Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra — Translation Notes
These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, Northern Edition (大般涅槃經, Taishō T0374), translated into Chinese by Dharmakṣema (曇無讖) at the court of the Northern Liang in 421 CE. They exist so that vocabulary and citation practice stay consistent across all forty parts.
The text, and which edition this collection translates
Three distinct versions of this sūtra circulate in the Chinese canon. An earlier, incomplete translation in six fascicles (T0376, the “Six-Fascicle Text,” tr. Faxian and Buddhabhadra, c. 418 CE) covers only material corresponding to roughly the first third of Dharmakṣema’s text and ends before the sūtra’s central teachings on buddha-nature are reached. Dharmakṣema’s own translation (T0374), forty fascicles in thirteen chapters, is the Northern Edition — the version this collection translates in full. A later editorial team in the Liu Song, led by Huiyan, Huiguan, and the lay scholar Xie Lingyun, cross-checked Dharmakṣema’s text against a Sanskrit manuscript Faxian had brought back and produced the Southern Edition (T0375), thirty-six fascicles reorganized into twenty-five chapters. This collection translates only the Northern Edition, and preserves its fascicle and chapter numbering throughout — part numbers in this collection correspond one-to-one with the Northern Edition’s own forty fascicles (卷), not with the Southern Edition’s different scheme.
The base text runs to roughly 335,000 Chinese characters. Fascicle length is unusually even for a text this size — every fascicle falls between about 6,200 and 10,400 characters, with no single outsized or truncated fascicle — which is why this collection follows the straightforward convention of one part per fascicle, forty parts in all, rather than subdividing chapters further the way some shorter treatises on this site do.
Structure: thirteen chapters, several spanning many fascicles
The Northern Edition names thirteen chapters (品), several of which run six or seven fascicles and are themselves divided by the sūtra’s own colophon into numbered sub-sections (之一, 之二, 之三…):
| Chapter | Fascicles | Parts |
|---|---|---|
| 壽命品 (The Buddha’s Lifespan) | 1–3 (之一 through 之三, sharing fascicle 3 with the next two chapters) | 1–3 |
| 金剛身品 (The Vajra Body) | 3 | 3 |
| 名字功德品 (Virtues of This Sūtra’s Name) | 3 | 3 |
| 如來性品 (The Tathāgata’s Nature) | 4–10 (之一 through 之七) | 4–10 |
| 一切大眾所問品 (Questions from the Whole Assembly) | 10 | 10 |
| 現病品 (Manifesting Illness) | 11 | 11 |
| 聖行品 (Noble Conduct) | 11–14 (之一 through 之四) | 11–14 |
| 梵行品 (Pure Conduct) | 15–20 (之一 through 之六) | 15–20 |
| 嬰兒行品 (Infant-Like Conduct) | 20 | 20 |
| 光明遍照高貴德王菩薩品 (The Bodhisattva King of Light) | 21–26 (之一 through 之六) | 21–26 |
| 師子吼菩薩品 (The Bodhisattva Lion’s Roar) | 27–32 (之一 through 之六) | 27–32 |
| 迦葉菩薩品 (The Bodhisattva Kāśyapa) | 33–38 (之一 through 之六) | 33–38 |
| 憍陳如品 (The Chapter on Kauṇḍinya) | 39–40 (之一 through 之二) | 39–40 |
This collection’s part titles keep the sūtra’s own 之一/之二… numbering visible rather than smoothing chapters that span several fascicles into a single undifferentiated block.
Commentary sources, and a version caveat that matters throughout
This sūtra attracted an unusually rich commentarial tradition, but three of its major commentaries were not all written against the same edition, and citing them without noting which edition each assumes would misrepresent what they actually say:
- Huiyuan’s Commentary on the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (大般涅槃經義記, T1764, 隋 慧遠述) is written directly against the Northern Edition translated here, in the same fascicle order, and is this collection’s primary commentarial source. A correction to how this note previously described it: Huiyuan’s own “卷” divisions do not correspond one-to-one with the sūtra’s forty fascicles — the extant text (missing its own fascicles 1 and 3) runs to only about ten “卷” of commentary in total, each covering roughly four sūtra fascicles on average, and a commentary-fascicle boundary can fall in the middle of a sūtra fascicle’s own content. Locating the right passage therefore means searching by keyword or topic within the commentary, not assuming “義記卷八” discusses this collection’s Part 8 — confirmed directly while preparing Part 8, whose opening section (the nectar/three-refuges verses) turned up in the commentary’s unlabeled span between its own 卷二 and 卷四, well before its own 卷八 heading.
- Bao Liang’s Compilation of Explanations of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (大般涅槃經集解, T1763, 梁 寶亮等集), seventy-one fascicles compiling commentary from more than a dozen fifth- and sixth-century masters, is organized around the Southern Edition but is cited in this collection wherever it preserves material relevant to a Northern Edition passage — most importantly for the icchantika question in 如來性品 and 一切大眾所問品 (Parts 4–10), where it preserves some of the only surviving fragments of Zhu Daosheng’s own reasoning for his famous, initially condemned claim that even the icchantika possesses buddha-nature.
- Zhiyi and Guanding’s Profound Meaning of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (大般涅槃經玄義, T1765) and Commentary on the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (大般涅槃經疏, T1767) are both written against the Southern Edition’s twenty-five-chapter scheme, which does not map chapter-for-chapter or fascicle-for-fascicle onto the Northern Edition. Wherever this collection cites either work, the note identifies the corresponding Southern Edition chapter and fascicle explicitly, rather than asserting a direct correspondence to the Northern Edition part being discussed. Readers should not assume a citation from these two works to “fascicle N” means Northern Edition fascicle N.
Where no surviving ancient commentary treats a passage, reading notes are marked as original commentary from Ru-Yi Meditation Center, following this site’s standing practice.
Core terminology
| Chinese | English | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 一闡提 | icchantika | Kept as the Sanskrit loanword, matching this site’s Foxing Lun pages. This sūtra is the classical locus for the debate over whether the icchantika can attain buddhahood; Part 1 already excludes the icchantika from the assembly’s universal loving-kindness, setting up a tension the sūtra’s later chapters (especially 如來性品) address directly. |
| 佛性 | buddha-nature | Matched to this site’s existing Foxing Lun and tathāgatagarbha-line pages. |
| 常樂我淨 | permanence, bliss, self, purity | The sūtra’s reversal of the four ordinary marks (impermanence, suffering, no-self, impurity), applied to nirvāṇa and the Dharma-body — a central doctrinal thread from 壽命品 onward. |
| 大般涅槃 | Mahāparinirvāṇa | Kept as the Sanskrit title throughout rather than translated as “Great Final Nirvāṇa,” matching how this sūtra is referred to in English-language scholarship generally. |
| 波羅奢花 | palāśa flower | The flame-of-the-forest tree (Butea monosperma), whose red-orange blossoms furnish this sūtra’s recurring simile for blood appearing on skin in anguish. Distinguished from 波利質多 (pārijāta), a different tree named later in Part 1’s list of heavenly flowers — the two are not interchangeable despite superficially similar transliteration patterns. |
| 力士 (力士生地) | the Mallas | The clan/people of Kuśinagara, not “strongmen” in a generic sense; 力士生地 is rendered “the land/birthplace of the Mallas.” |
| 阿利羅跋提河 | the Ajitavatī River | Following the identification used in existing English-language scholarship on this sūtra, rather than coining a fresh transliteration. |
| 無邊身 (菩薩) | the bodhisattva Boundless Body | Translated rather than transliterated, since 無邊身 functions descriptively in the text (a body literally without bound, containing cities in every pore) and has no fixed independent Sanskrit-name convention on this site the way Mañjuśrī or Mahākāśyapa do. |
| 摩訶迦旃延 / 薄俱羅 / 優波難陀 | Mahākātyāyana / Bakkula / Upananda | Standard Sanskrit forms of well-attested disciples’ names. |
| 娑婆世界 | the Sahā world | Kept as the standard transliteration (this world-system, the one Śākyamuni teaches in), matching general site convention for this term. |
| 伊字三點 | the three dots of the letter i | The sūtra’s central simile (Part 2) for the inseparability of liberation (解脫), the Dharma-body (法身), and great prajñā (摩訶般若): three things, none of which is individually nirvāṇa, that together — configured as Maheśvara’s three eyes rather than merely joined or merely juxtaposed — constitute it. Rendered literally as “the letter i” (the Sanskrit vowel diacritic the simile describes) rather than reaching for an English-alphabet analogy, which would misrepresent the visual logic of three dots forming one character. |
| 純陀 | Cunda | The Pāli/Sanskrit form of this donor’s name, matching how he is generally identified in Buddhist scholarship; distinct from the Cunda who offers the Buddha’s last meal at Pāvā in the Pāli Mahāparinibbāna Sutta narrative, though the two figures and episodes are historically related. |
| 純陀 (title as literary etymology) | — | Part 2 has the assembly gloss Cunda’s own name as meaning “one who understands the subtle meaning” (名解妙義), reflecting the sūtra’s own Chinese-text wordplay rather than an independently attested Sanskrit etymology; this gloss is translated as the text presents it, without asserting it as established Sanskrit philology. |
| 摩訶迦葉 | Mahākāśyapa | The disciple to whom the Buddha entrusts the Dharma in Part 2 (壽命品), prior to his own absence from the assembly noted in Part 1 — his absence in Part 1 and this entrustment in Part 2 are not in tension; he is simply not yet present at Kuśinagara when the entrustment is spoken. |
| 迦葉菩薩 (Part 3 onward) | the bodhisattva Kāśyapa | Distinct from Mahākāśyapa (摩訶迦葉), the elder arhat entrusted with the Dharma in Part 2. This Kāśyapa is introduced in Part 3 as a young bodhisattva of the brahmin clan from Tāla village, and is the principal questioner for a large stretch of the sūtra ahead (the 迦葉菩薩品, Parts 33–38, is named for him). Kept distinguished in translation as “the bodhisattva Kāśyapa” wherever both figures could otherwise be confused. |
| 七種羯磨 | the seven disciplinary acts | Introduced in Part 3: expulsion (驅遣), reproach (訶責), probation (置/依止), public censure (舉罪), suspension pending acknowledgment of an offense (不可見), suspension pending repentance (滅), and suspension for an unrelinquished wrong view (不捨惡見). Rendered descriptively rather than with fixed Vinaya-Sanskrit terms, since Huiyuan glosses each against a specific canonical precedent rather than a single technical vocabulary. |
| 密迹力士 | the vajra-wielding spirit Guhyapāda | Kept as the standard Sanskrit reconstruction for this class of vajra-bearing guardian spirit (also transliterated Guhyapada/Vajrapāṇi-adjacent in some traditions); the specific episode in Part 3 (crushing a disguised offender at a poṣadha assembly) is declared by the Buddha, within the same passage, to be a manifested apparition rather than an historical event — this is stated directly in the sūtra’s own text, not an interpretive gloss added here. |
| 覺德 / 有德王 | Kakuvimarda / King Yǒudé | The monk and king of Part 3’s central parable on defending the Dharma with weapons. 覺德 (Kakuvimarda) is identified by the Buddha as a past life of the buddha Kāśyapa (迦葉佛, one of the six buddhas preceding Śākyamuni — not the bodhisattva Kāśyapa of this sūtra’s dialogue, nor Mahākāśyapa); 有德 (Yǒudé, “Possessed of Virtue”) is identified as a past life of Śākyamuni himself. Rendered by transliteration (Kakuvimarda, reconstructed from Pāli Sanghakuvimaḍḍana-type forms used for this figure in comparative sources) and by descriptive translation of the king’s name respectively, since 有德王 functions as a plain descriptive title in the Chinese with no independently fixed Sanskrit proper name on record. |
| 阿閦佛 / 阿閦佛國 | Akṣobhya / the buddha-land of Akṣobhya | The eastern buddha and pure land to which King Yǒudé and his soldiers, and later the monk Kakuvimarda, are reborn — kept as the standard Sanskrit name (Akṣobhya, “the Unshakable”), matching general Mahāyāna usage. |
| 八味 | the eight flavors | Part 3’s expansion of the six ordinary tastes (bitter, sour, sweet, pungent, salty, bland) into eight by dividing “sweet” three ways (not-bitter, not-sour, not-pungent) — applied first to Cunda’s offered food in Part 2, then again to this sūtra’s own name in Part 3 as permanence, constancy, security, coolness, freedom from old age, freedom from death, freedom from defilement, and true happiness. The doubled use of the same eight-part structure for food and for the sūtra’s name is deliberate on the text’s own part, not a translation artifact. |
| 示現 | manifest / manifestation | Part 4’s central verb for the sūtra’s account of the Buddha’s biography: birth, marriage, Rāhula’s birth, renunciation, austerities, and enlightenment are all 示現 — outwardly shown to beings for their benefit — rather than events the eternal Dharma-body actually underwent. Rendered consistently as “manifest”/”manifestation” throughout, distinguished from 化 (transformation-body activity generally) and 應 (responsive appearance), which this sūtra sometimes uses in adjacent but not fully interchangeable senses; a future part should confirm whether the site’s existing Yogācāra pages (化身/應身/法身 three-body vocabulary) need a cross-reference note here once 如來性品 concludes. |
| 一闡提 (Part 4 development) | icchantika | Part 4 has the Buddha say he himself “manifests as an icchantika” within Jambudvīpa while explicitly denying he is one (“一闡提者云何能成阿耨多羅三藐三菩提” — how could an icchantika ever attain unsurpassed, complete awakening?). This is the sūtra’s first move toward treating the icchantika designation as a temporary, alterable condition rather than a fixed nature, following Part 1’s quieter exclusion of the icchantika from the assembly’s universal loving-kindness. Later parts in 如來性品 (Parts 4–10) should track this thread toward the sūtra’s fuller treatment, cross-checking Bao Liang’s T1763 for Zhu Daosheng’s surviving reasoning. |
| 阿那含 / 那含 | non-returner (anāgāmin) / returner | Part 4 distinguishes these as a minimal pair — one who takes on a body again after this life vs. one who does not — glossing the lamp-simile’s proper scope (extinguishing that leaves nothing behind applies cleanly to the arhat, only loosely and “obliquely” to the anāgāmin, who still carries some remainder of craving). |
| 一闡提 (Part 5 tension) | icchantika | Part 5 states outright that the icchantika is “incurable” (不可治) — the one exception to an otherwise universal healing of Jambudvīpa’s beings — and then, within the same fascicle’s own litany of liberation’s marks, states that “it could not possibly be so” that the icchantika condition is forever fixed, since a single moment of faith extinguishes it. These two statements are held in visible tension rather than harmonized in this collection’s reading notes; readers should track how later parts of 如來性品 (Parts 4–10) and the 迦葉菩薩品 (Parts 33–38) resolve or continue to hold this tension, cross-checking Bao Liang’s T1763 for Zhu Daosheng’s surviving reasoning. |
| 迦蘭伽 / 命命鳥 | the kalaviṅka bird / the jīvaṃjīvaka bird | Kept as Sanskrit loanwords (kalaviṅka is the standard term for this mythical bird of exceptionally beautiful voice, invoked elsewhere across Mahāyāna literature; jīvaṃjīvaka, “life-giving” or two-headed bird, is a related but distinct legendary bird also prized for its call). Both are used in Part 5 as a limit case for how a likeness can be apt for one comparison (the Buddha’s voice) and wholly inapt for a superficially similar one (empty space), despite sharing an abstract property. |
| The “marks of liberation” litany (Part 5) | — | This collection numbers no specific count for this litany (commentarial and popular tradition sometimes cites it loosely as containing “the many names of liberation”); rather than assign a fixed number not clearly stated in the base text itself, this collection simply translates the full sequence as it appears, letting its cumulative, non-exhaustive character speak for itself, consistent with the reading note attached to that section. |
| 四種人 (Part 6) | the four kinds of people | Part 6’s own fourfold scheme of Dharma-protectors — one still possessing the nature of affliction, a stream-enterer/once-returner, a non-returner, and an arhat — is glossed by Huiyuan as bodhisattva-ground designations borrowed from śrāvaka-path vocabulary for pedagogical reasons, not as claiming that fourth-ground bodhisattvas and śrāvaka arhats occupy the same rank. This collection keeps the plain śrāvaka-path terms (stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, arhat) as the text itself does, with Huiyuan’s mapping onto specific grounds recorded only in the reading note, not imported into the translation itself. |
| 依法不依人 / 依義不依語 / 依智不依識 / 依了義經不依不了義經 | the four reliances | Standard, fixed English renderings for this sūtra’s famous fourfold hermeneutic (reliance on the Dharma not the person, the meaning not the words, wisdom not consciousness, the definitive teaching not the provisional), matching how these are generally cited across English-language Buddhist scholarship. Kept consistent for any future part that references them. |
| 旃陀羅 | caṇḍāla | Kept as the standard Sanskrit loanword (an outcaste class in the traditional Indian social hierarchy) rather than translated descriptively, matching how the term is conventionally handled in English-language Buddhist scholarship; the usurper-king parable in Part 6 depends on the term’s connotation of social illegitimacy for the throne, which a purely descriptive rendering would flatten. |
| 我 (Part 7, as buddha-nature) | self | Part 7 has the Buddha explicitly redefine “self” (我) as a synonym for the tathāgatagarbha and buddha-nature, distinct from the ordinary, deluded notion of a fixed personal self that earlier no-self teaching denies. This collection renders 我 as “self” throughout rather than switching to a different English word in this technical usage, since the sūtra’s own argument depends on readers tracking that the same Chinese word is being given two different referents (the ordinary self that does not exist, and buddha-nature, which does) — see the fourth fascicle’s four-inversions passage and this fascicle’s more detailed restatement for the site’s fullest discussion of this distinction. |
| 十對 (Part 7) | the ten paired contrasts (Māra’s teaching vs. the Buddha’s) | This collection’s own descriptive label (not a term from the sūtra itself) for the structured sequence of ten “if someone teaches X, that is Māra; if someone teaches Y, that is the Buddha” pairs that make up the bulk of Part 7’s opening section, following Huiyuan’s own count and analysis of the passage’s structure. |
| 波羅夷 | pārājika / one of the gravest offenses | Kept as the standard Vinaya technical term (transliterated) on first use in each context, glossed descriptively elsewhere, for the four offenses (sexual intercourse, theft, killing a human being, and false claims to superhuman attainment) whose commission traditionally means permanent expulsion from the monastic community — central to Part 7’s extended discussion of when an apparent claim to attainment does or does not actually cross this line. |
| 三歸 / 三歸依 | the three refuges | Distinguished from 三寶 (“the Three Jewels,” the objects taken refuge in). Part 8 opens by teaching that the three refuges have both a separate aspect (別相), proper for worldly/lesser teaching, and a single essential nature (一體) identical to buddha-nature and to self — the fascicle’s own point is that a bodhisattva should hold to the second rather than the first. |
| 甘露 | nectar | Rendered as “nectar” rather than transliterated as amṛta, matching this collection’s general practice of using an established English word where one exists. Part 8’s opening verses use the same substance-metaphor (nectar to the faithful, poison to the slanderer) that Part 3’s eight flavors and Part 8’s own closing verses (“the place of nectar” for the deathless, 不放逸/heedfulness as its gate) return to; kept consistent as “nectar” throughout. |
| 十四音 / 半字・滿字 | the fourteen sounds / the half-letter and the full letter | Part 8’s extended letter-mysticism, glossing each sound of the Siddham syllabary (the script used to write Sanskrit) with a Dharma-meaning. Because these are units of sound rather than translatable words, this collection keeps each Chinese transliteration character as the entry’s own headword rather than reconstructing an unverified Sanskrit phonetic value — consistent with this collection’s standing practice (see the note on Part 1’s proper names, below) of not inventing unattested reconstructions. 半字 (“half-letter”) and 滿字 (“full letter”) are kept literal rather than replaced with “provisional/complete teaching,” since Part 8 uses the same half/full vocabulary in two senses that are not quite parallel (doctrinal content elsewhere in the sūtra; the root syllabary itself here) and literal translation lets a reader track both. |
| 迦隣提 | the kāraṇḍava bird | Paired throughout Part 8 with 鴛鴦 (the mandarin duck) as two birds that never travel apart, illustrating dharmas — suffering/bliss, permanence/impermanence, self/no-self — that likewise cannot be taken singly. This collection tentatively identifies 迦隣提 with the kāraṇḍava, a water-bird named in other Mahāyāna sūtras’ bird-lists (e.g. the Sukhāvatīvyūha), rather than with the kalaviṅka (迦陵頻伽) of Part 5’s 迦蘭伽/命命鳥 entry, whose Chinese transliteration uses different characters. This identification should be treated as tentative rather than settled Sanskrit philology. |
| 金錍 | the golden probe | The physician’s lancet in Part 8’s central simile for degrees of seeing buddha-nature: a hundred blind men have the film over their eyes cut away, and see only by slow, hazy degrees, matched to a “one finger, two fingers, three fingers” exchange — a simile Huiyuan reads as reaching all the way up to the tenth bodhisattva ground, not merely to ordinary beings. |
