Seven Names for Stillness, and the Four Doors Into It

Master Cháng Bǎi situates this opening within the treatise's full seventeen-ground architecture: the first two grounds (the five sense-consciousnesses, and the mind ground) established the basic apparatus of cognition; the three grounds just completed, spanning fascicles 4 through 10, surveyed the three realms, their beings, and the entire causal mechanics of karma and rebirth in exhaustive detail. Grounds six through nine — Meditative Equipoise, Non-Equipoise, the Ground With Mind, and the Ground Without Mind — now turn to mapping the actual states a mind can occupy, before the treatise moves on to the shared path of the three vehicles (grounds ten through twelve: hearing, reflection, cultivation) and then each vehicle's own distinct path (the śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva grounds), closing with the grounds of the two nirvāṇas already explained in fascicle 9. Ground six, he notes, is where the treatise finally turns from describing the raw material of saṃsāra to describing the tool that actually escapes it.

He unpacks the seven Sanskrit near-synonyms the source material surveys before analysis begins, each stressing a different nuance: samāhita (equipoise) stresses a mind drawn evenly toward stillness, free of both dullness and agitation, and covers the broadest territory — with mind or without, contaminated or uncontaminated; samādhi (one-pointed unification, historically rendered "samādhi" or "concentration") stresses the mind held level before and after, and covers ordinary scattered-mind states as well as full absorption; samāpatti (actual attainment) stresses a depth of settling that reaches all the way to attainment, whether or not conceptual activity remains; dhyāna (quieted contemplation, the oldest term, "chán" in Chinese) stresses a mind that is both stilled and actively investigating at once, wisdom and stillness in balance — which is exactly why the four dhyānas, uniquely among meditative states, are considered ideal ground for realizing the noble path, while the four formless attainments, strong in stillness but weak in active wisdom, are not; citta-ikāgratā (one-pointedness of mind) stresses sustained, repeated recollection of a single object until it becomes continuous; śamatha (calm-abiding) stresses the mind's coming to rest on one object; and dṛṣṭadharma-sukhavihāra (dwelling in present happiness) names specifically the four dhyānas themselves, each carrying its own measure of joy, bliss, or equanimity, distinguishing full absorption from its own preliminary access states, which do not yet count as "dwelling in happiness" in this technical sense.

Master Cháng Bǎi previews how these four topics will unfold across the fascicle: the four dhyānas (靜慮) are the foundational states themselves; the eight liberations (解脫) name eight specific ways affliction is actually suppressed through meditative mastery; the eleven unifications (等持, samādhi in its narrower technical sense) survey concentration's many varieties; and the six attainments (等至, samāpatti) round out the picture with states reaching even deeper than ordinary absorption. He notes each dhyāna is named precisely for what it has just renounced to arrive: the first dhyāna, reached through the classical method of applied and sustained thought, has left behind the desire realm's craving, hatred, and harmfulness, and carries five distinguishing qualities — applied thought, sustained thought, joy, bliss, and one-pointedness of mind; the second, reached by observing applied and sustained thought's own coarse disturbance and letting it settle, has left even those behind, carrying inner clarity, joy, bliss, and one-pointedness; the third, reached by observing joy's own agitating quality, has renounced joy itself while retaining the second dhyāna's bliss, now settled into mindfulness, clear comprehension, equanimity, bliss, and one-pointedness; and the fourth, reached by observing that even bliss is itself a subtle disturbance, has renounced bliss as well, arriving at purified equanimity, purified mindfulness, neutral feeling, and one-pointedness — each dhyāna, in turn, is what the one before it looks like once its own subtlest remaining agitation has also been seen through and released.

Master Cháng Bǎi traces the classical logic behind each step: the first liberation has a practitioner still holding some inward perception of form contemplate outward forms as repulsive (resting on the first dhyāna), breaking the desire realm's attachment to beauty through deliberate exposure to ugliness; the second repeats the same repulsive contemplation once inward form-perception has itself been let go (resting on the second dhyāna), to confirm the release is genuinely stable rather than merely suppressed by the first dhyāna's own coarser state; the third liberation is the classical tradition's most striking reversal — resting on the fourth dhyāna, the practitioner now deliberately contemplates something beautiful and pure, proving mastery complete precisely by no longer being disturbed even by what used to provoke the strongest craving, "directly realized and fully dwelt in" marking this as no longer a technique but an accomplished, stable liberation.

The fourth through seventh liberations are the four formless attainments themselves, each releasing one further layer of dependency exactly as fascicle 5's own earlier survey described (space releasing the body, consciousness releasing the space-object, nothingness releasing consciousness-as-object, and neither-perception-nor-non-perception releasing even that subtle remainder); and the eighth, cessation of perception and feeling, available only to a non-returner or arhat, is the deepest attainment the path recognizes, a temporary cessation of mental activity itself used as a genuine rest from even the subtlest formless states. He notes the whole sequence is traditionally called the "eight forms of turning away" (八背捨) precisely because each one is defined by what it deliberately turns from — ugliness first to break craving, then beauty to prove craving is genuinely gone, then each successive formless dependency in turn.

Master Cháng Bǎi flags this reuse of the "with applied and sustained thought / with sustained thought alone / with neither" threefold scheme as a genuine terminological trap: it is the exact same three names that organized the entire three-grounds arc spanning fascicles 4 through 10 (有尋有伺地・無尋唯伺地・無尋無伺地), but there it classified entire realms of existence, while here it classifies a single meditative state's own internal structure — the same three labels doing two structurally different jobs, one cosmological and one psychological, and worth keeping cleanly separate. He previews that most of these eleven categories, and all six attainments, receive no elaboration here — this section is purely a naming pass, with full explanation deferred until roughly a third of the way into the fascicle, once the groundwork of what actually distinguishes meditative equipoise from ordinary concentration has been laid.

He notes the emptiness/aimlessness/signlessness triad and the noble-limb triad both reach ahead to teachings usually associated with much later sections of the treatise (the three gateways to liberation, and the eightfold noble path's meditation-relevant limbs), while the vajra-like concentration — named for its capacity to shatter every remaining affliction the way a diamond shatters any other substance — marks the single decisive moment a trainee becomes an arhat, the last concentration of the path of cultivation immediately preceding final, complete direct realization.

Master Cháng Bǎi traces the causal chain this passage presupposes, already taught in the Śrāvaka-bhūmi: purified ethical conduct leaves no grounds for regret; freedom from regret allows genuine joy to arise; joy settles into physical and mental ease; and that ease, in turn, is what actually allows the mind to enter real concentration — precisely why moral discipline is called concentration's own foundation rather than a separate, optional prerequisite. Desire-realm attention can be genuinely focused, even genuinely careful and correct in what it observes (the treatise is explicit that ordinary examination of phenomena is not impossible there), but it is missing this specific causal ancestry — it was never drawn forth by settled ethical confidence ripening into joy and ease — so however sharp it becomes, it is never called "equipoise" in the treatise's own technical sense.

He draws out the practical stakes of this distinction from the Yogācāra tradition's own debate about entry points to the noble path: some practitioners who cultivated genuine meditative stability in a past life can reach direct realization of the truths already at the level of "approach concentration" (未到地定, the threshold state just short of the first dhyāna proper), while those without that prior cultivation must actually reach the first dhyāna or beyond before the same breakthrough becomes possible — in both cases, however, genuine progress requires having actually crossed into equipoise's own causal chain, not merely sharpened desire-realm attention indefinitely. This distinction, he notes, is the entire reason this ground exists as its own separate topic: it is describing a qualitatively different kind of mental event, not simply "more concentrated" ordinary attention.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes the first dhyāna is defined as much by what it removes as by what it adds: joy and sorrow chasing sensory pleasure, and joy and sorrow bound up with actually doing wrong, are both left behind once the mind settles into genuine seclusion from desire — the desire realm's whole emotional economy simply stops applying. He treats the fifth category, unwholesome equanimity, as the most subtle and interesting of the five, precisely because it looks like virtue (no active joy or sorrow) while actually being a form of complicity: the ruler who personally refrains from wrongdoing but quietly lets subordinates commit it unchecked is, Cháng Bǎi stresses, not innocent — the classical gloss on this passage draws the parallel to an old saying, that a father who fails to instruct his child, or a teacher who fails to discipline a student, shares real responsibility for what follows.

He unpacks the four progressively deeper readings of this same "unwholesome equanimity": first, the bare toleration of witnessed wrongdoing without intervention; second, that same indifference actively turning toward planning further wrongdoing, coarse and subtle thought both devoted to scheming; third, wrongdoing indulged in so habitually and for so long that indifference itself hardens into settled character, no longer even requiring active choice; and fourth, the specific neutral, affectless feeling — neither pleasure nor pain — that accompanies wrongdoing once it has become this thoroughly normalized. He offers this whole passage as a genuinely practical mirror for meditation practice itself: a stray unwholesome thought that arises and is neither acted on nor actually confronted, simply left to pass unexamined, is exactly this same "indulgent equanimity" in miniature — and left unaddressed, it is precisely what prevents concentration from ever actually settling into genuine equipoise.

Master Cháng Bǎi traces the five as a genuine causal sequence, each resting on the one before: gladness comes first, simply from honestly reviewing one's own conduct — the ethical restraint, sense-faculty guarding, moderation in eating, and reduced sleep cultivated at the preparatory stage — and finding, quite simply, nothing to regret; joy follows once actual meditative effort is genuinely underway, a delight specifically in the practice itself, not merely in having behaved well; tranquility is what remains once the body's stiffness and the mind's restlessness — sitting cross-legged no longer feels foreign, and the mind no longer resists settling — have both genuinely eased; bliss is tranquility's own natural fruit, felt in two registers at once, an unharmed bodily ease (which he locates, in the tradition's own account, in the storehouse consciousness sustaining the body even while the five sense-consciousnesses have quieted) and a mental ease that is the direct experience of release from desire's own grip; and concentration, one-pointedness itself, is what all four of the others together finally make possible.

He offers this passage as genuinely earned from experience rather than abstract description: a beginner sitting in meditation, he notes, is often drenched in sweat, starving the moment the sitting ends, fighting a mind as unruly as a small child running in every direction at once — precisely because governing one's own mind is far harder than governing anything external, given how deeply habituated its patterns already are from beginningless saṃsāra. He treats the passage's real message as encouragement rather than intimidation: genuine progress is gradual and cumulative, exactly like learning to climb a mountain that looks impossible from the base — an outburst of anger that once lasted three years can, with sustained practice, shrink to a week, then to three hours, and eventually dissolve as soon as it arises, once a practitioner has genuinely internalized that the words provoking it are themselves empty of any real weight to carry.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains the "uncontaminated method" this passage refers to: resting within an already-settled meditative absorption, the practitioner turns insight-practice onto the five aggregates themselves — contemplating them as a sickness, an abscess, an arrow lodged in the flesh, and, more fully, as suffering, empty, and without self, until genuine dread and revulsion toward the aggregates naturally arises, and the mind settles instead into the deathless realm of nirvāṇa; or, taking a complementary approach, contemplating suchness, the nature of things, and the ultimate reality directly, and settling the mind there. Both approaches, he stresses, are only possible resting on an already-accomplished concentration — the reason the Buddha always teaches concentration's own establishment before turning to the liberating insight built on top of it.

He notes the tradition names seven distinct facets of "suchness" itself, each corresponding to a different angle of realization: suchness as it appears in the sheer beginningless flow of conditioned existence; suchness as the selflessness of both persons and phenomena; suchness as the truth that all experience is nothing but consciousness's own display; suchness as it underlies the very fact of suffering (the truth of suffering); suchness as it underlies suffering's mistaken cause, craving (the truth of origin); suchness as the utterly stainless purity of cessation itself (the truth of cessation); and suchness as it underlies the genuine path leading there (the truth of the path) — the four noble truths and three further facets together forming a sevenfold map of the same single, unchanging reality, approached from seven different directions. Cháng Bǎi treats this teaching ordering itself as a practical corrective: a student eager to skip straight to liberating wisdom without first doing the patient work of settling the mind in concentration is, in effect, trying to run before the ground beneath their own feet has stabilized.

