金剛般若經旨贊 2.219

2.219

Sūtra: "Subhūti... would they be many?" Commentary: Next below is the second [practice], the purification of the sovereign practicing and abiding that breaks down the name-and-form body, severing the twenty-seventh doubt concerning the oneness or difference of the true and the transformation. The preceding text clarified that relying on the true, one responds in accordance with resonance, manifesting deportment free from the mark of coming and going, but did not broadly reveal the sovereign mastery of the skillful means of supernormal transformative functions. If the various sublime wisdom practices lacked this, they could not generate the various pure deportments either. Yet bodhisattvas have not left behind their clinging minds, and cannot emulate the Buddha in arousing wisdom practices; conversely, they doubt whether all the supernormal powers of the transformation body are one with or different from the true realm of phenomena. If they were different, since the true is unmoving, wisdom arisen apart from the true would be false; like external kinds of wisdom, it should not be aroused. If they were one, this would just be tathatā; apart from the true, there should not be any other active function—how could I be made to forcefully arouse it? Because of clinging, although they cultivate, they cannot arouse it; because of doubt, they do not cultivate the cause of arousing it. Now, wishing to sever their minds of doubt and clinging and cause them to arouse signless wisdom relying on the true, [the Buddha] speaks the simile of grinding the world into atoms, adducing the meaning of the world and atoms being neither one nor different to reveal that the transformation and the true are also neither one nor different. Asaṅga, in terms of eliminating clinging to be able to arouse it, calls it the purification of the sovereign practicing and abiding that breaks down the name-and-form body; Vasubandhu, with respect to severing doubt to cultivate a single cause, calls it severing the doubt concerning the oneness or difference of the true and the transformation. The text is divided into six: first, the skillful means of having nothing seen; second, non-conceptualization as it is; third, the mind which does not conceptualize; fourth, regarding which dharmas one does not conceptualize; fifth, through which skillful means one does not conceptualize; sixth, how one does not conceptualize. Within the first, there are two: first, the Tathāgata, using the simile of atoms, instructs him to analyze and contemplate the marks of the aggregates; second, Subhūti, using the simile of the world, reveals and causes him to know that the marks of the aggregates are empty. Within the first, there are again six: first, questioning; second, answering; third, inquiring; fourth, explaining; fifth, objecting; sixth, resolving. This is the first. Now, the word "world" commonly illustrates two meanings: first, it illustrates the Dharmakāya as the total essence of tathatā; second, it illustrates the general mark of the clung-to aggregates. The collection of atoms also illustrates two meanings: first, it illustrates the countless transformation bodies that are aroused; second, it illustrates the analyzed composite mark of the aggregates. Because one clings to the mark of the aggregates without analyzing it, one cannot accord with the true and arouse the cause of transformation. Using the world to illustrate the marks of the aggregates, [the Buddha] causes him to contemplate it broken into pieces like a collection of atoms; because the grasping at dharmas and afflictions are entirely severed, one can then realize the true, and relying on the true, arouse transformations. The true and the transformation are neither one nor different, just as breaking a world produces many atoms, and the total world and the atoms are neither one nor different. To reveal these two meanings, he therefore asks Subhūti: "If the three-thousandfold world were broken into atoms, would that collection of atoms be many?" The treatise says: