The Truths Realized Differ in Depth According to Different Levels of Wisdom

Each dharma carries meanings at different levels, and people of differing wisdom will naturally arrive at understandings at different levels. Followers of the Small Vehicle understand it as the emptiness of scattering, decay, and destruction; Mahāyāna practitioners, besides this, add the emptiness (śūnyatā) of the tathāgatagarbha. Bodhisattvas who have attained the bhūmis, as well as the Buddha, see material form as the operation of the four great seeds—empty and nothing more. Material form is itself an empty mark; this profound principle is absolutely impossible for pre-bhūmi bodhisattvas (pūrvabhūmika bodhisattva) to observe, and they cannot truly understand its actual content. The Buddhas observe material form directly down to its very source. Newly awakened bodhisattvas can only understand material form as that which is generated by the empty-natured eighth consciousness; their power of observation is weak, and their understanding consists largely of inference.

However, impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and non-self mainly refer to the Small Vehicle's dharma of scattering, perishing, and destruction. From the preceding impermanence of material form, one realizes and knows that material form is suffering; then one realizes and knows that material form scatters and decays and does not long endure; finally, one will realize and know that material form is not the unscattering, undecaying subject representing the self that we have believed in since beginningless kalpas.