| 先陀婆 | saindhava | Part 9’s famous secret-word parable: a king’s single word means salt, a vessel, water, or a horse depending on context, understood correctly only by the minister who grasps his intent. Kept as the standard Sanskrit transliteration (well attested in comparative Buddhist scholarship on this parable) rather than translated, since the parable’s own point depends on the word being a single sound carrying four distinct referents. |
| 一闡提 (Part 9 similes) | icchantika | Part 9 defends the icchantika’s exclusion from this sūtra’s universal “cause for bodhi” through more than a dozen paired similes (scorched seed, pearl in mud, vajra excepting tortoise shell and goat horn, a wound with no skin for poison to enter through, and more). Huiyuan reads these consistently as claims about a total absence of receptive capacity, not claims that the icchantika is a worse offender than one who has committed the four gravest offenses or the five heinous crimes — those offenders are repeatedly named in the same passages as still reachable. See the Part 9 reading notes for the full structural analysis. |
| 丈夫相 (Part 9) | the mark of a true man | Part 9’s equation of buddha-nature with manhood, and not-knowing-buddha-nature with womanhood, regardless of the body either is born into — glossed by Huiyuan as operating strictly on the axis of understanding (grasping the truth = “male,” failing to grasp it = “female”), not physical form; a woman who knows she possesses buddha-nature is directly said to bear this same mark, and the sūtra’s own text has Kāśyapa immediately clarify that he does not mean this “according to the ways of the world,” a clarification the Buddha praises. Translated literally rather than softened, with the reading note carrying Huiyuan’s clarification of what the metaphor does and does not claim. |
| 有餘義 / 無餘義 | left with something unsaid / stated without remainder | Part 10’s own formal hermeneutic, introduced by Cunda and closed by a definition from the Buddha: only the wholesome dharmas of permanence and bliss that aid the path are ever stated “without remainder,” fully and unconditionally; everything else the Buddha teaches — a string of provisional verses about rivers, forests, women, kings, food, and more, each challenged in turn by Mañjuśrī — carries a silent qualification legible only once the specific listener it was spoken for is identified. Kept literal rather than glossed as “provisional/complete teaching” to preserve the sūtra’s own two-term technical pair, distinct from the 半字/滿字 (half-letter/full-letter) vocabulary of Part 8, which sorts something else (the root of language itself, not the scope of a given statement). |
| 一闡提 (Part 10 definition) | icchantika | Part 10 gives the sūtra’s most precise definition yet: one who utters harsh, unrepentant slander of the true Dharma; one who commits a gravest offense or heinous crime without ever feeling fear, shame, or confessing it; or one who denies that the Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha exist at all — in every case turning on persistence and refusal rather than the act alone. The mango-seed simile in this same fascicle states that the condition dissolves the instant a wholesome mind arises (“he is then no longer called an icchantika”), consistent with Part 9’s own reading of the label as naming a present, structural incapacity rather than a fixed, permanent essence. |
| 拘尸那城歡喜 / 善賢 / 羖羝德 | the caṇḍāla Joy / Sudhānā / Goshirsha | Three minor named figures in Part 10 for whom the Buddha is said to have taught a specific verse on a specific occasion — a caṇḍāla predicted to swift buddhahood, a woman who named her own condition as one of powerlessness, and a brahmin ascetic practicing self-starvation. Kept as proper names (transliterated where a form is well-attested, translated descriptively for 歡喜 and 善賢 where it is not, following this collection’s standing practice for Part 1’s assembly list) since each figure anchors one of the fascicle’s provisional-verse case studies to an actual, individual audience rather than a general claim. |
| 病行 / 病行處 | sick conduct / a place of sickness-conduct | Part 11’s own technical pair, introduced at the close of 現病品 and formally named among the sūtra’s five practices at the opening of 聖行品. “Has a place of sickness-conduct” describes the five kinds of person (stream-enterer through pratyekabuddha) who still carry some remaining fetter, contrasted against the Tathāgata, who has none; “sick conduct” as a bodhisattva practice is, per Huiyuan, not the same category — it names conduct that treats illness (spiritual or physical), most fully exemplified later in this collection by King Ajātaśatru’s repentance in 梵行品, not conduct that merely exhibits it. |
| 如來祕密之教 | the Tathāgata’s own secret teaching | Part 11’s own name for a catalogue of paradoxical statements (“the Tathāgata is a lion, and yet not a lion”) that describe the Buddha through a conventional image while denying, in the same breath, that the image is literally true. Distinct from 如來祕藏/祕密之藏 (“the Tathāgata’s own secret treasury,” the recurring term since Part 2 for buddha-nature and the tathāgatagarbha itself) — 祕密之教 names a rhetorical technique, not a doctrine, and this collection keeps the two phrases distinct in translation accordingly. |
| 十住 / 十地 / 初不動地 | the ten abiding-stages / the ten grounds / the first unshakable ground | This collection has already used “the ten abiding-stages” (十住) for the bodhisattva rank invoked in Part 8’s golden-probe simile; Part 11 introduces the “unshakable ground” (不動地) attained through steadfast precept-keeping, which Huiyuan is careful to identify as the first ground’s own unshakability, distinct from the more advanced unshakability traditionally located at the eighth ground — the two should not be conflated despite sharing a name. |
| 四念處 / 堪忍地 | the four foundations of mindfulness / the ground of forbearance | Part 12’s meditation sequence: contemplating the body (down to bare, colored bone), feeling, and consciousness in turn, each yielding no fixed self, with the fourth traditional foundation (mental objects) left unelaborated since the first three, taken together, already accomplish the same general demonstration. Attaining this fourfold contemplation is said to establish the bodhisattva at “the ground of forbearance” (堪忍地), kept distinct in translation from the unshakable ground (不動地) reached through precept-keeping in Part 11 — two different grounds reached through two different practices, not two names for the same attainment. |
| 三受 / 三苦 | the three feelings / the three sufferings | Part 12’s technical pair resolving the sūtra’s apparent tension between teaching that everything is suffering and teaching that real pleasure exists: the feeling of suffering contains all three kinds of suffering (acute suffering, the suffering built into conditioned activity, and the suffering of change), while the feeling of bliss and the neutral feeling each contain only the latter two. Pleasant feeling is therefore real as an experience without ever being free of the suffering underlying it — both scriptural claims hold simultaneously, at different levels of analysis, rather than one canceling the other. |
| 頂生 (王) | Mūrdhaja | The cakravartin king born from a boil on his father’s own head, whose story of conquering every human continent and then falling from the summit of Trāyastriṃśa heaven illustrates the suffering of separation from what one loves in Part 12. Kept as the standard Sanskrit reconstruction (“Crown-Born,” matching the name’s own sense in Chinese) rather than translated, following this collection’s practice for named figures with an independently attested form; revealed, at the story’s close, to be a past life of the Buddha himself, with the Śakra of that same episode identified as a past life of the buddha Kāśyapa. |
| 九種愛 | the nine similes for craving | Part 13’s classification of craving as the true cause (集諦) of the five aggregates: like an unpaid debt, a rākṣasī wife, a snake coiled on a flower-stem, food forced down though unsuited, a harlot, a māluta vine-seed, proud flesh in a wound, a fierce gale, and a comet. Not a flat list: per Huiyuan, the first binds even the noble (śrāvaka/pratyekabuddha), the next six harm the ordinary person only (each closing “the bodhisattva alone excepted”), the eighth (the gale uprooting Śāriputra’s own root of bodhi) reaches even an advanced disciple, and the ninth returns to the ordinary person generally. |
| 陀羅驃 / 求那 | dravya / guṇa | Part 13’s transliteration of two Vaiśeṣika-style philosophical categories (substance, and the quality inhering in it) within the list of things the eightfold path sees through — invoked as categories from outside the Buddhist schools proper, not adopted as the sūtra’s own analytic scheme. |
| 六喻 for the path being one (Part 13) | the physician’s water / the many names for water / the goldsmith’s gold / fire / consciousness / the sense-object | Six similes answering Kāśyapa’s challenge that the Buddha has named many different things “the path” elsewhere (faith, heedfulness, effort, mindfulness of the body, right concentration, buddha-mindfulness samādhi, contemplation of impermanence, forest solitude, teaching others, precepts, good friendship, loving-kindness, wisdom, giving — fourteen in all). Per Huiyuan, the first three establish the point (one thing serving many treatments; one thing named per audience; one thing counted out per the practitioner’s rank) and the last three reinforce each in turn. The gold simile’s own numbered list (one path through twenty) is this fascicle’s densest technical passage; see the Part 13 reading note for Huiyuan’s gloss on 見/慧/智 and the Satyasiddhi/Madhyama Āgama disagreement over where 信行/法行/信解脫/見到 fall relative to the path of seeing and cultivation. |
| Water-names (波尼, 欝持, 紗利藍, 紗利, 婆耶) | untranslated / tentative | Part 13’s list of names for water in different tongues, spoken to a thirsty crowd. Huiyuan himself treats these as likely dialectal variants rather than confidently identified Sanskrit terms; this collection follows that hedge rather than asserting more precision than the commentary claims. 甘露 (“nectar”) and 牛乳 (“cow’s milk”) in the same list are genuine Chinese words, not transliterations, and are translated accordingly. |
| 中智 / 上智 | middling wisdom / superior wisdom | Part 13’s resolution of why the Buddha can say the Four Noble Truths already contain every dharma and yet that he has “never taught” most of what they contain: the two lesser vehicles’ middling wisdom grasps each category (the aggregates, the sense-fields, the elements, craving, and so on) under one general aspect, while a buddha’s or bodhisattva’s superior wisdom resolves the very same category into an unlimited number of particular instances. Per Huiyuan, nothing new is being withheld — the same four truths are known at an incomparably finer grain, distinguished along three axes (scope, depth, and grain of resolution). |
| 世諦 / 第一義諦 / 實諦 | worldly truth / ultimate truth / the real truth | Part 13’s three-way technical vocabulary, not fully interchangeable. Worldly truth and ultimate truth are Mañjuśrī’s opening pair, resolved through Huiyuan’s four-tenet-school schema (立性宗/破性宗/破相宗/顯實宗, shallow to deep) into several valid sub-analyses rather than one fixed definition. The real truth (實諦) is a further, separate technical term defined afterward through seven criteria (true, non-inverted, non-false, Mahāyāna, buddha-spoken, one undivided path, having permanence-bliss-self-purity) and is where the Tathāgata/empty space/buddha-nature identification is made — kept distinct from “ultimate truth” in translation since the sūtra itself introduces it as a separate question. |
| 如來 / 虛空 / 佛性 (Part 13, as three names for one reality) | the Tathāgata / empty space / buddha-nature | Part 13 has Mañjuśrī treat these three as apparently identical, and the Buddha’s answer affirms they share one reality without quite making them synonyms: per Huiyuan, “如來” here names specifically the Dharma-body, already arrived at ultimate purity (result); “佛性” names that same purity considered from where an ordinary being still stands, not yet manifest (cause); “虛空” names neither cause nor result, but the bare fact of this reality’s own equality, apart from every determinate nature. |
| 外道計常樂我淨我 (Part 13) | the heretics’ case for permanence, bliss, purity, and self | Part 13 closes with Mañjuśrī voicing, at full length, the strongest case rival traditions make for their own claim to permanence (eight arguments), bliss (five), purity (three), and a self (eight) — twenty-four arguments in total, kept untrimmed in this translation since the next fascicle answers this catalogue specifically, not a summary of it. The Buddha’s rebuke closing this fascicle (a run of some twenty “是諸外道…” clauses) is, per Huiyuan, a moral diagnosis of the mindset that clings to these views, not the point-by-point logical refutation of the twenty-four arguments themselves — that refutation is reserved for Part 14, continuing the same dialogue without a change of speaker or setting. Readers should not mistake the fascicle’s closing rebuke for a completed rebuttal. |
| 破常八複次 (Part 14) | the point-by-point refutation of the eight permanence arguments | Part 14 answers Part 13’s eight arguments not in their original order but in three batches: the first two (karmic retribution, the consequence of killing) fall together to a single general point (“whatever arises from cause and condition is impermanent”), paired with buddha-nature’s own ten-fold definition of permanence to show that denying the heretics’ permanence is not denying permanence outright; the eighth (ordinary property enduring) is dismissed as mistaking resemblance across change for identity; and the middle five (recollection, recognition, practiced skill, counting, recitation) are split between an analysis of mind’s impermanence (covering four of the five) and form’s impermanence via the body’s embryonic stages (covering the fifth, recognizing a face or hand). Bliss and purity receive no comparable point-by-point answer: the sūtra dismisses both in one line each (“impermanent, and therefore suffering; suffering, and therefore impure”), pointing back to Part 12’s resolution of the three feelings and three sufferings rather than repeating a five-fold and three-fold rebuttal. |
| 破我八複次 (Part 14) | the point-by-point refutation of the eight self arguments | Answered in four reordered pairs per Huiyuan: (1) the sense faculties as instruments of an agent, paired with (4) grasping tools to perform actions — both answered via the form/non-form framework and by reusing the “fixed recollection” analysis from the permanence refutation; (7) denial itself proving a self, paired with (8) companionship and its absence — both answered by showing the Tathāgata, empty space, and buddha-nature to have no companion, and that a self capable of being denied is thereby proven not to exist; (6) things combining to bring mutual benefit, paired with (5) an infant’s inborn urge to nurse — answered by exposing “benefit” as a bare label (like nicknaming a poor man “wealthy”) and by noting the same infant equally grasps at feces and fire; (2) involuntary marks (breathing, blinking) paired with (3) involuntary salivation at seeing another eat — answered via the sleeping person (who shows none of these marks) and the wooden puppet (which shows all of them), with the Tathāgata named as the one case where a true self is present despite showing none of the ordinary marks at all. |
| 生盲摸乳喻 | the blind man and the color of milk | Part 14’s closing simile for both the permanence and self refutations: a man blind from birth asks after milk’s color and is told, in succession, that it is white like a conch, textured like rice-flour, soft like snow, cold like a crane — four true partial comparisons that never once arrive at the color itself. Read as illustrating how a heretic seizing on one true fragment of the Buddha’s teaching (permanence here, self there) resembles the real virtue in one respect without ever actually seeing it, which is also, per Huiyuan, why the sūtra answers all twenty-four arguments individually rather than dismissing the heretics’ position at a single stroke. |
| 轉法輪 (Part 14, five similes) | “turning the wheel of the Dharma” | Answering Mañjuśrī’s suggestion that the Buddha, dying tonight, is at last teaching something new: eye-consciousness arising through the eye/form/light/attention, fire from a drill’s parts, ghee churned from curds, a sprout from a seed, and a drum’s sound each show several conditions producing an effect with no single component “doing” it — and each simile closes with the formula “if it does not do X, this not-doing is itself the true turning of the wheel, and the true turning of the wheel is itself the Tathāgata,” treating “turning the wheel” and “the Tathāgata” as the same not-acting named from two angles, not two things linked by inference. |
| 十番對比 (波羅㮈 vs 拘尸那) | the ten-fold Vārāṇasī/Kuśinagara comparison | Part 14’s answer to whether tonight’s teaching is “more” than the first turning of the wheel: eight real, unhidden differences (audience’s vehicle, faculty, diligence, results attained, who requested the teaching, content taught, and how far the sound of it carried) are affirmed outright — what is denied is only the inference from “this differs from that” to “the Tathāgata now does something he did not always do.” The cakravartin’s wheel-treasure simile closes the point: one wheel subdues the unsubdued and stabilizes the already-subdued without ever being two wheels. |
| 二十五三昧 / 二十五有 | the twenty-five concentrations / the twenty-five states of existence | Part 14’s catalogue pairing one named concentration to each of the twenty-five states of saṃsāric existence (the four continents, six heavens of the desire realm, four dhyānas plus their sub-realms, and four formless spheres). Per Huiyuan, “breaking” all twenty-five at the first bodhisattva ground does not contradict the fact that a first-ground bodhisattva has not exhausted birth-and-death: what is broken is only the coarse residue of segmented birth-and-death in each realm, not its subtle residue (exhausted only at buddhahood) nor the transformational birth-and-death a bodhisattva continues to enter afterward — including the deliberate rebirth in hell described immediately afterward in the same fascicle, “not as the fruit of his own past karma, but through the power of his own mastery.” |
| 醍醐六階喻 | the six-stage dairy simile (cow, milk, curds, fresh butter, clarified butter, ghee) | Part 14’s simile ranking this sūtra above every other Great Vehicle scripture: per Huiyuan, the six stages track six real stages of the Buddha’s teaching career (his own response-body; the twelve divisions of śrāvaka-vehicle scripture; the sūtra genre generally; the Vaipulya scriptures, reasoning from particular cases to a principle; the perfection of wisdom, reasoning from principle to practice; and this sūtra itself, disclosing the underlying dharma-nature-nirvāṇa directly) rather than an arbitrary count. The “如來” identified with ghee is specifically the Dharma-body, not the response-body (“the cow”) at the simile’s other end. |
| 雪山童子半偈 | the Snow Mountain Boy and the half-verse | Part 14’s closing narrative, among this sūtra’s most celebrated passages: a former life of the Buddha as a Himalayan ascetic who hears half of “all conditioned things are impermanent; this is the nature of arising and ceasing” from a demon (Śakra in disguise, testing him) and gives up his body to hear the other half, “arising and ceasing themselves extinguished, this very extinction is bliss.” Per Huiyuan, Śakra’s test runs in five deliberate moves (fearsome form, an attractive half-truth, a claim of cannibalism, an appealing second half-verse, then a sudden demand for the body) matching the “three trials of gold” (burning, hammering, grinding) Śakra names in the same speech — a single test can be faked, so three genuine provocations are needed. |
| 超十二劫 (Part 14) | surpassing twelve kalpas before Maitreya | The sūtra’s own count of how much time the Snow Mountain Boy’s sacrifice let Śākyamuni close relative to Maitreya, differing from other scriptures’ “nine kalpas.” Per Huiyuan, one tradition holds the initial gap was twelve kalpas, of which three were closed through diligent practice and a further nine only later (at the third incalculable eon, through the buddha Puṣya’s praise) — so “nine kalpas” names the later increment other texts describe, “twelve kalpas” the total closed from the start. He adds, without softening it, that this whole “surpassing of kalpas” framework is treated as literally real within the Abhidharma schools but only as a skillful, non-literal expedient within the Great Vehicle, where a bodhisattva who has entered the fixed lineage cultivates practice on equal footing with every other such bodhisattva, with no true “earlier” or “later” between them. |
| 十二部經 | the twelve divisions of the scriptures | Part 15’s opening definition of the traditional twelve-fold genre classification of Buddhist scripture (sūtra, geya, vyākaraṇa, gāthā, udāna, nidāna, avadāna, itivṛttaka, jātaka, vaipulya, adbhutadharma, upadeśa), given here with a worked example for each. Per Huiyuan, “sūtra” itself is used in three nested senses across this passage — the entire canon, the eleventh division specifically (plain prose discourse), and just the opening formula before further classification — a reader should track which sense a given occurrence intends rather than assume the term is univocal. |
