The Lion's Roar, and the One True Refuge

Jizang explains the name directly: when the Tathāgata's declaration of no further becoming is grounded in his own unimpeded wisdom-vision, it is called a lion's roar precisely because "the principle is settled beyond doubt" (道理決定，名師子吼) — a pronouncement with no hedge or qualification left in it anywhere. He contrasts this with the two vehicles' own four kinds of knowledge, which are, in his phrase, never truly self-attained: "the two vehicles' four kinds of knowledge are obtained by being taught by another; the Tathāgata realizes his own directly" (小乘四智由他教得，如來自證故). The same four-line proclamation — "my rebirth is exhausted," and so on — means something different depending entirely on who is speaking it.

On the "resting place" (蘇息處), Jizang surveys two prior readings before setting both aside: one takes the phrase as referring jointly to Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna nirvāṇa together, another as the two vehicles' own claim to a final nirvāṇa free of the death of inconceivable transformation. He treats the passage more simply, as one continuous error rather than two separate claims: the two vehicles wrongly regard their own extinction of afflictions as final — "they consider it nirvāṇa, and consider it ultimate" (自謂涅槃究竟) — the identical mistake, in a different key, as their earlier wrong claim that their four kinds of knowledge were already complete. A way station mistaken for the destination is still one mistake, however many places in the text it shows up.

Jizang also distinguishes two kinds of śrāvaka who are eventually converted to this teaching: those who never heard the Mahāyāna at all and had no bodhi-seed to begin with (本乘聲聞), and those who once heard the One Vehicle teaching, generated bodhicitta, and then retreated back into the lesser vehicle anyway (退菩提心聲聞). Both count as "dharma-deluded" the moment they mistake arhatship for something final — "if they realize arhatship, they consider it ultimate, and do not know there is still buddhahood to attain" (若證羅漢，則自謂究竟，不知作佛) — and both become undeluded only upon hearing the One Vehicle teaching and turning back toward buddhahood, which he supports with the Lotus Sūtra's own Parable of the Conjured City, where travelers who mistake a phantom resting place for their real destination eventually "attain entry into the Buddha's wisdom" (得入佛慧) once the illusion is dispelled.

Jizang parses the Tathāgata's fourfold description here as two pairs, not four independent claims: the first two lines concern permanence of time — "the first states the dharmakāya's ever-abiding nature, the second the response-body's ever-abiding nature" (前明法身常住，後明應身常住) — while the latter two concern boundless activity on others' behalf, compassion and comfort. He supports the response-body's endless activity with a citation from the Treatise on Buddha Nature: "since sentient beings are inexhaustible, the transformation-body's transforming of beings is inexhaustible as well" (眾生無盡，故化身常化物無盡).

The collapse of the three refuges into one is where Jizang's own Sanlun training shows most clearly. He reads "Dharma" here as standing for every provisional teaching — the various three- and five-vehicle doctrines are themselves only the causal path leading toward buddhahood, not the resultant fruit itself — and "Saṅgha" as śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and even bodhisattvas who have not yet merged with the Buddha's own substance. Understood this way, refuge in Dharma and Saṅgha is "merely a provisional refuge, and so is called partial" (但是權歸，故名少分) — not because Dharma and Saṅgha are somehow lesser in themselves, but because, described at the level of provisional teaching-content, they remain causal rather than resultant. Once understood instead at the level of the first principle — ultimate truth, resultant virtue — Dharma and Saṅgha are simply "not different from the Tathāgata" (無異如來), and refuge in them just is refuge in the Tathāgata.

He resolves the odd-sounding claim that "the Tathāgata is himself the three refuges" — rather than the Tathāgata being one refuge that somehow absorbs two others — by decomposing his single substance into three aspects at once: "as awakening, the Tathāgata's whole being is called Buddha; as norm, his whole being is called Dharma; as harmony, his whole being is called Saṅgha" (如來舉體覺義為佛、舉體軌義為法、舉體和義為僧). This is Jizang's signature move: not one thing subsuming two others, but one reality carrying three names at once — the same dissolution of apparent plurality into a single underlying substance that his school applies everywhere else. He also gives three concrete reasons the Buddha ever taught a threefold refuge to begin with, rather than only the one ultimate refuge from the start: to counter rival triads taught by other traditions; as a medical analogy, with the Buddha as physician, Dharma as medicine, and Saṅgha as nurse, all three needed together to treat the disease of affliction; and to answer three distinct fears, illustrated by a deer that escapes a hunter in three successive bounds — the same three-stage pattern, he notes, as the Lotus Sūtra's "three turnings of the Dharma-wheel," where the original, single teaching gives way to provisional branch teachings pitched at limited capacities, before those branches are finally gathered back into the one root they came from.