Master Cháng Bǎi names the seven stages in their working order, cross-referencing their fuller treatment in the Śrāvaka-bhūmi: attention that discerns the mark (了相作意) first correctly recognizes exactly what coarse quality is to be abandoned in the lower state and what peaceful quality is to be gained in the higher, giving rise to genuine aspiration; attention of resolve (勝解作意) actually undertakes the effort, the real turning point where wisdom born of cultivation, not merely of hearing or reflection, begins doing the work; attention of withdrawal (遠離作意) sheds the coarsest, most visible grade of the lower state's affliction; attention that gathers joy (攝樂作意) sheds its middling grade, now tasting real delight in the practice; attention of examination (觀察作意) checks whether the lower affliction has genuinely been left behind, guarding against the false confidence of mistaking partial progress for complete success; attention that perfects the effort (加行究竟作意) sheds even the subtlest remaining grade; and attention that is the very fruit of that perfected effort (加行究竟果作意) is simply the accomplished result itself, actually experienced — the fundamental concentration finally attained.

He treats "liberation" in this specific contaminated-method sense as provisional rather than final — closer to a stone weighing down grass than to actually uprooting it, a temporary suppression of a lower state's affliction from currently manifesting, not the permanent destruction of its underlying seed, which only the uncontaminated method described in the previous section can accomplish. He also notes the treatise's own further clarification that concentration and this provisional liberation can, in a stricter sense, be described as arising together — at the exact moment the seventh, culminating attention is reached, the immediately following moment of actually severing that grade of affliction and the resulting concentration are simultaneous, which is why some scriptural passages speak of the two as one and the same event rather than in sequence.

Master Cháng Bǎi stresses that desire's actual object is never the sensory thing itself but the mind's own distorted overlay on it — the Mahāvibhāṣā's own line, that "the world's fine objects are not truly desire; true desire is a person's own discriminating craving," makes exactly this point: the five senses' raw data is intercepted by conceptual thought, which then obsessively pursues either a present object or a merely remembered one, mistaking its own fabrication for something genuinely worth chasing.

He retells the Ekottarika Āgama's story of Prince Subhūti, a former life of the Buddha himself: a childless king struck a bargain with the god Indra to receive a son on the condition the boy would later be allowed to renounce the world — the son being a dying celestial being, Subhūti, who had only agreed to be reborn as a human on that promise. Once grown, the king built the prince palace after palace and surrounded him with entertainers to make him forget his vow, until Indra himself returned to remind Subhūti of who he really was. Startled awake, the prince reasoned through his own attachment to the palace's dancing girls, recognized both their bodies and his own as impure and without any real self to be found, and composed a verse capturing the entire hindrance in one line: "Desire, I know your root — you arise from thought alone; if I do not think you, then you simply do not exist." Having seen this clearly, he left the palace, sat beneath a tree, and entered final nirvāṇa as a pratyekabuddha on the spot. Cháng Bǎi draws the moral directly for meditation practice: desire is sustained by rehearsal — dwell on an object repeatedly and craving for it only intensifies; simply decline to dwell on it, and, as the prince demonstrated, it has nothing left to stand on.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes ill will's first trigger carries a specific sting worth naming honestly: being corrected by a fellow practitioner for a genuine fault, however deserved, often provokes resentment rather than gratitude — precisely because it feels like a wound to "me" rather than a simple correction of mistaken conduct; recognizing that it is only the deed at fault, not some injured self, is itself already most of the way toward letting the resentment go rather than carrying it onto the meditation cushion.

On dullness and drowsiness, he treats the sevenfold diagnosis as a genuinely useful checklist for any meditator troubled by persistent sleepiness: an unresolved ethical lapse quietly draining resolve; senses left habitually unguarded, wearing the mind out before it even sits down; eating too much, too little, or the wrong kind of food (he notes sweet foods in particular are traditionally flagged as drowsiness-inducing); insufficient reduction of ordinary sleep; sitting down without the habit of clear, moment-to-moment awareness of one's own state; simple lack of energetic effort in actually applying the antidotes to affliction; and, more generally, indulging any affliction at all, which clouds body and mind together. He explains why dullness and drowsiness, despite feeling different, are combined into one hindrance: dullness is the loss of capacity itself, letting every other affliction back in and undermining the very effort meant to counter it, while drowsiness is what dullness becomes once awareness of the meditation object is lost entirely — the two are so close in mechanism that drowsiness never arises without dullness already present, even though other kinds of affliction may or may not accompany a given bout of dullness. Cháng Bǎi adds that genuine concentration always rests on three qualities working together — mindfulness holding the object, clear comprehension noticing when the mind has wandered, and equanimity that simply rests once mindfulness is already correctly in place, needing neither further exertion nor slack correction — the same three qualities dullness and drowsiness are what most directly undermine.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads remorse as restlessness's own emotional shadow — restlessness dwells excitedly on family, homeland, mortality's distance, and past pleasures, while remorse dwells on the exact same memories with regret instead of longing, which is why the two are combined into a single hindrance despite feeling different: both are the mind agitated by the same class of memory, only inflected oppositely. He retells the story of the bodhisattva Dizang, traditionally identified with the Korean prince Kim Kiao-gak who practiced on Mount Jiuhua, and his young attendant who grew homesick after years on the mountain. Rather than scold the boy, Dizang sent him home with a poem: "In this quiet gate you long for home" — acknowledging plainly that monastic life is simple, spare, short on the ordinary warmth of family — "bid the clouds farewell, descend Jiuhua." "You'd rather ride a bamboo horse with the children than gather grains of gold on this earth" — gently naming the boy's own preference without shaming it. "Don't mistake the moon reflected at the bottom of a well for something worth scooping up" — a warning that sensory pleasure below is as illusory as a reflection, alluring but ultimately empty. "And don't linger over tea and flowers in a cup" — fleeting comforts, gone as soon as savored. "Go well, and don't weep too much — I have the clouds and mist of the mountain for company, and I am never lonely." Cháng Bǎi treats the poem's real teaching as neither guilt nor forced endurance, but honest acknowledgment paired with genuine equanimity — a model, he suggests, for how a practitioner might meet their own homesickness during long practice, without either suppressing it or being ruled by it.

On doubt, he distinguishes two registers: doubt toward the Three Jewels and the path directly saps the courage needed to actually practice, since no one applies real effort toward a goal they secretly suspect is unreachable; doubt about one's own existence across the three times, and about the Four Noble Truths themselves, is a subtler, more philosophical uncertainty — the mind genuinely unable to settle whether a given proposition is true, caught oscillating between two possibilities with no resolution. Both, he notes, are equally disqualifying for concentration, since a mind still holding a live question about whether the whole enterprise is even worth pursuing has not yet actually committed itself to the object of meditation at all.

Master Cháng Bǎi treats the strategic logic here as deliberately targeted: rather than attempting to suppress every minor sensory pleasure at once, the teaching isolates the single strongest driver of desire — attraction between the sexes — on the reasoning that mastering the strongest case makes every weaker case of sensory craving correspondingly easier to release. He notes the "food" is never the physical features themselves but the mind's own unsound dwelling on them as inherently attractive, exactly the same point desire's own definition made earlier in the fascicle.

On the antidote, he distinguishes the inward and outward contemplations: inwardly, a living body is thirty-some named unclean substances and structures — hair, nails, bone, marrow, organs, and the fluids that constantly seep from its nine openings — the same anatomical unsparing detail the treatise gave of the body back in fascicle 3; outwardly, a corpse's own progression through discoloration, bloating, decay, and finally bare bone makes visible, over time, exactly what the living body already conceals beneath an appealing surface. He references — without transcribing at length — the classical verses on renouncing the five desires from the Śamatha-Vipaśyanā treatise, whose central image is a body compared to a leaking sack of impurities and a corpse one nourishes for years only to bury it in the end; their conclusion, he notes, is not self-loathing but liberation — seeing the body's actual nature clearly is precisely what frees a practitioner from being deceived and controlled by desire for it, opening the way to concentration's own much deeper happiness. He treats sound and unsound reflection here as two directions of the identical habit-forming mechanism already established for desire's "food": dwelling repeatedly on a false appealing appearance strengthens craving, while dwelling repeatedly on the same body's actual impure nature weakens and eventually starves it — the antidote works by exactly the same mechanism as the poison, aimed in the opposite direction.

Master Cháng Bǎi lists the nine occasions in full: resentment toward oneself; toward a loved one, in the past, present, or future; and toward a disliked person, likewise in the past, present, or future — six base categories, with the latter two tripled across time to make nine. He stresses the treatise's own reminder embedded here: none of "self," "loved one," or "disliked one" names anything ultimately real — each is simply a conventional label placed on the aggregates' own ceaseless flow, so resentment always targets a fiction, however real the pain it generates feels in the moment.

On the antidote, he traces loving-kindness meditation's own mechanism: sustained wish for others' wellbeing, developed through repeated cultivation until it becomes a settled disposition rather than an occasional effort, directly opposes ill will's own habitual disposition; and careful discernment — deliberately considering one's own situation, others' situations, both loved and disliked people, and the specific and shared marks of genuine loving-kindness — systematically works through the same nine occasions that would otherwise generate resentment, replacing each with a wish for that same person's happiness instead. He offers the classical verse from the Śamatha-Vipaśyanā treatise as a memorable summary rather than transcribing it in full: anger is named there as a poison whose root, once cut, brings both safety and freedom from worry, since a mind churning with resentment injures its own bearer well before it ever reaches its intended target — practical advice, he notes, worth memorizing and returning to whenever anger arises during practice.

Master Cháng Bǎi treats the three lights as addressing three different depths of darkness: physical light simply counters the literal darkness of night, an overcast sky, or an enclosed room, useful mainly as a concrete visualization aid when drowsiness sets in during sitting practice; the light of the Dharma counters a subtler darkness — the specific ignorance and doubt named among the nineteen kinds of not-knowing surveyed at length back in fascicle 10's own analysis of dependent origination's first link, dispelled here by genuinely internalized understanding of the teaching (what has been learned, reflected on, and directly experienced, the three wisdoms in familiar sequence) and by recollecting the Three Jewels' own qualities to rouse a flagging, sinking mind back to alertness. He cites the Platform Sūtra's own line — "one lamp dispels a thousand years of darkness; one moment of wisdom destroys ten thousand years of delusion" — as capturing exactly why the Dharma itself is called a light: it doesn't merely occupy a dark mind, it structurally cannot coexist with the ignorance that dullness feeds on.

On the body's own radiance, he notes this refers to certain heavenly beings' naturally luminous bodies, already surveyed in the treatise's own earlier cosmological material, and explains its specific meditative use: a practitioner cultivating what the tradition calls "the great mind" concentration can visualize this same radiance as a way of purifying and stabilizing the first dhyāna itself, a technique the fascicle will return to in more detail later. He treats the whole threefold scheme as moving from outermost to innermost: physical light for a physically dark room, the Dharma's light for a mind darkened by ignorance and doubt, and a visualized deity's radiance as a specific, advanced meditative support — three tools for the same underlying problem of a mind that has gone dim rather than clear.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes all three "thoughts" share the same structure: a genuinely neutral fact (a relative's circumstances, a homeland's condition, one's own current youth or vigor) is elaborated by the mind into an entire emotional narrative — gladness if things seem favorable, grief if not — that has nothing to do with the meditation object at hand. He treats "freedom from imminent death" as the subtlest and most dangerous of the three, since it rests on a simple illusion: a young or currently capable person unconsciously assumes there will always be more time, quietly deferring real practice to some later, more convenient season that death may never actually grant.

He summarizes the antidote reasoning the text develops for each: for family, the classical image of birds roosting together on a single branch at nightfall only to scatter in every direction come morning — kinship itself is simply karma's own temporary convergence, no more permanent than sand held loosely in a closed fist, which stays together only as long as the hand stays closed; a renunciant who has already formally left family behind gains nothing by mentally returning to it night after night. For homeland, every place has its own genuine drawbacks — too cold, too hot, too dangerous, too disease-ridden — and travel rarely lives up to its own reputation; the real point, put memorably, is that "when the mind is pure, the land is pure" — wherever one can actually practice well already is the best possible place, with no need to go seeking another. For mortality, death's timing is entirely unpredictable, and the Dharmapada's own counsel — do only what should be done, and do it always — is offered as the practical antidote to a mind quietly betting on having more time than it may actually have.

Master Cháng Bǎi names the nine stages of settling in their working sequence: inward abiding, first withdrawing attention from external objects; sustained abiding, evening out the mind's tendency to wander outward moment to moment; renewed abiding, catching and re-settling the mind whenever it does wander; close abiding, bringing attention back to the object again and again until it stays near; tamed abiding, seeing through the appeal of sensory objects and affliction clearly enough that the mind no longer chases them; pacified abiding, quieting the mind's own unwholesome deliberation and secondary afflictions directly; fully pacified abiding, actively rejecting even a residual unwholesome thought the instant it arises, rather than merely tolerating it; single-pointed abiding, sustained, unbroken concentration achieved through deliberate effort; and finally genuine equipoise, where the same unbroken concentration continues effortlessly, no longer requiring active effort to maintain — the full arc from a scattered beginner's mind to settled absorption.