| 四無量心 (Part 15, the count of four) | the four immeasurable minds (loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity) | Part 15 has Kāśyapa mount four separate arguments that these should be counted as three, two, or one (via their three shared objects — beings, dharmas, and no-object; via two personality types who need different pairs of them; and via “immeasurable” itself resisting a fixed count), which the Buddha answers first by reframing the whole question — dependent origination itself is taught as one link up through twelve depending on the audience, without contradiction — and then with four independent, stacked arguments for exactly four (distinct essential natures; mutual necessity as companions; exclusivity as a single mental “vessel” at any one moment; and a fourfold cross-tabulation of having a genuine object and having full mastery, with only buddhas and bodhisattvas occupying the cell with both). |
| 大慈 / 大悲 (Part 15) | great loving-kindness / great compassion | Part 15’s technical distinction: a bodhisattva can reach full equanimity toward superior enemies and loved ones alike through a graduated seven-grade practice (per Huiyuan, matching the Abhidharma-mahāvibhāṣā’s sevenfold scheme, not the ninefold division some traditions wrongly report) and still not possess “great” loving-kindness, since this accomplishment remains fragile — illustrated by four similes (a dried bean resisting an awl, a loyal house-dog against a skittish wild deer, ink on stone against ink on water, a bonfire against a lightning-flash). “Great” loving-kindness is reserved specifically for the first bodhisattva ground, where the icchantika — the theoretical limit case for provoking anger — draws none at all. |
| 慈觀是否虛妄 (Part 15) | whether compassion is an empty contemplation | Kāśyapa’s challenge that wishing beings well, when they do not visibly receive happiness, resembles the deliberate false-imaging used in loathsomeness meditation (seeing one’s own food as worms, one’s clothing as skin) — a real category of practice, making the challenge a fair one rather than a strawman. The Buddha’s answer distinguishes visualization laid over an unchanged object (loathsomeness meditation) from an actually demonstrated mastery over how reality itself appears (earth transformed to gold, a being seen as no being) — with the real/empty test being whether the practice actually severs the affliction it targets in the practitioner, independent of whether the object of the practice visibly changes. |
| 布施八事發願 | the eight gifts and their vows | Part 15’s closing sequence: food, drink, a vehicle, clothing, incense, bedding, a dwelling, and a lamp, each given with its own renewed vow reframing the material object as an image for a spiritual attainment (food as wisdom, drink as the Dharma’s flavor, a vehicle as the path itself, clothing as freedom from form, incense as moral fragrance, a bed as the ground of realization, a house as the whole Dharma-realm, a lamp as wisdom’s light). Per Huiyuan, these demonstrate the “purity of intention toward others” half of a giving practice whose “purity in one’s own practice” half (freedom from stinginess, from concern for reputation, from procedural fault, from discriminating among recipients, dedicated toward bodhi) is illustrated by the preceding poisoned-arrow simile — a wound treated before its cause is investigated, since insisting on the investigation first guarantees the treatment never happens. |
| 慈即如來 / 慈若無常即聲聞慈 | loving-kindness is the Tathāgata / counterfeit loving-kindness is a śrāvaka’s | Part 15’s closing pair of matched litanies (identical three-step chains run in opposite directions): the affirmative litany identifies some sixteen genuine attainments with loving-kindness and loving-kindness with the Tathāgata (the Great Vehicle, the path of bodhi, Brahmā, a father and mother, the inconceivable, buddha-nature, emptiness, permanence-bliss-self-purity, nectar, the buddha’s immeasurable domain); the negative litany identifies a matching set of defects (impermanence, suffering, impurity, a mere false notion, being conditioned, reaching only the four śrāvaka fruits) with a counterfeit loving-kindness, and that counterfeit with the śrāvaka who mistakes it for the real thing. |
| 五神通事蹟 (Part 16) | the five miracles of loving-kindness | Part 16’s answer to the challenge that compassion delivers no real benefit: five named case-histories (the grieving mother Vāsiṣṭhī restored to sanity, the laywoman Mahāsenadattā’s own flesh healing a dying monk, Devadatta’s stomachache cured from a distant city, five hundred blinded bandits given back their sight, twelve thousand mutilated Śākya women made whole) in which beings perceive the Buddha helping them in person while his body never actually leaves where he sits. Per Huiyuan, these demonstrate “無量門” (the immeasurable gateway): loving-kindness is not a power that happens to also work at a distance, but a single mental state already containing the full range of a buddha’s qualities. |
| 極愛一子地 | the ground of utmost love, as an only child | Part 16’s name for the ground a bodhisattva reaches through loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy — defined through five parental similes (joy at a child’s safety; grief at a child’s illness; removing something harmful from a child’s mouth; willingness to die alongside a doomed child, extended to wishing rebirth alongside the icchantika in hell; and unbroken attention through every ordinary moment). Per Huiyuan, this ground is identified with the first bodhisattva ground, the same threshold Part 15 named as where compassion first becomes “great” — this fivefold analysis is that same attainment’s own elaboration, not a separate teaching. |
| 為護正法斷婆羅門命 | killing the slandering brahmins to protect the Dharma | Part 16’s extended defense of the sūtra’s own account of a past-life king killing brahmins who slandered the Great Vehicle — met first by nine “even should…” impossibility hypotheticals establishing that the plain claim “the Tathāgata causes affliction” cannot be entertained at all, then by an argument that a bodhisattva practicing the six perfections is, in that very practice, structurally engaged in extending life, and finally by the specific case: the killing was done “out of loving affection, not an evil mind,” like a parent having an unruly child executed under the law, proven by the brahmins’ own three-stage realization in hell (where they came from, where they now were, why) leading to faith in the Great Vehicle and ten kalpas of life in a pure buddha-field they could not otherwise have earned. |
| 三品殺 / 一闡提殺無罪報 | the three grades of killing / killing an icchantika carries no retribution | Part 16’s taxonomy: the lowest grade (an animal, still carrying some slight wholesome root, which is why killing one carries retribution at all), the middling grade (anyone from an ordinary person through a non-returner), and the highest grade (one’s parents, an arhat, a pratyekabuddha, or a bodhisattva assured of buddhahood) — with the icchantika, entirely lacking even the five faculties beginning with faith, falling outside all three grades, compared instead to non-acts like digging earth or cutting grass. Per Huiyuan, this appears to conflict with the sūtra’s own teaching elsewhere that giving to an icchantika earns a thousandfold greater merit than giving to an animal, but the two rulings measure different things: giving is measured by the giver’s own state of mind (an icchantika’s wretchedness intensifies the giver’s generosity), while killing is measured by the victim’s own remaining capacity to be harmed (which the icchantika, by definition, lacks). |
| 曠野鬼神 | the wilderness demon | Part 16’s story of the Buddha subduing a flesh-eating spirit too violent to reason with by manifesting as a still more fearsome spirit first, then returning to his own form to teach once the demon’s resistance broke — closing with the standing precept that monks feed such spirits, since the point of the fear was only to open a door reason could not, never to leave the frightened party worse off once it closed. Cited by the Buddha, together with several other spirit-taming episodes, as the pattern behind his harsh words to Devadatta: coarse in tone, but true, timely, and beneficial — the one combination, out of an eightfold classification of speech, that licenses speaking harshly at all. |
| 十一空 | the eleven kinds of emptiness | Part 16’s systematic list (internal, external, internal-and-external, conditioned, unconditioned, without-beginning, intrinsic-nature, no-existence-at-all, ultimate-meaning, emptiness-of-emptiness, and great emptiness), leading to Subhūti’s own “ground of empty equality.” Per Huiyuan, the first ten operate on the level of characteristics (clearing away a mistaken projection), while the eleventh (identified with the perfection of wisdom itself, following Nāgārjuna’s distinction between the eighteen emptinesses as “the lesser gateway” and prajñā as “the great gateway”) describes reality directly rather than negating something projected onto it. “The emptiness of intrinsic nature” (七, denying only a thing’s claim to self-standing nature) and “the emptiness of no existence at all” (八, illustrated by a childless man’s empty house, denying even the thing’s conventional appearance) are kept distinct — a distinction easy to collapse in translation but structurally important to the list’s own internal logic. |
| 亦見亦知 / 知而不見 | both seeing and knowing / knowing without seeing | Part 16’s closing eightfold epistemology, distinguishing “seeing” from “knowing” along five separable axes per Huiyuan (by faculty — wisdom vs. the heavenly eye; by the stage a contemplation has reached; by certainty; by coarseness vs. subtlety; by depth), then mapping all eight cases onto the traditional five eyes (physical, heavenly, wisdom, Dharma, buddha). The long catalogue of heterodox austerities in the first case (self-starvation, the cow-vow, fire-worship) demonstrates that “knowing without seeing” can still be complete knowledge — the bodhisattva need never have witnessed any of these practices deliver liberation to know with certainty that none of them ever will, since none of them ever has. |
| 四無礙智 | the four kinds of unimpeded knowledge | Part 17’s four qualities (unimpeded knowledge of the Dharma, of meaning, of expression, and of eloquence), defined three separate times — by object, by scope, and by the qualifier of non-attachment (knowing without grasping). Per Huiyuan, ordinary grasping chains a being to the aggregates through craving → bondage → inability to escape suffering, while a bodhisattva’s knowing has already passed through and beyond that same chain in reverse — “knowing” and “grasping” are not two answers to the same question but two different relationships to an object entirely. Elsewhere in this sūtra “無礙智” refers to the six higher knowledges (v. Part 16’s closing five-eyes summary); this fascicle’s four-part scheme is a distinct, narrower technical term and the two should not be conflated. |
| 聲聞緣覺無四無礙 | why the two vehicles lack unimpeded knowledge | Part 17’s argument that even Śāriputra, Maudgalyāyana, and Mahākauṣṭhila — each named “foremost” among the Buddha’s disciples in wisdom, supernatural power, and unimpeded knowledge respectively — never possess all four in full. The pratyekabuddha’s silent mode of teaching structurally forecloses unimpeded knowledge of expression and eloquence before any question of inner attainment arises; his ignorance of “the two characters for eternally abiding” points, per Huiyuan, to a specific doctrinal blind spot (no arrival at this sūtra’s claim that buddha-nature is genuinely eternal), not illiteracy. The many-rivers simile (“the Gaṅgā, the Sindhu, and the ocean are all genuinely immeasurable without being equal in volume”) resolves the apparent contradiction with the Buddha’s earlier ranking of these three disciples: a superlative among peers does not entail full possession of the ranked quality. |
| 無所得 | non-attainment | Part 17’s sustained teaching that a bodhisattva’s own knowledge is itself best named “non-attainment,” stated as nine parallel paired definitions (against ignorance, the twenty-five states of existence, the two lesser vehicles, the eleven non-Vaipulya scripture divisions, the wheel of birth-and-death, the four inversions, the five wrong views, and the awakening of the two lesser vehicles) before a tenth move uses speech to dissolve the residual sense that “non-attainment” is itself one more thing just attained through the conversation. Per Huiyuan, the argument never claims a bodhisattva knows nothing — only that what he knows has no fixed mark for the mind to seize and hold as an object; the seizing, not the knowing, is what “attainment” names and “non-attainment” denies. |
| 本有今無，本無今有 | what was is now not; what was not is now | The sūtra’s most celebrated verse, first spoken to Cunda and explained here in eight paired contrasts (each: a specific past limitation named as “what was,” paired with the specific past absence — of the perfection of wisdom, the thirty-two marks, a vision of buddha-nature, the six perfections, the thirty-seven factors, the real meaning of the middle way, sharp-faculty disciples like Kāśyapa, a bodhisattva such as Mañjuśrī — named as “what was not,” with the sūtra’s own closing formula in each case ruling out treating any one of the eight as a permanent, unchanging feature of the Tathāgata rather than a stage since surpassed). Read together, per Huiyuan, the eight pairs trace something closer to a spiritual biography in miniature than a static doctrinal formula. |
| 世諦即第一義 (Part 17) | worldly truth, spoken by a buddha, is itself the ultimate truth | Part 17’s closing statement on the two truths, distinct from — and more radical than — the four-tenet-school analysis given in Part 13. Per Huiyuan, this does not collapse the distinction between the two truths outright; it locates the ambiguity in the listener’s own uncertainty about which truth is being addressed at a given moment, not in any instability in the Tathāgata’s own speech — a buddha may state worldly truth while a listener mistakes it for the ultimate, or the reverse, and this asymmetry between the speaker’s settled clarity and the listener’s uncertainty is itself “the profoundest domain of every buddha, not known by any śrāvaka or pratyekabuddha.” |
| 相貌見 / 了了見 | seeing by inference from a mark / seeing fully and completely | Part 17’s two kinds of seeing, illustrated by eight similes of inference (smoke for fire, a crane for water, a horn for a cow) that are each true, not false, despite never directly perceiving the thing itself — the status Part 16 called “knowing without seeing.” “Seeing fully and completely,” illustrated by an eye directly beholding an āmalaka fruit already resting in one’s own open hand, is a different kind of contact altogether, with no inferential gap for a “mark” to be a sign of — which is why the passage insists this seeing “has, from the very outset, no mark of seeing involved at all.” |
| 六十五種身見 | the sixty-five varieties of the view of a self | Part 17’s implicit background (spelled out by Huiyuan, not itemized in the base text) for the claim that a bodhisattva’s cultivation of wisdom removes “the self in the body, the body in the self, the body as self, the body as not-self” — a fourfold scheme that, checked against each of the five aggregates in turn against the other four, yields thirteen variants per aggregate (one direct identity-view plus twelve variants of “self as container of X” and “X as container of self”), for sixty-five total across all five aggregates. |
| 十號 | the ten epithets of the Buddha | Part 18’s recollection of the Buddha, unpacking Tathāgata, worthy one, fully and rightly awakened one, perfect in wisdom and conduct, well-gone, knower of the world, unsurpassed one, tamer who guides the true man, teacher of gods and men, and buddha — with “world-honored one” standing outside the count as a summary term. Per Huiyuan, every gloss operates on two registers at once: a plain “worldly sense” using the words’ everyday meanings, followed by a “revealed sense” reinterpreting the same syllables to point at a specific doctrinal referent — a reader who stops at the worldly gloss misses the sūtra’s deeper point, made through, not despite, the ordinary meaning of the word. The first five epithets name the Buddha’s own inward attainment; the last five name his outward benefit to others. |
| 三明 | the three illuminations | Part 18’s technical triad within the gloss on “perfect in wisdom and conduct”: the bodhisattva’s illumination (the perfection of wisdom itself), every buddha’s illumination (the buddha eye), and “the illumination of the unillumined” (ultimate emptiness itself). Per Huiyuan, the third term is deliberately paradoxical — emptiness is not itself a cognitive faculty the way the first two are, yet is called an “illumination” because it is what a buddha’s and bodhisattva’s illumination are both illuminations of, the object generating a name normally reserved for the seeing subject. |
| 六念 | the six recollections | Part 18’s closing practice set for 梵行品 (recollection of the Buddha, the Dharma, the Saṅgha, moral discipline, giving, and the gods), each ending on an outward-facing note — the bodhisattva’s explicit refusal of the personal liberation his own practice would earn him (the stream-entry fruit under recollection of moral discipline; the ordinary heavens under recollection of the gods), redirected instead toward benefiting every being. “The heaven of the ultimate meaning” (第一義天) under recollection of the gods is not a seventh heaven added to the traditional list but a category shift, naming the permanent nature of every buddha and bodhisattva itself. |
| 菩薩不可思議 | why a bodhisattva is inconceivable | Part 18’s extended argument, organized (per Huiyuan) around three kinds of achievement: genuinely seeking bodhi before ever having seen it (holding nothing back of body or life prior to any confirming experience); benefiting beings despite total clarity about saṃsāra’s faults (the burning-house parable: clear-eyed knowledge of danger and willingness to re-enter it are not in tension but the definition of this love); and remaining unshaken by conditioned existence while fully immersed in it (entering the womb with full awareness, unlike the three ordinary grades of rebirth-consciousness the sūtra catalogues). The ocean-crossing and thread-suspended-Sumeru exchanges test the very edge of “conceivable,” showing the term tracks a being’s actual category and function, not the physical difficulty of a feat. |
| 二種法（有壞滅／無壞滅） | the two kinds of dharma (what perishes / what does not) | Part 18’s nine-fold division answering how the Dharma can be said to “perish” at all: worldly dharma, impermanence and its companions, what the two lesser vehicles uphold, the external, the conditioned, what can be attained, what is shared in common, and what pertains to humans all perish; the ultimate meaning, permanence-bliss-self-purity, what a bodhisattva upholds, the internal, the unconditioned, the unattainable, the uncommon, and what pertains to the gods do not — with the ninth pairing (the eleven other scripture divisions vs. the Vaipulya scriptures) landing the sūtra’s actual answer to Kāśyapa’s question: only the Vaipulya teaching of buddha-nature and the Tathāgata’s permanence “does not perish,” independent of any particular scroll’s survival. |
| 迦葉佛法七日即滅 | why the buddha Kāśyapa’s Dharma is said to have lasted only seven days | Resolved, per Huiyuan, by distinguishing a teaching’s content from its occasion for being spoken: at Kāśyapa Buddha’s time, beings already lived this sūtra’s truth without needing to hear it stated, so the content was never absent even though never spoken aloud — “seven days” names only how long the occasion for silence lasted. The present age is unusual not because the content changed but because circumstances (the long catalogue of inverted perceptions — self for no-self, worldly truth for ultimate) now require its explicit restatement. |
| 六對法滅法住 | the six conditions for the Dharma’s survival | Part 18’s sequence of escalating tests for whether the Dharma abides long after a buddha’s parinirvāṇa, each presupposing the last is satisfied: at least one disciple who understands the profound meaning; material support from lay patrons; teaching motivated by nirvāṇa rather than personal gain; disciples coexisting without destructive rivalry; honest observance of monastic discipline (no hoarding, no false claims of attainment); and — the most subtle, per Huiyuan — resisting the temptation to claim private, unverifiable authority over what the Buddha “really meant,” instead keeping the check external and shared (“should this meaning accord with the twelve divisions of scripture, I shall uphold it; if not, I shall set it aside”). |
| 拘睒彌事件 | the incident at Kauśāmbī | Part 18’s account of five hundred precept-breaking monks killing a hundred arhats over a Vinaya dispute (whether the Buddha relaxed the four gravest offenses near his death), Māra’s incitement escalating it to the deaths of all six hundred. Per Huiyuan, the sūtra resolves this not by having the majority turn out doctrinally wrong in some subtle way — they commit murder, which settles nothing about who was correct — but by locating the Dharma’s actual survival in 120,000 unnamed bodhisattvas the narrative never shows doing anything, restating this fascicle’s “two kinds of dharma” teaching (institutional survival is not what “the Dharma has not perished” means) in the register of a narrative rather than a doctrine. |
| 病行 — sick conduct, illustrated | Part 19 opens the fifth of the five practices this collection first listed in Part 11 — but rather than defining it directly, the sūtra “shows it through an event” (寄事表法, per Huiyuan): the entire fascicle is King Ajātaśatru’s story, never once labeled “sick conduct” within the text itself, which is why the sūtra neither opens nor closes this section with the summary formula it uses for the other four practices. | |
