The Practice Itself

Zongmi treats this question as a direct response to a gap the previous chapter left open: Samantabhadra's answer closed with "knowing illusion is already leaving it, with no further method needed" — which some listeners, he says, might take to mean nothing further needs doing at all. Universal Eye asks for the actual practice precisely so the teaching will not be mistaken for an excuse not to practice. The chapter that follows he divides into three movements matched to the bodhisattva's name itself, which he glosses as holding both wisdom and compassion at once: "seeing all dharmas as purely clean is the great wisdom of the universal eye; seeing all sentient beings as already buddhas is the great compassion of the universal eye." Universal Eye's own name is thus a preview of where the chapter is going to end up.

Zongmi reads "rely first on śamatha" as a deliberate ordering: precepts kept by an already-agitated mind, he says, are not yet fit ground for this contemplation, so stillness is placed first even though the text lists precepts right alongside it — practice and sequence, he adds, need not match exactly. On the "community of fellow practitioners" sitting oddly next to "a still room," he offers two readings: different temperaments need different settings (a dull, sinking mind benefits from a group's energy; a scattered, restless one needs solitude to settle), and, more fully, that calm and insight need each other — a practitioner may live among peers for the sake of discussing the Dharma and still keep a private hour, morning, midday, and night, to sit in silence, so the two settings are not actually in tension.

On the four-elements reflection itself, Zongmi calls this the first of a two-part sequence — first a probing, investigative contemplation (尋伺觀) that questions where the self could possibly be located among earth, water, fire, and wind, given that these four are mutually exclusive (earth is obstructive and sinks, wind is unobstructed and rises; water and fire likewise contradict each other) so no single self could coherently belong to all four; only after this questioning does the "as-it-really-is" contemplation (如實觀) that follows conclude outright that the body has no fixed substance at all. He is explicit that "each element going its own way" does not mean the moment of physical death — the four elements are already, right now, distinguishable component by component; recognizing this at any moment already counts as their having "each gone their own way."

Having emptied the body, Zongmi notes, the sūtra turns to the mind by the same two-stage method: a probing contemplation, then an as-it-really-is conclusion. The mind has no fixed mark of its own — it depends on an object to arise at all, and the object's own nature is empty, arising only because the mind projects it. Root and object turn out to be mutually dependent, so pressed for a location, neither one can be found. He glosses "conditioning energy" (緣氣) carefully: this false, conditioned mind, though arising in dependence on causes and conditions, is not simply cut off from the true mind — it retains some trace, some "flavor," of it, the way a scent lingers faintly in a robe that once held incense, which is why the text uses the word "energy" (氣) rather than describing the false mind as wholly other than the true one. Once the six dusts are seen to scatter — because the four elements they depend on have already been shown to have no fixed substance — the conditioning mind that depended on those dusts has, at that point, nothing left to condition it either.

Zongmi marks a shift in register here: the previous two sections emptied self out of body and mind individually — what he calls emptying the person (我空) — while this passage empties the body, mind, and every dust-object together as one, which he calls emptying the dharmas themselves (法空). He is careful to head off a misreading: none of this is newly caused to vanish just now. "Form is emptiness — not that form is destroyed to make emptiness," he writes, quoting the Heart Sūtra directly; the body and mind were never anything other than empty. What ends is only the mistaken clinging that took them to be otherwise — hence "dissolve" is the word used, not "destroy."

On the mirror simile, Zongmi's gloss deliberately corrects its own most natural first reading: "though it says 'polishing the mirror,' what is actually being polished is the grime." Cultivating the path, he says, is nothing more than clearing away what was false — the mirror's own brightness was never absent, only covered over; polishing does not add light, it removes what hid it. He maps the simile onto the two contemplations directly: attachment to person and to dharmas is the grime, the probing-then-as-it-really-is contemplations are the polishing, the mind's own original, unbuilt brightness is the light, and the emptying of both person and dharmas is what that appearing looks like from the outside.

Zongmi reads the mani-jewel simile as doing two jobs at once: it confirms everything the sūtra has argued so far (a fool who mistakes the jewel's reflected colors for the jewel's own nature is exactly like a being who mistakes illusory body-and-mind for something real, the five colors mapping onto the five destinies of rebirth), and it also opens what comes next, since — unlike the earlier mirror, which is bright only once wiped clean and needs polishing to show it — the mani jewel is bright and pure to begin with, ten-directionally radiant without any polishing at all. The mirror suits emptying by contrast; the jewel suits what follows once nothing is left to contrast against.

