The Mundane Path Through the Absorptions

Master Cháng Bǎi unpacks both verses as tables of contents for fascicles 33 and 34 respectively. The mundane-path verse names, in order: the seven kinds of mental engagement that carry a practitioner from near-attainment concentration through freedom from desire (learning the object's mark, confident understanding, seclusion, gathering joy, examination, the culmination of effort, and its fruit); the eight absorptions this fascicle will detail — the four dhyānas and four formless spheres; two attainments without mind (the attainment of non-perception and the attainment of cessation); five of the six superknowledges (divine eye, divine ear, mind-reading, psychic power, and recollection of past lives — omitting only the knowledge of the exhaustion of contaminants, since that belongs only to the supramundane path); and finally the differentiated marks of those reborn in the form and formless heavens, along with the outward signs of someone who has genuinely become free of desire. The supramundane-path verse, held for fascicle 34, previews investigating the four noble truths through the identical seven mental engagements, culminating in arhatship itself. Cháng Bǎi frames near-attainment concentration as a genuine fork in the road: a practitioner who stops here and simply enjoys its partial peace makes no further progress; the only two ways forward are the mundane path toward ever-deeper absorption, or the supramundane path toward liberation itself — fascicles 21 through 34 together tracing a Hearer-disciple's entire journey from the provisions of the path through final attainment.

Master Cháng Bǎi distinguishes the four precisely: a follower of an outside path pursues the mundane path exclusively, since without the Buddha's teaching there is no concept of liberation to aim for at all, and such a practitioner typically mistakes deep absorption itself for final liberation; a practitioner within the true teaching but of weak faculties simply cannot yet move quickly enough toward direct realization, and so first strengthens concentration as preparation; one of sharp faculties but immature wholesome roots has the capacity but not yet the ripeness needed to actually enter the stream of the noble path; and a bodhisattva, uniquely, does not pursue the mundane path out of any limitation at all, but by deliberate choice — postponing personal liberation for countless future lives of benefiting beings, and cultivating the dhyānas' profound stillness partly because that same concentration strengthens the very capacity needed to guide others skillfully. Cháng Bǎi notes the second and third differ subtly: one lacks the raw capacity, the other has the capacity but not yet the maturity — a distinction worth knowing since the appropriate encouragement differs for each.

Master Cháng Bǎi maps out the yield of the mundane path in full: the fourth dhyāna can give rise to the attainment of non-perception, where the sixth consciousness's feeling and perception are entirely stilled; the peak of neither-perception-nor-non-perception can give rise to the far rarer attainment of cessation, where even the seventh consciousness's self-grasping activity is stilled alongside them. The four root dhyānas can also develop five of the six superknowledges — psychic power (shrinking, expanding, or transforming physical matter), recollection of past lives, the divine ear (hearing at any distance without obstruction), the divine eye (knowing where a being will be reborn), and mind-reading (knowing another's thoughts directly) — together with further noble qualities such as the samādhi of non-contention (Subhūti's practice of checking, before begging for alms, that his presence would trouble no one) and the samādhi of wish-fulfilling wisdom (instantly mastering a body of knowledge merely by wishing to understand it, rather than through laborious study). Cultivating the nine levels at low, middling, or high grade determines specific heavenly rebirth within each level's own sub-tiers — the first dhyāna's retinue-of-Brahmā, ministers-of-Brahmā, and Great Brahmā himself, for instance, corresponding to low, middling, and high cultivation respectively — and genuine freedom from desire, once attained, visibly changes a practitioner's outward bearing in body, speech, and mind, details the treatise promises to spell out further ahead.

Master Cháng Bǎi previews all seven in sequence: learning the object's mark correctly identifies the lower level's suffering, coarseness, and obstruction, and the upper level's peace, excellence, and genuine escape; confident understanding repeatedly generates vivid understanding of that same comparison; seclusion first abandons the lower level's grossest, most obvious afflictions; gathering joy abandons the lower level's middling afflictions, delighting in the process of letting go; examination checks whether the lower level's afflictions have genuinely been abandoned, guarding specifically against the false confidence of imagining oneself further along than one actually is; the culmination of effort abandons even the lower level's subtlest remaining afflictions, forming the final uninterrupted path immediately preceding attainment; and the fruit of that culmination is the actual moment of liberation from the lower level — the release itself, receiving in full whatever qualities the newly attained higher level brings. Cháng Bǎi notes this same seven-stage structure, first sketched in outline back when four kinds of mental engagement were introduced in fascicle 31, now receives its complete and definitive treatment — and will recur, essentially unchanged, when the supramundane path applies the identical seven engagements to the four noble truths in fascicle 34.