| 六臣六師 — the six ministers and their six teachers | Part 19’s six ministers each recommend one of the historical “six heterodox teachers”: Candraprabha→Pūraṇa Kāśyapa (空見, denial of moral causation), Treasury-Virtue→Maskarī Gośālīputra (常見, seven indestructible eternal elements including suffering, pleasure, and life itself), True-Attainment→Sañjaya Vairaṭīputra (一因見, all present suffering caused solely in the past, so no present act bears present fruit), Knower-of-Meaning→Ajita Keśakambalī (自然見, radical non-discrimination: gold and dirt, friend and foe, all literally equal), Auspicious-Virtue→Kakuda Kātyāyana (自在天因見, Īśvara authors every being’s fate, reducing beings to a puppet-maker’s wooden men), Fearless→Nirgrantha Jñātiputra (不須修道, automatic liberation after 80,000 kalpas regardless of conduct). All six ministerial visits share an identical four-part structure (health inquiry, king’s confession plus his complaint that he has no physician, the minister’s argument plus teacher recommendation, the king’s conditional “should he truly be able to remove my crime, I shall take refuge in him”) — the hedge, not an assent, on Huiyuan’s reading. | |
| 二白法：慚愧 — the two white dharmas, shame and remorse | Jīvaka’s answer to the six ministers in Part 19: not a seventh denial of consequence, but an argument that shame (慚, not committing a crime oneself, feeling disgrace before other people) and remorse (愧, not teaching another to commit one, confessing openly, feeling disgrace before the gods) are themselves sufficient grounds for the king’s crime to be forgivable — distinguished sharply from the icchantika, whose defining trait is the absence of exactly these two dharmas alongside disbelief in cause and effect, not merely the gravity of any one crime. | |
| 一闡提不可治 vs 王可治 — why the icchantika is incurable but the king is not | Part 19 restates and sharpens the tension this collection has tracked since Part 5 (一闡提不可治 vs. later teachings that even an icchantika can turn back): Jīvaka’s own diagnostic criterion is not the severity of the crime (the king has committed patricide, one of the five gravest offenses, the same category as the icchantika’s own disqualifying acts) but a five-part refusal — disbelief in cause and effect, absence of shame or remorse, disbelief in karmic fruit, disregard for this world and the next, and unwillingness to approach a good friend or any buddha’s teaching. Because the king retains shame, remorse, and the capacity to be moved by argument, Jīvaka’s closing line — “the great king, at this moment, is no icchantika” — functions as the passage’s actual thesis. | |
| 佛所治癒者總表 — the catalogue of everyone the Buddha has healed | Part 19’s escalating proof-list (Śakra fearing his own death, Aṅgulimāla, Prince Suvīra, 500 hungry ghosts, 500 blinded bandits of Śrāvastī, the caṇḍāla Vāyusa, the incest-patricide-matricide youth Ajita of Vārāṇasī, the drunk elephant, Māra himself, the wilderness demon converted through the householder Sudhana, the butcher Vipula, King Nāgamudrā of Fine Stone city, and Devadatta), followed by the paired list “he does not teach only the noble… but also the lowly,” which Huiyuan reads as the passage’s own explicit thesis in propositional form: the Buddha’s compassion is defined by symmetry across every axis — rank, wealth, sharpness of mind, temperament, degree of affliction, sex, age, spiritual readiness, social station — designed to leave the king no criterion by which his own case could reasonably be an exception. | |
| 阿鼻地獄「無間」四義 — the four senses of Avīci’s “no interval” | Part 19’s sky-voice describes Avīci hell in a single sense (suffering follows suffering with no interval of relief), but Huiyuan glosses “無間” as bearing four distinct senses worth holding apart: the retributive process is without interval (rebirth into the hell follows death instantly), the body is without interval (it fills the hell entirely regardless of how many beings enter), the lifespan is without interval (one full, unbroken kalpa), and the suffering is without interval (this fascicle’s own sense). He also notes that the Abhidharma tradition assigns a separate kalpa per gravest offense, while this sūtra — agreeing with the Āgamas — has all five share a single kalpa, severity registering as intensified suffering rather than added time. | |
| 為阿闍世不入涅槃 — six readings of “for Ajātaśatru’s sake” | Part 20 opens with the Buddha stacking six distinct glosses on a single sentence: “for” moves from meaning every ordinary being, to every conditioned being, to everyone who has not yet seen buddha-nature, to (most narrowly) only Ānanda’s and Kāśyapa’s own two assemblies; “Ajātaśatru” moves in parallel from everyone guilty of a gravest offense, to everyone still possessed of affliction, to everyone without the bodhi-mind, to (equally narrowly) the king’s own harem and the women of Rājagṛha — before a final etymological pair of readings takes “ajā” as unborn and “śatru” as enemy, yielding “for the sake of keeping the enemy of affliction unborn.” None of the six competes to be the “real” meaning; the sūtra’s own closing line calls this secret speech itself inconceivable, compounding the “worldly sense plus revealed sense” pattern from Part 18’s ten epithets six times over in one utterance. | |
| 月愛三昧 — the moon-love samādhi | Part 20’s light that heals the king’s wound before Jīvaka speaks another word, explained through six similes grouped by function: immediate effect on contact (blooming lotuses, a traveler’s joy), effect over time in two complementary directions (the waxing moon growing wholesome roots, the waning moon shrinking affliction — two descriptions of one process, per Huiyuan, not two accomplishments), and felt quality plus rank among practices (relief from summer heat, the full moon’s preeminence among stars). Named for love rather than compassion or wisdom — deliberately, on Huiyuan’s reading, since the passage is an experience of being cared for prior to any further argument. | |
| 一闡提也分兩種：現在得善根／後世得善根 | Part 20’s refinement of the icchantika teaching through the physician-and-unfavorable-omens parable (first outlined in Part 18, given in full here): a physician who reads every inauspicious sign — a bad dream, a deformed messenger, unfavorable day and star, direct examination confirming death is certain — and still does not withhold treatment, promising to return and providing for the patient’s needs in the meantime. The icchantika splits into sharp faculties (benefiting within this very life) and middling faculties (planting a cause that ripens only in a future life) — the sūtra’s own point being that neither case licenses silence, since a buddha never teaches in vain even when a fruit is lifetimes away. | |
| 五陰破「定父」／三世破「定殺」 — dismantling a fixed father, a fixed act of killing | Part 20’s core argument against the king’s own conviction of certain damnation: no single aggregate, sense-field, or element can be pointed to as “the father” without arbitrarily privileging it over the rest; and, because killing is defined as blocking off a future arising, the very same aggregate of form is killable only in its future aspect — already-past form cannot be killed (it is already gone) and presently-perishing form cannot be killed (it is already ceasing on its own) — so killing names a shifting relation to time rather than one fixed fact about an agent and a victim. | |
| 心口作＝輕／身口心作＝重 — light versus grave karma | Part 20’s technical distinction (an act committed by mind and speech alone is light; by body, speech, and mind together, grave) applied to the king’s own case: he ordered only that his father’s feet be cut off, never his death, placing his culpability, on strict classification, below even a minister ordered to behead someone who hesitates before acting. The “if the king is guilty, so are we buddhas” argument that follows is read by Huiyuan as a reductio, not a genuine claim of divine culpability — tracing the causal chain far enough back implicates everyone, which shows the notion of a single isolable culprit incoherent rather than merely lessened. | |
| 殺法殺業殺者殺果及解脫皆了則無罪 — the three gates on the reality of killing | Part 20’s culminating argument, per Huiyuan structured as three successive depths: a gate affirming killing has real existence but that mere knowledge or occasioning of an act (the wine-merchant, the sun and moon) does not constitute committing it; a gate breaking into emptiness via the nirvāṇa-as-neither-existent-nor-non-existent analogy, where killing’s status shifts entirely with the viewer’s own mental state (shame, view of existence, view of eternalism, each toggling existent/non-existent independently); and a gate revealing the underlying reality, where “killing” impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and non-self is reinterpreted as attaining permanence, bliss, reality, and true self — repurposing the very language of killing to describe liberation, culminating in “I too kill these and do not go to hell; why would you?” | |
| 伊蘭子生栴檀樹 — the eraṇḍa seed that grew into a sandalwood tree | Part 20’s spontaneous image, offered by the king himself (not prompted by the Buddha) once he grasps the teaching on impermanence: an eraṇḍa seed, which in nature only ever produces another eraṇḍa tree, growing instead into sandalwood — his own body the seed, his newly faithful mind the sandalwood, “rootless” naming his prior lack of reverence for the Three Jewels. Huiyuan reads the king’s own initiative in reaching for this image, rather than merely accepting an argument, as evidence he has genuinely internalized the teaching. | |
| 天行品略而不論，指《雜華》 — heavenly conduct deferred to the Avataṃsaka | Part 20 closes the third of the five practices (天行, the bodhisattva’s eight meditative absorptions) with a single line pointing readers to the Avataṃsaka rather than treating it directly — the only one of the five practices this sūtra handles by pointer instead of exposition, which Huiyuan reads as the sūtra declining to duplicate material it judges already thoroughly covered elsewhere. | |
| 楊葉止啼三喻 — the three parables of skillful deception in 嬰兒行 | Part 20’s closing chapter on infant-like conduct, its three parables (a willow leaf called gold to calm a crying infant; wooden animals; wooden figures) tracing an escalation per Huiyuan: the willow leaf calms an ordinary being’s destructive impulse with a heavenly reward still, in ultimate truth, impermanent birth-and-death dressed up as permanence-bliss-self-purity; the wooden animals draw a being disillusioned with saṃsāra toward the two lesser vehicles, themselves without independent reality; and the wooden figures address the hardest case — teaching that beings exist, while knowing they do not, precisely to prevent the more dangerous error of nihilism once a being has correctly seen through self and other as illusory. | |
| 光明遍照高貴德王品 — the chapter on Bright Virtuous King | Part 21 opens a new chapter, six fascicles long (21–26), formally the “chapter on ten kinds of merit” per Huiyuan, titled instead for the bodhisattva who requested it — his own name compounding wisdom (光明遍照, illumination reaching everywhere) and merit (高貴德王, virtue worthy of kingship), the two forms of adornment a bodhisattva accumulates. The ten merits split into six qualities any advanced practitioner cultivates and four marking a genuine further advance (faith, moral discipline, good friends, being fully equipped, and vast learning, culminating in the thirty-seven factors) — Part 21 covers only the first of the ten, “hearing what was never heard,” in full. | |
| 聞所不聞 — hearing what was not heard | Part 21’s central paradox, pressed hard by Bright Virtuous King as a plain logical contradiction (hearing and not-hearing cannot both apply to the same case) before being resolved across the fascicle by distinguishing a name genuinely audible and speakable (permanence, bliss, self, purity) from the unconditioned reality that name points toward (nirvāṇa itself, which is neither conditioned, nor sound, nor sayable). The listening-etiquette teaching mid-fascicle (reverence, no hope of gain, treating self and other equally, holding the Mahāyāna’s view) is, per Huiyuan, the sūtra’s actual direct answer to the objection — a real transformation the listener undergoes, not a literal simultaneous contradiction. | |
| 諸法非有非無等二十一對 — the twenty-one paired negations for nirvāṇa | Part 21’s opening catena describing the Tathāgata’s own nirvāṇa (neither existent nor non-existent, neither conditioned nor unconditioned, etc.), each pair denying two opposite errors rather than staking a middle position — “neither existent nor non-existent” denies both bondage to saṃsāra’s existence and a lack of every virtue; “neither conditioned nor unconditioned” denies both ordinary arising/ceasing and inert stasis without responsive activity. The device forestalls Bright Virtuous King’s coming objection: if nothing here is pinned to one fixed pole, “hearing” and “not-hearing” were never coherent as mutually exclusive categories to begin with. | |
| 因緣亦非因緣：光明/來/不來 — “a cause, and yet not a cause” | Part 21’s resolution of the silent-bodhisattva-chain and the visiting bodhisattva Vaidūryaprabha’s “coming that is not coming”: at the level of ultimate truth, the light (named, in turn, wisdom, nirvāṇa, the Tathāgata, compassion, recollection of the Buddha, the Mahāyāna’s unique path) has no cause, being an ever-abiding dharma; at the level of worldly truth, it has a perfectly tellable cause (Vaidūryaprabha’s own approaching journey from the pure world Acala). Two truths about the same event, not a contradiction — the same device resolving why “coming” and “not-coming” both apply once any fixed notion of a determinate nature in beings is removed. | |
| 不生生／不到到 四句法 — the four-part structures of born/unborn and arrived/unarrived | Part 21 extends “hearing/not-hearing” into a family of parallel tetralemmas: internally, an ordinary being is “born-born” (unbroken birth after birth) while a fourth-abiding bodhisattva is “born-unborn” (mastery over his own arising); externally, a seed’s germination shows the same pattern stripped of consciousness. The “arrived” set maps directly onto degrees of attainment (stream-enterer through pratyekabuddha, each “arriving” after a fixed span of kalpas measuring remaining defilement, not literal distance to an unconditioned goal) and is the structure the sūtra uses to finally resolve Bright Virtuous King’s opening objection by exact parallel. | |
| 作因／了因 — the productive cause and the revelatory cause | Part 21’s answer to why nirvāṇa’s dependence on cultivated causes (the thirty-seven factors, the six perfections) does not make it impermanent: a potter’s wheel is a productive cause, genuinely bringing something new into existence, while a lamp is a revelatory cause, merely illuminating what was already fully present in the dark. Practice functions only as a lamp with respect to nirvāṇa — necessary to its being seen, never to its being produced — distinguished from the sūtra’s ordinary five-fold causal analysis (generative/combinatory/sustaining/augmenting/remote cause), which governs conditioned phenomena generally but does not apply to nirvāṇa’s own substance at all. | |
| 檀波羅蜜 vs 施 — what turns giving into its perfected form | Part 21’s closing distinction, per Huiyuan a matter of realization (nine explicit “non-seeings”: no giver, no receiver, no wealth, no season, no field of merit, no cause, no fruit, no more or less, no purity or impurity) before any ordinary-language markers (spontaneous vs. solicited, constant vs. occasional, without regret, without hope of reward). The five closing extreme similes (clinging to a corpse to survive drowning, escaping prison through a latrine, a noble person relying on an outcaste in crisis, a sick person eating what is unclean, a starving brahmin eating dog meat) share one point: an ordinarily repugnant act or object becomes, under the right extremity, the very thing that saves — perfection measured by freedom from attachment to purity of form, not by how an act looks from outside. | |
| 一闡提亦不決定 — the icchantika, too, is indeterminate | Part 22’s answer to Bright Virtuous King’s severing-of-wholesome-roots puzzle (if buddha-nature is unsevered, how can severing wholesome roots define an icchantika?): buddha-nature falls outside three pairs that do apply to ordinary wholesome roots — internal/external, tainted/untainted, permanent/impermanent in the ordinary sense — and so shares neither category’s vulnerability to severance. The technical test: anything genuinely severable must be capable of being regained later; “icchantika” names the temporary interval before this recovery, not a different metaphysical category of being. | |
| 定相唯在涅槃 — the one fixed mark, found only in nirvāṇa | Part 22’s governing principle for the whole fascicle: illustrated by three similes of mistaken fixity (a conjured army, a summer mirage, a mountain echo), every dharma an ordinary being or even a lesser-vehicle practitioner takes as fixed is, in fact, indeterminate — icchantika-hood, the four gravest offenses, the five gravest offenses, even the fruits from stream-entry through pratyekabuddhahood (each “arriving” only after a fixed span of kalpas). Nirvāṇa alone, bearing permanence, bliss, self, and purity, is the one genuine exception — the point “nothing is fixed” was never meant to erase. | |
| 如來不定：非天非非天…二十對 — is the Tathāgata a god? twenty paired negations | Part 22’s exhaustive catalogue of what the Tathāgata both is and is not (god, human, spirit, a being, a dharma, form, long, short, marked, mind, conditioned, permanent, illusion, fixed, subject to outflow), opened by defining four kinds of “god” (worldly/king, born/from the four heavens up, pure/stream-enterer through pratyekabuddha, meaning/the ten-abiding bodhisattva who penetrates every dharma’s emptiness) that the Tathāgata is none of — and yet beings rightly call him “god beyond gods.” Each pair denies two opposite ways of fixing his nature, whether the category seems to elevate him or merely describe him factually. | |
| 如來非常亦非非常：七番／八番 | Part 22’s technical centerpiece, seven reasons for “not permanent” (a body with parts, possessing knowledge, speech, a clan-name, parents, the four postures, a fixed location) measured against empty space, and eight for “nor not permanent” (freedom from birth, from fixed nature, universal presence, freedom from location- and time-bound existence, namelessness/formlessness, freedom from cause and effect, transcendence of the three time-periods) — the pair Bright Virtuous King’s own “indeterminacy” challenge most directly threatened, since a Tathāgata reducible to either pole alone would collapse into either an ordinary conditioned being or an inertly static abstraction incapable of actually appearing and teaching. | |
| 七漏 — the seven kinds of outflow | Part 22’s closing practical framework (per the Satyasiddhi tradition, cited by Huiyuan): 見漏/修漏 (view and cultivation — the substance of outflow, illustrated by the sūtra’s own catalogue of unanswerable questions about self, body, and causation), 根漏 (the five faculties, tamed through mindfulness born of wisdom rather than suppression), 惡漏 (evil companionship — a vicious elephant harms only the body while an evil friend harms the Dharma-body itself), and 親近漏 (reliance on the four requisites, resolved through the wound-dressing analogy: the body is tended only as the instrument of practice, never for its own sake). The movement from the deepest, most abstract root of affliction to its most concrete, everyday expressions closes the fascicle on practical instruction rather than further doctrinal analysis. | |
| 一偈換三兩肉 — three ounces of flesh for a single verse | Part 22’s past-life story of the future Śākyamuni selling his own flesh, day by day for a month, to a sick man in exchange for money to offer a buddha of the same name in a prior age, in order to hear this sūtra — retaining only a single verse (“如來證涅槃，永斷於生死…”) from his own admitted dullness at the time. Distinct from the Snow Mountain boy’s half-verse story in Part 14 (there, total sacrifice for half a verse; here, a smaller, incremental sacrifice for a smaller but still complete verse) — the two stories together showing this kind of sacrifice recurring across the bodhisattva path in proportion to what is sought, not confined to one unrepeatable case. | |
| 三惡覺 — the three evil thoughts | Part 23’s treatment of the outflow of feeling (受漏): the thought of desire, the thought of ill-will, and the thought of harm, selected from a classical fuller catalogue of eight as the gravest. The bodhisattva’s own extended internal monologue against them (some twenty distinct self-exhortations, organized around not disappointing those who trust him as “a good field of merit,” his own honorific titles each carrying an implicit standard, and the six rare circumstances he has already attained) is this collection’s most extensive first-person model yet of talking oneself out of temptation in real time, closed by five similes of refusal escalating from physical revulsion through social prohibition to sheer indifference. | |
| 四毒蛇五旃陀羅一詐親六大賊一河 — the extended parable of the man and the four snakes | Part 23’s famous ancient parable (elaborated here in unusually full interpretive detail per Huiyuan, compared to shorter tellings elsewhere in the canon), treating the outflow of thought (念漏): a man flees a king’s four poisonous snakes (the four elements — solidity/moisture/heat/motion, each of the four castes, forever threatening yet tended), five outcastes with drawn swords (the five aggregates, which exceed the snakes in danger since death by them, unlike ordinary outcastes, leads to hell), a false friend (craving, which blinds sight and hearing and grows harder to detect the more intimately it is held), an empty village (the six sense-bases, permanently — not merely contingently — empty of any real self), and six thieves in the night (the six sense-objects, which continue plundering wholesome roots even past stream-entry, non-returning, and so on, yielding only to full buddhahood) before crossing a raging river (affliction itself, fathomable only by a buddha, uncrossable by unaided effort, impassable for the icchantika even with a buddha’s help) on a raft of the eightfold path, the six perfections, and the thirty-seven factors of awakening. | |