On the specific antidote reflection, he draws out its deliberately symmetrical logic: decline (illness, shortened life, loss of family, loss of wealth, broken precepts, corrupted view) is obviously painful and worth turning from, but the text insists prosperity deserves exactly the same wary treatment, since anyone who has ever enjoyed good fortune will eventually lose it, while the reverse — recovering from genuine decline — is far harder to count on; prosperity is, in his phrase, "easily lost and hard to regain," making it no less worth remaining equanimous about than decline itself. He treats the practical instruction as aimed at emotional evenness above all: a mind riding high on good news or crushed by bad news is equally unfit for settling into concentration, so the real skill is meeting both with the same measured wariness — genuinely grateful for neither, disturbed by neither — which alone leaves the mind free to actually rest on its meditation object rather than being pulled by whatever just happened.

Master Cháng Bǎi cites the Xianyang Shengjiao Lun's own precise reasoning for why even asking "does a self exist?" is already a trap: answering "yes" commits the error of adding something real (a self) onto what is actually just the five aggregates, which contain no such thing; answering "no" commits the opposite error of subtracting something real — the conventional, functioning person who does experience cause and effect — reducing to a nihilism that denies karma altogether. The same double bind applies to other beings (claiming they are identical to oneself, or claiming they are entirely separate, both generate absurd consequences) and to the world's own nature (whether it is permanent, impermanent, or any combination), since the world's actual arising is, in the text's own words, "commonly known and already evident" — a functioning, observable process that speculative theorizing about its ultimate metaphysical status can only distort, never clarify.

He treats this whole prohibition as targeted specifically at what these fourteen or so classical unanswerable questions have in common: none of them, however they are answered, actually reduces affliction or advances a practitioner one step toward liberation — dwelling on them only breeds more uncertainty, since a meditator who spends the sitting period wondering whether the self is permanent has, by definition, stopped attending to the meditation object altogether. The instruction is not that these questions are forbidden to think about in principle, but that they are simply the wrong tool for the task at hand — settling the mind requires resting it on a single, workable object, not chasing metaphysical puzzles that the treatise elsewhere shows to be badly formed from the start.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains that doubt's speculative questions (does a self exist across time, is the world permanent) only ever arise because a person has not yet clearly seen what actually is there: not a self, but the twelve links — ignorance and formations projecting consciousness through feeling, craving and grasping moistening that projection into becoming, birth and old-age-death as its lived result. Once this causal structure is genuinely understood, the question "does the self exist in the past" simply dissolves, since there was never a self there to begin with, only a causal process — dependent origination itself becomes the light dispelling the specific darkness doubt feeds on, exactly paralleling how the earlier "light" antidote countered dullness's own darkness.

He treats the closing line — every hindrance has its own tailored antidote — as the section's real summary: impurity contemplation for desire, loving-kindness for ill will, light for dullness, calm-abiding's settling stages for restlessness, and understanding dependent origination for doubt are not five arbitrary techniques but five precisely matched responses to five distinct kinds of misunderstanding, each countering exactly what generates its corresponding hindrance rather than being a generic, one-size-fits-all remedy. With this, the treatise's account of the five hindrances — their nature, and what feeds and starves each one — is complete in its entirety, and the fascicle now turns to its next major topic: the specific distinguishing qualities of each of the four dhyānas themselves.

Master Cháng Bǎi structures the five according to the Xianyang Shengjiao Lun's own threefold analysis: applied and sustained thought are the method-quality, the actual coarse and fine investigation — contemplating the body's impurity to release desire, or cultivating loving-kindness and compassion to release hostility and harm — that does the work of overcoming the desire realm's two defilements (affliction and karma) in the first place; joy and bliss are the benefit-quality, the resulting reward once that method succeeds — joy specifically a mental gladness, vigor, and ease felt through the transformed sixth consciousness once the transition into absorption has occurred, and bliss specifically a bodily ease he locates, per this treatise's own Yogācāra account, in the storehouse consciousness sustaining a now-untroubled body even while the five sense-consciousnesses have quieted; and one-pointedness of mind is the essence-quality, the actual substance of the absorption itself, resting free of dullness and agitation, effortlessly unified on its object — the foundation all the other four qualities exist to establish and support.

He treats this three-part structure (method, benefit, essence) as the template the treatise will now apply to each of the remaining three dhyānas in turn, showing exactly how each dhyāna's own qualities shift as coarser methods are no longer needed, benefits deepen, and the essence itself becomes progressively more refined and less effortful.

Master Cháng Bǎi carries the method/benefit/essence template forward: in the second dhyāna, inner clarity is now the method-quality — no longer the coarse work of applied and sustained thought, but a settled, undivided, undistorted mind that has simply let that same applied and sustained thought go, recognizing it as agitating dust now that a calmer standard has been reached; joy and bliss remain, deepened, as the benefit-quality; one-pointedness remains the essence. In the third dhyāna, equanimity, mindfulness, and clear comprehension together form the method-quality, actively working to release joy's own excitement — mindfulness holding steady the recognition that joy is itself agitation, clear comprehension catching it the instant it tries to reassert itself, equanimity resting undisturbed once it is gone; bliss alone remains as benefit, now, in his words, the most sublime bliss in the entire three realms, illustrated by the classical image of a swimmer whose head still breaks the surface in joy but who, in bliss, is fully submerged, the whole body immersed at once rather than merely touched at the surface.

In the fourth dhyāna, purified equanimity and purified mindfulness form the method-quality, now releasing bliss itself as still too subtly agitating; the benefit-quality is neutral feeling, neither pleasant nor painful, utterly still — the treatise's own description places it beyond the reach of the three cosmic calamities (fire, water, wind) and the eight kinds of movement (applied and sustained thought, joy, bliss, sorrow, pain, and the in- and out-breath itself, which ceases entirely at this level). He notes the Yogācāra tradition insists mindfulness, clear comprehension, and equanimity together are indispensable at every one of the four levels without exception — mindfulness to know which state one currently occupies, clear comprehension to notice immediately if a coarser state has crept back in, and equanimity to release it — the same three-part operating method simply growing more refined as the levels themselves grow more refined.

Master Cháng Bǎi identifies the underlying three-part logic named explicitly in the Yogācāra tradition's own cross-reference: each dhyāna's qualities sort by reflecting on the object (what the practitioner actually contemplates to reach that level — impurity or loving-kindness for the first, releasing coarser thought for the second, releasing joy for the third, releasing bliss for the fourth), resting on that object without distraction (concentration itself, one-pointedness, the single constant across all four levels), and enjoying the object once attained (the specific feeling-benefit each level actually delivers — joy and bliss for the first two, bliss alone for the third, neutral feeling for the fourth). He stresses that a great many other qualities are genuinely present at each level too — the treatise itself acknowledges this — but only these particular ones are singled out because they are what actually matter most to a practitioner: the specific tool that gets a level reached, and the specific reward that level actually delivers, rather than every incidental feature that happens to accompany it.

He treats this whole comparative table as evidence of a single continuous logic running through all four levels: at each stage, a specific method releases whatever the previous stage found agitating, delivers a specific resulting benefit, and rests throughout on the identical foundation of one-pointed concentration — the entire path from the first dhyāna to the fourth is thus not four unrelated states but one continuous refinement, each level simply seeing more clearly than the last what still counts as disturbance.

Master Cháng Bǎi draws out why equanimity, mindfulness, and clear comprehension are present at every single level yet only explicitly named at some: in the first dhyāna they are simply folded into applied and sustained thought's own working, present but not separately called out; in the second, they surface under the name "inner clarity" because joy's own excitement still lingers as something requiring active management; in the third, joy's excitement has genuinely been released, so the three qualities appear under their own proper names — equanimity, mindfulness, clear comprehension — no longer folded into a broader label; and in the fourth, the same three qualities reach their most refined expression yet, now called "purified" specifically because even bliss, the last remaining subtle disturbance, has finally been released as well. He treats this naming pattern itself as instructive: it is never that a new tool is introduced at each level, but that the identical tool — steady awareness, immediate recognition of disturbance, and the release of whatever is recognized — simply operates on a progressively finer target, from the coarse thought of the first level down to the barely perceptible remainder still present in the third.

Master Cháng Bǎi glosses "elevated mind" through the treatise's own comparison: a mind not yet settled is like a candle in the wind, guttering the instant any of the eight worldly winds (praise, blame, gain, loss, and the rest) blows through it — genuine learning and eloquence count for nothing in the moment they're actually needed, because attention was never trained to hold steady on one object long enough to build real strength. A settled mind, by contrast, is like still water: nothing troubles its surface, so whatever lies beneath becomes visible, and sound reasoning attention can actually be applied wherever it's needed rather than being swept away by habitual reactive patterns.

He explains the careful distinction behind "dwelling in happiness": the first and second dhyānas deliver joy, the third delivers bliss, and the fourth delivers a settled equanimity that itself counts as a kind of happiness — precisely because reaching total freedom from craving after happiness is itself experienced as deeply satisfying — and all four, uniquely, deliver this experience in both body and mind at once, since even the fourth dhyāna, though free of ordinary pleasant feeling, still belongs to the form realm and thus still has a body to be at ease in. The four formless attainments, by contrast, have no body at all, and therefore no bodily happiness to speak of — mental stillness alone, however profound, does not qualify for this particular name. He adds a small further point some traditions raise: even the fourth dhyāna's equanimity can rightly be called a happiness in its own right, since attaining exactly what was sought — freedom from the pull of bliss itself — is its own kind of satisfaction, distinct from but not lesser than the more obviously pleasurable happiness of the lower three levels.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains the obligation to speak: a genuinely accomplished meditator staying silent when directly questioned risks having the questioner conclude that no one actually attains these states, casting doubt on the entire teaching rather than simply on one modest individual — false humility, in this specific case, does real harm. He notes the deeper point buried in the required disclosure: the answer must clarify that one enters formless absorption to investigate reality (contemplating emptiness, boundless consciousness, nothingness, or neither-perception-nor-non-perception) rather than merely to enjoy a pleasant abiding — since the formless attainments, having no body at all, carry no bodily happiness and are therefore never rightly called "dwelling in happiness" the way the four dhyānas are, a point requiring exactly this kind of correction to avoid being misunderstood.

On the two further names, he stresses both mark absorption's real ceiling: "partial nirvāṇa" because each level only suppresses its own specific target of affliction (the first suppresses desire and harm, the second applied-and-sustained thought, and so on) without touching that affliction's underlying seed — cut the grass but not the root, and it grows back the moment conditions permit, which is why the text calls this "uncertain" rather than final. "Provisional nirvāṇa" makes the same point from a different angle: non-Buddhist meditators reach these identical absorptions through identical technique, proving decisively that dhyāna itself, however genuinely peaceful, is not yet the liberation the path is actually aimed at — exactly the caution fascicles 6 and 7's survey of the sixteen non-Buddhist doctrines, and fascicle 9's account of Udraka Rāmaputra's fall, already sounded at length.

Master Cháng Bǎi maps this fivefold release onto the classical five feeling-faculties (sorrow, pain, joy, pleasure, and equanimity) rather than the simpler threefold pleasant-painful-neutral scheme, giving a more granular account of exactly when each drops away: sorrow, the mental distress bound up with desire realm craving and its frustration, is released already at the threshold of the first dhyāna, since seclusion from desire is precisely what that level accomplishes; bodily pain is released at the second dhyāna, once the coarse discomfort tied to ordinary bodily existence has settled; joy's own excitement is released at the third, exactly as already explained; and pleasure itself, the fourth dhyāna's own last remaining positive feeling, is finally released at the fourth level, arriving at pure equanimity.

He treats the closing reference to the signless concentration as pointing one step beyond ordinary meditative attainment altogether: even the settled equanimity of the fourth dhyāna, however refined, is still a feeling with content, still something to rest in — the noble path's own signless concentration goes further still, releasing equanimity itself as the very last thing standing between a practitioner and genuine liberation. He treats the whole progression as confirming, from yet another angle, the point the previous section already made explicit: absorption by itself, however deep, only ever suppresses feeling level by level; only the path's own liberating insight, layered on top of these same absorptions, actually finishes the job.

