The Diligence Behind Every Perfection

Taixu reads the question as tightly focused on that one word, "cause" (正因), rather than as an invitation to survey the six perfections in general. Shansheng already knows a bodhisattva must give, keep precepts, be patient, meditate, and gain wisdom — what he wants to know is what actually produces this whole cluster of practice in the first place. The entire chapter that follows is aimed at answering that one narrow question, not at re-describing the six perfections themselves.

Taixu identifies this passage explicitly as the Four Right Efforts (四正勤) from the thirty-seven factors of enlightenment: ending what is already unwholesome, preventing what is not yet unwholesome from arising, producing what is not yet wholesome, and strengthening what is already wholesome. By naming this venerable fourfold formula as the "true cause" of all six perfections, the sutra ties giving, moral discipline, patience, meditation, and wisdom back to a single, most basic exertion — none of the other five perfections can even begin without this effort already underway.

Taixu pauses specifically on the phrase "never becoming satisfied with the wholesome dharmas already attained," because it seems to cut against ordinary spiritual advice about contentment. He resolves the apparent contradiction by separating two different objects of "enough": toward the five worldly desires — wealth, sex, fame, food, and sleep — a practitioner should indeed know when enough is enough. But toward wholesome dharmas themselves, one should never feel that enough has already been gathered. This passage is speaking specifically about the cultivation of good, he notes, which is exactly why it insists on the opposite of restraint here — dissatisfaction, in this one domain, is itself a virtue.

This entire passage still falls under what Taixu's own outline labels "distinguishing right from deviant" — the sutra defines right diligence here not by abstract argument but by simply listing where it is actually spent: guarding one's own body as an instrument of the Dharma even while holding it lightly; wearing away at the scriptures for one's own sake; turning that same effort outward to bring other beings to submission; and finally directing the whole of giving, discipline, learning, and meditation toward bodhi itself. Diligence, on this reading, is never a single undifferentiated effort — it is defined by what it is aimed at, and a bodhisattva's diligence is distinguished from every lesser form of effort precisely by having bodhi, and the welfare of others, as its object.

The closing line on laziness functions as the passage's proof by contrast: strip diligence away, and every other perfection collapses with it — a lazy person cannot even complete an act of giving all at once, let alone sustain discipline, patience, or concentration. This is the sutra's own demonstration of why it named diligence, and not any of the other five, as the true underlying cause.

Taixu treats this fourfold grid as making a single point: diligence should be cultivated so thoroughly that it pervades the perfection of vīrya specifically, not scattered into forms of effort that never actually reach the far shore. Deviant diligence, diligence spent on merely ordinary good deeds, and the diligence of śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas are all real exertion, yet none of them counts as a perfection, because a perfection requires the bodhisattva's own aspiration behind it. Wisdom, conversely, is a perfection without needing to be characterized as diligence at all. Five of the six perfections are, in a bodhisattva, simultaneously both diligence and perfection — and the very same practices, carried out by an unawakened ordinary being or a follower of the lesser vehicles without the bodhi mind behind them, remain neither one. The line separating these categories, in every case, is not the activity itself but what is behind it.

Taixu's gloss here is brief and deliberately unromantic: a householder's diligence is objectively harder to sustain than a monastic's, and the text says so without softening it. The cause it names — being bound about by many evil causes and conditions — points to the ordinary entanglements of family, livelihood, and social obligation that a monastic has already stepped outside of. Taixu offers no easy reassurance at this closing line, only an honest acknowledgment of the greater difficulty facing anyone who takes up the bodhisattva path while still living at home — which is, after all, the audience this entire sutra was spoken to in the first place.