| 非有漏非無漏（收尾）— neither subject to outflow nor free of it | Part 23’s closing pair completing the twenty-pair catalogue from Part 22 applied to the fascicle’s own central term: the Tathāgata is genuinely free of outflow in his own nature, yet continues moving within the twenty-five states of existence to teach beings there — which is, by definition, “subject to outflow” — so an observer mistaking this continued presence for actual affliction wrongly concludes the Buddha still suffers it. Closes the seven-outflow sequence (見漏/修漏/根漏/惡漏/親近漏/受漏/念漏) begun in Part 22. | |
| 涅槃 vs 大涅槃 — nirvāṇa and great nirvāṇa | Part 23’s answer to Bright Virtuous King’s pivot question (after conceding “everything is indeterminate”): ordinary language already pairs a lesser and greater instance of one category (sea/great sea, river/great river…), so nirvāṇa/great nirvāṇa should surprise no one. Five similes mark an ordinary, merely circumstantial “nirvāṇa” (hunger relieved, illness cured, fear allayed, poverty ended, craving’s object seen through — each dependent on a prior deficiency, evaporating once it’s removed, and, crucially, even a full severing of every affliction through the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception still counts as merely small, since residual trace/習氣 persists); six similes (ocean/river/mountain/city/being/person) mark what is genuinely great — not more of the same but a capacity of an entirely different order, requiring the direct, complete seeing of buddha-nature not yet attained even by the ten-abiding bodhisattva. | |
| 八自在（大我）— the eight kinds of mastery that constitute the “great self” | Part 23’s precise unpacking of why nirvāṇa, despite having no self in the ordinary sense, is said to possess the “great self”: mastery of quantity (one body into many or many into one), of size (a mote of dust filling a trichiliocosm), of weight (a vast body flying weightlessly), of mastery-over-mastery itself (one unmoved mind animating countless distinct manifestations, each “having its own mind”), of the faculties (any single sense performing every sense’s function), of attainment (a hinge paradox: precisely because nothing fixed is attained, attainment becomes possible at all), of speech (a single verse’s meaning genuinely inexhaustible across kalpas), and of pervasion (present everywhere like space, equally imperceptible in itself). The sixth (mastery through non-attainment) ties every other kind back to the fascicle’s governing emptiness-of-fixed-self argument, keeping the list from reading as mere miraculous power. | |
| 四樂／四淨（收尾第一分十德）— four blisses, four purities, closing the first of the ten merits | Part 23’s closing redefinition of “bliss” for a nirvāṇa said to have no ordinary pleasure: freedom from the whole suffering/pleasure cycle (escaping the three-feelings framework, not merely landing on its neutral third term), great tranquility, omniscience, and an indestructible body — paired with four purities (freedom from the twenty-five states of existence, pure karma, a permanent body, a mind free of outflow). The sūtra’s own closing move — placing “great nirvāṇa” among names given “without cause” (like lotus or empty space, not like Śāriputra named for his mother) — humbles every definition offered across the whole fascicle: description, never full domestication. The passage’s closing line credits only “the merit of the first division” of the chapter’s ten — the entire three-fascicle argument since Part 21 completes just one of ten. | |
| 十功德之第二：昔所不得而今得之 — five sub-varieties of the second merit | Part 24’s second merit (attaining, seeing, hearing, arriving, knowing what was never attained before), distinguished from the two lesser vehicles’ own identical-sounding attainments not by greater magnitude but by a shared freedom from every fixed mark: a bodhisattva’s single mind manifests bodies in all five destinies simultaneously (versus one at a time); mind and body no longer bound to each other (unlike an ordinary being’s, illustrated through a drunk man, an infant, and correlations between emotion and physical bearing); hearing and seeing without ever forming the mark of “hearing” or “seeing” itself; and knowing every realm’s minds at once, or a stream-enterer’s sixteen successive moments of insight within a single mind. | |
| 聲無定相，果報在心不在聲 — sound has no fixed nature; the fruit lies in the mind, not the sound | Part 24’s answer to Bright Virtuous King’s challenge (doesn’t the promised guarantee of awakening from hearing a single word of this sūtra prove sound does have a fixed, automatic causal power?): the same evil word produces an evil mind in one listener and nothing in another, since the actual cause is the listener’s own mental state, illustrated by a face reflected in a blade looking elongated held upright and widened held sideways — the reflection genuinely differs without the face itself being unstable. The guarantee of awakening was never about the sound’s own fixed power but about “the markless mark” — hearing without clinging to any mark of word, phrase, speaker, or the act of hearing itself. | |
| 十事（第四功德）→ 淨佛土十願 — the fourth merit’s ten items, and the ten vows purifying a buddha-land | Part 24’s fourth merit: a root too deep to uproot (heedfulness, illustrated through fourteen similes as the specific condition under which every other wholesome root — faith, discipline, giving, wisdom, patience, learning, diligence, mindfulness, concentration, good friendship — is able to grow at all), resolute conviction about one’s own body, non-discrimination between fields of merit, purifying a buddha-land (ten vows mapped one-to-one onto the ten wholesome courses of action — non-killing yields long life, non-stealing yields material abundance, right speech yields beautiful sound, right view yields universal wisdom, and so on), eliminating three kinds of residue (residual karmic fruit, residual karma binding even the noble ones to a fixed further number of rebirths, and residual existence — an arhat or pratyekabuddha’s own static fruit), a pure body (32 marks built from accumulated wholesome minds), understanding conditions, leaving behind enemies (only slander of the Vaipulya teachings counts as a true enemy; affliction itself is not, since it is the very condition of continued rebirth for beings’ sake), and abandoning the two extremes (the twenty-five states of existence and craving). | |
| 佛何以只修九事不修淨土 — why does the Buddha appear not to purify a buddha-land? | Part 24’s answer to Bright Virtuous King’s follow-up: the premise mistakes a deliberately chosen manifestation (teaching within the visibly impure Sahā world) for the Buddha’s own underlying reality — his true attainment is the world Unsurpassed, as pure as any other buddha’s own land, matching this collection’s Acala/Pūrṇacandraprabha parallel-world narrative from Part 21. Maitreya’s own future vow to purify this same world demonstrates its impurity was never fixed to begin with, only the present stage of a trajectory already underway. | |
| 金剛三昧 — the vajra samādhi (sixth merit) | Part 24’s famous concentration, shattering the fixed mark of every dharma without ever diminishing itself — like a diamond that cuts anything and is never blunted, and every lesser samādhi “belonging” to it as a lesser king belongs to a wheel-turning sovereign. Its recurring refrain — multiplying bodies, reaching countless worlds, severing innumerable beings’ affliction, all “without the thought that this has been accomplished” — extends the eight-masteries’ non-attainment principle from Part 23: an accomplishment performed without the thought “I have accomplished this” prevents the destructive power itself from generating a subtler pride in its place. Named for vajra’s own famously unfixed color under changing light — even the name enacts the “nothing is fixed” argument organizing the whole chapter since Part 22. | |
| 涅槃近因四法 — the four near-causes of nirvāṇa (seventh merit) | Part 25’s answer to what actually causes nirvāṇa (not grueling ascetic practice, but four relational and cognitive conditions): a good friend, listening, reflection, and right practice — each unfolded through cascading similes (a physician curing illness; a leprosy so severe it requires the singular remedy at Mount Sumeru’s edge; a father’s plain warning against a courtesan; a mirror; a treasure-island guide; an elephant-trainer’s hook). “Listening” collapses through successive redefinition into hearing the twelve divisions, then the Vaipulya scriptures, then this sūtra specifically, then the eightfold noble path itself — establishing that full listening is never passive but already identical with practice. | |
| 涅槃/佛性/如來/法/僧/實相/虛空 七法差別之相 — seven terms, seven distinct definitions | Part 25’s technical vocabulary test closing “right practice”: nirvāṇa (eight qualities: exhaustion, wholesome nature, reality, truth, permanence, bliss, self, purity — contrasted with a merely worldly severing of affliction, which earns the same eight words but remains unreal since affliction can return), buddha-nature (six or seven qualities including “destined to be seen”), the Tathāgata, the Dharma, the Saṅgha, true reality, and empty space each receive their own defining list rather than being treated as loosely interchangeable synonyms for “the sacred.” Space itself is then shown to have no fixed nature at all — named only for an absence, produced by nothing, the template the sūtra immediately applies to nirvāṇa (“no fixed dwelling place… simply the place where affliction is severed”). | |
| 佛何以拒魔於尼連禪河而三月後方般涅槃 — why the Buddha refused Māra at the river yet set a three-month term decades later | Part 25’s answer to Bright Virtuous King’s historical challenge (doesn’t the Buddha’s own delay prove severing affliction ≠ nirvāṇa, and doesn’t his later three-month countdown prove the opposite?): distinguishes “nirvāṇa, not great nirvāṇa” (severing affliction without seeing buddha-nature, impermanent since affliction’s root persists) from great nirvāṇa itself (seeing buddha-nature, yielding permanence-bliss-self-purity together) — the bodhi-tree awakening already reached the first; the specific three-month delay concerned staying active for named, still-uncompleted disciples (the five ascetics, Ugra’s fifty, Bimbisāra’s court, the Kāśyapa brothers, Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana’s circle), not which kind of nirvāṇa had been attained. Māra’s own error: assuming nirvāṇa is definable by external behavior (silence = death) rather than an internal, permanent quality of mind. | |
| 涅槃字源否定式列舉 — the etymology of “nirvāṇa” as pure negation | Part 25’s closing catalogue: “ni” (not) + “vāṇa,” glossed successively as weaving, covering, going/coming, grasping, fixity, newness/age, obstruction, mark, existence, combination, and suffering — nirvāṇa named, in every case, as that term’s negation, never as a positive state added atop ordinary experience. Includes a cited rival etymology (Uraka Kapila’s followers: vāṇa = “mark”) confirming the sūtra engages a real contemporary debate rather than inventing the exercise. Closes with single defining sentences for all seven terms from the vocabulary test above, looping back to end the merit on the same claim that opened the Māra episode. | |
| 十功德第八：除斷/遠離/成就/修習/守護/親近/信順/心慧解脫 | Part 25’s eighth merit, organized as elimination (five aggregates, five views — the fundamental sources of bondage) → active cultivation (six recollections, five concentrations, the single protected bodhi-mind, guarded like an only child, a blind man’s last eye, a wilderness traveler’s guide) → outward extension (four immeasurable minds, trust in the one vehicle) → resulting liberated state (mind well liberated: craving/anger/delusion severed; wisdom well liberated: every dharma known without obstruction — explicitly credited as the source of the second merit’s “hearing/seeing/arriving at what was never heard/seen/arrived at before,” showing the ten merits are cumulative, not merely sequential). | |
| 心亦不繫亦非不繫：貪結中道 — is the mind ever truly bound by desire? | Part 25’s hardest logical challenge: if the mind’s nature never contained craving, craving could never arise in it (five impossibility similes: milking a horn, a barren woman’s child, fire from damp wood, oil from pressed sand, a stake in empty space); yet craving visibly does arise and produce real consequences, seemingly proving it a fixed property after all — a dilemma sharpened by the three-time analysis (a past mind is gone, a future mind doesn’t exist, a present mind isn’t yet liberated) paralleling the sūtra’s own lamp-and-darkness analogy elsewhere. Resolved via the middle way: consciousness arises from eye/form/light/mind/attention together without being fixed in any one of them — dependent origination itself is what “not fixed, yet not nonexistent” means, the same structure craving shares with consciousness. Sun/moon obscured by cloud (never truly mixed with what obscures them) explains how craving can be entirely removed without ever having been a component of the mind’s own substance. | |
| 獼猴黐膠喻 — the monkey caught in glue | Part 25’s parable for how an essentially pure mind becomes bound: not through the mind’s nature changing, but through successive, self-compounding contact — one touch of curiosity becoming, through the monkey’s own foolish attempts to free itself, all five limbs stuck. Three-tiered Himalayan terrain maps three-tiered vulnerability: ground impassable to both person and monkey (the fully liberated path, unreachable even by Māra), passable to the monkey alone (wise non-Buddhist practitioners the five desires cannot bind), and passable to both (ordinary beings and Māra operating freely together). Closes on a concrete, behavioral test (corrupt monks’ worldly dealings, gambling, courier work) rather than a philosophical one — “my disciple” vs. “Māra’s retinue” settled by conduct, not metaphysics. | |
| 三種病人：定命／不定命／命盡 — three kinds of patients, resolving the icchantika dilemma | Part 26’s answer to Bright Virtuous King’s sharpest icchantika challenge yet: the fixed-lifespan patient (cured regardless of circumstance, like the thousand-year-lived people of Uttarakuru) maps to the bodhisattva, whose bodhi-mind guarantees the outcome once given rise to — not because buddha-nature mechanically forces the result the way a river reaches the ocean, but because the cause (the bodhi-mind itself) is already genuinely present. The icchantika belongs instead to the “life already exhausted” category: unaffected by circumstance not because success is guaranteed, but because his wholesome roots are so thoroughly severed that no condition, favorable or unfavorable, can touch them — total present incapacity, not destiny. | |
| 一闡（信/方便/進/念/定/慧/無常善）+ 提（不具）— the sevenfold etymology of “icchantika” | Part 26’s technical redefinition: “icchan” names, in turn, faith, skillful means, diligence, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom, or impermanent goodness, and “tika” names incompleteness in each — the icchantika lacks these seven practical capacities entirely, while buddha-nature itself belongs to none of these seven categories (neither faith nor its absence, neither wholesome nor unwholesome in the ordinary sense), remaining logically untouched by the icchantika’s own real and total deficiency, since the two operate at entirely different levels. | |
| 箜篌喻 — the lute that makes no sound by itself | Part 26’s central image for buddha-nature’s presence in the icchantika: a king dismantles an entire lute — strings, skin, wood — searching for “the sound” as a fixed, isolable object, and finds nothing, because the sound was never absent, only unmanifest without the combination of conditions (player, plucked string, resonant wood) that bring it forth. Buddha-nature is exactly the same, requiring precisely the practice the icchantika has, for now, entirely abandoned — paired with the milk-curds simile (dependency on conditions proves the absence of a fixed pre-existing nature, which is exactly what allows something new to be genuinely accomplished rather than merely uncovered). | |
| 真善知識的判準：舍利弗教錯二弟子 — what makes a “true” good friend | Part 26’s fourth of the ninth merit’s five accomplishments, illustrated by Śāriputra himself mismatching meditation objects to two students’ temperaments (breath-counting, suited to a scattered mind, given to an already-exacting goldsmith; skeleton-contemplation, suited to a coarse mind, given to a launderer) — the error is pedagogical fit, not doctrine, showing that even the wisest disciple can fail as a “true” good friend without perfect attunement to the individual. The Buddha’s own extended catalogue of individually-fitted interventions (Nanda’s lust, Aṅgulimāla’s anger, Ajātaśatru’s delusion, Vākkali’s accumulated affliction) illustrates the standard; closes correcting Ānanda’s own claim that good friendship is “half the holy life” — the Buddha insists it is the whole. | |
| 難作能作／難忍能忍／難施能施 — hard to do, hard to endure, hard to give, yet done | Part 26’s three heroic-virtue categories (eating a single sesame seed for kalpas, entering Avīci’s fire, giving away kingdom and body), each closed by the same non-attainment qualification as the vajra samādhi (Part 24) and eight masteries (Part 23): performed without ever thinking “I have done this.” The closing parent-child simile (unconditional love persisting through a child’s own contempt and abuse, without resentment or a tally of favors) gives this abstract principle its emotional register, extended through the concentration on emptiness to the closing image of a forest indifferent to axe and flood alike — freedom from anger and joy as unconditional love, not detachment. | |
| 空是否自空 — is emptiness itself empty? | Part 26’s meta-level puzzle: if emptiness is dharmas’ own inherent nature, cultivating a concentration to “see” it seems redundant; if not, no cultivation could produce it. Resolved by distinguishing already-true nature (form is neither identical to nor separate from the four elements or four colors, never pinned to a fixed nature under analysis) from beings’ failure to see it, misled by apparent continuity across moments — cultivation removes the obstruction, not creates the emptiness. The concentration on emptiness does not convert existing things into nonexistent ones (the salt-into-sweetness objection, rightly rejected) but removes the superimposed fixed mark (“woman,” triggering craving) ordinary perception adds atop bare data. Even the ninth-ground bodhisattva still sees a fixed nature in dharmas — the very last, subtlest obstruction only the direct seeing of buddha-nature dissolves. | |
| 阿難迦毘羅城喪親喻 — Ānanda’s grief at Kapilavastu, and the Buddha’s undiminished radiance | Part 26’s closing demonstration of what “seeing emptiness” accomplishes in practice: not suppressed feeling, but genuinely different perception of the very same catastrophic loss (the Śākya clan’s massacre) — Ānanda sees real, substantial kin and city; the Buddha sees nothing fixed there to begin with, and his own countenance shines only brighter. Closes the ninth merit on the same principle pursued since Part 22, now shown as a difference in how grief is or isn’t generated by the identical event, not argued abstractly. | |
| 栴檀貿易凡木等五喻 — five trades of the genuine for the counterfeit (tenth merit) | Part 26’s closing warning: corrupt monks trade sandalwood for common wood (an indolent, honor-seated congregation unwilling to actually listen), gold for brass (discipline broken for sensory gratification), silver for pewter (the ten wholesome deeds abandoned for their ten-fold opposite), silk for coarse wool (shame and remorse replaced by shamelessness), and ambrosia for poison (false claims of attainment substituted for real freedom from outflow). The six heterodox teachers’ own elaborate case against this sūtra’s authenticity (permanence/bliss/self/purity, permitted possessions and meat, one vehicle instead of three, no final extinction) is the sūtra’s own self-aware acknowledgment of every serious doctrinal objection a conventional reader might raise — voiced by hostile monks so it can be named and set aside. Closes the entire six-fascicle chapter (光明遍照高貴德王菩薩品, Parts 21–26) on faith in even half a verse already constituting discipleship and partial seeing of buddha-nature — the criterion was never flawless argument, but faith itself. | |
| 師子吼十一因緣 — the eleven reasons a lion roars | Part 27’s opening simile, mapping a real lion’s physical description and eleven reasons for roaring onto the Buddha’s own qualities and reasons for teaching, split between reasons benefiting the rightly-practicing and reasons vanquishing the wrong — the chapter’s own justification for its name, since Lion’s Roar Bodhisattva “internally verifies” this very roar through the three conducts (聖行/梵行/天行) first unfolded in Parts 11–20. | |
| 莊嚴畢竟／究竟畢竟 — the adornment of ultimate completion / the final attainment of ultimate completion | Part 27’s opening distinction: the six perfections adorn the path (accumulated practice), while the one vehicle — identical to buddha-nature itself — is the final attainment that practice leads toward; goal and process are related but not identical, like a buried treasure and the digging that uncovers it. | |