Master Cháng Bǎi treats this fivefold diagnostic as a genuinely practical meditation instruction disguised as Abhidharma classification: a practitioner still working to release sorrow entirely (someone who has renounced ordinary sensory pleasure but has not yet reached the first dhyāna) will find sorrow interrupting practice from time to time, and the instruction is not simply to suppress it but to actually examine it — where does this sorrow's dormant seed come from (its cause); what present conditions, beyond the bare seed, are letting it surface right now, such as an unguarded sense-door or unsound attention (its condition); what two specific triggers set it off this particular time — either a lingering attachment to sensory pleasure now denied, or, just as often, worry over one's own lack of visible progress toward the very absorption being sought (its origin, itself traced back to ignorance's own seed); what it actually feels like, the characteristic knitted-brow heaviness of grief (its mark); and what it is currently driving the mind to do, namely further unsound, distorted thinking (its activity).

He notes the same five feeling-faculties (pain, pleasure, sorrow, joy, and equanimity) are elsewhere given six distinct justifications for why they were singled out at all — as what actually experiences the fruit of karma, as what most powerfully triggers defilement in contact with objects both outward and inward, as what most powerfully affects the body's own wellbeing, as what most clearly reveals a being's flourishing or decline, as what tracks directly onto the four kinds of food sustaining a body, and as what clear comprehension must track moment to moment in order to keep unwholesome reactivity from ever gaining a foothold — reasons which together explain why this fivefold analysis, rather than some other scheme, was chosen as meditation's own diagnostic vocabulary. He treats the whole method as exportable well beyond sorrow specifically: exactly the same five questions — cause, condition, origin, mark, activity — can, and should, be asked of any afflictive state that surfaces during practice, turning what might otherwise be experienced as a vague, undifferentiated disturbance into something precise enough to actually work with.

Master Cháng Bǎi summarizes the complete four-step method this whole passage has now laid out, applicable to any afflictive state a meditator encounters, not sorrow alone: first, simply recognize that the state has arisen at all, since most people remain entirely unaware they are even caught in affliction; second, diagnose it through the five questions just given — its seed, its supporting conditions, its specific trigger, its felt quality, and the further activity it is driving; third, restrain the mind from continuing to feed it, redirecting attention firmly back to genuinely wholesome reflection rather than dwelling on what provoked it; and fourth, aim at its complete elimination, both the currently manifest disturbance and the dormant seed still capable of producing it again later.

He treats the closing distinction between worldly and uncontaminated concentration as the entire passage's real payoff: worldly absorption — concentration alone, without the specific liberating insight the treatise describes elsewhere as resting on it — can only ever suppress a given affliction's coarse, currently active form, exactly as a stone weighs down grass without killing its root; this is precisely why even a genuinely accomplished meditator can still, under the right renewed conditions, find an old affliction reasserting itself. Only uncontaminated absorption, joined with the direct insight that actually severs a seed at its root, removes both layers at once — proof, he stresses, that concentration by itself, however deep or however many levels it climbs through, was never going to be sufficient on its own; it is always concentration paired with wisdom, never concentration alone, that finishes what affliction's diagnosis and restraint can only begin.

Master Cháng Bǎi distinguishes sorrow's two marks with real precision: the first, "sorrow rooted in craving," arises whenever something pleasing to the eye or any other sense is wanted but not obtained, or was once enjoyed but is now past, diminished, lost, or simply changed — the familiar grief of ordinary attachment. The second, "sorrow accompanying the wish for freedom," is subtler and, he stresses, not itself a fault: a sincere practitioner who has genuinely seen the impermanence, suffering, and selflessness of form and every other phenomenon, and who now sincerely wishes to actually dwell in the noble ones' own liberation, can still feel a real anxiety and apprehension wondering when — or whether — that attainment will actually come. He treats this second kind as worth naming precisely because it can otherwise masquerade as spiritual failure rather than what it actually is: a normal, even honorable, byproduct of genuine aspiration not yet fulfilled, distinct in kind from ordinary craving-based grief even though both are technically "sorrow."

On pain, he notes its four causes are entirely physical and circumstantial — self-inflicted or other-inflicted harm, the discomfort of holding one posture too long, injury from the elements, and other external affliction — and stresses the treatise's own honest admission that even a practitioner who has achieved genuine freedom from desire still experiences these; the first dhyāna releases sorrow specifically, not physical pain, which is exactly why it needs to be named as a still-remaining category rather than assumed already gone. Joy and pleasure, by contrast, are simply located precisely: joy belongs specifically to the second dhyāna, and pleasure specifically to the third — each one is what that particular level, and no other, actually delivers.

Master Cháng Bǎi separates two distinct situations the text is careful to distinguish: a desire-realm practitioner who has attained the first dhyāna through meditative effort still has an ordinary desire-realm body, still subject to holding a posture too long, still subject to the elements, still capable of self-harm or harm from others — so pain's seed remains fully capable of manifesting the moment absorption is left. A being actually reborn as a first-dhyāna god, by contrast, has an entirely different kind of body altogether, one that requires no solid food, needs no fixed posture maintained past comfort, and exists in a realm without hostility between its inhabitants — the specific supporting conditions pain's manifestation depends on (bodily fatigue, elemental imbalance, external harm) are simply structurally absent there, even though the underlying seed, in the strict technical sense, has still not been uprooted.

He draws out the four categories of "coarse unfitness" behind pain's four causes, each mapped precisely to a corresponding condition: dread-based unfitness underlies self- or other-inflicted harm; fatigue-based unfitness underlies prolonged posture; elemental-conflict unfitness underlies injury from fire, water, or wind; and karmic-result unfitness underlies whatever other circumstantial suffering the body's own past karma still carries. He treats this whole resolution as reinforcing the same point the previous section on worldly-versus-uncontaminated concentration already made: a seed's absence of manifestation is never the same as its actual removal — favorable circumstances alone, whether meditative absorption or a fortunate rebirth, can suppress a great deal without ever touching the root, which is precisely why the treatise insists on tracking seed and manifestation as two genuinely separate questions throughout.

Master Cháng Bǎi lays out the argument as a clean reductio. Both the first and second dhyānas carry joy and pleasure; if joy and pleasure were what set them apart, the two levels would be indistinguishable. What actually separates them is the feeling each has managed to leave behind — the first dhyāna releases sorrow, the second additionally releases pain, so a headache or an aching foot can no longer even arise there. To claim the first dhyāna already sheds pain is therefore to erase the very boundary between it and the second, which both scripture and lived experience insist is real.

He adds the second structural marker the treatise leans on: the first dhyāna still needs applied-and-sustained thought precisely because its coarse unfitness — its residual pull toward desire, ill-will, and harm — has not yet fully quieted, so it must keep actively investigating to hold desire at bay; that is why "applied-and-sustained thought" is named as one of its distinguishing qualities. The second dhyāna has stilled that thought and severed its coarseness, so it is instead marked by "inner clarity." Both markers, he stresses, are set up on the basis of what coarse unfitness has or has not been severed — which is only coherent if severance genuinely differs level by level. From this the whole ladder falls into place: the first dhyāna releases sorrow, the second pain, the third joy, the fourth pleasure, and the signless concentration equanimity itself — each higher attainment shedding one more layer of feeling's coarse residue than the one below it.

Master Cháng Bǎi is careful to keep the signless mind-concentration distinct from the cessation-of-perception-and-feeling attainment. The latter genuinely stops the first six consciousnesses' feeling and perception together with the self-grasping seventh consciousness; the signless concentration, by contrast, is an uncontaminated conscious absorption — the mind is still present and functioning, so feeling still arises within it, and specifically the neutral, neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling. What the concentration accomplishes is the total removal of the affliction-seeds that would otherwise cling to that neutral feeling and to the "this awareness is my self" grasping built on it. So "the equanimity-faculty is forever extinguished" means the latent affliction is gone, not that neutral experience has ceased.

He underlines the recurring principle: feeling itself is never the fault. Any karmic result at all is bound to carry feeling — the awakened and the unawakened alike register sensation. The difference is entirely in what follows: for the ordinary being, feeling touches off craving or aversion and so becomes fuel for further rebirth; for the noble one, the same feeling arises but sets nothing in motion, because the seed that would have reacted to it is gone. This, he notes, is exactly what the classical phrase "the sage does not receive any dharma" means — not that a sage has no sensation, but that sensation no longer binds.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains the strict logic behind calling equanimity "released." A feeling is not itself a latent affliction; what qualifies as the latent tendency is the incapacitating coarse unfitness of the affliction that habitually accompanies that feeling. Once that accompanying affliction — chiefly the seed of ignorance and the "this thought is my self" grasping — is permanently severed so that it can never again couple with the feeling, we are entitled to say the equanimity-faculty has been released, even though neutral feeling itself persists. The name tracks the disappearance of the affliction, not the disappearance of the sensation.

On the range: neutral feeling begins to dominate at the fourth dhyāna and continues through all four formless attainments — the sphere of infinite space, of infinite consciousness, of nothingness, and of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, the last being the "peak of existence," the highest point of the three planes of becoming. He notes that reaching the release of even this most rarefied equanimity — dissolving the self-view still latent in the topmost formless attainment — is the accomplishment of an arhat alone; no lesser attainment reaches that far.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads "gateway of favorable release" (順出離界) with 界 in its sense of cause: each of the five is a cause that conforms to and conduces toward release. He lines them up with the feeling-releases already established. Releasing the desire realm's three root defilements — desire, ill-will, and harm — is what carries a practitioner up through the dhyānas, releasing sorrow (first dhyāna), pain (second), joy (third), and finally pleasure (fourth); so these three defilements' antidotes together constitute the gateway for the first four feeling-releases. The method is the impurity contemplation against desire, loving-kindness against ill-will, and compassion against harm — and, as the next sections will insist, succeeding at even one of the three suffices to release all three.

The last two gateways handle equanimity, split by realm. Contemplating form as selfless, empty, and signless releases the fourth dhyāna's equanimity; contemplating the cessation of the view of a real self — seeing feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness alike as without self or anything belonging to a self — releases the equanimity that runs through the entire formless realm. He notes the summit of this whole structure is the fully accomplished arhat, who releases the pain, pleasure, sorrow, joy, and equanimity of all three realms at once, "receiving no dharma at all."

Master Cháng Bǎi settles the phrase carefully. "Favorable release" does not mean that an ordinary or still-training practitioner uses these gateways to become released from the five feelings on the spot; rather, it names the causes — abiding and practicing within which one becomes capable of release. The teaching is aimed at anyone who wants to be free of craving, and specifically, he glosses, free of the craving rooted in the view of a real self — that is, to dissolve both the deliberately-reasoned and the innate grasping at "I." These gateways can be taken up while one is still an ordinary being; carried to completion, they yield arhatship. Maitreya is here showing the Buddha's disciples exactly how to "receive no dharma at all," how to release each of the five feeling-faculties.

On why three antidotes for one simultaneous severance: the three defilements do fall together the instant the first dhyāna is genuinely reached, so a single successful contemplation dissolves all three at once. The reason the treatise still names three is that practitioners differ in disposition — one person finds the impurity contemplation most natural and effective, another loving-kindness, another compassion. Because the methods of countering are genuinely different even though their result is the same, three separate gateways are set out, so that each temperament can find the entry that suits it. He stresses the practical payoff: you do not have to master all three; whichever one you can actually practice will, on its own, release all of desire, ill-will, and harm.

Master Cháng Bǎi first notes why the higher releases do not split into varieties the way the desire-realm ones did: both the fourth dhyāna's equanimity and the whole formless realm's equanimity are answered by the one and the same signless concentration, which cuts the view of a real self and thereby releases them together — so there is nothing further to distinguish. In an aside he records that this treatise differs from some later meditation manuals on where the four immeasurables can be based: it holds they may be cultivated resting on any of the four dhyānas and even the first three formless attainments — loving-kindness most powerfully from the third dhyāna (whose bliss is the finest in all three realms, so wishing beings that bliss fits best), compassion from the sphere of infinite space (seeing all suffering as empty), sympathetic joy from the sphere of infinite consciousness, and equanimity from the sphere of nothingness.

