A Pure Mind, and How It Comes to Be Defiled

Jizang opens this chapter by naming, in advance, exactly what makes it hard: it continues the previous chapter's pairing of saṃsāra as the dependent, arising side of things and the tathāgatagarbha as the supporting, pure side, and he states the crux without softening it — "purity should not have defilement, and defilement should not have purity; this matter is hard to clarify, and only the Buddha can fully understand it" (淨不應有染、染不應有淨，此事難明，唯佛能了). He notices something telling in how Śrīmālā herself structures her own argument here: a brief statement, an extended explanation, and finally "looking up in deference to the Buddha" (仰推於佛) — the exposition itself ends not in a closed logical proof but in reverent deference, which Jizang reads as the text's own signal that this doctrine is built to exceed ordinary comprehension by design, not by accident.

Jizang glosses the tathāgatagarbha's five names — counting "tathāgatagarbha" itself alongside the four storehouses just listed — by drawing on the Treatise on Buddha Nature and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, assigning each name its own governing sense: tathāgatagarbha itself carries the sense of own-nature — every dharma is subsumed within it, marked by selflessness; the storehouse of the dharma-realm carries the sense of cause — it is the very object that a sage's practice, such as the four foundations of mindfulness, takes as its field, bringing what has not yet arisen into being and what has already arisen to fulfillment; the storehouse of the dharmakāya carries the sense of attainment — through faith and delight in it, a sage comes to possess the Tathāgata's own virtues; the world-transcending, supreme storehouse carries the sense of reality, since it alone escapes the three faults that make something merely mundane; and the storehouse of inherent purity carries the sense of secrecy — "when all dharmas accord with this nature, they are called internal and correct, hence pure; when they run counter to it, they are called external and deviant, hence defiled" (若一切法隨順此性…違此理則名為外). He is careful to add that these five names track five aspects of meaning, "not five separate essences" (非體別有五也) — one reality, described five ways depending on which function is in view.

Jizang's central resolution turns on strict mind-moment analysis: at any single instant, the mind is either wholesome or unwholesome, never both at once, so there is never an actual moment where purity and affliction genuinely coexist to "touch." His key citation is the sūtra's own line — "affliction does not touch mind, mind does not touch affliction" (煩惱不觸心，心不觸煩惱) — and he reaches for the classic rope-and-snake image to make the logic vivid: a person sees a rope in dim light and mistakes it for a snake; the illusory snake arises purely from delusion and never actually touches the rope, and the rope, entirely unchanged, is never touched by the illusory snake either. Real "defilement," on this model, would require dye and cloth to actually be present together — but a pure mind-moment and a defiled mind-moment never co-occur, so no literal contact, no literal dyeing, ever takes place.

He backs the analysis with Nāgārjuna's own chapter on bondage and liberation in the Middle Treatise — "if one says the five aggregates can be bound, and some other affliction among the aggregates comes to bind them, this too does not hold" — and cites a commentary attributed to the translator Tanying: "when mind is pure, there is nothing that comes to bind it; when mind is defiled, there is nothing left that could be bound" (心淨時則無物來縛，心垢時則無可縛), tying Śrīmālā's paradox directly to the Madhyamaka analysis of bondage he inherits from his own lineage.

But Jizang refuses to let this analysis explain the phenomenal fact of affliction away entirely — his synthesis holds both truths at once: a prior mind-moment is pure, a later mind-moment is defiled, and the later moment's arising obscures the earlier one; this obscuring relation is what "defilement" names, even though nothing ever literally entered or touched the earlier, pure moment. He parallels this with Nāgārjuna's chapter analyzing defilement and the one defiled: neither can be found under analysis as a fixed, independent thing, and yet, conventionally, through dependent designation, an "agent" and an "object" of defilement are still provisionally and usefully spoken of. If even the coarse defilement of an ordinary mind is this hard to pin down, Jizang notes, the defilement of a mind inherently pure by nature is harder still — which is exactly why the passage ends where it does, at the Buddha's "real eye," rather than at a fully closed argument any listener could reconstruct alone.

Jizang reads "my disciples" across this passage as spanning four progressive grades of faith, not the three Śrīmālā names outright: following-faith, at the stage of the ten faiths, believing simply because it has been taught; faith-grown-strong, at the stage of the ten abodes, likened via a citation from the Vimalakīrti Sūtra to standing "firm as vajra"; according-with-correct-wisdom, cultivated on the approach to the first ground through the five contemplations named in this very passage; and final attainment itself — the forbearance of the unarisen, from the first ground onward. Only this last stage constitutes full, direct realization; the earlier stages involve progressively less self-generated insight and correspondingly greater reliance on trust in what has been taught.

On why deferring to the Buddha's authority, without personally penetrating the "pure yet defiled" paradox, still counts as a complete and legitimate relationship to the teaching rather than a mere placeholder for real understanding, Jizang ties it back to his opening framing of the whole chapter: "one who has faith in the Tathāgata… having faith in what the Buddha has said, is freed from the icchantika obstruction, and therefore does not slander this profound meaning" (信如來者…既信佛所說，離闡提障，故不謗深義). Trust in the Buddha's own endorsement of Śrīmālā's teaching is, by itself, sufficient to avoid slandering a doctrine that exceeds one's own comprehension — the third kind of good son or daughter, who says only "this is not my domain," is not a lesser or failed version of the first two, but a complete category in its own right.