Why Goodness Becomes the Final Attachment | Dialogues IV

Literally “ground” or “level”. In this episode it refers to the ten stages of the bodhisattva path described in Mahāyāna sources such as the Daśabhūmika Sūtra. The map is developed differently across traditions and should not be treated as a clinical or empirical scale.

“Immovable”, the eighth bodhisattva ground. Textual and commentarial traditions associate it with irreversibility, effortless activity and a profound stabilisation of insight. The precise account of what has been abandoned or realised varies by doctrinal system.

Often translated as acceptance, patient endurance or acquiescence regarding the non-arising of phenomena. It names a non-frightened receptivity to the emptiness of phenomena, not a claim that appearances simply cease or that conventional causality is abolished. “Confidence of equality” is the episode’s interpretive rendering rather than the only standard translation.

Śūnyatā, emptiness, means that phenomena lack independent, intrinsic nature. In Madhyamaka, this is inseparable from dependent arising: things function conventionally because they arise through conditions. Non-arising concerns the absence of self-established origination under ultimate analysis, not the denial of ordinary experience.

Mahāyāna sources and commentaries distinguish compassion focused on sentient beings, compassion focused on phenomena or dharmas, and objectless or non-referential compassion. The sequence describes increasingly non-reifying ways of responding; it need not imply coldness towards particular people.

Non-referential or “objectless” compassion: care not founded on grasping a helper, recipient or act of helping as independently real. “Objectless” does not mean indifferent or inactive; the episode uses the magician analogy to emphasise clear, responsive engagement.

Effortlessness or action without deliberate exertion. In the later-bhūmi context, it describes awakened activity that no longer has to be constructed through self-conscious striving. It is presented as the fruit of extensive cultivation, not a shortcut around discipline.

Skilful means: forms of teaching or action adapted compassionately to circumstances and capacities. It is not a general licence to ignore ethics; claims of skilful means remain especially vulnerable to self-deception when used to excuse avoidable harm.

A Buddhist image for teachings used to cross rather than to possess. The early raft simile appears in the Alagaddūpama Sutta; the Diamond Sutra invokes the same logic while warning against grasping either dharmas or non-dharmas. Releasing the raft is not rejecting practice before it has served its purpose.

Usually translated as “Good Intelligence” or “Good Mind”. It is associated with four analytical knowledges concerning teachings, meanings, language and eloquence, enabling skilful communication to varied audiences.

“Cloud of Dharma”, the tenth bodhisattva ground. The cloud suggests a vast capacity to receive and rain down teaching. Classical descriptions are richer than a single metaphor and differ from the episode’s simplified psychological narrative.

A common Mahāyāna distinction between afflictive obscurations, associated with grasping and reactive emotions, and cognitive obscurations, which impede complete knowledge. Traditions disagree about precisely when and how these are removed across the paths and bhūmis.

A traditional quality of buddhahood. Buddhist philosophers and schools differ over its scope and mode. The episode stresses unobstructed knowledge of phenomena and their empty nature rather than an encyclopaedia of miscellaneous facts; that explanation remains doctrinal, not empirically testable.

The “Dharma body” or truth dimension of buddhahood. Depending on the Mahāyāna system, it can refer to the emptiness of awakened mind, its unobstructed knowing, or both. The episode’s image of its gradual emergence between the eighth and tenth bhūmis is an interpretive synthesis, not a universally shared formulation.