only kind that actually points at what has no fixed nature to begin with. So the teaching is not a thing (非法) and not simply nothing either (非非法) — it stands clear of both.

The closing line — sages and worthies differ, though all rest in the same unconditioned reality — gets Taixu's simile of three birds escaping one net, or three animals fording one river: a sparrow, a crane, and a great roc all fly free of the same net, but not to the same height; a rabbit, a horse, and an elephant all cross the same river, but the rabbit paddles the surface, the horse wades through the middle, and the elephant's feet reach the riverbed. Stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, arhat, the ten bodhisattva grounds, buddhahood — all differ not because they cultivate different truths, but because each goes only as deep into the same single truth as their own crossing allows.

Taixu unpacks the scale of the comparison before its point: a "billion-world universe" (三千大千世界) is a small-thousand of world-systems multiplied a thousandfold into a medium-thousand, multiplied a thousandfold again into a great-thousand — a single Sahā world, our entire cosmos, several times over — filled edge to edge with the seven treasures: gold, silver, lapis lazuli, giant clam shell, agate, amber, coral. Even giving away wealth on that scale, he notes, still only plants the finite, measurable merit of a worldly cause, because it is still gathered around a giver, a gift, and a fixed idea of "merit" as a thing possessed.

Taking up even four lines of this sūtra and explaining them to one other person outweighs that entire cosmos of treasure, because — as Taixu puts it plainly — "this sūtra is the mother of all buddhas": every buddha of the ten directions and three times, and the very awakening each of them attained, comes forth from exactly this teaching on non-abiding. Passing it on doesn't just transfer information; it plants the seed a listener's own buddhahood eventually grows from. And true to the section's own logic, the last line refuses to let even "buddha-dharma" become one more fixed thing to grasp: "what is called the buddha-dharma is no buddha-dharma at all — that is why it is called the buddha-dharma" is the sūtra's first full statement of the name it, negate it, rename it pattern that will run through everything still to come.