大乘法界無差別論疏 1.4

1.4

First, as for the reasons for the arising of the teaching, there is first the general and then the specific. As for the general, it is as stated in the sixty-fourth fascicle of the Yogācārabhūmi: "One who wishes to compose a treatise must possess six causes: 1. Desiring to cause the meanings of the Dharma to be widely disseminated; 2. Desiring to cause sentient beings of various faiths and understandings, through this condition, to enter the true Dharma in accordance with any one [of them]; 3. In order to cause the various gates of meaning that have fallen into oblivion to be reopened and revealed; 4. Desiring to show a brief summary that gathers extensive and dispersed meanings; 5. Desiring to reveal profound meanings; 6. Desiring to adorn the meanings of the Dharma with various beautiful words to generate pure faith." Now, specifically distinguishing this treatise, there are briefly ten causes: 1. To assist the Buddha in propagating transformation, to brighten the Buddha-sun, to cause the Dharma to abide long, and to repay the Buddha's kindness; 2. For those of dull faculties in the final age who cannot awaken to the Buddha's profound sūtras, providing expedient explanations to cause them to understand the Dharma; 3. For the heterodox who mock and slander the Buddha-Dharma, guiding them to give rise to pure faith; 4. For the various Hīnayāna sects that do not believe in the Great [Vehicle], skillfully revealing the Mahāyāna to cause them to accept it with faith; 5. For those within the Mahāyāna who cling to the expedient teachings, explaining the profound purport to cause them to renounce the expedient and return to this ultimate; 6. Briefly gathering the vast, profound, and abstruse meanings of the Tathāgata to make them easy to enter; 7. To reveal that the true, great bodhicitta is the fundamental, essential, and wondrous basis of the Buddha, causing sentient beings to generate practice and seek it; 8. Explaining the dharma of the tathāgatagarbha within the minds of sentient beings in the sūtras, causing them to have definitive faith that this exists; 9. To explain that in the sūtras there is never the dviyāna and there is only the ekayāna as the ultimate; 10. To reveal that the Buddha-fruit's dharmakāya and the tathāgatagarbha dharma of sentient beings are of one nature without duality, cause and effect being equal and of solely one taste.