| 十二因緣即佛性：因／因因／果／果果 — the twelve links as buddha-nature, via cause/cause-of-cause/fruit/fruit-of-fruit | Part 27’s central causal framework: ignorance and craving are cause and cause-of-cause, consciousness and awakening are fruit and fruit-of-fruit; the twelve links “neither emerge nor cease, neither cause nor fruit” when seen by the contemplative wisdom that avoids both permanence-view and annihilation-view — “seeing the twelve links is seeing the Dharma is seeing the Buddha is seeing buddha-nature.” Four levels of contemplation (śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva, buddha) track how much of the chain each practitioner sees, not a different kind of seeing. | |
| 貧人寶藏喻 — the poor man’s hidden treasure | Part 27’s simile answering why something permanently present in every being remains unseen: like a treasure buried beneath a poor man’s own house, buddha-nature’s presence is not in question, only its being uncovered — reused for the icchantika’s own claim to buddha-nature despite total present incapacity. | |
| 本有今無，本無今有 — what was, is now absent; what was not, is now present | Part 27’s resolution (continuing Part 17’s earlier treatment) via the three times: buddha-nature’s future existence (certain eventual awakening), present existence (currently obscured, lacking the marks), and past existence (some affliction already severed) hold together without the incoherence of a single dharma existing identically across all three times at once — paired with the milk-and-ghee exchange simile validating the icchantika’s truthful-but-not-yet-realized claim through certainty of transformation. | |
| 首楞嚴三昧五名 — the Śūraṅgama samādhi’s five names | Part 27’s identification of buddha-nature with a single samādhi bearing five functional names (首楞嚴三昧/般若波羅蜜/金剛三昧/師子吼三昧/佛性, recalling the vajra samādhi’s own five names from Part 24) plus a three-tiered hierarchy of concentration (buddha-nature as upper, the first dhyāna as middle, the bare ten-great-ground mental factor of concentration as lower) — demonstrating “concentration” as a graded continuum every being already occupies at some level. | |
| 尼連禪河五百梵志喻：非我而說我 — the Nairañjanā river brahmins, and saying no-self as self | Part 27’s resolution of the sharpest apparent contradiction between the no-self teaching and buddha-nature: “self,” applied to buddha-nature, denies not the ordinary aggregates-controller self but affirms permanence and complete mastery — allowing the Buddha to say no-self as self, and self as no-self, in the same breath without contradiction, since each usage targets a different referent. | |
| 十四門描述佛性 — the fourteen-fold catechism of buddha-nature | Part 27’s systematic tetralemma (form/not-form/neither; mark/not-mark/neither; one/not-one/neither; permanent/annihilated framing; existent/non-existent/neither; exhausted/not/neither; cause/effect/neither; meaning/not/neither; word/not/neither; not-suffering/not-bliss; self/not-self/neither; empty/not-empty/neither), each pole justified by its own distinct reason rather than a blanket denial — refusing every fixed predicate while still explaining why each partial description is not simply false. | |
| 十法五重定義 — the ten things a bodhisattva must accomplish, five times redefined | Part 27’s longest passage: the same ten headings (few desires, contentment, tranquility, diligence, right mindfulness, right concentration, right wisdom, liberation, praising liberation, teaching with the great nirvāṇa) redefined through five successive registers — baseline desire-taxonomy, the renunciant’s four-disease/four-medicine asceticism, honest self-study of this very sūtra, advanced solitary contemplation, and finally a “purified engagement” register where proximity to kings and donors, condemned in round one, becomes compatible with practice once desire for gain is uprooted. Even at the most accomplished level described, the bodhisattva still falls short of the Buddha’s complete clarity, since some structure of practice is still being performed. | |
| 眼見／聞見 — seeing with the eye, and seeing through hearing | Part 27’s closing epistemology for recognizing the Tathāgata, whose mind cannot be read directly: eye-seeing (witnessed conduct — birth marvels, six years of austerity, undisturbed grass beneath his seat) paired with hearing-seeing (reported declarations — Asita’s prophecy, the verdict on his two teachers’ formless attainments), together inferring interior motive (for beings’ sake, or for gain?) from an assembled lifetime pattern rather than any single sign. The middle way itself is redefined here through the Buddha’s manner of teaching (never self-elevating, never teaching for gain yet never fruitless) rather than a metaphysical claim alone. | |
| 生因／了因 — the generative cause, and the revealing cause | Part 28’s central analytical tool for the whole milk-curd debate: a seed (生因) produces a sprout it did not contain, while a lamp (了因) merely reveals an object already present in the dark. Nirvāṇa itself is declared a revealing cause and fruit without any cause at all — “vāṇa” (cause) negated by “nir” (absence) — while buddha-nature is a revealing cause for awakening and a fruit revealed by the six perfections, setting up every subsequent round of the debate over whether buddha-nature is “produced” or merely “uncovered.” | |
| 乳有酪性 — does milk contain the nature of curd? | Part 28’s central, longest debate: Lion’s Roar argues buddha-nature must already, secretly exist in beings as curd is said to exist in milk; the Buddha refutes this through a knife’s distorted reflection (long when upright, wide when sideways — no fixed image could explain this), a milk-seller charging only for milk and not for curd, a pregnant wife not yet called “mother” (on pain of an absurd grandchild-regress), and the fact that no one sees all five flavors or a nyagrodha tree’s full growth sequence present at once in a single seed — resolved via the primary-cause/conditional-cause (正因/緣因) framework: milk’s own primary cause plus the curdling agent and warmth as conditional cause, with dependence on conditions read as proof of genuine novelty, not evidence of fainter pre-existence. | |
| 了因自了了他之辯 — can a revealing cause reveal itself? | Part 28’s regress argument against treating the “conditional cause” as a hidden pre-existing nature merely waiting to be revealed: an already-present revealing cause would need no further revealing; if it can reveal both itself and another, it must be single yet perform two distinct functions; the “I, together with seven others, make eight” counting simile fails because a counted form never counts itself — intelligence does the counting, not the counted object; and if the effect already sat fixed in the cause, discipline, concentration, and wisdom could never actually increase through training, which contradicts what is plainly observed of students under a teacher. | |
| 三世有法，無有是處 — the verse on the three times, and the past/future/present resolution | Part 28’s restatement (continuing Parts 17 and 27) of “what was not, is now present; what was, is now absent,” resolved through four similes for how “existence” already applies flexibly, in ordinary speech, across all three times: an orange’s sourness absent from seed and sprout yet inseparable from them (past existence), sesame oil not yet pressed yet truthfully promised (future existence), a king’s forgotten curse whose speaker “no longer exists” yet whose consequence still lands (past existence in a second sense), and a potter’s pot not yet thrown yet truthfully answered for (future existence in a second sense) — establishing that “buddha-nature exists” can be true in virtue of certain future attainment without claiming it is already, fully present now. | |
| 尼拘陀子八種不見因緣 — the eight reasons a thing goes unseen, and the nyagrodha seed | Part 28’s catalogue (too distant, too near, destroyed, distracted-mind, too subtle, obstructed, too numerous, too similar to its surroundings) tested against the nyagrodha seed and found not to apply — a tree’s own characteristic form is coarse, not subtle, ruling out exactly the excuses that would let a hidden tree escape detection — paired with the burning argument: were “burnability” and “growability” both fixed properties present from the start, both should be equally actual at once, yet a burned seed never also produces a tree. | |
| 石中金性 — gold hidden in ore | Part 28’s resolution to the entire causation debate: gold, silver, copper, and iron all share the name and substance “ore,” yet only the right combination of furnace and human effort draws out gold specifically — dependence on conditions to become manifest is compatible with already being the specific kind of substance it is. Finalizes the two-causes framework: buddha-nature as primary cause (正因), the arising of the bodhi-mind as conditional cause (緣因), not the effect (buddhahood) already sitting complete within the cause. | |
| 心非佛性 — the mind is not buddha-nature | Part 28’s answer to Lion’s Roar’s sharpest challenge (if buddha-nature is fixed, why does anyone retrogress, and how can the icchantika sever it?): the bodhi-mind is impermanent and genuinely capable of retrogression, and is exactly what the icchantika severs — but the bodhi-mind was never itself buddha-nature to begin with, only its conditional cause. Buddha-nature proper operates at an entirely different level than any mental event, and remains untouched by whatever happens to the mind that seeks it. | |
| 七寶山喻 — the seven-jewel mountain | Part 28’s simile resolving why a permanent goal can still have a traveler turn back from it: two men seek a distant mountain of treasure and healing water; one turns back on hearing how perilous the road is, the other presses on and succeeds, and the first — seeing his companion’s success — sets out again and also arrives. The road, mountain, and water never become impermanent merely because a traveler turns back; retrogression is a fact about bodhisattvas, never a fact about buddha-nature itself. | |
| 不退菩薩大願 — the vow of the non-retrogressing bodhisattva | Part 28’s longest sustained first-person passage: an exhaustive vow covering bodily harm met with gratitude, worldly competence (language, medicine, statecraft) placed entirely in service of others, chosen rather than feared austerity, and deliberate rebirth among non-Buddhist teachers to undermine wrong view from within — closing on the same separation as the mind/buddha-nature distinction: however total this resolve becomes, it remains an act of mind, and is explicitly said not to be buddha-nature itself. | |
| 三十二相業因緣 — the karmic causes of the thirty-two marks | Part 28’s closing demonstration that non-retrogression can be discussed entirely in the vocabulary of ordinary karmic cause and effect: each of the thirty-two marks (level soles, the wheel-mark, webbed fingers, the uṣṇīṣa, the white ūrṇā, and so on) is traced to one specific virtuous act — nursing sick parents, sweeping the road for others, never disputing another’s faults — with no claim that the mark was somehow already latent in the bodhisattva beforehand. | |
| 蠟印印泥喻 — the candle-wax seal pressed into clay | Part 29’s answer to bondage and liberation without a persisting self: a seal is lifted away yet its impression remains, neither the seal itself surviving in the clay nor the impression coming from nowhere — a strict, shaped dependency between successive moments (paired with the intermediate-state’s own three kinds of nourishment and its origin in an inverted perception of the parents at conception) without any single substance traveling between them. | |
| 子斷／果斷 — severing the seed, and severing the fruit | Part 29’s resolution to why an arhat, who still possesses name-and-form, can nonetheless be called liberated: he has severed the seed (affliction itself) but not yet the fruit (buddha-nature still unseen) — two different grades of “liberation” that let the sūtra affirm both the arhat’s genuine attainment and his continued distance from awakening at once. | |
| 喻有八種 — the eight kinds of simile | Part 29’s rare metalinguistic catalogue (forward/reverse/direct/non-simile/prior/posterior/prior-and-posterior/pervasive), each demonstrated at length (rain filling every vessel from ditch to ocean and back; the monkey-mind; King Prasenajit’s four mountains; a flower-gatherer swept away; the Dharmapada’s water-drop verse; the pārijāta tree’s leaf-to-fragrance sequence mapped onto a disciple’s whole path). Closes by teaching that a simile need only be taken in part — “the Tathāgata’s face is like the full moon” borrows only roundness, not distance — which is what licenses correcting the lamp-and-oil simile (wick=25 states of existence, oil=craving, light=wisdom, warmth=the noble path) against Lion’s Roar’s objection that a being and his own affliction are not, in fact, separable like a lamp and its oil. | |
| 念念滅而相似相續 — moment-by-moment perishing that still accumulates | Part 29’s answer to how cultivation is possible without a persisting self: a reciting student, a goldsmith across a lifetime, a newborn calf’s untaught instinct for milk, and one lamp-flame never instructing the next all show real, cumulative, and irreversible results produced without any single substance carried across the successive moments — only a reliable pattern of dependency from one moment to the next. | |
| 須陀洹陰惡國不失喻 — the stream-enterer reborn in an evil land | Part 29’s hard case for the above: a stream-enterer’s precepts survive rebirth in an evil land not because any substance persists, but because an effect — a “power” — outlives its own cause, illustrated through a lion-king’s lingering reputation clearing a mountain he no longer occupies, digested ambrosia whose effect outlasts the substance, and a grandson inheriting wealth he never personally earned. | |
| 真修戒定慧 — the true cultivation of precept, concentration, and wisdom | Part 29’s double definition of the three trainings: first by intention alone (bodhisattva vs. śrāvaka distinguished by cultivating for every being’s sake and “seeing no [precept/samādhi/wisdom], no mark of it, no one practicing it, no fruit to be gained,” culminating in a vow to personally absorb every being’s affliction), then by concrete content (the sixteen evil livelihoods built on raising-then-slaughtering trades, the specific catalogue of wrong samādhis mistaken for nirvāṇa, and the catalogue of wrong views on self and form). | |
| 生死非涅槃：因果之辨 — why saṃsāra, though unborn and unceasing, isn’t nirvāṇa | Part 29’s distinction: birth-and-death has a beginning and an end for any given being and runs entirely through cause and fruit, while nirvāṇa’s own essence has neither — its “cause,” buddha-nature, does not itself produce it, and its status as “fruit” is only the destruction of affliction, not a further conditioned production. | |
| 佛性不一不二：忍辱草與聖道喻 | Part 29’s resolution of whether buddha-nature is shared or individual: neither one nor two, like empty space — illustrated through the forbearance-grass (eaten yet never exhausted), a shaded tree, a single-gated city, a bridge, and a physician treating every patient, corrected, once Lion’s Roar objects that an ordinary road does produce real congestion, by distinguishing the noble path as buddha-nature’s revealing cause (了因, like a lamp) rather than its generative cause (生因) — non-competitive in a way ordinary sharing is not, exactly as one being’s ignorance never depletes anyone else’s share of the twelve links. | |
| 毒在乳酪醍醐喻 — poison running unchanged through milk, curd, and ghee | Part 29’s answer to how buddha-nature can be one thing across a god’s, a human’s, an animal’s, a hungry ghost’s, and a hell-being’s radically different bodies: a single property can persist unchanged through every change of name that milk undergoes on its way to ghee, exactly as buddha-nature persists, one and unvarying, through birth after birth in different bodies and destinies. | |
| 拘尸那城非邊地弊惡 — why humble Kuśinagara was never really humble | Part 29’s answer to why the Buddha chose this small city over the six great cities for his parinirvāṇa: worth is established by function, not appearance (a lowly house a king visits, foul medicine that cures, a corpse that saves a drowning man), demonstrated across four past lives at this exact site — King Kauṇḍinya founding it in a past kalpa, wheel-turning king Sudarśana (the Buddha himself) practicing the four immeasurables here for eighty thousand years each, a past-life Kapilavastu where prince Siddhārtha first heard this very sūtra and vowed to reenact it, and Bimbisāra’s own invitation and the Kāśyapa brothers’ conversion via the eighteen transformations. | |
| 須達多買祇園喻金布地 — Sudatta covering Jeta’s garden with gold | Part 29’s famous conversion narrative: Sudatta’s fright at merely hearing the word “Buddha,” a gate of light that vanishes the instant fear intrudes on right recollection, and a generosity contest resolved not by argument but by escalation — Jeta’s flippant price (gold covering the entire ground) met literally, converting him from reluctant seller to co-donor who gives the remaining ground outright and builds the gate himself, ending with the Buddha’s own instantaneous arrival only once every human effort has already been spent. | |
| 六師遊六城喻 — the six teachers’ flight through six cities | Part 30’s extended narrative: slandered before King Prasenajit as fatherless and motherless, the Buddha answers with fifteen days of wonders rather than argument, and the six teachers flee city to city, each flight ending in defeat — Sāketa’s calf-and-milk plea recalling the Buddha from teaching his mother in the Trāyastriṃśa heaven, Vaiśālī’s courtesan and Licchavi conversions, Vārāṇasī’s involuntary skeleton-vision, and Campā’s poisoned mango failing to stop a child’s birth from his mother’s own funeral pyre — before a final “great illusionist” accusation at Kuśinagara turns the Buddha’s own skillful-means flexibility into the charge against him. | |
| 十三放逸果報 — the thirteen fruits of heedlessness | Part 30’s catalogue (delighting in worldly business, useless speech, prolonged sleep, bad company, indolence, contempt from others, forgetfulness, remote dwelling, untamed senses, discontent in eating, aversion to stillness, and wrong views), preceded by five simpler fruits, answered not by the Buddha directly but by the brahmin youth Aprameya’s lotus-in-the-pond simile: a buddha’s arising in one land was never favoritism, since he is like the sun, appearing for no one person or place exclusively. | |
| 樹提喻：母死子生 — Jyotiṣka, the child born from his mother’s funeral fire | Part 30’s demonstration that karmic fruit, once sufficiently weighty, cannot be prevented even by murder: the six teachers poison a pregnant woman to disprove the Buddha’s prophecy of a son, yet the child is born unharmed from the flames of her own cremation, “sitting upright amid the fire like a pair of mandarin ducks on a lotus platform” — named for the very fire that failed to consume him. | |
| 師子吼三喻破我 — the true lion’s roar: refuting the self as seer, as form, and as all-pervading | Part 30’s most direct engagement with rival self-theories: against “the seer is the self” (six senses operate at once while a person faces only one direction; a stable self should see unchangingly through an aging organ; a fixed self should see inside and outside simultaneously); against “form is the self” (five reasons — ugly forms would be impossible, the four castes couldn’t arise from one self, the body remains subject to conditions, birth defects are inexplicable, no one chooses a divine body at will); against “the self pervades everywhere like space” (an eternal self couldn’t have been “at first unseen”; a truly pervasive self should inhabit and receive every destiny’s karmic fruit at once; one self erases individual distinction while many pervasive selves erase difference in ability and fortune) — closing with the sūtra’s own reassignment: “self,” rightly used, names only the Tathāgata, free of action, birth, affliction, and every fixed mark. | |
| 二月十五日涅槃之義 — why the second month, why the fifteenth day | Part 30’s symbolic reading of the parinirvāṇa’s timing: spring (the second month), when beings are most tempted toward the thought of permanence, is chosen precisely to teach universal impermanence there while reserving the Buddha’s own true permanence for a different register; the fifteenth day is chosen because the full moon, unlike the waxing moon of the eighth day (marking birth, renunciation, awakening, and the first turning of the wheel), is already whole and changing no further — its eleven traditional benefits mapped term by term onto eleven benefits of “the Tathāgata’s own full moon.” Closes on the traveling-mother simile: children too young to understand mistake her absence for death, though she has not died. | |
| 娑羅雙樹莊嚴喻 — which monks adorn the twin sāla trees | Part 30’s parallel portrait gallery: Ānanda (transparent transmission, “like water poured between vessels”), Aniruddha (the heavenly eye reaching every world-system), Kāśyapa (few desires and contentment), Subhūti (freedom from contention), Maudgalyāyana (supernatural range), and Śāriputra (ninefold wisdom, equanimous toward teachings of both impermanence and permanence) — each excelling in one dimension, before Lion’s Roar names the Tathāgata alone as the one who integrates all of them, prompting his request that the Buddha remain, which the next section explicitly declines. | |
| 如來無住住 — the Tathāgata’s abiding that does not abide | Part 30’s extended refusal of Lion’s Roar’s request that the Buddha “dwell” in the sāla grove: dwelling presupposes conditioned form (already severed), arrogance (already severed), or finitude (which would make him impermanent) — run through some twenty registers (the vajra samādhi, illusion, the Dharma-realm, the six perfections, the four foundations of mindfulness) before resolving into a negation-chain (no dwelling-house → non-existence → unborn → deathless → markless → unbound → unattached → undefiled → wholesome → unconditioned → great nirvāṇa → permanence → self → purity → bliss). Followed by a list of ten things that “could never be so” (evil action yielding good fruit, the icchantika attaining awakening, the Tathāgata truly dwelling in Kuśinagara) and the reasons for entering the cave of dhyāna — addressed to beginner and advanced practitioner, heedless disciple and Mañjuśrī alike. | |
