Self-Realized Wisdom, and the One Vehicle

The commentators are precise that self-realized noble wisdom being attained "alone, in a solitary place... relying on no one else" does not mean it comes from nowhere, and open their gloss by naming the unbroken lineage it nonetheless depends on: "前聖所知，即自證聖智行相及一乘行相，謂過去諸佛無不從此二種行門成等正覺，以其遞相傳授，政所謂佛佛授受、祖祖承承者也" — "'what the noble ones before you have known' refers precisely to the practice of self-realized noble wisdom and the practice of the one vehicle — every buddha of the past, without exception, attained complete enlightenment through exactly these same two practices, handed down from one to the next in succession; this is precisely what is meant by 'buddha receiving from buddha, patriarch inheriting from patriarch.'" The solitude is real — no one else can do the realizing for you — but it takes place within, not apart from, a continuous transmission stretching back through every prior buddha.

On why the one vehicle is reserved for the Buddha alone, excluding even Brahmā and the two lesser vehicles, the commentators tie the exclusion directly to the mechanics named just before it: "謂了根塵能取所取妄心，即妄顯真，如實而住，故云『如實處不生妄想』" — "it means fully understanding that the grasping and grasped mind bound up with sense-faculty and sense-object is itself false; displaying the true directly through that very falseness, one abides exactly where reality actually is — hence it is said that 'no false thought arises within the very place where reality actually is.'" This is a genuinely comprehensive realization, leaving no residual false thought of any kind — which is precisely why the three vehicles that follow, each still carrying some unresolved habituated force, are explained as the graduated, provisional path toward this one uncompromising standard, not as three separate final destinations of their own.

The commentators are careful that "so long as mind itself still turns at all, no vehicle among them is truly ultimate" applies without exception — even, on their reading, to the buddha vehicle as named in the list just before it: "言有心轉者，轉即起動，謂若有一念心動，雖佛乘亦非究竟，況餘乘乎" — "'so long as mind still turns' means: wherever even a single thought stirs into motion, even the buddha vehicle, [named here as one item on the list,] is not yet truly ultimate — how much less, then, the other vehicles?" The "one vehicle" that follows is not simply a fifth item added to make the list complete; it names the state reached only once every vehicle, every rider, and the very framework of "vehicles" as a category have all been left behind together — which is why the commentators gloss it as reached only "於心行處滅" ("where the very functioning of mind itself has ceased"), not by climbing to the top of a hierarchy that still includes it as one rung.

On the closing drunkard simile, the commentators are explicit that the delay it describes is not laziness or failure on the śrāvaka's part, but the simple, unavoidable time a residual habituated force takes to exhaust itself: "此三昧身墮無為坑，乃至經劫不覺。譬如世人醉酒昏亂，都無覺知，至於酒消而後乃覺" — "this body dwelling in samādhi has, in a sense, fallen into the very pit of the unconditioned, remaining, for kalpa after kalpa, without full awareness — just as a person deep in drunken confusion has no awareness at all, and awakens only once the wine itself has finally worn off." Nothing accelerates the drunkard's own waking except the wine's own residue actually running its course — and the commentators' closing gloss ties this directly back to the fascicle's central concern: "此喻二乘根轉心，迴覺法無我究竟正智" — "this illustrates how the two lesser vehicles' own faculties eventually turn, their minds coming round at last to the ultimate, correct wisdom of the no-self of dharmas" — the same realization Fascicle One's opening pages, and this entire fascicle, have been building toward all along.