Master Cháng Bǎi unpacks desire's fourfold danger in meaning: it brings little genuine satisfaction yet is condemned by the Buddha, it constantly stokes further craving rather than resolving it, and it drives beings toward unwholesome action; it breeds constant distress, since desire's very nature is to grieve when unfulfilled and grieve again when lost; it is the basis for countless diseases, since compulsive pursuit of sensory pleasure directly damages health; and it is the basis for the calamity of rebirth itself, since unabandoned desire simply perpetuates the entire cycle of old age, sickness, and death indefinitely. On substance, he distinguishes inner craving (attachment to one's own body and existence) from outer craving (attachment to external objects and other beings) as the two basic forms desire's underlying substance takes — the raw material this entire investigation is meant to dismantle.

Master Cháng Bǎi distinguishes object-desire (the sensory object itself — a sight, a sound, a person) from affliction-desire (the actual craving mind that grasps at it), citing the classical formula that "the world's fine objects are not truly desire; true desire is the discriminating craving of the mind" — a cup of coffee is only ever object-desire; the felt need for it is affliction-desire. He then traces three distinct distortions bred by the three feelings: pleasant feeling breeds "perceptual distortion" (mistaking an object's appearance for something genuinely fine) and "mental distortion" (the craving that follows from that misperception); painful feeling breeds no comparable distortion since its unpleasantness is at least accurately recognized, only the secondary reactions of indignation and resentment; and neutral feeling — the subtlest and most commonly overlooked — breeds delusion and, through it, an entire cluster of secondary afflictions (concealing one's faults out of fear of losing reputation, lashing out when disturbed, deceiving and flattering others for personal gain, and both shamelessness before oneself and indifference to others' judgment), because neutral feeling is where a being most easily overlooks the aggregates' own subtle, ever-present suffering of conditioning — mistaking a self-grasping "I" for genuinely, permanently existing beneath the placid surface. Only a noble one, Cháng Bǎi notes, actually recognizes this neutral feeling for the subtle suffering it truly is; every ordinary being takes it as simple, harmless neutrality, which is precisely why it breeds the deepest distortion of the three — distorted view itself.

Master Cháng Bǎi unpacks each image: a dry bone, gnawed at by a dog that can never actually be satisfied by it, since there is no meat left to satisfy anything; raw flesh, fought over by competing scavengers the instant it appears — illustrated by the Jin-dynasty story of the beautiful Lǜzhū, so fiercely contested between her master Shí Chóng and a rival that the dispute ended in Shí Chóng's execution and Lǜzhū's own suicide; a burning torch of grass, liable to scorch the very hand holding it; a single ember, small enough to seem harmless yet capable of burning down an entire forest, just as the smallest indulged desire can consume every accumulated merit; a venomous serpent, which even the wise keep their distance from; a dream, vivid while it lasts and gone the instant one wakes; borrowed ornaments, which must eventually be returned to their true owner, since nothing about them was ever truly one's own; and treetop fruit, so ripe it could fall and rot at any moment, unstable and impossible to rely upon. He tells the *Mahāvibhāṣā's* story of a tyrannical king named Duōqiú, deposed by his own ministers and reduced to selling straw sandals for a living — until his kind-hearted brother and successor took pity and granted him first one district to govern, then, as his ambition grew, two, three, four, and five, until he finally murdered his own brother to reclaim the throne outright. Indra, observing this from his heavenly assembly, disguised himself as a brahmin and lured the still-insatiable king with false promises of hidden treasure across the sea — leaving him to waste away in anxious, unfulfilled longing until the Buddha himself intervened, teaching that desire's pursuit brings joy only when satisfied and torment when it is not, and that a truly wise person recognizes an unmet promise for what it is rather than suffering over it. Cháng Bǎi treats the whole sequence — eight similes plus one cautionary tale — as cataloging exactly why desire, whatever momentary pleasure it offers, belongs entirely and irredeemably to the dark category.