| 十相與三相：定慧捨 — the ten marks, and the three marks of concentration, wisdom, and equanimity | Part 30’s closing taxonomy: nirvāṇa is “signless” for being free of ten marks (form, sound, fragrance, flavor, touch, arising/abiding/decay, male, female), whose causal chain to death and back to permanence is dissolved by cultivating concentration, wisdom, and equanimity — equanimity glossed through a charioteer’s balance of a four-horse team, diagnosing why the ten-abiding bodhisattva (wisdom-heavy) and the śrāvaka (concentration-heavy) each fail to see buddha-nature clearly while only the Buddha holds both in balance. Closes with an exhaustive numerical taxonomy of samādhi (two-fold through ten-fold, then innumerable) and of wisdom (prajñā/vipaśyanā/jñāna), demonstrating that no single scheme exhausts the whole of concentration practice. | |
| 毘婆舍那能破煩惱之辯 — does insight alone destroy affliction? | Part 31’s opening dilemma: wisdom and affliction cannot coexist (like light and darkness), so speaking of wisdom “destroying” affliction already smuggles in a causal transaction that light/darkness don’t actually license; tested against whether destruction occurs “by reaching” affliction or not, alone or with a companion, and against the fire/axe standard (a genuine destruction should leave a mark or remainder, which affliction’s cessation never does) — resolved not by settling the metaphysics but by defending concentration’s own practical necessity regardless. | |
| 定慧知時非時 — knowing the right time for concentration, wisdom, or equanimity | Part 31’s diagnostic guide: arrogance (from success, honor, even pride in generosity) calls for concentration’s sobering stillness; discouragement, doubt, and a sense of moral backsliding call for wisdom instead; equanimity is reserved for when concentration and wisdom are already roughly matched; and when balanced cultivation itself produces affliction, the remedy is a return to recitation and the six mindfulnesses rather than more meditation. | |
| 涅槃十二異名 — the twelve names of nirvāṇa | Part 31’s causal-negation catalogue: unborn/unemergent/unproduced (negating ordinary causal process) and island/refuge/tranquility/final extinction (negating ordinary danger — the four torrents, every fetter, every fire of affliction) — two families answering, respectively, the philosophical puzzle of what escapes causation and the practical need for actual safety. | |
| 菩薩十法明見涅槃 — the ten dharmas for seeing signless nirvāṇa | Part 31’s checklist, most notable for its account of faith: believing the Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha are permanent while specifically not believing the literal narrative of the Tathāgata’s birth, sickness, austerities, or death, nor that Devadatta truly wounded him, nor that the true Dharma truly perishes — directly recalling the two-bodies distinction (the responsive body within ordinary causal history vs. the true body that never enters it). Pure precepts are tested through four escalating disguises of desire requiring no physical contact at all (flirtation, attraction to a mere sound, vicarious desire, precept-keeping aimed only at heavenly reward). | |
| 純陀布施無盡之詰難 — Cunda’s challenge: can karma ever be exhausted? | Part 31’s hardest karma debate: if giving to the Buddha yields inexhaustible reward and deliberate karma must certainly ripen, Cunda’s own single act of generosity should generate an unending sequence of pleasant fruits that could never terminate in awakening — and by the same logic an icchantika’s crimes should never be exhaustible either. Resolved through decisive/indecisive karma (a distinction correcting two opposite errors: denying karma has any fixed fruit at all, and treating every action’s fruit as rigidly fixed) and the wise/foolish distinction, where karmic weight is not a fixed physical property but something a cultivated mind can actually alter. | |
| 定業因果三時：現生後報 | Part 31’s three-times taxonomy of decisive karma (present-life, next-life, later-life retribution), with present-life retribution’s own example — betraying a bear’s den to a hunter and having one’s hand fall off — deliberately mirroring the truth-act stories told in the same fascicle: consequence made visible immediately rather than deferred. A buddha’s awakening causes every remaining karmic action to ripen at once, explaining why the Buddha’s own biography still includes real physical suffering despite complete freedom from binding karma. | |
| 非現生後受是惡業 — bodies freely chosen, not karmically earned | Part 31’s catalogue of the Buddha’s own past lives as an animal, a hungry ghost, an outcaste executioner, a border-dweller, a woman, a eunuch, and a follower of the Nirgrantha (Jain) sect — the bodhisattva possesses none of the karma that would ordinarily produce these bodies, yet voluntarily receives their fruit anyway, to reach beings otherwise unreachable, demonstrating that appearing to suffer and actually incurring karmic debt are entirely separable. | |
| 提婆達多刺目喻／迦羅富王割截喻 — the two truth-act healing stories | Part 31’s most vivid demonstration of karma’s alterability: Devadatta, coveting a second pearl, gouges out the bodhisattva’s eyes after a shipwreck (restored by the vow “should I hold any ill will toward Devadatta, let my eyes remain blind”); King Kalābu tests a forbearing ascetic’s claim that “forbearance is precept” by cutting off his ear, nose, hands, and feet in succession (restored by the identical vow-structure) — both healed not by any remedy but by the simple, spoken truth of an unafflicted mind. | |
| 十喻：智愚業報輕重 — ten similes for how wisdom turns heavy karma light | Part 31’s matched set (a fat man surviving deep mud, an antidote neutralizing poison, strong digestion handling a large drink, a wise prisoner’s release, sight avoiding a hidden pit, a full stomach absorbing wine, armor turning back an enemy, prompt washing keeping a garment clean, a spare axle keeping a cart moving, a hidden reserve softening a robbery’s loss), each pairing a passive endowment with an acquired resource — wisdom functioning less as a single skill than as an accumulated margin of safety. | |
| 不修身戒心慧五重定義 — five escalating rounds of “not cultivating” body, precept, mind, wisdom | Part 31’s closing structure (echoing Part 27’s ten-things pattern): a baseline round, then progressively subtler failures (clinging to a permanent self, self-serving precept-keeping, an ungoverned mind, failure to distinguish wholesome from unwholesome), culminating in an ultimate-truth round where even perceiving body, precept, mind, or wisdom as objects with a cause, fruit, or fixed nature is itself named a failure — the same “no mark, no cultivator” formula from the fascicle’s own opening section. Closes with three similes of proportion (cotton outweighed by gold, salt lost in the Ganges, an elephant snapping a chain) showing karma altered in weight without being denied in reality. | |
| 磁石詰難 — the magnet argument | Part 32’s opening challenge: if buddha-nature draws a being toward awakening the way a magnet draws iron, cultivation becomes pointless, exactly as the sun reaches its zenith and rivers reach the sea regardless of effort. Refuted by denying magnets attract through any intention of their own at all (“a different thing is present, and a different thing arises”), illustrated through fire and firewood, a mindless sunflower turning to the sun, and a mindless plantain tree responding to thunder — extended into a claim about dependent origination generally: even the twelve links involve no fixed producer reaching out to pull the next link into being. | |
| 恒河七種人喻 — seven kinds of people crossing the river | Part 32’s answer to why buddha-nature’s universal presence doesn’t make the path optional: the icchantika and the backslider both sink for the same reason (impermanent wholesome roots easily severed by bad company), while the stream-enterer through Tathāgata all share one foundation (faith, precepts, scripture, giving, wisdom) and differ only in how far it carries them — the bodhisattva deliberately stopping in the shallows to keep helping others still struggling, only the Tathāgata reaching the mountain on the far shore. Paired with a sixteen-item taxonomy of exactly how the icchantika sinks (six general causes, five clerical transgressions, five doctrinal corruptions, three denials of the three jewels’ permanence). | |
| 井喻／胡麻喻：佛性須修方見 | Part 32’s positive case for cultivation despite universal possession: buddha-nature is like water at the bottom of a deep well — certainly present, yet requiring a bucket and rope (the noble path) to actually see; like oil in sesame seed, invisible apart from proper extraction. The noble path itself is buddha-nature’s revealing cause (了因, like a lamp), never its generative cause (生因) — non-competitive in exactly the way one being’s cultivation never depletes another’s. | |
| 盲人摸象喻 — the blind men and the elephant | Part 32’s central image for six failed identifications of buddha-nature with form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness, or a self apart from the aggregates: each blind man’s description is partially right and partially wrong, since each seizes on something impermanent in its instances yet continuous across change (a golden color surviving reshaping, a clan-name surviving generations, heat surviving a flickering fire) and wrongly leaps from this continuity to identity with buddha-nature itself — the same leap Part 27’s fourteen-fold catechism already ruled out. | |
| 佛性異名十則 — ten things buddha-nature is truly called | Part 32’s positive list (great compassion, great joy and equanimity, great faith, the single-child stage, the fourth power, the twelve links, the four unobstructed knowledges, the crown samādhi), each justified by an identical formula — “because every being is certain, in the end, to attain it” — future certainty rather than persistent continuity being the actual warrant, distinguishing this list from the elephant parable’s six rejected identifications. The Buddha explains he never says directly “form is buddha-nature” for fear of producing the very reifying wrong view (severe enough to lead to hell) the elephant parable just diagnosed. | |
| 菩薩自試不退心 — how a bodhisattva tests his own non-retrogression | Part 32’s graduated self-tests (a seven-day-per-grain starvation fast, relinquishing wealth and body “like grass,” carving one’s own body into a lamp, giving head/eyes/marrow/flesh outright), each framed as diagnostic rather than meritorious — proving resolve empirically rather than earning it. Extended into voluntary rebirth as food for starving beings (feigning death so the eater feels no guilt) and as animals who teach the Dharma to their own kind, all “not actually receiving this evil karma” despite the karmic-looking body, continuing Part 31’s freely-chosen-not-earned framework. | |
| 菩薩不可思議十事 — ten inconceivable qualities of the bodhisattva | Part 32’s catalogue of paradoxes: compassion with no prior cause, kindness expecting no repayment, austerity for others’ benefit named one’s own true self-interest, equanimity toward friend and foe alike, gentleness and apparent arrogance both deployed as skillful means untouched by real feeling, and — the culminating item — a bodhisattva who has already seen there is no fixed being, no real affliction, and no genuine path, who nonetheless continues performing the very conduct that “destroys suffering” as though it were real. Includes voluntary rebirth in Tuṣita heaven despite censuring every state of existence, and undefiled entry into the womb “like the blue jewel in Indra’s crown.” | |
| 大海八不思議對照大涅槃經八不思議 | Part 32’s extended pervasive simile (the largest single instance of Part 29’s “pervasive simile” method): the ocean’s eight wonders (gradual deepening, an unreachable bottom, one uniform taste, a tide that never exceeds its limit, every kind of treasure, great inhabitants, no lingering corpses, constancy despite every river’s inflow) mapped point-by-point onto the sūtra’s own eight — its depth explicitly including the claim that self/no-self, permanence/impermanence, and emptiness/non-emptiness are each taught by turns “and yet no single, fixed formulation of buddha-nature is ever given as final.” | |
| 化生詰難：如來何以不化生 | Part 32’s question of why the Buddha, possessing the eight masteries, was not born by transformation like beings at the kalpa’s start — answered by six reasons split between what the audience needs to accept the teaching (unimpeachable lineage, real kin as “external protection,” deliberately being born into rather than above caste) and what an ordinary body makes possible afterward (real reciprocal parents, cremation relics, consistency with every other buddha’s own pattern). | |
| 師子吼讚佛偈 — Lion’s Roar’s closing hymn | Part 32’s verse summary of the entire six-fascicle chapter: epithets each justified by a single argument (the great ship’s captain for having crossed the river himself, the great physician for knowing cause and cessation together), the mother/father similes recalling the single-child-stage identification of buddha-nature, hell endured without felt pain restating the freely-chosen-suffering framework, and a fourfold rejection of causation (suffering “not made by self, by other, by both, or without cause”) closing the chapter’s own causation debate on the same note Part 27 opened it. Closes the entire 師子吼菩薩品 (Parts 27–32) chapter. | |
| 善星比丘三喻六證 — Sunakṣatra’s slow fall, and six similes for three kinds of disciple | Part 33’s opening: Kāśyapa charges the Buddha with lacking compassion or skillful means toward Sunakṣatra, his own former son who mastered scripture and the four dhyānas yet fell into hell. Answered first by six similes (sons, fields, jars, patients, horses, donors) showing that teaching bodhisattva, śrāvaka, and icchantika in that order, with the icchantika last, is compatible with — indeed requires — equal exertion once each is actually taught, illustrated by a lion exerting full strength killing even a hare. Sunakṣatra’s own three-episode fall (fearing a bogeyman he should know his teacher fears nothing; praising a degraded ascetic’s “no cause, no effect” as arhatship; staking his credibility on a false ascetic’s arhatship against the Buddha’s own prophecy, only to interview the resulting hungry ghost at its own corpse and still disbelieve) traces attainment without comprehension collapsing the moment bad company supplies an alternative framework. | |
| 一髮不能拔喻 — the single hair unable to bear the body’s weight | Part 33’s resolution of why buddha-nature’s presence never guarantees present rescue: the icchantika is like a man sunk in a latrine pit with only a hair’s tip unsubmerged — real, but unable to bear his weight now, though his future rescue remains certain. Severing is of two kinds (severing in the present, and obstructing the future from the present); the icchantika is fully endowed with both, yet buddha-nature itself — neither past, future, nor present — can never be severed by anything operating within the three times, since it never belonged to them in the first place. | |
| 佛性未來已見故有 — why buddha-nature is spoken of as “future” | Part 33’s answer to Kāśyapa’s own sharpest objection: if buddha-nature is permanent like space, why call it future at all, and doesn’t the icchantika’s love for his own family already count as something wholesome? Buddha-nature’s own atemporal status is distinguished from the future-tense language used to point toward it (borrowed because a being’s purified future body is where it is finally seen, the same “cause taught as fruit” convention used elsewhere); the icchantika’s family affection is denied wholesome status entirely, since every action he performs — including this one — seeks no true cause or fruit, like every part of the myrobalan fruit sharing the same bitterness. | |
| 何故聽善星出家 — why ordain someone doomed to fall | Part 33’s two-part justification: politically, leaving Sunakṣatra in the royal succession risked a hostile ruler with power to suppress the Dharma; existentially, even a life ending in severed roots included twenty real years of precept-keeping and meditative attainment, “a wholesome cause” not erased by its own eventual failure. Grounded in the teaching that faculties are never fixed — superior, middling, and inferior faculties genuinely convert into one another — which is also why a severed wholesome root can, in a future life, grow back. | |
| 爪上土喻 — the earth beneath a fingernail | Part 33’s image for the rarity of a complete human rebirth with access to right faith: compared against the earth of every world-system in the ten directions, exactly as genuine belief in this very Nirvāṇa Sūtra is compared against the earth of every world lacking it. | |
| 未來二十種異說詰難 — Kāśyapa’s catalogue of twenty future disputes | Part 33’s remarkably direct preview of real historical Abhidharma controversies (unmanifest form, whether the twelve links are conditioned, whether a violated precept survives, whether mind is momentary or enduring, whether stream-enterers attain buddhahood) that would in fact divide Buddhist schools for centuries — put to the Buddha as a challenge: if he foreknows every future dispute, why not settle them decisively now? Paired deliberately with the Sunakṣatra question as a second instance of the same dilemma (complete knowledge seemingly obligating prevention of an avoidable outcome). | |
| 一名無量名／一義無量名／無量義無量名 — one name many meanings, one meaning many names, many meanings many names | Part 33’s fourfold taxonomy resolving the appearance of doctrinal inconsistency: nirvāṇa’s twenty-five names and Indra’s ten names are a single referent named from many angles, not competing definitions; the Buddha’s own epithets are many meanings each with its own name; the five aggregates alone are renamed as inversion, the four foundations of mindfulness, or the twelve links depending entirely on context. Illustrated by the elephant’s load a donkey cannot carry, the warning never to praise faith to the faithless or wisdom to the fool, and Śāriputra’s own admitted teaching error — marking the boundary between ordinary compassionate teaching and the Buddha’s own “fifth power,” the power of liberating interpretation that matches teaching to listener without fail. | |
| 二十難逐一解答 — Part 34’s point-by-point resolution of Kāśyapa’s twenty disputes | The entire fascicle answers each item from Part 33’s closing catalogue by naming the specific person and occasion behind each half of a seemingly contradictory pair: the three-month announcement calibrated four different ways (fragrant-mountain sages, three hundred thousand wrestlers moved by a stone lifted and dissolved to dust, Cunda’s vow, the extensive Ajātaśatru parricide narrative), self and no-self (King Sudarśana’s eighty-four-thousand-year past life versus the two-hands-clapping simile), the intermediate state affirmed and denied, five kinds of retrogression against three causes an arhat lacks, the Buddha’s response-body and Dharma-body, the twelve links as conditioned and as a fourfold classification including what is “neither conditioned nor among the twelve links” (space and nirvāṇa), the five desires permitted to some disciples and forbidden to every householder, giving as intention and as the five aggregates, the three unconditioned dharmas denied as mere absence yet defended to Maudgalyāyana with eleven honorific names, form as bare elements and as mirror-derived quality, unmanifest form debated with Prince Bodhi, mental factors reduced to ignorance and then affirmed through the eye-form-light-desire chain, Mahānāma’s one-portion upāsaka and Kātyāyana’s fully-received fasting precept, the four gravest violations losing monastic status against Cunda’s four-kinds-of-monk “polluting the path,” and the one vehicle against each fruit’s own distinct parinirvāṇa. | |
| 象喻總攝二十難 — the elephant simile named as the fascicle’s own method | Part 34’s buddha-nature pair (six qualities proving it exists “apart from beings” versus “beings themselves are buddha-nature”) closes by explicitly re-invoking Part 32’s blind-men-and-the-elephant simile and Part 26’s lute simile as the sūtra’s own precedent, naming its own interpretive method openly: every doctrine in the fascicle is one hand on one part of the same elephant, true as far as it reaches and wrong only if mistaken for the whole. The final dispute (one buddha per world-system versus the Mahāyāna sūtras’ own buddhas of the ten directions) is left explicitly unreconciled, the only one of the twenty not resolved by a further clause. | |
| 疑即是著／杌根喻 — doubt as itself attachment, and the stump mistaken for a man | Part 35’s opening puzzle: doubt normally requires having seen two indistinguishable things (a stump mistaken for a man, a monk mistaken for a brahmin ascetic), yet beings doubt nirvāṇa without ever having seen it — resolved by identifying what has actually been “seen twice” as suffering and its absence, not nirvāṇa itself. A fixed conclusion reached without resolving the underlying doubt (e.g. that a stream-enterer never falls into the evil destinies) is itself still called doubt, since “to be free of doubt in this way is itself simply doubt.” | |
| 斷善根二十九難 — twenty-nine arguments for severing wholesome roots | Part 35’s extensive catalogue, organized (after Huiyuan) into four slanders: no genuine giving (six arguments), no father or mother as real cause (six arguments), no cause and fruit generally (three arguments), and no such thing as a sage (nine arguments, escalating to the sharpest: a single shared nirvāṇa could never be attained, while many separate nirvāṇas would be impermanent, so no sage can exist either way). Explicitly the province of “intelligent, clever, sharp-of-faculty” minds, not the foolish. | |
