Bodhisattva in Name, or Bodhisattva in Fact?

Taixu places this chapter inside a larger movement of the sutra he calls "accumulating merit and wisdom," and reads its title quite literally: the nominal bodhisattva and the true-substance bodhisattva are distinguished here entirely by their observable characteristics — what they actually do — which is exactly why the chapter is named for the two of them together rather than for any abstract principle.

He also flags something easy to miss in the question itself: Shansheng explicitly asks only about the nominal bodhisattva, yet the Buddha's reply, taken as a whole, plainly covers both kinds. Taixu takes this as evidence that both were already implied in the question — a single distinction only really makes sense once both of its terms are on the table.

Taixu's gloss on this portrait is unsentimental: this is someone who took the bodhisattva vow and then never actually learned or taught within the Buddhadharma itself, relying on outside doctrine instead — going so far, at the extreme, as to happily adopt other people's harmful opinions as though they were his own. That drift away from the actual teaching, more than any single bad act on the list, is what earns the label "nominal."

He glosses several phrases directly: coarse, wild speech is exactly what it sounds like — crude and unruly; "regret" here means the specific regret of having taken the vow and then wishing one hadn't; "self-contempt" means simply not believing oneself capable of ever reaching unsurpassed bodhi. "Not diligently cultivating the skillful means to break the fetters" he reads very concretely — it means not practicing giving as the antidote to stinginess, and not practicing patience as the antidote to jealousy and anger. This, he notes, is one whole type of nominal bodhisattva: someone who has genuinely given rise to bodhicitta but simply never takes up the bodhisattva's actual practice.

Taixu reads this as a second, distinct type: someone whose original vow was never fully sincere to begin with, so that the moment the sheer scale of the path — measureless kalpas of real effort — actually registers, fear and regret follow naturally. He singles out conscience and shame (慚愧) as the single most important quality in practice, and defines the pair precisely: conscience is reverence for good, looking up to the conduct of buddhas and bodhisattvas and measuring oneself honestly against it; shame is refusal of evil, seeing unwholesome conduct — in others or in oneself — and firmly declining it. Together, he notes, this is close to what is simply called having "a sense of shame."

On "killing sheep to sacrifice to heaven," he draws a pointed contemporary parallel: this is no different from Buddhists in his own day who take refuge in the Three Jewels and receive the precepts, yet continue performing sacrificial rites to local gods and spirits on the side — practice and superstition run in parallel rather than the latter yielding to the former. And on giving, precepts, and meditation practiced only for heavenly rebirth or long life, his point is that the actions themselves are not the problem; it is the motive underneath them that quietly converts a real practice into a merely nominal one.

Taixu reads this whole passage, start to finish, as an exhortation rather than a static description: progress and regress in practice are never fixed. A nominal bodhisattva who genuinely takes up bodhisattva conduct can become a true-substance one; sudden advance followed by sudden retreat, or the reverse, is simply the ordinary condition of unenlightened beings. His practical advice follows directly from this: if honest self-examination shows you are still living inside the nominal portrait, the remedy is not despair but a single act of conscience and shame, turning the practice forward again — which is enough, on its own, to make one a true-substance bodhisattva.

He glosses several terms concretely. "Profound meaning" is simply the deep meaning of the Dharma itself. "Upholding, reciting, copying, explaining, reflecting on meaning" corresponds to the five practices of a Dharma teacher named in the Lotus Sutra, spelled out more fully elsewhere as ten practices toward a scripture: copying it, making offerings to it, giving it to others, listening to it attentively, reading it, upholding it, expounding it, reciting it, contemplating it, and actually practicing it. Not begrudging wife, children, or wealth for the Dharma's sake, he notes, is exactly the disposition that can carry a practitioner toward the home-leaving, monastic path. The "sword of wisdom" he identifies with the three classical forms of wisdom — from hearing the teaching, from reflecting on it, and from actually cultivating it — each capable of cutting through the conditions that feed affliction. And on "not letting affliction gain the upper hand": he defines mastery here as simply the capacity of one thing to move or control another — if affliction can move a wholesome state of mind, affliction has gained mastery over it; holding affliction in deliberate contempt is exactly how a practitioner denies it that mastery in the first place.

Taixu treats "faith" here as specifically faith in the Three Jewels, and "not clinging to body or life" as simply the direct consequence of genuinely knowing that body and life are impermanent — not a special feat of asceticism. He notes that the four means of gathering beings were already explained earlier in the sutra, and glosses "conventional truth" precisely: it is the willingness to treat worldly affairs as real and meaningful on their own terms, which is exactly why this bodhisattva speaks to people in the language they themselves actually use rather than insisting on his own.

On proportionate giving — equal giving when means are ample, the poor prioritized when means are scarce — he adds a note on "skills that a bodhisattva wishes others to learn": this points to the classical five sciences a bodhisattva is meant to pursue — inner wisdom (the Dharma itself), linguistics, logic, medicine, and the practical crafts — with ordinary "skills and arts" corresponding to the latter four. He reads the entire passage, taken as a whole, as a direct exhortation: it is written specifically to encourage the reader to move from the nominal condition toward the real practice it describes.

Taixu notes, almost in passing, that a closing line of exactly this kind — a short word of encouragement — appears at the end of every chapter in this part of the sutra, and reads that recurring pattern itself as a sign of just how deep and earnest the Buddha's compassion actually is: never content to end a hard teaching without also leaving behind a reason to keep going.

Read against the sutra's own audience, the line carries real weight. This entire scripture was taught for Shansheng, a layman, not for a monastic assembly — so this closing acknowledgment that the householder's path to true-substance practice is the harder one is not a throwaway remark. It is the Buddha naming, directly and without minimizing it, the actual difficulty of the very audience in front of him.