Master Cháng Bǎi tells the story of Nanda's kinsman, a young man of the Buddha's own clan, on his very wedding day — the Buddha, knowing the young man's readiness for liberation had ripened, arrived with Ānanda to claim him for the monastic life, brushing aside hostile onlookers' objections that a wedding was no place for renunciants. Later, having secretly caused the groom's ostentatious prayer to a manifested deity to appear answered, the Buddha asked how much the elaborate wedding had cost — and, learning that a full third of the sum had gone toward "purchasing" the bride, proceeded to ask, with disarming directness, what her hair alone might be worth, then her spit, her earwax, her internal organs, working through all thirty-six unclean substances one by one until the young man, tallying the true value of what he had paid so dearly for, realized he had been badly cheated by his own infatuation — and, his desire already weakened by ten thousand years of elemental-analysis practice carried over from past lives, found it fully collapse on the spot, whereupon the Buddha revealed his true form and the young man joined the monastic order immediately. Cháng Bǎi draws the lesson directly from the principle of function: the body's genuine needs — food for hunger, clothing for cold, shelter for exhaustion, medicine for illness — are entirely legitimate, but only ever as remedies for an affliction already present, never as objects of attachment in their own right; craving what merely functions as medicine is precisely the confusion this entire investigation is meant to dissolve.

Master Cháng Bǎi notes the elegant simplicity of this closing move: having spent such extensive effort cataloging the desire realm's danger, distress, disease, and calamity across meaning, substance, characteristic, category, time, and principle, the first dhyāna's peaceful mark requires no separate catalogue of its own — it is simply and exactly the absence of everything just described. This economy is itself instructive: genuine peace, in this analysis, is not some additional quality layered on top of ordinary experience, but precisely what remains once desire's coarseness has been thoroughly seen through and let go. With both the desire realm's coarse mark and the first dhyāna's peaceful mark now fully recognized, learning the object's mark — the first of the seven mental engagements — is complete, and the treatise moves next to the second engagement, confident understanding.

Master Cháng Bǎi treats "moving beyond hearing and reflection" as a genuinely significant marker: at the first mental engagement, a practitioner still needs to actively recall teaching or consult a text to bring the coarse/peaceful comparison to mind; by the second, it arises directly through cultivation-born wisdom, immediately present the moment one sits, without any intervening step of remembering what was taught. He illustrates the resulting fluency with two anecdotes — two monks discussing wading through water, where the junior corrects the senior's phrasing from "not wetting the feet" to "the feet stay unwet," a subtle shift from active effort toward mind not chasing outward at all; and Guǎngqīn's rebuke to a disciple begrudging fruit given to monkeys ("isn't giving it to you the real waste?") — neither citing scripture directly, yet both perfectly in accord with its deepest point, precisely the fluency confident understanding is meant to produce: no longer parroting the teaching, but embodying its intent so thoroughly that speech naturally aligns with it unprompted.

Master Cháng Bǎi tells the classic story of an old monk warning his young disciple, sent down the mountain for supplies, to avoid a dangerous "tiger" — a woman with long hair and a skirt. A week later, asked what he liked best in the village, the boy answered without hesitation: the tiger. Cháng Bǎi reads examination as institutionalizing exactly this honest self-report: rather than assuming middling-grade affliction is now fully gone simply because gathering joy felt genuinely peaceful, the practitioner deliberately reconstructs a tempting image and watches, with real honesty, whether an inclination to approach it still arises — as it very often does, since only the underlying tendency's coarser and middling layers have actually been severed so far, not its deepest root. This stage exists precisely to prevent the false confidence of believing oneself further along the path than one genuinely is.

Master Cháng Bǎi identifies the culmination of effort as severing the desire realm's lowest three grades of affliction — the subtlest and most stubborn remainder — through redoubled, meticulous practice that checks and rechecks what was already thought severed. He is careful to underscore the treatise's own explicit caveat: even this complete suppression of every desire-realm affliction is temporary, a matter of the underlying seeds being pressed down rather than destroyed, since only the supramundane path can accomplish genuine, permanent eradication. The culmination's fruit follows immediately and without any gap: the very next moment delivers actual entry into the first dhyāna's root absorption — the culmination of effort forming the final uninterrupted path, and its fruit the moment of liberation itself, exactly the two-part structure (uninterrupted path, then liberated path) that will recur identically when the same seven engagements are applied to the four noble truths in fascicle 34. With this, the complete seven-stage climb from near-attainment concentration to the first dhyāna proper — learning the mark, confident understanding, seclusion, gathering joy, examination, the culmination of effort, and its fruit — stands fully demonstrated as the treatise's worked example for the entire mundane path.

Master Cháng Bǎi identifies the first dhyāna's five defining factors — applied thought (coarse investigation comparing desire's coarseness to the first dhyāna's peace), sustained thought (the same comparison examined more finely), joy (a sixth-consciousness-linked delight — mental gladness, courage, ease, and pliancy all at once), happiness (an ālaya-consciousness-linked bodily ease pervading the whole physical body), and one-pointedness of mind (concentration's own defining stillness) — noting joy belongs to the mind and happiness to the body, together constituting the "joy and happiness born of seclusion" that gives the first dhyāna its name, intensifying in three stages from faint (at seclusion and gathering joy) through expanding (at the culmination of effort) to fully pervading the entire body without gap (at the culmination's fruit, actual entry into the first dhyāna). He then distills each engagement's single function into one clean verb: learning the mark forms the wish; confident understanding actually begins the work; seclusion, gathering joy, and the culmination of effort progressively abandon the upper, middle, and lower grades of affliction in turn; examination guards specifically against false pride at partial progress; and the fruit of culmination simply receives, complete, what the preceding six engagements together produced — a structure the treatise notes maps onto a broader forty-engagement scheme from the "Stage of Concentrative Equipoise," with learning-the-mark and confident-understanding together called "accordant engagement," seclusion/gathering-joy/culmination-of-effort together called "counteracting engagement," gathering joy doubling also as "purity-according engagement" (via the six recollections), and examination alone called "investigation-according engagement." With the entire seven-stage structure now fully defined, functionally distinguished, and mapped onto this wider scheme, the treatise's worked example of leaving the desire realm for the first dhyāna stands complete in every respect.

Master Cháng Bǎi traces a single thread of dissolution running through all four formless spheres, each one simply discarding what the last still quietly relied on: infinite space still needs a perceiving mind to hold "boundless space" as its object, so infinite consciousness turns that same perceiving faculty on itself, no longer minding an external void but minding its own boundless capacity to mind; nothingness then notices that even this self-referential object cannot be found under scrutiny, and rests in that very absence as its "object" (an assumed, constructed absence, he stresses — not emptiness in the Prajñāpāramitā sense, still a conditioned state within saṃsāra); and neither-perception-nor-non-perception finally recognizes even "nothingness" as one perception too many, yet cannot simply have no perception at all — that would already be either the un-Buddhist attainment of no-perception or the arhat's cessation, both deliberate stoppages this natural ascent has not chosen — so it settles into the barest, most attenuated flicker of a "micro-mind" (微微心) that the entire three realms of existence can offer, all discursive naming-and-comparing (的意言分別) finally worn away. He notes one structural difference from the four dhyānas: in the formless realm one no longer investigates the six aspects (meaning/substance/characteristics/category/time/principle) at all, simply resting the mind through calm-abiding alone on each successive object — and one further mark distinguishing the two domains bodily: entering any of the four dhyānas still feels, subjectively, like occupying a vast empty room, whereas entering any formless absorption feels like dissolving directly into open space itself, with no felt boundary of a body remaining at all.