On "once the dust is gone and the contrast with it is removed, there is no one left to be called a bodhisattva" — Zongmi notes this quietly dismantles the very vocabulary the sūtra has just spent three sections building: sentient being and bodhisattva were both provisional labels, applied only for as long as there was dust to be contrasted against and a leaving-behind to be named. Once genuinely nothing is left to leave behind, calling someone a "bodhisattva who has left illusion behind" makes no more sense than continuing to call clean water "unmuddied" once no one remembers it was ever muddy to begin with.

Zongmi reads these three passages as one continuous unit built directly on the framework of his own teacher's teacher, Dushun (杜順), founder of the Huayan school's Discernment of the Dharmadhatu (華嚴法界觀門) — the same three-tiered vision already at work across this site's Treatise on the Sūtra of the Ten Grounds collection. First comes the contemplation of true emptiness (真空觀): the long chain running from the mind's own purity out through the six faculties, six sense-objects, four elements, and every category of worldly and transcendent dharma up to the eighty-four thousand dhāraṇī-gates, each said to be "pure" because each, seen clearly, dissolves without remainder into awakening itself — followed by the shorter chain confirming the same list is likewise "unmoving," since awakening never moves. Second comes the unimpeded interpenetration of principle and phenomena (理事無礙觀): rather than dissolving each phenomenon into principle, this stage shows that each phenomenon, precisely because it is not separate from that principle, is itself as boundless and pervasive as the principle it embodies — hence the faculties and sense-objects are said to fill the whole dharma-realm, not merely to vanish into it. Third comes the unimpeded interpenetration of phenomenon and phenomenon (事事無礙觀), illustrated by a hundred lamps lit in a single room: each lamp's light fills the entire room, yet no lamp's light displaces or is confused with any other's — every phenomenon, on this view, both pervades and is contained within every other, without contradiction.

Zongmi treats these three as strictly cumulative, not interchangeable options: true emptiness alone can collapse into a bare negation that dissolves the world without accounting for how phenomena still function; adding unimpeded principle-and-phenomena shows how what is empty can still act, without collapsing into confusion; and only the third stage, unimpeded phenomenon-and-phenomenon, delivers what he calls the sūtra's own promise — that purity is not achieved by escaping the world of things, but is already, right now, how each thing already stands in relation to every other. This same threefold vision, worked out at far greater length, is what this site's Avataṃsaka-related pages — the Ten Grounds treatise among them — return to again and again as the Huayan school's central contribution to Chinese Buddhist thought.

Zongmi reads this closing movement as the chapter's payoff: "becoming identical to the Buddha's own state" (頓同佛境), arrived at through matching mental attitude, matching vision, and matching accord with reality itself. On the eightfold list of things a bodhisattva no longer favors or resists — bound versus released, weary of birth-and-death versus cherishing nirvāṇa, and so on — he notes these are four pairs, not eight separate points, and that the underlying principle is stated plainly in the text's own reasoning: "because everything, without exception, is awakening" — quoting the Awakening of Faith's definition of awakening itself as "the mind's substance being free of thought." A bodhisattva at this stage has, in Zongmi's phrase, simply stopped generating the eight biased attitudes named here, the way light has no bias for or against what it illuminates.

On "sentient beings have, from the very beginning, already been buddhas" — the single most quoted line in this sūtra — Zongmi is careful about how literally to take it: this is not a claim that ordinary confused beings, unaltered, count as buddhas in the sense a Buddhist would ordinarily mean by the word; it is a claim about what is disclosed once "cultivation" and "completion" are themselves seen through, the way the previous paragraph has just shown neither survives close examination. He cross-references six competing accounts of exactly when a being becomes a buddha, current in the schools of his own day — from the once-only awakening of Śākyamuni in early Buddhist doctrine, through the "three uncountable eons" of the gradual path, to Huayan's own teaching that the very first arousal of bodhicitta already counts as full awakening — and places this sūtra's claim in the sixth and final position, the one belonging distinctively to the perfect teaching: not that beings gradually become buddhas, and not even that awakening happens in a single instant, but that being a buddha was never, at any point, something still to be arrived at.

Zongmi notes that this chapter's verse compresses an unusually long prose passage into just three short stanzas — the two-emptiness contemplation of body and mind rendered in full, but the entire threefold dharmadhatu of true emptiness, unimpeded principle-and-phenomena, and unimpeded phenomenon-and-phenomenon reduced to the single line "unmoving, pervading the whole dharma-realm." He treats this as the clearest example in the sūtra of the verse working at a wholly different altitude than its prose counterpart — a reader who has just worked through the mani jewel, the sevenfold purity chain, and the hundred lamps in one room is being handed, in the verse, only the barest outline to hold the whole architecture together in memory.