The Higher Training in Morality

Vasubandhu pauses here to answer an obvious question: moral discipline is already one of the six perfections covered in Part 5, so why does it need a separate treatment as a "higher training"? His answer is that the three higher trainings — morality, concentration, and wisdom, covered in this and the next two parts — are being examined here specifically for how each causes the next: discipline gives rise to concentration, and concentration gives rise to wisdom, a causal sequence worth its own dedicated treatment even though the same three qualities were already named among the six perfections. The treatise also points its reader directly to Asaṅga's companion work, the Bodhisattva Grounds (Bodhisattvabhūmi), for the full ceremony and detailed rules of bodhisattva precepts — this part covers only what makes that code distinctively excellent, not its full content.

Vasubandhu states the contrast plainly: śrāvakas and others have only the discipline of restraint — abstaining from wrongdoing — with no equivalent to the other two. A bodhisattva has all three at once, and Vasubandhu describes them as building on one another: the discipline of restraint is what makes the other two possible in the first place, since without basic ethical stability neither sustained spiritual practice nor genuine service to others can be reliably carried out; the discipline of gathering wholesome dharmas then channels that stability directly into cultivating every quality that leads to buddhahood; and the discipline of benefiting sentient beings channels it outward, into the actual, active work of helping others mature. Restraint alone, on this account, is only the foundation — necessary, but not yet the whole structure a bodhisattva's precepts are meant to support.

Vasubandhu clarifies the categories with concrete cases. "Inherently wrong actions" — killing, stealing, and the like — are wrong regardless of any code; both vows equally forbid them, which is the "shared" portion. "Merely prohibited" actions are wrong only because a specific rule forbids them, not because they are inherently harmful, and here the two codes can diverge in both directions: a monastic rule against staying overnight in a certain place might be broken by a bodhisattva who judges that staying will genuinely benefit someone, while the very same bodhisattva might be considered to have transgressed by declining to help someone in need even where a śrāvaka's narrower rule would permit inaction. The sharpest difference, though, is that a bodhisattva's precepts extend to the mind itself — a śrāvaka's code governs only bodily and verbal action, so purely internal states of craving or ill will, however unwholesome, are not technically transgressions there, whereas for a bodhisattva they are. The underlying principle Vasubandhu draws out is simple: the real measure is whether an act genuinely, faultlessly benefits beings, not whether it happens to match a rule written for a narrower purpose.

Each of the four names a dimension along which the bodhisattva's precepts simply exceed the śrāvaka code's scope. The training-points themselves are more numerous and varied, since they cover restraint, positive cultivation, and active benefit to others all at once, rather than restraint alone. The merit they gather is of a different order of magnitude, since a śrāvaka's discipline is not aimed at accumulating the vast resources needed for full buddhahood. The resolve behind them reaches every single sentient being, not a bounded circle of concern. And their ultimate aim is nothing less than unsurpassed, perfect awakening itself, rather than personal liberation. Vasubandhu treats these four together as showing that "vastness" here is not merely a difference of degree, but a difference in what the discipline is actually oriented toward at every level — how many rules, how much merit, how wide a concern, and how high a goal.

Vasubandhu is careful to specify exactly what licenses this: a bodhisattva able to read another being's mind directly, who sees with certainty that a particular person is about to commit an act — say, killing a great many others — that will condemn them to a terrible rebirth, and who has no other way to stop it, may choose to end that person's life first, taking on the karmic consequence personally, purely out of compassion for both the would-be victims and the perpetrator, who is thereby spared a far worse fate. Such a bodhisattva, Vasubandhu says, is like a skilled physician who must sometimes cause pain to heal — the act incurs no fault at all, because it arises entirely from a benefiting mind free of anger or self-interest, and it generates immense merit precisely because of the compassion behind it. He also glosses "manifesting transformation bodies" with two illustrative examples: a bodhisattva appearing as a stern king to discipline unruly subjects into good conduct, and the well-known jātaka tales in which a bodhisattva appears to give away his own wife and children, causing apparent distress, while no real being is actually harmed by an illusory, transformation-body event, and the deeper purpose is always to plant and ripen genuine faith. This "excellence of profundity" is explicitly bounded, not a general license: it applies only to a bodhisattva with the wisdom to know such things with certainty and the compassion for it to be entirely selfless — not a permission ordinary practitioners can invoke for themselves.