Master Cháng Bǎi opens by naming five distinct sources from which powers resembling superknowledge can arise, so the reader can tell them apart: powers simply born with a person from past-life results (small and unstable); powers lent by spirits possessing the practitioner, which vanish the instant the spirit loses interest — he tells of a well-known fortune-teller who traded twenty years of uncannily accurate readings, granted by a spirit, for his eyesight, and lost both his accuracy and his sight the very day the bargain's term ran out; powers from certain drugs, illustrated by Nāgārjuna and a companion once eating an invisibility potion brewed from seventy-two herbs, using it to slip into a palace and molest the women there, his companion caught and killed while he alone escaped and was moved by the episode to real remorse and renunciation; powers from reciting mantras, which can produce genuine but limited responsiveness; and finally powers from genuine concentration itself — the only one of the five that is stable, expansive, and trustworthy, since it is rooted in dhyāna's own freedom from desire rather than in an external, fickle, or accidental source. He notes that superknowledge as such is common to the whole world, available to any sufficiently accomplished practitioner of any path; what distinguishes the Buddhist path is not the powers themselves but wisdom joined to them — turning bare superknowledge into the "five clarities," able not just to perceive phenomena but genuinely to understand the causal relationships underlying what is perceived. Twelve specific perceptions must be cultivated to bring these five superknowledges to fruition — lightness, softness, the perception of space, the harmonizing of body and mind, confident understanding, sequential recollection of past experience, the perception of massed and varied sounds, the perception of light and appearance, the perception of affliction's bodily transformations, and the perceptions of liberation, of the eight bases of mastery, and of the ten bases of totality — the last three shared across all five superknowledges, the first nine each belonging specifically to one.

Master Cháng Bǎi shows how each of the five perceptions builds functionally on the last: lightness alone lets a practitioner imagine floating; softness nurtures that lightness until floating becomes reliable rather than occasional; space then lets an already-light, already-soft body pass straight through what looks like solid matter — walls, gates, locked doors mean nothing once the obstructing matter itself is confidently understood as empty; body-and-mind-in-accord keeps the whole apparatus obedient under pressure, illustrated by the ambition of becoming a university president or head of state — the mind must actually be equipped for the role it wills the body toward, not merely wish it into being; and confident understanding, the boldest of the five, extends the same transformative power outward onto the elements themselves — near and far, large and small, even earth and water interchanged, as when Mount Sumeru is confidently understood as fitting inside a mustard seed, or a mustard seed as containing Sumeru. He passes along several illustrative stories: a shepherd boy who threw a stone at what looked like a pool of water and struck the meditating Venerable Fǎjìn instead, since the master's water-perception had become so complete it manifested visibly to others; Nāgārjuna's invisibility episode already mentioned as an example of drug-induced (not concentration-induced) power for contrast; the Buddha and his monks, refusing to pay a boatman's fare, simply crossing a river cross-legged through the air instead — the boatman weeping and prostrating in apology at the sight; and a practical accomplishment named directly: eventually one can travel bodily all the way to the first-dhyāna heaven and move freely there, in either of two ways — coming and going at will, or reshaping the visible and audible aspects of that heaven's elements according to one's own wish.

Master Cháng Bǎi traces each feat back to its source: multiplying and merging bodies both come purely from confident understanding (one manifesting outward, the other withdrawing back in) — he tells of a Daoist accusing Great Master Huìsī of rebellion, soldiers sent to arrest him arriving to find several identical Huìsīs and no way to tell which to seize; passing through walls comes from the perception of space, since a wall obstructs only a mind that still confidently understands it as solid — treat the same matter as empty and there is nothing left to pass through; walking on water and moving through earth extend the same principle to the remaining elements. The Buddha's own river crossing is retold here in full: asked to ferry the sangha across, the Buddha found the boatman wanted payment, and rather than pay for what should have been an act of merit, simply led the assembly cross-legged through the air over the water instead — the boatman, watching, wept and prostrated in apology. Touching the sun and moon is cited from the Cliff-Notes' discussion of asuras doing exactly this with their hands, and reaching the Brahmā world is glossed as free coming-and-going between the desire realm and the first dhyāna's heaven, in either of two ways: traveling there and back at will, or reshaping that heaven's own visible and audible elements according to one's wish. He adds one caution running through the whole catalogue: none of this is unique to Buddhism — psychic power of this kind is available on any sufficiently advanced path, and only wisdom joined to it, not the power itself, marks the difference a Buddhist practitioner should actually be cultivating it for.