He then frames the "sharp-seeing one." The term "desire" here covers both the inward affliction of craving and the outward five sense-objects it reaches for. A sage who has directly realized the truths and severed the view-path afflictions now, in order to press on and remove the cultivation-path afflictions too, deliberately raises the observation-attention — the fifth of the seven attentions — and conjures the most alluring desire-object he can, either the whole field of them or some single favorite, then watches his own mind to see whether affliction still arises. The purpose, Cháng Bǎi stresses, is guarding against spiritual overestimation: only by testing can one confirm whether desire is genuinely gone. He recalls the cautionary tale of a teacher who had proclaimed himself an arhat for sixty years and trained many disciples, until one doubting student, checking in meditation, saw his teacher had not in fact attained it; the student conjured an attacking elephant, the teacher fled in fear — and since an arhat feels no fear, the teacher understood, bowed to his own student as teacher, and only then practiced through to real arhatship. The lesson: keep testing yourself; the faintest trace of desire means the work is not done.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads these six as a graded portrait of a mind that has lost all traction on desire. The mind "does not enter" because it no longer perceives any real excellence in sense-pleasure to be drawn toward. It "finds no charm" because the old spark of delight simply fails to catch even when the loveliest form or sweetest sound is presented. It "does not settle in" because it no longer imagines that indulging the object will leave it happy afterward. It has "no fascination" because it neither dwells on the object's supposedly pure, exquisite, pleasure-giving marks nor lets another person's enthusiasm pull it into grasping them.

The last two are the most experientially telling. "Withering" (萎顇) — Cháng Bǎi glosses it as a kind of dryness — is when the practitioner deliberately gives the mind free rein, even coaxes it to dwell on how beautiful the object is, and still no fondness or ease arises; he likens it to walking through a field of a hundred flowers without a single petal clinging to one's robe. "Letting fall" is the mind taking up the object as its focus and then, precisely because no fondness sustains it, dropping it again almost instantly — the exact opposite of the child who, wanting a toy, cannot stop thinking how lovely it is until his parents buy it. Here the object is raised and released in a moment, with no continued dwelling.

On mark seven, Cháng Bǎi notes the sage will sometimes deliberately hold the mind on the desire-object a good while longer than necessary, precisely to make the test rigorous — and still not a flicker of craving or fondness follows. On mark eight, "resting evenly in equanimity," he draws out the two kinds of equanimity the mind may occupy: wholesome equanimity (善捨), where the strength of insight actively transforms any incipient defilement so the mind stays bright and aligned with the good — a fruit of strong contemplative power; and neutral equanimity (無記捨), where the strength of calm-abiding simply leaves the object no pull at all, so the mind never even stirs toward it — a fruit of strong stillness. Either way the mind proceeds "on level ground," neither craving nor recoiling, roving over the object and observing it in peace. He is careful to distinguish this cultivated evenness from the ordinary person's incidental neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant blankness: the sage's version is guarded by right mindfulness and free of all affliction, and if the least craving did arise it would be countered on the spot.

On revulsion (厭) and its three sub-terms, Cháng Bǎi explains that "revulsion" is the general name for abandoning and turning away, while "aversion, opposition, turning-the-back" (惡・違・背) mark the same movement seen at three moments of contemplating the object — its beginning, middle, and end — corresponding to seeing its three faults in turn: that it is impermanent (never pausing even a moment, unstable, fraught with dread), that it is suffering (a great root of pain, a great abscess, a great barbed thorn, a great bondage), and that it is a thing bound to decay (fragile, easily broken, always diminishing). Because these faults hold of desire in the past, hold now, and will hold in the future alike, seeing them deeply is what finally lets one leave desire for good. He closes the twelve-mark set by noting its whole method: the sage, through observation-attention, deliberately raises his most cherished desire in the mind to check whether any trace of it can still arise.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads the four as the exact positive counterpart of the twelve marks just given. The mind "enters" release because it now perceives real excellence in leaving desire behind, so it is genuinely drawn toward it. Its "charm" is a pure confidence: knowing desire to be unclean and unworthy, the practitioner develops clean faith in release itself, practices toward it, and actually accords with and attains it. Its "settling" is the mind holding steady on the release-object — for instance the impurity-contemplation image — without drifting. Its "firm conviction" is that, dwelling here undefiled, it becomes unbound from craving: even while the observation-attention keeps raising desire-objects for inspection, right mindfulness of their faults keeps the mind unstained, so it meets no snag, and it drops each object effortlessly and spontaneously, without having to force itself.

He notes that "release from desire" itself has two dimensions, matching desire's own two sides: release from the inward affliction of craving is release-by-association (相應離), the mind-consciousness coming to be joined with wholesome factors free of craving; release from the outward sense-objects is release-by-domain (境界離), no longer being caught by the forms, sounds, and the rest that the storehouse-consciousness projects. A non-returner has fully released the desire realm's craving; only an arhat completes release across all three realms.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains that "well gone" (善逝, Sugata) is properly one of the Buddha's ten epithets — "risen to the utmost, never to fall back" — here borrowed to praise the arhat's total release from desire. In the instant before arhatship the meditator abides in the "attention of the consummation of means," whose supporting concentration is likened to vajra: so hard and sharp that it cuts through even the most subtle afflictions without obstruction, which is why it is called the vajra-like concentration. Resting in it, one severs, without interval and forever, the coarse-unfitness seeds of every category of affliction, wins the knowledge of exhaustion (that the afflictions are finished) and the knowledge of non-arising (that, their cause spent, no future suffering-result can ever arise again), and so is truly "well gone" — the Buddha at his own awakening likewise entered this vajra concentration to sever all ignorance.

He then situates the earlier attentions as the runway to that moment. The seven attentions — knowing-the-marks, resolute-conviction, seclusion, delight-in-gathering, investigation, consummation-of-means, and fruit-of-consummation — are cultivated in order, each severing a coarser grade of affliction than the last (seclusion removes the lower realm's strong afflictions, delight-in-gathering the middling, and the consummation-of-means the last and finest). The middle five must be "well cultivated, well practiced, well and repeatedly practiced" before the consummation-of-means can arise at all. Hence the treatise's precise labeling: the consummation-of-means marks the actual "severance position," while knowing-the-marks through investigation mark the "preparatory-path position" — real work, but work that only clears the ground.

Master Cháng Bǎi keeps the three precisely apart. "Entanglement" (纏) is a standard name for affliction in its active form — the manifest defilement that binds a being, drives evil deeds, and drags one into the lower destinies; to be "loosed" is to have that active manifestation no longer arise. "Released" is stated from the side of the object: even when the observation-attention raises an alluring desire, the mind-consciousness is no longer taken in by its supposedly pure and exquisite marks, and once out of absorption the five senses are no longer caught by the actual sense-objects either. "Unbound" is stated from the side of the seed: since all things arise from seeds, the sage who has cut off every cause and condition for affliction to arise will never again generate its manifestation — this is the deepest and final freedom, freedom from the latent tendency itself. He notes the three form a natural depth-ordering: manifestation, its object-hook, and its underlying seed.

Master Cháng Bǎi stresses that desire is never a single tidy fault — one craving spawns a whole family of afflictions. Setting aside craving proper, desire in the desire realm still breeds stinginess, arrogance, restlessness, and heedlessness, and through the mutual reinforcement of one factor kindling another, eventually the whole range of hatred, delusion, conceit, doubt, and the wrong views as well. Beyond these inward afflictions come the three outward faults: "ruinous loss," where desire drives one to take up weapons and do violence until the accumulated evil karma delivers a lower-realm rebirth stripped of anything worth having; "burning," where craving consumes its own host, body and mind alike ablaze — he recalls the Lotus Sūtra's "the three realms are not at peace, like a burning house," and the classical exhortation that when one's own head is on fire one does not dawdle; and "distress," where the moment a cherished desire-object changes or decays, sorrow and lament come flooding in. He notes fear, envy, and the endless wish to be met with everyone's warm smile are all just further faces of this same desire.

Against all four, he lines up the sage's threefold freedom exactly: "freed" from the active entanglements those faults consist of, "transcending" the alluring object-marks that hook them, and "unbound" from the seeds that would regenerate them — desire in every layer, active, object-facing, and latent, no longer able to move him.

Master Cháng Bǎi unpacks "the feelings conditioned by desire" into four kinds a person ordinarily takes up: sustaining feeling (the outer world of mountains, rivers, and earth that supports the body), equipment feeling (the daily necessities one uses), enjoyment feeling (the sensations of actually consuming food and pleasures), and lingering-fondness feeling (the way one keeps looking back on and pining for those sensations afterward, wanting them again and again). An arhat in the nirvāṇa-with-remainder still has a body and mind carried over as the result of past contaminated karma, but his mind is joined with nirvāṇa; all clinging to these four feelings is utterly gone, so he "never takes them up." Whether a desire is about to be reached (met with the craving that wants union, wants no separation, wants increase) or presently being enjoyed (met with the craving that wants it never to leave, wants it to last), those defiled feelings simply no longer arise in him.

He draws the crucial distinction that a sage is not a stone: sages have feeling too, and one living in the desire realm still uses its things. But the ordinary being's feeling is born of contact conjoined with ignorance — met without knowing the object is dreamlike and unreal, so craving fires; the sage's feeling is born of contact conjoined with clear knowing — met with sound attention that sees it as illusory, empty, and fraught with fault, so the feeling arises but stays quiet, binding nothing. This, Cháng Bǎi says, is the exquisite state the image captures: the red lotus on which a water-drop cannot rest but rolls straight off. With this the whole account of the five gateways of favorable release is complete — the method throughout being to catch affliction by its cause, sequence, mark, and activity, to firmly restrain the mind from letting it arise, and by sound attention and right mindfulness to extinguish it without remainder.

Master Cháng Bǎi names the six and pairs each with what it counters: loving-kindness answers ill-will; compassion answers the wish to harm; sympathetic joy answers envy and the inability to rejoice at others' good; equanimity answers craving; the signless concentration answers the mind's habit of grasping at marks; and abandoning self-conceit answers the lingering doubt about one's own liberation and what has been realized. Cultivated to completion, these six are certain to release ill-will, harm, and the whole family of afflictions — which is exactly why they are set up as six gateways of favorable release.

He reads the opening objection as a portrait of someone who has practiced wrongly: lacking enough wisdom of learning, reflection, and cultivation, this person imitates others in cultivating the four immeasurables, the signless concentration, and the concentration on abandoning self-conceit, yet the poison-arrow of doubt still festers in the mind, muddling it. Has such a person actually realized anything? Plainly not — he has not seen non-self and non-possession-of-self, and so he slides into slander, protesting that one can cultivate all four immeasurables and still feel anger arise, and concluding that loving-kindness and the rest therefore cannot really be antidotes at all. The treatise raises this precisely in order to answer it in what follows — the fault lies in the incomplete practice, not in the gateways.

Master Cháng Bǎi frames the whole set as Maitreya's corrective to the person who practiced without understanding. It is not that loving-kindness and the rest fail to counter ill-will and harm; it is that this practitioner never learned how to wield them to actually sever affliction, could not reach non-conceptual wisdom, and so fell into the wrong conclusion. The first four gateways are differentiated because the desire-realm defilements they release differ — loving-kindness against ill-will, compassion against harm, sympathetic joy against displeasure (envy), equanimity against craving-and-anger. The fifth, the signless, is set up against the mind's incessant grasping at marks: the sixth consciousness, forever fabricating marks of self and of phenomena, is disturbed moment to moment by this "mark-following consciousness," and only resting in the noble abidings — emptiness, wishlessness, signlessness, and the cessation attainment — by not attending to any mark and rightly attending to the signless realm, dissolves it. The sixth, abandoning self-conceit, is set up against the subtle "I alone can practice this" conceit that rides along with the mind even in cultivation and obstructs direct realization; only when even the finest self-conceit is severed does doubt about one's own liberation and attainment end, opening the way to final freedom. He notes self-conceit is so tenacious that its innate form is cut only by an arhat (and purified only at the eighth bodhisattva ground), which is exactly why the signless / emptiness concentration is needed to reach it.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes the object and the counter-motion in each case. Loving-kindness takes as its object beings who are neither suffering nor happy and wishes them happiness — beginning with the dearest, then the neutral, then even one's enemies — so that no thought of ill-will or injury can proceed. Compassion takes as its object beings who are suffering and wishes to pull that suffering out; he cites the bodhisattva-ground image of one who removes a being's pain as instantly as brushing off a mosquito that has bitten his own foot, and observes that the bodhisattva treats removing others' suffering as his own happiness — a reach of heart far beyond the ordinary person who only wants his own comfort.

On sympathetic joy he dwells longest, since "displeasure" is simply another name for envy — the grudging inability to be glad at another's good fortune. Rejoicing (隨喜) is heartfelt approval of another's good, delighting in it as though the fine thing had happened to oneself. He draws out the classical fourfold structure of any good deed — doing it oneself, urging others to do it, rejoicing when others do it, and praising both the deed and the doer — and notes that rejoicing costs no bodily or verbal effort yet carries great merit, for three reasons: it rests on right confidence in the karma of merit, it means one genuinely wants all beings happy and here they are making their own merit, and it recognizes the doer as a companion on the same path. Because the self-centered mind so readily slides from envy into obstructing or spoiling others' good, cultivating constant rejoicing is, he stresses, a direct road into the great vehicle's compassion.