| 斷三世因／二時還生善根 — severing the causes of all three times, and the two moments of return | Part 35’s precise technical account of “severing”: only the arising of a present result from a past cause, and the capacity to give rise to a future result, are actually severed — the bare past cause and the eventual future result themselves are never severed, since neither could be severed even in principle. Wholesome roots regenerate at two moments: first entering hell (through dread) and emerging from it (once the offense is exhausted). | |
| 四種答／五六七種佛性配十地 — four kinds of answer, and buddha-nature’s visible qualities mapped stage by stage | Part 35’s taxonomy (definite, analytical, following-the-question, and set-aside answers) resolves whether a person who has severed his wholesome roots still possesses buddha-nature by tracing exactly which of buddha-nature’s seven universal qualities (常我樂淨真實善) are already visible at each stage: five for bodhisattvas of the first through fifth abidings (self and bliss withheld as belonging properly to the fruit), six for the sixth through ninth abidings and for a final-body bodhisattva, seven only for the Tathāgata himself. The milk-to-ghee sequence (stream-enterer as milk, non-returner as curds, arhat as fresh butter, bodhisattva as refined butter, Tathāgata as ghee) tracks the identical progression. Set-aside answers are of two kinds: rejecting a false claim (a severed person definitely lacks buddha-nature) and warning against attachment (he definitely, already, possesses it as settled fact). | |
| 非內非外七番／佛性非有非無 — seven rounds of neither-internal-nor-external, and buddha-nature as neither existent nor non-existent | Part 35’s sevenfold demonstration (five aggregates, twelve sense-bases, inner/outer paths, the Buddha’s physical marks vs. his mental qualities, inner reflection vs. hearing the Dharma, the giving-perfection vs. the other five, and the wrestler’s-jewel/poor-woman’s-treasure similes) that buddha-nature is reached only through union, never through either extreme alone. Paired with the seed-fruit, milk-curd, and salt arguments proving that “definitely exists” is attachment and “definitely does not exist” is falsehood — the śirīṣa fruit, appearing whole at five inches the instant the Pleiades rise with no visible prior buildup, closes the case for arising without accumulation. | |
| 隨自意／隨他意／隨自他意／七種語 — three ways of teaching, and seven kinds of language | Part 35’s account of why the sūtra can sound self-contradictory across forty fascicles: most apparent inconsistency is a shift between teaching according to the Buddha’s own unstated intent (the five-hundred-monks story, where every answer is called “correct” while the real point goes unspoken), according to the listener’s own framework turned back on him (the illusionist householder Pāṭalika), or according to plain agreement with worldly consensus. The seven kinds of language (cause, fruit, cause-and-fruit, simile, not-to-be-taken-literally, ordinary-worldly, and as-intended) culminate in as-intended language, the register buddha-nature itself is taught in — imported from the Ratnagotravibhāga’s fivefold rationale, chiefly to prevent beings from despairing that awakening is impossible for them. | |
| 恒河七種眾生重用於本經自身 — the river simile reapplied to this very sūtra | Part 36 turns Part 32’s sevenfold river taxonomy onto how a real listener receives this sūtra’s own hardest claims: “always sinking” now names the reader who dismisses the Tathāgata’s permanence and universal buddha-nature as a non-Buddhist forgery; “briefly rising, then sinking again” names one who believes yet remains incomplete across five compounding layers — faith, precept, learning, giving, wisdom — each incompleteness explained as flowing directly from the one before it, illustrated by a named list including Devadatta and Sunakṣatra; “abiding” names those (Śāriputra, Maudgalyāyana, and a long list of monks, nuns, and lay disciples) whose practice is already complete. | |
| 煖法／七十三種得煖法人 — the warmth stage, and its seventy-three practitioners | Part 36’s technical account: warmth is wisdom itself (the sixteen practices contemplating the four truths), self-warm rather than caused by anything else, resembling the fire-drill’s three stages (warmth, fire, smoke = the sixteen practices, the stream-entry fruit, and the path that cuts off the fetters). Though itself a conditioned, form-realm-only dharma, it marks the unconditioned path the way a rider both loves and drives a horse — cherished (it still yields further birth) yet also driving the practitioner past that very birth. Seventy-three kinds distributed across the desire realm’s ten grades and nine further grades in each of the seven higher stages up to the sphere of nothingness. | |
| 三結重故名須陀洹／新舊二名 — why three fetters alone name the stream-enterer, and the old/guest naming convention | Part 36’s resolution of a real numerical puzzle (a stream-enterer severs a lake’s worth of affliction yet is defined by three fetters, “like a single drop”): self-view, mistaking a wrong cause for the true cause, and doubt are singled out because they are constant, subtle, root-causal, and each the direct adversary of one of the three trainings — the way a king’s whole army is summed up as simply “the king comes.” Every noble one, from stream-enterer through Buddha, may in principle be called by any of the higher names, since each new attainment is simply a fresh name laid over the same underlying undefiled cultivation — “stream-enterer” happens to be reserved for the very first because it marks a structural position (just completed the sixteenth mind-moment of the path of seeing) rather than a fixed quantity of severed affliction. | |
| 中般涅槃唯欲界有／七種果／生因了因重申 — intermediate-state nirvāṇa exclusive to the desire realm, seven kinds of fruit, and generative/revealing cause reprised | Part 36’s five kinds (later six, then seven) of non-returner’s parinirvāṇa, explained via the desire realm’s unique “external” layer of affliction alongside the “internal” layer every realm shares — giving the intermediate state one further chance to reject it before form-realm rebirth would otherwise settle the matter. The seven-fruit taxonomy (skillful-means, gratitude, intimacy, residual, equality, retribution, departure) each with a near and far cause builds from ordinary examples toward nirvāṇa itself, finally resolving Kāśyapa’s causation challenge by reprising Part 28’s generative-cause/revealing-cause distinction: the path generates the cessation of affliction, but only reveals nirvāṇa’s own already-present purity. | |
| 心口想異方成謗 — slander requires mind, speech, and thought at odds | Part 36’s precise criterion for what makes a flat claim about the icchantika’s buddha-nature into actual slander of the three jewels: not which side of the debate one takes, but whether inner conviction, spoken words, and underlying intent genuinely agree. Denying a real future possibility is slander; describing that same possibility honestly in compressed language (the icchantika can generate fresh, uninterrupted wholesome roots and thereby attain awakening) is not. Closes with buddha-nature “existent” only to refute the rabbit’s horn and “non-existent” only to refute space, never asserted as either in some further sense — and with the entire “teaching according to one’s own intent” section (spanning the end of Part 35 through all of Part 36) capped by the claim that the Buddha’s own three names — Tathāgata, Arhat, Samyaksambuddha — derive from this very habit of speaking according to his own intent. | |
| 佛性如虛空三義／破空十一難 — three specific points of resemblance to space, and eleven arguments against space’s own existence | Part 37 limits the space simile to exactly three shared features (outside the three times, neither internal nor external, free of obstruction) reached from opposite premises — space because it does not exist at all, buddha-nature because it is permanent — then, when pressed on why space itself isn’t equally “existent,” runs eleven separate arguments (as light, as location, as sequence, as a threefold emptiness-solidity structure, as constructible, as mere absence of obstruction, as physically joined to matter, as indicated by a pointing finger, as something matter depends on) each showing that any candidate account of space turns out countable, locatable, constructed, or dependent — and therefore impermanent, unlike genuinely permanent buddha-nature. | |
| 十法不與世諍 — ten dharmas that keep a bodhisattva from disputing with the world | Part 37’s list (faith, precept, good friends, inner reflection, diligence, mindfulness, wisdom, right speech, delight in the Dharma, compassion) nearly duplicates Part 27’s ten-thing list under different names, applied here to resolve why the Buddha calls his own body “permanent” while agreeing with worldly wisdom that ordinary form is impermanent: an ordinary being’s aggregates arise from affliction and are correctly called impermanent, while the Tathāgata’s aggregates, having no affliction as their cause, are correctly called permanent by that very same standard — no dispute with the world anywhere, only a difference in whose body is under discussion. | |
| 三漏／觀漏因果輕重 — the three leaks, and the five-step method of observing affliction | Part 37’s technical taxonomy (desire-leak, becoming-leak, ignorance-leak, with ignorance as the root beneath the other two) paired with a five-step contemplative method: observe affliction’s fault (the blind man led into thorns and abandoned), observe its cause, observe its fruit, observe its relative weight, then cultivate the path — severing the heaviest affliction first so the lighter ones “depart on their own,” continuing Part 36’s “the king comes, the king goes” principle. The seed-in-one-container simile explains how a single body generates every kind of different affliction without requiring several distinct underlying natures. | |
| 妙藥王喻／受愛觸想業苦十二因緣 — the wondrous medicine king, and the full feeling-craving-contact-perception-karma-suffering cycle | Part 37’s resolution of Kāśyapa’s hardest paradox (if affliction is beings and beings are affliction, how can a “wondrous medicine king” exist in a poisonous body?): not every fruit is capable of becoming a further seed, and pure holy conduct is precisely a fruit of affliction that no longer serves as affliction’s own cause. Traced in full technical detail — feeling as craving’s near cause, perception as feeling’s inversion, contact graded into wise/ignorant/neutral, desire as the mistaking of the five sense-objects for what causes them, karma’s three kinds (body/speech/mind) and four fruits (black-black/white-white/mixed/neither, the last being fruit without retribution), closing on the twelve-links cycle restated as a closed loop of affliction generating karma generating suffering generating further affliction — each stage capped by the same refrain: the medicine king was never added from outside, only found by observing the poison clearly enough to stop it reproducing itself. | |
| 一切法即梵行／四十二句讚經 — “every dharma is pure conduct,” and forty-two similes for the sutra itself | Part 38’s opening answer to what pure, holy conduct actually is: first an expansive catalogue (after Huiyuan, forty-two phrases) of similes for the sutra itself — treasury, root of every medicine, dwelling-place, unbreakable vajra, banner, caravan-leader, medicine king, staff, bridge, canopy, lion king, mirror, clothing, wealth, ambrosia, ornament, axe, storehouse, father and mother of every buddha — before narrowing to the working answer: the thirty-seven factors of the path, shown to already contain everything the catalogue separately praised. | |
| 三十七品九義／根因增之別 — the thirty-seven factors known nine ways, and the root/cause/increase distinction | Part 38’s technical mapping of nine terms (root, cause, inclusion, increase, lord, guide, supreme, real, ultimate) onto eight of the ten universal mental factors (desire, contact, feeling, volition, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom, liberation) plus their fruit, restated through three parallel lenses — the monastic path from going-forth to buddhahood, and the twelve links from consciousness to birth-old-age-death — as the same ninefold structure viewed three ways, not three competing systems. Root/cause/increase are distinguished as first arising, unbroken continuous similarity, and that similarity’s productive transformation into something new. | |
| 十想得涅槃／麁細無常 — the ten perceptions that lead to nirvana, coarse and subtle impermanence | Part 38’s exhaustive method for attaining nirvana: impermanence (coarse — internal aging, external seasons, others’ fortunes, even what is only heard of; subtle — the ten-stage bodily sequence from membrane to old age proving moment-by-moment perishing beneath visible gradual change), suffering, no-self (five converging arguments), weariness toward food (the fourfold food taxonomy, and impurity-perception as factually false yet functionally true), the world’s own lack of any place worth delighting in, and death (the four-archers simile for the speed of impermanence, six lord-of-death similes each capturing a different quality of imminence) — the six base perceptions generating seven further ones as their natural fruit. | |
| 迦葉偈頌收束迦葉菩薩品 — Kāśyapa’s own hymn closing the twelfth chapter | Part 38’s closing verses are Kāśyapa’s first extended praise-offering across six fascicles of questioning, paralleling Lion’s Roar’s own closing hymn in Part 32 — marking the second complete six-fascicle chapter (迦葉菩薩品, Parts 33–38) after 師子吼菩薩品 (Parts 27–32). Moves from the paradox of true self within no-self, through the difficulty of the very first arising of the awakening-mind, to the repeated calf-and-mother image for the Buddha’s own instinctive compassion, culminating in “every being’s own different suffering is, in every case, this single Tathāgata’s own suffering alone” — closing on loving-kindness itself named as liberation, and liberation named as the great nirvana. | |
| 六梵志問難 — six brahmins debate the Buddha, opening the final chapter | Part 39 opens 憍陳如品 with King Ajātaśatru redirecting a mob of provoked heretics straight to the Buddha; six debate in turn, classified (after Huiyuan) by underlying wrong view: Jātiśroṇa and Vātsīputra hold that nirvāṇa must be impermanent (wrong-view heretics), Senika and the Kāśyapa-gotra brahmin hold a self-view, Pūrṇa and Śuddha hold an extremist view built on the fourteen unanswerable questions. Each objection is dissolved by showing the question’s own frame was the error, not by choosing a side; all six ask for ordination on the spot. | |
| 生因了因破常無常詰難 — generative/revealing cause turned against a rival system’s own vocabulary | Part 39’s answer to Jātiśroṇa: rather than attacking Sāṃkhya cosmology directly, the Buddha borrows the brahmin’s own admitted generative-cause/revealing-cause distinction (already present in his system) to show an impermanent cause and permanent fruit are not contradictory — the identical distinction used against the milk-curd debate in Part 28 and nirvāṇa’s own causation in Part 36, here turned outward for the first time against an opponent’s own framework rather than developed from within the sutra. | |
| 異相互無／三病三藥 — mutual non-existence, and three diseases with three medicines | Part 39’s answer to Vātsīputra’s “nirvana is a mere absence” objection: nirvana is the third of the sutra’s standard fourfold non-existence taxonomy (mutual, reciprocal absence between distinct things, like a horse not existing within an ox), the only kind that entails neither impermanence nor absolute nothingness. The three-disease/three-medicine simile (heat/wind/cold cured by ghee/oil/honey; craving/hatred/delusion cured by impurity/loving-kindness/causal-wisdom contemplation) shows an “absence” can constitute health rather than a mere gap. | |
| 先尼我遍一切／燈炷喻反噬 — Senika’s pervading self refuted, and the lamp-simile turned back on its author | Part 39’s longest debate: Senika’s self, both “identical to” and “distinct from” the acting body (house-fire simile), is dismantled by showing “pervading everywhere” splits into permanent/impermanent and material/immaterial senses that can’t cohere together, then by four further refuges refuted in sequence — self as passive instrument (sickle simile), self split into knowing/unknowing halves, self as what remembers (a true self would never forget), self as what sees/hears (six-consciousness analysis: wind-through-a-bell, heated-iron-in-water). Senika’s own lamp-wick-and-undifferentiated-light simile is shown to prove the opposite of his intent and turned back on him. | |
| 未斷因緣之焰／十四難不答 — the detached flame still has a cause, and why the fourteen questions go unanswered | Part 39’s resolution of the Kāśyapa-gotra brahmin’s body/life-force dilemma: a flame broken free of its fuel by wind seems uncaused, but still depends causally on the wind — body and life-force are likewise “identical” in sharing ignorance-and-craving as sustaining cause and “distinct” in that the body alone can cease while that causal continuity carries on, like the flame riding the wind through the intermediate state. Pūrṇa’s fourteen classic unanswerable questions (permanent/impermanent, bounded/unbounded, body-and-life-force, the Tathāgata’s state after death) go unanswered not because they lack a true answer but because fixing on any single position, whichever one, is itself the disease — the extinguished-fire simile dissolves rather than picks among the fourteen options for what happens after parinirvana. | |
| 五大轉變破自性 — the shifting four elements refute inherent, fixed nature | Part 40’s answer to the naturalist ascetic (納衣梵志), who argues that everything has its own fixed nature apart from causation, citing the four elements’ own supposedly uncaused natures as proof. The Buddha shows the elements themselves are observably unfixed (water freezing yet still called “water” rather than “earth,” metals melting into flowing “fire” that behaves like water) — if even the bedrock elements shift under conditions, nothing can serve as proof of a truly fixed nature. The naturalist’s own reliance on simile is turned back on him: a genuinely self-identical nature could never be illuminated by comparison to anything else. | |
| 城喻／弘廣是菩薩示現 — the city with one gate, and a heretic revealed as a hidden bodhisattva | Part 40’s answer to Hongguang’s question of whether the eightfold path saves everyone: the Buddha’s silence (matching his refusal to answer Pūrṇa’s fourteen questions in Part 39) is explained by Kauṇḍinya’s own simile — a gatekeeper can guarantee every entrant uses the one gate without knowing or needing to know how many will actually choose to enter. The Buddha then reveals Hongguang has already vowed buddhahood under a past buddha and deliberately plays the heretic for beings’ sake — recasting the whole confrontation sequence across Parts 39-40 as possible staged pedagogy rather than a real contest. | |
| 阿難被魔所惱／大陀羅尼 — Ananda captured by Mara’s army, freed by a dharani | Part 40’s narrative interlude: countless demons, transformed into false Buddha-images each teaching contradictory doctrines, hold Ananda captive twelve leagues away specifically to disrupt the future transmission of the teaching he alone is slated to carry forward. The Buddha’s own recounting of how Ananda first became his attendant (rejecting five hundred arhats as too old, Maudgalyayana’s samadhi-vision, Ananda’s three preemptive conditions) and his eight inconceivable qualities plus eight sustaining dharmas precede Manjushri’s rescue via a dharani taught by every buddha of ten Ganges-sands of world-systems — a demonstration of reach no ordinary argument could accomplish. | |
| 須跋陀羅：無所有處誤認涅槃／無相之相 — Subhadra mistakes a formless attainment for nirvana, and the markless mark | The sutra’s final teaching, given to the Buddha’s last ordained disciple: Subhadra’s attainment of neither-perception-nor-non-perception is rejected because it remains, definitionally, a perception, and his own teacher Udraka Ramaputra — sharper of faculty — made the identical mistake and died still bound by it, closing off spiritual attainment as its own guarantee of correctness. The markless mark (無相之相) is defined through roughly forty exhaustive negations (self/other, cause/fruit, agent/recipient, seeing/seer, karma/its lord) before naming the place all these negations converge as the true mark, the Dharma-realm, the ultimate wisdom, the truth of ultimate meaning, and the emptiness of ultimate meaning — five names for one realization, the same “one meaning, many names” pattern named as far back as Part 33. Closes the entire 40-fascicle translation. |
A note on Part 1’s translation of proper names
Part 1’s enormous assembly list names dozens of kings, nāga kings, spirit kings, and other beings by titles transliterated in the Chinese (e.g. 和修吉龍王, 毘沙門, 睒婆利王). Where a name has a well-attested Sanskrit or Pāli original independently identifiable from Buddhist literature generally (Vāsuki, Vaiśravaṇa, Śambara, and so on), this collection uses that reconstructed form. Where a name is a Chinese descriptive title without an independently attested Sanskrit original (e.g. 可畏王, “the fearsome king,” or 妙音蜂王, “the bee-king of wondrous voice”), this collection translates the title’s sense directly into English (e.g. “the rākṣasa king Bhīṣaṇa” glosses 可畏 rather than reconstructing an unattested Sanskrit proper name) or, where translation would misleadingly suggest independent Sanskrit attestation, renders the descriptive sense of the Chinese as an English epithet. Later parts translating similar lists of names will follow this same distinction and add entries here as new cases arise.