Master Cháng Bǎi draws the line between noble and ordinary psychic power at durability and use: a noble one who transmutes dirt into gold produces gold that stays gold and spends like gold, while an ordinary practitioner's transmutation is closer to an illusion — visible, perhaps even briefly convincing, but reverting the moment it is tested, unusable in practice. Both grades of power, he notes, ultimately trace to the eight color-totalities (perfected within the ten totality-bases) for transformation and confident-understanding power, and to the space-totality specifically for the power of conjuring something from nothing. He then glosses the further noble qualities the passage adds almost in passing: the concentration of freedom from contention, in which a noble one, before setting out anywhere, first checks in meditation whether that day's path would displease anyone and avoids it if so — compassion functioning as an actual practical constraint on movement, not merely a sentiment; wish-fulfilling wisdom, called on when asked a Dharma question one cannot immediately answer — entering this concentration, forming the aspiration to know, and finding the answer arises; and the four unimpeded understandings (of the teaching's words, of its meaning, of skillful expression, and of eloquent delivery), attained in full only at the ninth bodhisattva ground, which even solve the practical teaching problem of an audience nodding off mid-sermon — a difficulty, he notes dryly, that every teacher below the ninth ground still occasionally faces. All of this, he stresses, ultimately traces back to the identity-consciousness totality-base's own thoroughgoing purification — dhyāna's own root, still doing the work beneath even these most exalted attainments.

Master Cháng Bǎi grounds each of the three registers in a concrete illustration. For bodily stillness: Master Xuánzàng's biography records him receiving officials and ordinary visitors all day without ever shifting posture, and a story of a Shanghai monk hosting a visiting lama who lay down once at night and did not move — blanket, pillow, and all — until dawn, which he ties to the *Avataṃsaka*'s vow-verse "when about to sleep, may all beings' bodies find peace and their minds no agitation" — most people toss and turn precisely because their mindfulness cannot sustain itself unbroken through the night. For the senses: one freed of desire still sees, hears, tastes, and touches normally — the apprehension itself is not suppressed — but the automatic second step, craving arising on the heels of apprehension, simply no longer fires; a face is seen without being sorted into beautiful or plain, a sound heard without being sorted into pleasant or grating. On the matter of fearlessness he adds real nuance rather than simple praise: the *Bodhisattva Stage* names five classical fears (of not surviving, of a bad reputation, of death, of a bad rebirth, of speaking before a crowd) properly overcome only from the stream-enterer or the bodhisattva's stage of joy onward — so a merely mundane-path practitioner, one who has left the desire realm's afflictions temporarily suppressed but not uprooted, should not be assumed to have removed all five outright; Master Cháng Bǎi flags this discrepancy explicitly as something the careful reader should keep turning over, rather than resolving it for them. What genuinely does hold at this stage, drawing on the *Stage of Concentrative Equipoise*'s own simile, is a mind "woven tight as an eight- or nine-stranded cloth" that no mosquito of ordinary agitation can bite through — bright, continuous, evenly spread, able to bear heat and cold, insults and physical pain alike without disturbance. With this the mundane path's account closes.

Content arc recap: fascicle 33 opened by naming the mundane path's complete scope in two summary verses, then spent its first half demonstrating the seven mental engagements exhaustively for a single worked example — leaving the desire realm for the first dhyāna, covering the six-things investigation, the five defining factors, and each engagement's distinct function in turn. From there, the treatise itself signaled that the same climb repeats identically at every remaining stage, governed by one universal principle (each lower stage carries more suffering and a shorter lifespan than the one above it), which let the second half move with real economy through canonical definitions of the second, third, and fourth dhyānas (equanimity only named once joy is fully gone; happiness itself finally abandoned at the fourth), the four formless absorptions as one continuous dissolution of ever-subtler objects, the two mindless attainments sharply distinguished as an ordinary being's mistake versus a noble one's deliberate rest, the five superknowledges built from twelve cultivated perceptions with their vivid classical illustrations (Fǎjìn's water-samādhi, the Buddha's river crossing, Nāgārjuna's invisibility potion), the further noble qualities of freedom from contention and wish-fulfilling wisdom, a complete map of which grade of practice leads to which heaven — down to the non-returner's five pure abodes — and finally a practical, human portrait of what freedom from desire actually looks like from the outside. Fascicle 34 turns to the supramundane path: the same seven mental engagements applied not to climbing the absorptions but to directly contemplating the four noble truths, culminating in arhatship.