Curing Illusion With Illusion

Zongmi reads Samantabhadra's question as two distinct traps, not one. The first — "how can illusion cure illusion?" — follows directly from Mañjuśrī's chapter, where knowing body and mind are like a sky-flower already counted as the whole of practice; if so, what is there left to do? The second — "if all illusion is finally extinguished, there is no mind left; who practices?" — he traces to a different worry, that the sūtra's own logic of dissolving every trace, carried to its conclusion, seems to leave no one standing to do the dissolving. He glosses the "illusion" language itself with a stock five-part analysis he says applies to every illusion-simile the sūtra will use from here on: on the simile side, a silk cloth, a magician's skill, the conjured horse, the horse's being-then-not-being, and a fool who takes it for real; on the doctrinal side these correspond to true nature, the discriminating mind, dependent arising, the emptiness of self and dharmas, and the deluded clinging to self and dharmas as real. A third worry Zongmi draws out from the question's own momentum — if not practicing just leaves beings endlessly circling in illusion, is refusing to practice also wrong? — sets up the fourfold answer that follows: not a contradiction to resolve piece by piece, but a single teaching that dissolves all three worries by showing that neither acting nor not-acting was ever quite the right frame.

Zongmi treats "all illusion arises from the wondrous mind of Perfect Enlightenment" as this section's foundation and expects a natural objection to follow immediately: if truth genuinely gives rise to falsehood, is truth not itself the source of falsehood — contradicting the earlier teaching that ignorance has no real basis at all? His answer turns on how "arise" is meant: falsehood relies on truth in order to appear, so truth is spoken of as its source, but this is exactly like a second moon appearing when one presses a finger against the eye — the second moon depends on the real moon to appear, yet the real moon itself never at any point becomes two. Present delusion sees falsehood; truth itself was never false. "The sūtra says it is illusion that arises from the awakened mind," he writes, "not that the awakened mind gives rise to illusion" — a distinction on which the whole answer rests.

On the threefold dismissal that closes this passage — awakening spoken of in dependence on illusion is itself illusion; saying awakening exists is not yet free of illusion; saying it does not exist is exactly the same — Zongmi reads each clause as retracting the position just offered, exactly as in Mañjuśrī's earlier fourfold release. A practitioner who has just been told illusion dissolves back into an unmoved awakened mind might now reach for "awakening" as something solid to hold on to; the text immediately withdraws it, then withdraws the withdrawal, so that no resting place, positive or negative, is left standing. Only then does it say the ending of illusion is "unmoved" — not because a thing called awakening was left untouched somewhere off to the side, but because there was never, at any point, anything there to move.

Zongmi reads the fourfold "leaving behind" as answering, point by point, the very worry Samantabhadra raised about an infinite regress: first one leaves behind illusory objects; then the mind that does the leaving, itself still illusion-like, is also left behind; then this act of leaving-behind, which is itself a kind of illusion, is left behind in turn; then even the leaving-behind of that leaving-behind is left behind. He offers a second, equally valid way of counting the same four steps — leave the delusion, leave the awakening, discard the leaving, discard the discarding — and notes that the process is not truly infinite, because it terminates: "when there is nothing further left to leave behind, all illusions are thereby removed." He glosses this with the Heze line: "delusion arising is itself awareness; when delusion ceases, awareness ceases too; when both delusion and awareness have ceased together, this is true suchness."

On the fire-drill, Zongmi maps its four elements onto the four stages: the two pieces of wood are the illusory delusion being cultivated and the illusion-like wisdom doing the cultivating; the smoke is the leaving-behind; the ash is the final relinquishing. He also catches what he takes to be a translation error — the source text says "the ashes fly, the smoke disperses" (灰飛煙滅), but by the natural order of a fire actually burning out, the smoke ought to disperse first and only then would ash be left to scatter; he judges this an artifact of the translators reversing the phrase, not a point of doctrine. On the closing claim — knowing illusion already is leaving it, with no further method needed — he supplies the sūtra's own later image for why: it is like a person who dreams he is wounded and, within the dream, seeks a doctor and medicine for it; on waking and realizing it was only a dream, what further remedy could there possibly be left to seek?

Zongmi notes that the verse compresses the prose's threefold dismissal of awakening — spoken in dependence on illusion, said to exist, said not to exist — into a single line, and drops the fire-drill's fuller unpacking (the leaving-behind of the leaving-behind, the smoke and the ash) down to its bare two-line image. He treats this as typical of how these closing verses relate to their prose counterparts throughout the sūtra: restating the chapter's structure at a much higher altitude, for readers who have already worked through the argument once and now want it held in a single, memorable shape.