On equanimity, Cháng Bǎi describes a mind that dwells "in the middle" — neither craving nor recoiling, holding all beings level with no partiality of dear-or-hated — so it counters craving and anger at once; a second sense is the bodhisattva teaching beings to let go of craving in pleasant circumstances, of anger in unpleasant ones, and of delusion in neutral ones. He offers the wry Western verse of a man who studies his brother through a critical microscope (how coarse he looks), then a contemptuous telescope (how small), until he picks up the mirror of truth and finds how alike they are — the point being that the affliction we see in others is really our own. On the signless: contemplating form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness as marker-less, arising and perishing moment by moment, counters the mark-following mind, since the moment mind discriminates, a mark appears and craving, hatred, and delusion take their marks from it; this is arhat-level. On abandoning self-conceit: a stream-enterer who has cut the view-path afflictions can know for certain he will never fall to the lower destinies (no doubt about his own liberation) and has attained the fourfold confirmed faith in Buddha, Dharma, Saṅgha, and precepts (no doubt about his own realization) — and since such doubt always travels with self-conceit, removing the conceit ends the doubt for good, chiefly through the emptiness concentration seeing the five aggregates as without self or anything belonging to a self.

He underlines the closing verdict as the answer to the whole objection: the gateways never fail; where ill-will or harm still surfaces, the cause is invariably incomplete or unskilled cultivation, not any defect in the methods themselves.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains the categories. The heavenly abidings (天住) are the four dhyānas and the formless attainments; so among the earlier five gateways, the first four — releasing desire, ill-will, harm (through the first four dhyānas) and then form (through the formless attainments) — fall under the heavenly abidings, while the fifth, the cessation of the view of a real self reached through the signless concentration, falls under the noble abidings (聖住), which are emptiness, wishlessness, signlessness, and the cessation attainment. In the later set of six gateways, the first four are the four immeasurables — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — which are the Brahmā-abidings (梵住, "pure abidings," open to ordinary beings and noble ones alike, "Brahmā" meaning the purity won by leaving desire behind); the fifth, the signless, belongs to the signless noble abiding, and the sixth, abandoning self-conceit, to the emptiness and wishlessness noble abidings.

Master Cháng Bǎi takes the four one by one. Rely on the Dharma, not the person: practice by the measure of the authentic teaching, not by the standing of whoever speaks; before relying on any teacher, weigh what they say against the Dharma, for in a degenerate age genuine sages are rare and a self-styled founder is unreliable — this requires actually entering the scriptures oneself and discerning the principles of the three vehicles' path, so as not to be swayed. Rely on the meaning, not the letter: do not read the sense off the surface of the words, but think through the truth the words are pointing at; seek the deep intent of the teaching rather than ornamental phrasing, and honor a plainly-worded teaching that carries the real meaning over an elegant one that does not.

Rely on the definitive-meaning sūtras, not the provisional: Cháng Bǎi surveys the classical fourfold way of drawing the definitive/provisional line — by whether a teaching bears the three Dharma-seals (so all genuine liberating teaching is "definitive" and non-Buddhist teaching is not), by whether it presents the ultimate as permanent (the Mahāyāna's account of the ever-abiding Dharma-body over the merely provisional), by whether it is explicit rather than veiled (the third-turning explicit teaching of three natures and three non-natures over the veiled second-turning "all is empty"), and by whether it is complete rather than abbreviated. He adds the important qualification that a practitioner richly equipped with roots of merit, cleared obstacles, matured continuum, deep conviction, and accumulated merit-and-wisdom is not hemmed in by these distinctions, whereas one lacking that equipment should keep to the definitive-meaning teachings to avoid the grave karma of slandering the Dharma. Rely on wisdom, not consciousness: the ordinary being learns and practices with the sixth consciousness's fabricating discrimination, which must not be trusted as a basis for action — hence "do not believe your own mind; your mind cannot yet be believed" — until, through calm-abiding and insight, contaminated cultivated-wisdom gives way to the uncontaminated wisdom that directly realizes reality, transforming consciousness into wisdom. Until that direct realization, one leans on the wisdoms of learning and reflection with sound attention; only afterward does one truly "rely on wisdom, not consciousness."

Master Cháng Bǎi maps each reliance to the failing it corrects. The flatterer-deceiver wears an air of sanctity but has attained no path; "study with me and you can't go wrong," he says — so the remedy is to rely on the Dharma, not the person, which means one must actually be able to debate and test him, discerning whether he truly grasps the stages and principles of realization rather than being taken in by his dignified manner. This, Cháng Bǎi stresses, presupposes that the student has entered the scriptures deeply enough to have a "Dharma-discerning eye"; to go seeking teachers without one is genuinely dangerous. The world-conformer loves elegant phrasing — poetry and fine words — and misses the meaning the words carry, so the remedy is to rely on the meaning, not the letter. The one wedded to his own view takes the non-genuine for genuine and the genuine for non-genuine, unable to set aside his self-view to understand the teaching's real sense, so the remedy is to rely on the definitive-meaning teachings, not the provisional. And the one for whom hearing is the utmost treats the Dharma as a subject to accumulate and never puts it into practice — like a bank clerk counting money that is not his own — so the remedy is to rely on wisdom, not consciousness. He adds the balancing caution: one who only wants to practice while refusing to study the teaching cannot tell when he has gone wrong either — practice must not leave the scriptures, and the scriptures must not leave practice.

Master Cháng Bǎi ties each reliance to its moment. At the time of attaining the fruit (winning one of the noble fruits), one practices by the Dharma of the aggregates seen as without self or anything belonging to a self — so one relies on the Dharma, not the "person," since "so-and-so" is only a conventional designation laid on form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness, nothing real to be clung to. At the time of retaining the teaching (hearing and mastering it), one must grasp the sense the words carry in order to hold the Dharma in mind at all — so one relies on the meaning, not the letter. At the time of examining the meaning, one relies on the definitive teachings that carry beings toward nirvāṇa rather than the provisional teachings that only incline them toward the fortunate human and heavenly destinies (the "merit" and "imperturbable" karma he glosses as the deeds that ripen into desire-realm and form/formless-realm results respectively). At the time of practicing the Dharma in accord with the Dharma — cultivating calm and insight along the thirty-seven factors with body, speech, and mind free of the fourfold inversion — one relies on the wisdom won through practice, not the sixth consciousness's fabricating discrimination; hence the warning "do not believe your own mind." He lines the four up with the three wisdoms: at the stage of hearing, rely on the Dharma not the person and on the meaning not the letter; at the stage of reflection, on the definitive not the provisional; at the stage of cultivation, on wisdom not consciousness.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains why attention is treated as the hinge of the whole practice. Attention's function is to rouse the appropriate mind-seed and steer it into contact with the object: even when the faculty is intact and the object is present, if attention fails to arise, no mind or mental factor arises either — so the very "stirring of a thought" turns on attention. It comes in two families, sound and unsound: sound attention (如理作意) is the mind, having heard the true teaching from a good guide, turning to examine the profound meaning in accordance with that guidance and with the suchness of the two selflessnesses; unsound attention is attention conjoined with affliction. He recalls the four forces that call attention forth (from the Mind Ground): the force of inclination (fondness for the object), of mindfulness (having well grasped the object's mark), of the object itself (an especially vast or vivid object presenting itself), and of repeated habituation. He notes attention and object are neither identical nor separable — each conditions the other's purity or defilement — which is exactly why, after treating the seven and forty attentions, the ground will go on to treat the object and the practice of attending to its various marks.

Master Cháng Bǎi walks the seven as one continuous arc, taking entry into the first dhyāna as his example. Knowing the marks (了相): through learning and reflection one comes to see clearly why to practice — rightly discerning the desire realm's coarseness and the dhyāna's peace, examining desire through the classical six aspects (meaning, thing, mark, grade, time, and principle), until, resolved that desire is faulty and that something finer than desire exists, one actually vows to practice; this stage still mixes in learning and reflection and is only a preliminary. Resolute conviction (勝解): now one takes up calm and insight in earnest, repeatedly generating a forceful, vivid conviction about that same coarseness-and-peace — this is the real severing power, and it must be based on the threshold concentration to count as cultivation-wisdom. Seclusion (遠離): fueled by well-practiced conviction, the first path that actually severs affliction arises, casting off the coarse grade of affliction. Delight-in-gathering (攝樂): the mind, now tasting the flavor of concentration and genuinely loving the practice, sheds the middling grade of affliction.

Investigation (觀察): to guard against overestimation, one deliberately raises a desire-object in the mind to test whether the subtlest affliction is truly gone — exactly the diagnostic met earlier in the desire-testing passage; if any craving remains, one abandons the conceit of premature attainment and presses on. Consummation of means (加行究竟): sustained conviction finally casts off the subtlest grade of affliction — this is the actual moment of severance, the uninterrupted path. Fruit of the consummation of means (加行究竟果): the path of liberation, the moment the dhyāna is genuinely attained, when pliancy and the feelings of joy and bliss arise and one formally enjoys the attainment's benefit. Cháng Bǎi closes with the recurring caution: in a merely contaminated absorption this whole sequence only presses the grass down with a stone — suppressing the manifestation of desire without uprooting its seed, and always leaving a higher level still above (a second dhyāna above the first, and so on); only the uncontaminated noble path is the "unsurpassed," the final release from desire with nothing beyond it.

Master Cháng Bǎi lays out the fifteen rubrics under which the forty are gathered, each a different angle on how the mind is directed: (1) by the three wisdoms — attention on the letter, on the meaning; (2) by the four foundations of mindfulness — body, feeling, mind, phenomena; (3) by the conventional versus the real — resolute conviction, the real; (4) by training status — trainee, adept, neither; (5) by full-knowledge and severance — full knowledge, active severance, already severed; (6) by the four kinds of object — discriminated image, non-discriminated image, limit-of-the-thing, task-accomplished; (7) by calm and insight — resolute discernment (insight), stilling (calm); (8) by partial versus full cultivation; (9) by application — uninterrupted, earnest; (10) by severing affliction — conforming, counteracting; (11) by the method repeatedly practiced — conducing-to-purity, conducing-to-investigation; (12) by the gradual stages of practice — forced-effort, interrupted, effortful, spontaneous; (13) by the calm-and-insight pair — discernment, inward gathering; (14) by the adept's fruit — purifying-the-obstruction, purity-of-conduct-accomplished-in-reliance; and (15) by persons — established-by-others, grasped-by-inner-ascendancy, vast, all-pervading. He notes several attentions recur across rubrics (attention on phenomena, resolute conviction) because the same act of mind can be classified from more than one angle.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes that "attention on the letter" and "attention on the meaning" divide the labor of learning: hearing fastens on the words the Buddha spoke, while reflection and cultivation press into the truth those words carry — the mind never leaving either letter or meaning, but weighted toward one or the other by stage. The four-foundations attention is simply this same sound contemplation aimed at body (as impure), feeling (as suffering), mind (as impermanent), and phenomena (as without self).

On the crucial pair: the resolute-conviction attention is also called "constructed" or "imaginative" attention (假想作意). When one cultivates, say, the impurity contemplation, the sixth mental consciousness raises a vivid image resembling the object — a whitened skeleton, a bloated corpse — and, by the force of strong conviction, experiences it as if actually present; but the image is a fabrication of the discriminating mind, not the real object, so it is called an "augmenting" or "superimposing" mark. The attention of the real, by contrast, contemplates phenomena as they actually are through three marks: the self-mark (earth as hard, water as wet, fire as warm, wind as moving), the common mark (all conditioned things as impermanent, suffering, empty, without self — the sixteen aspects of the four truths), and the mark of suchness (the reality disclosed by the two selflessnesses of person and phenomena). He aligns these with the Yogācāra account of the two wisdoms: contemplating self-mark and common mark by name-and-concept is the work of subsequently-attained wisdom, which knows that even a thing's apparent "own-mark" is only a conventional imputation, illusory like a reflection or a moon-in-water; while directly realizing suchness itself — where all subject-object, sense-field, and language-discrimination fall away, "the path of words cut off, the ground of mental activity extinguished" — is the work of fundamental non-conceptual wisdom.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains that a "trainee" is anyone from the stream-enterer up to the candidate for arhatship, and that such a one's attention can be spoken of two ways. By its own nature, it is the trainee's uncontaminated attention — the moment non-conceptual wisdom is present, cultivating the contemplation of the person's emptiness of self. As it occurs in the continuum, it is all the wholesome attention that arises in a trainee, including the ordinary discriminating states after emerging from absorption — which are wholesome, never unwholesome, yet still carry a trace of contamination.

He draws out why: a trainee has severed the deliberately-reasoned grasping at self (the sixth consciousness's constructed self-view) but has not yet severed the innate grasping at self rooted in the seventh consciousness. So even his post-absorption wholesome attention toward worldly things remains contaminated, because that subtle innate "I" still underlies it; only the arhat is uncontaminated at all times. This is exactly why the "in-continuum" attention is classed by the fact that it arises in a trainee's stream, not by being uncontaminated. The same two-sided analysis applies to the adept (arhat): his attention by its own nature is his uncontaminated wisdom, and his attention in the continuum is the whole wholesome span of his mind — which, since innate self-grasping is now gone, is uncontaminated through and through.

Master Cháng Bǎi maps the triad onto the classical paths. "Full knowledge" belongs to the path of preparation: the mind thoroughly knows its object — the aggregates, sense-bases, and elements — but has not yet the power to sever affliction. "Active severance" is the uninterrupted path, the consummation-of-means attention, which does two things together: it both fully knows the object and cuts the affliction. "Already-severed" is the attention of one in whom affliction is gone — recalling that a merely worldly absorption cuts only affliction's manifestation, while it takes the noble path to cut its seed, so this attention proper belongs to the noble one. The "neither-trainee-nor-adept" attention is simply the whole run of worldly attention in an ordinary, not-yet-noble being.

Master Cháng Bǎi clarifies that both the "discriminated" and the "non-discriminated" image rest on the very same object — a "same-portion image" of the known thing, projected by one's own discriminating mind. The difference is what the mind does with it: taking up its marks and examining them (impermanent, suffering, empty, selfless, or impure) is insight; holding to it single-pointedly with repeated recollection and no further discrimination is calm. So "non-discriminated" does not mean thoughtless — it means resting on one object without splitting into varied discriminations, as in following the breath.

The "limit of the thing" is the object grasped in its two exhaustive dimensions: its exhaustive extent (盡所有性) — the full inventory and no more (the body is only the four elements' product, feeling only the pleasant/painful/neutral, mind only the eight consciousnesses, phenomena only the fifty-odd mental factors) — and its mode of being (如所有性) — its unchanging common mark as impermanent, suffering, empty, and selfless, through which one enters suchness. The "task-accomplished" attention is the attainment itself: through repeatedly cultivating calm and insight, all attention on images reaches fullness, and with that fullness comes the transformation of the basis (轉依) — every coarse unfitness of body and mind is extinguished, so that one passes beyond the image to a direct, non-conceptual perceptual knowing of the thing itself. Cháng Bǎi reads the doubled phrasing ("thus and thus … so and so") as covering both the cause-side (contemplating the four dhyānas and four formless attainments) and the fruit-side (actually attaining them, each with its own transformation of basis), while "the purified object" names the attention of one who, his coarse unfitness gone, moves through every object with no affliction arising at all.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads resolute discernment and stilling as the two halves of practice, each able to go first: one may discern phenomena from the outset (reflection-wisdom) and then steady the mind, or, already possessing concentration, discern with calm as the base (cultivation-wisdom) — and correspondingly for calm. His governing point is that calm and insight must interweave; neither is cultivated alone for long. Partial cultivation is running one of the two by itself; full cultivation is running both until they are yoked together and one-pointedness is won. Uninterrupted attention is unbroken continuity across all times; earnest attention is applying oneself without any slackening, born of really grasping how much the practice matters.

He then lines up the fruits precisely: resolute discernment purifies one's knowledge-and-vision (the decisive and investigative wisdoms); stilling grows pliancy; partial-and-full cultivation frees the mind from the five hindrances; uninterrupted-and-earnest attention frees it from the fetters. Two further fruits he underlines: uninterrupted attention means one does not squander a whole life to no purpose, and earnest attention swiftly wins the "higher knowledge" — the superknowledge of the exhaustion of the outflows. Citing the treatise's own analysis elsewhere, he notes three forces speed one to that liberating knowledge — the force of wisdom, the force of non-heedlessness, and the force of repeated practice — and that this last is exactly what "earnest attention" names.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains that the conforming attention works by wearied disenchantment: seeing the many faults of the still-contaminated aggregates of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness — contemplating this life as a sickness, as a boil oozing the pus and blood of greed, hatred, and delusion, as an arrow, a barb, a thing that kills — and so wearying of and breaking down attachment to the five grasping-aggregates, knowing them as impermanent, suffering, empty, and selfless. This "conforms to" severance but does not yet accomplish it; it still belongs to the path of preparation. The counteracting attention is the step that actually cuts: it casts the afflictions off, keeps the mind firmly settled in that severance, and drives the afflictions out of the continuum so they no longer arise.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains the attention "conducing to purity" as a remedy for the sinking mind. When the mind flags in absorption, one rouses it to gladness through the six recollections — three of refuge (recollecting the Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha) and three of attainment (recollecting one's own precepts, generosity, and cultivation of the immeasurables, which carry one toward nirvāṇa, toward resources, and toward heavenly rebirth) — or by contemplating some single fine thing among one's own worldly goods or, better, the seven noble riches (faith, precepts, learning, generosity, wisdom, conscience, and shame) and the attainments of the path. Sound attention on these joy-producing matters both keeps practice going and conforms to the winning of the utterly pure path and its fruits. The attention "conducing to investigation" is the self-auditing counterpart: checking whether one's afflictions have actually been severed, whether one has genuinely attained the concentration or wisdom one thinks one has, and whether one's earlier contemplation of the object was in fact faithful to the Dharma.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads the first three as a rising curve of effort. The beginner who has not yet reached the threshold concentration must keep whipping his own mind on, spurring himself continuously — running by forced effort. Once the threshold is attained, a practitioner who then works the higher dhyānas only slackly and intermittently — still needing to go back and consult the teaching because he does not yet clearly grasp how to proceed — runs with interruption. When that same practitioner drives the application with unslackening vigor, no longer interrupted by having to relearn the method, he runs with effort.

The spontaneous running he treats as the payoff, and sorts its four times into worldly and supramundane purity. Three are worldly: attaining the threshold concentration; entering a root dhyāna (concentration made full); and mastering it so it cannot be lost (concentration made sovereign, once craving, view, and conceit toward it are cleared). Two are supramundane: cultivating direct realization — when, resting on calm, the mind's sound attention joined to suchness gives rise without interval to non-conceptual decisive knowledge and direct perceptual knowing, the moment of first winning the noble fruit or the first ground, never to fall back; and attaining arhatship — when the vajra concentration arises and severs, without interval, the last innate grasping at self. After that the mind is well liberated, able to abide at will in the noble abidings (emptiness, signlessness, wishlessness, cessation), the heavenly abidings (the dhyānas and formless spheres), or the Brahmā-abidings (the four immeasurables), and to contemplate whatever true Dharma yields benefit, worldly or supramundane — pure at all times.

Master Cháng Bǎi treats discernment and inward gathering as one more naming of insight and calm — the mind selecting and examining an object's marks (the aggregates as impure, suffering, empty, selfless) versus drawing inward onto a single object with repeated recollection. On the "attention that purifies the obstruction," he reads its two clauses precisely: "casts off the outflows" is severing affliction's active manifestation (the entanglements); "forever destroys the coarse unfitness" is severing its seed (the latent tendency) — so this attention clears the obstructions of karma, affliction, and karmic result together. The "purity of conduct accomplished in reliance" is the state of one who has attained concentration or non-conceptual wisdom: with a body now free of coarse unfitness, he can range through every object of experience and no affliction stirs — the same freedom the red-lotus image described, now named as an attention.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes these last four classify attention by the practitioner. The śrāvaka's attention is "established by others" because a hearer must first receive the Buddha's teaching and only then, by contemplating it soundly within, reach non-conceptual wisdom. The pratyekabuddha's and bodhisattva's is "grasped by inner ascendancy" because they awaken without a present teacher — the solitary realizer through vows and long cultivation in past lives (much seeing of buddhas, much hearing of Dharma, much accumulation of roots of good) that let him awaken in an age without a buddha, and the advanced bodhisattva likewise from his own inner power. The vast attention is the bodhisattva's aspiration itself — clearly seeing saṃsāra's faults and the way out, arousing the great vow, and turning toward supreme awakening; this is the attention of generating bodhicitta. The all-pervading attention is twofold: a Buddha's, whose mind is at all times joined with the unobstructed knowledge that directly sees every realm, every matter, every grade, and every time without hindrance; and a bodhisattva's, whose skill in means ranges across the three vehicles (śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva) and the five sciences (inner science, logic, grammar, medicine, and the crafts). With this the forty attentions are complete.

Master Cháng Bǎi supplies the governing logic that makes this table read as more than a list. The seven root attentions are the actual meditative sequence based on the threshold concentration, running from knowing-marks up to the fruit of the consummation of means; the forty are cross-classifications, so each of the forty is placed with whichever of the seven stages actually does its job. Several placements follow directly from what each stage is. The knowing-marks attention alone still mixes in hearing and reflection, so it alone catches "attention-on-the-letter"; from it onward, one has passed beyond words into cultivation, so the other six catch only "attention-on-the-meaning." The three affliction-severing stages — seclusion, delight-in-gathering, and consummation-of-means — are the uninterrupted-path work, so they catch "active-severance" and "the real"; the three preparatory stages catch "full-knowledge"; and the fruit stage, being the liberation-path already-attained, catches "already-severed," "full cultivation," and the "task-accomplished."

He draws special attention to the "subsumed by none" cases, which are the interpretively important ones: the very first resolute-discernment and stilling, and forced-effort attention, fall outside the seven — because at that point one has not yet attained the threshold concentration, so the seven have not begun; only once calm or insight "takes the head" (i.e. one is working from within the threshold concentration) do they fall inside and range across all seven. The investigation attention, being the testing stage, catches the discriminated-image object and the checking of whether affliction is severed; the conforming attention, being the wearied-disenchantment of the preparatory path, is caught by the first two stages. Where a single one of the forty admits two readings — the "purity-conducing" and "investigation" attentions, or the whole "resolute-conviction/real" pairing — he notes the text's own hedge, "know it applies as fitting," and pins each reading to whether the act in question is a constructed image or a contemplation of the real self-mark, common mark, and suchness.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes the telling placements. Spontaneous running splits across "entering" a root dhyāna (consummation-of-means, whose affliction-antidotes have all arisen) and "having entered" it (fruit-of-consummation, which actually enjoys the result). The vast attention — the bodhisattva's vow toward great awakening — is subsumed by none of the seven, because arousing bodhicitta is not itself a concentration-state. A Buddha's all-pervading attention is the perfected fruit, so it falls under fruit-of-consummation alone; a bodhisattva's, still under cultivation across the three vehicles and five sciences, spans all seven. On the knowing-marks attention he draws the vehicle contrast sharply: for a śrāvaka it requires both hearing the teaching from another and one's own sound attention, whereas for a solitary realizer or advanced bodhisattva it needs only the provisions amassed in past lives, since they awaken without a present teacher.

His closing synthesis is the payoff of the whole analysis: the remaining attentions form a strict sequence in which each earlier one is the condition that gives rise to the next — knowing-marks before resolute-conviction, resolute-conviction before seclusion, and so on up; and within the forty, attention-on-the-letter before attention-on-the-meaning, resolute-conviction before the real, interrupted-running before uninterrupted before spontaneous. He frames the two schemes as one thing seen two ways: the seven root attentions are the body or basis of the practice, and the forty are its marks and functions — its unfolding and its fields of application. With this the ground's entire treatment of attention is complete, and it turns to the object.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains the four. The object-mark is the image the mind projects of whatever it takes as its known thing — the aggregates, sense-bases, and elements, or whatever the teaching directs one to contemplate: the moment the mind cognizes, it splits into a seeing-part and a seen-part, and the seen image (think of "Zhang San," and his face appears within) is the object-mark. The causal mark is the whole body of provisions for concentration (定資糧), without which absorption simply will not come: pure precepts, restraint of the sense-doors, moderation in eating, unbroken wakeful practice in the first and last watches of the night, dwelling with clear comprehension, good friends (teachers and the Dharma), hearing and reflection, freedom from obstacles, generosity, and the ascetic's full adornment. He dwells on these as the fine, practical, day-to-day conditions — how one eats, sleeps, guards the senses, and watches one's own mind — on which the whole possibility of concentration rests.

The marks to be avoided are the four obstacles that surface in sitting: dullness (the mind sinking toward sleep), agitation (the mind recalling worldly pleasures), scatter (random wandering thought), and attachment (craving for the sense-objects). The mark to be cultivated is nothing other than the deliberate antidote to each of these four — which the treatise now unfolds in detail, beginning with dullness.

Master Cháng Bǎi stresses that the identical four provision-failures — unguarded senses, immoderate eating, neglected wakeful practice, absent clear comprehension — produce different obstacles depending on temperament: the deluded fall into dullness, the greedy into agitation, the discursive into scatter, the craving-prone into attachment. Dullness is the deluded type's mind sinking toward sleep: fogged and heavy, taking no interest even in the excellent object (the concentration-object that could win absorption), often haunted by remorse over past deeds so that even cultivating the four bases of spiritual power (aspiration, effort, mind, investigation) is dragged down by regret. He notes the diagnostic honesty of "one-sidedly dwelling on the mark of calm alone" — someone who has never learned to balance calm with rousing energy will, on a dry object like counting the breath, simply doze.

Agitation is the greedy type's mirror-image failure: the mind loves non-quietude, has no disenchantment to steady it, and over-elevates — kept churning by fond recollection. He fills in the "agitation-prone thoughts": thoughts of relatives (worrying whether one's parents or children are warm and fed as the weather turns cold), thoughts of one's homeland and its sights, thoughts tinged with craving, ill-will, or the conceit of not-dying — the mind flooded with remembered pleasures. Just as one-sided calm breeds dullness, one-sided uplift breeds agitation; the remedy in both is the skillful balancing of calming, rousing, and equanimity.

Master Cháng Bǎi describes scatter as the discursive type's affliction: dull-facultied (weak in the five spiritual faculties, so slow to accomplish calm), forever seeking and undertaking — one moment planning a home for the elderly, the next an orphanage, finishing nothing — and unable to tell scatter from non-scatter. He points here to the classical antidote of the six perceptions (六種想) that settle such a mind on one object: the perception of no-mark (all things dependently arisen, without findable substance), of non-discrimination (marks are only the mind's fabrication), of quietude (using the nine stages of settling the mind when the hindrances arise), of no-function (things have no real efficacy), of no-longing-and-no-turbulence (seeing the object as impure, impermanent, and selfless, nothing worth clinging to), and of the bliss of cessation freed of affliction. Attachment is the craving type's affliction: mired in the pleasures of the fortunate human and heavenly rebirths, unable to see them as still saṃsāric and fault-ridden, and so without any aspiration toward the definitive good of liberation — "a person's conduct never exceeds his vision."

He then reads the closing line as the whole point of naming the four: the "mark to be cultivated" is nothing separate — it is exactly the matched antidote to each obstacle. Against dullness, rouse the mind with the six recollections; against agitation, still it with calm-abiding attention like the nine stages of settling; against scatter, apply the six perceptions; against attachment, contemplate the noble path's insight into all formations as impermanent, suffering, empty, and selfless, so as to loosen the grip of the fortunate rebirths. These four, together with the object-mark and the causal mark, are the treatise's brief four-mark scheme; the thirty-two marks that follow give the fuller inventory.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads the "mark of one's own mind" as a discipline of continuous self-observation — watching the just-past mind-moment with the present one — and gives it two sides: skillful knowledge of how defilement is reversed (knowing that a craving mind calls for the impurity contemplation, an angry mind for loving-kindness, so one can wield the right antidote), and clear knowledge of defilement's allure and its faults (recognizing how, across beginningless time, the mind has loved the defiled sense-objects and, even when it briefly climbs out, is dragged swiftly back, and how any affliction burns and harms self, other, or both).

He unpacks the mark through the classical ten pairs — twenty minds — that the meditator learns to read in himself: the mind with craving and free of craving; with ill-will and free of it; with delusion and free of it (these three the ordinary daily states); then the contracted (gathered) and the scattered mind; the sunken and the uplifted mind; the agitated and the unagitated; the quieted and the unquieted (quieted only once the threshold concentration is reached and the hindrances fall); the concentrated and the unconcentrated (concentrated once one can enter the first dhyāna); the well-cultivated and the ill-cultivated (whether entering, abiding, and emerging come easily); and the well-liberated and the ill-liberated (the arhat's final freedom versus a trainee's still-incomplete one). Knowing which mind is present, what conditioned it, and how to move from the defiled to the undefiled is the skill this first mark names; the remaining thirty-one refine it.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains the outer mark as the deliberate antidote-image raised once one has caught one's mind defiled: a mark of luminosity (the sun's or moon's light — he mentions Nāgārjuna's moonlight concentration) to counter dullness; a pure-sublime mark (recollecting the Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha, contemplating the Buddha's marks) to counter craving; or one of the other classical stilling contemplations matched to temperament — impurity for the craving-prone, loving-kindness for the anger-prone, breath-counting for the scattered, element-analysis for the conceited (the person is only five aggregates, with no self to be proud of), dependent-origination for the deluded, and buddha-recollection for the heavily obstructed. Cutting off an arisen affliction is "dispelling"; keeping an unarisen one from arising is "non-manifestation."

The support and range marks locate the object precisely: every image the mind projects is drawn from the five aggregates and their seeds that make up one's own person (serving as co-arising support, immediately-antecedent support, and seed-support), and it never exceeds the six sense-fields, from form through mind-objects. The attention mark is the Yogācāra insight that consciousness arises only when attention rouses it — even with the faculty intact and the object present, no cognition arises if attention fails — from which the practitioner draws a practical lesson: since a thought arises only by attention, one can govern one's own mind, sound attention purifying it and unsound attention defiling it. The mind's-arising mark gives three routes by which mind arises: through attention; through the karmic formations that perfume seeds into the storehouse-consciousness (the formations-condition-consciousness link); and through name-and-form, which mutually conditions consciousness. The abiding mark is the four stations of consciousness — form, feeling, perception, and formations — the four fields in which consciousness comes to rest.

Master Cháng Bǎi distinguishes the self-mark two ways: the self-mark of a class (all form marked by resistance; the five aggregates as five classes) and the individual self-mark (within form, the five faculties, five objects, and form-included-in-mind-objects; within feeling, the pleasant, painful, and neutral). The common mark is the three universal marks — impermanence as the common mark of all formations, suffering as the common mark of all contaminated things, and emptiness-and-non-self as the common mark of all dharmas whatsoever, conditioned or unconditioned; contemplating these is what severs affliction and accomplishes the noble path.

The coarse and calm marks he treats as a strictly relative pair — "coarse" meaning fault-laden: wherever a ground's faults are more numerous it is coarse, and wherever fewer, calm. The desire realm is coarse against the first dhyāna, which is calm; and so on up, the sphere of nothingness coarse against the peak of existence. This is exactly the material of the worldly path's six-aspect contemplation (六行觀): seeing the lower ground as coarse, suffering, and obstructive while yearning toward the higher ground as calm, sublime, and freed — the engine by which one ascends dhyāna to dhyāna without any uncontaminated insight, all the way to the summit of becoming.

Master Cháng Bǎi glosses the three time-marks simply: recollecting formations already undergone is the mark of receiving, thinking on formations yet to come is the mark of discrimination, and discriminating formations present now is the mark of accompaniment — remarking that the old tend to dwell in the past and the young in the future, while few actually live in the present with clear comprehension. The defiled and undefiled marks run through the ten pairs / twenty minds from the self-mark section. He draws out the practical distinction the text adds: a meditator who has attained worldly absorption but does not keep up the timely cultivation watches only the first three pairs (craving/free-of-craving, ill-will/free, delusion/free) — his ordinary out-of-session states — whereas one who does keep cultivating watches the later seven pairs (contracted/scattered, sunken/uplifted, agitated/unagitated, and so on up to well-/ill-liberated) that arise in actual practice, applying the "timely" antidotes: calming when agitated, insight when the object is clear, uplifting when sunken, equanimity when the mind is level. Defilement, he stresses, always has two layers — active manifestation (the entanglement) and dormant seed (the latent tendency) — so a mind is truly undefiled only when both are countered.

Master Cháng Bǎi reads right and wrong method as a matched pair of causal contemplations: the mark of right method is contemplating the bright-and-pure causes — how guarding the sense-doors, moderating food, and dwelling with clear comprehension keep the mind undefiled; the mark of wrong method is contemplating the reverse — how failing at those very provisions defiles it. He notes the practical value of watching the wrong-method mark too, since the mind is in fact defiled far more often than not: of the fifty-odd mental factors only eleven are wholesome, so unless one guards the senses and keeps clear comprehension the mind is easily stained. The mark of luminosity he unfolds as two lights — the darkness-treating light (contemplating the sun's or moon's radiance against dullness) and the light of the Dharma (against the three "darknesses" of ignorance, doubt, and dullness) — present at every ground, high or low, so "as below, so above."

The mark of investigation he ties to clear comprehension carried through all four postures. "Present observing the future-sitting" is forward-looking diligence: the seated grasping-mind now resolving to fulfill the Buddha's instruction to practice calm and insight in the night's first and last watches. "Sitting observing the lying" is review: recalling, while seated, whether last night's rest kept the perception of luminosity, the right-side lion's posture, mindfulness, and clear comprehension — even setting one's intended waking-time into the storehouse-consciousness so one wakes on time. And "a later act observing an earlier act" is the continuous discipline of the after-mind watching the fore-mind — the same moment-by-moment self-observation the very first mark named, now applied across time.

Master Cháng Bǎi explains why the impurity contemplation — the bruised-blue, festering, scattered corpse — earns the name "wholesome concentration": of all afflictions craving is the most powerful, and within craving, sexual craving is the most powerful of all, the very root that generates the round of suffering; since these marks are the antidote-object aimed straight at it, they are called wholesome. He recalls that the impurity contemplation and breath-counting were together honored in early Buddhism as the two "gates of the deathless."

The four following marks are the meditator's real-time toolkit for adjusting the mind. Calming is resting on the non-discriminated image (holding one object without further discrimination, as in watching the breath without analyzing it). Uplifting is rousing a sunken mind by taking up a pure-sublime mark (recollecting the Buddha, precepts, generosity) or a luminous one (the sun's or moon's light). Insight is contemplating phenomena through the three wisdoms — and he notes the treatise's own gradation: hearing-wisdom still leans on the words and cannot yet make the concentration-image vividly present; reflection-wisdom penetrates the intent but still cannot; only cultivation-wisdom makes the image clearly present and lets one actually receive the fruit of liberation. Equanimity is the even mind reached once neither too much effort nor too little is needed — the mind resting effortlessly on its object, both dullness and agitation gone, settling into the deepest quiet as a heightened letting-go toward the wholesome.

Master Cháng Bǎi ties the first three to the three root marks already given: one enters concentration by means of the causal mark (the accumulated provisions), the object-mark (fixing the mind on its object), and the mark-to-be-cultivated (the antidotes to the obstacles); one abides by growing so skillful in these marks that one can enter at will and reach a state that cannot be lost; one emerges the moment attention turns to a scattered object not belonging to the concentrated ground. On increase and decrease he draws out the treatise's key reciprocity: purified insight strengthens calm, calm deepens bodily-and-mental pliancy, pliancy in turn deepens one-pointedness, and one-pointedness again deepens pliancy — pliancy and one-pointedness mutually depending and mutually supporting, so that both "double and expand" together (increase), or, when practice slackens, both recede and shrink (decrease). The method mark is simply the two paths of calm and insight seen as the lever that drives the mind toward either increase or decrease.

The final mark, eliciting, he treats as the whole apparatus's payoff: mature calm-and-insight elicits the higher attainments — the power to compress a vast body of phrasing and meaning into a few words or a single character (and to expand it again), unfolding the Dharma's breadth and depth; the concentration of non-contention and of unobstructedness; the wondrous knowledge that fulfills whatever it vows; and, resting on samādhi, a Buddha's ten powers, fourfold fearlessness, and the rest of the supreme qualities, together with the penetration of the profoundest meaning by the subtlest wisdom. With this the thirty-two marks are complete.

Master Cháng Bǎi shows how the four root marks each absorb the thirty-two. The object-mark embraces them all, since every one of the thirty-two is something the mind takes as its object. The causal mark — the provisions for concentration — also embraces them all, because each mark serves as the condition that makes the next arise clearer and purer; this is why guarding and nourishing the concentration-provisions matters so much. And the causal mark itself divides into two: a bright category (the mark of right method) and a dark category (the mark of wrong method). The marks-to-avoid gather up every defiled mark; the marks-to-cultivate gather up all the rest, since each is to be applied at its proper occasion. With this the Ground of Meditative Equipoise completes its analysis of the object.