The Profound Yogācāra Meaning of the Diamond Sutra (21)

What the Buddha taught to subdue are precisely these seven deluded minds. How are they to be subdued? The World-Honored One said: "All sentient beings of every kind—whether egg-born, womb-born, moisture-born, or transformation-born; whether possessing form or without form; whether possessing perception, without perception, or neither possessing perception nor without perception—I cause them all to enter nirvāṇa without remainder and liberate them. Thus I liberate immeasurable, countless, boundless sentient beings, yet in reality no sentient being is liberated." The sentient beings of the three realms are divided into four modes of birth, nine states of existence, and twenty-five categories. Egg-born refers to sentient beings who do not dwell in the mother's womb and are not born from parents; the manas carries the ālayavijñāna directly into the eggshell, and when external conditions such as temperature are complete, the embryo grows and breaks out of the shell, like chickens, ducks, snakes, and birds. Womb-born refers to beings who, in the antarā-bhava, with the manas carrying the ālayavijñāna, enter the mother's womb; when the six faculties have grown and matured, they emerge from the womb.

Womb-born includes all humans, most animals, some ghost-kind, and some asuras. Moisture-born refers to beings of meager merit (alpa-puṇya) who are born under certain conditions of temperature and humidity (such as in damp soil and air by watersides and seashores), such as various insects and bacteria, and some asuras. Transformation-born refers to those who can be born through transformation, such as devas in the various celestial realms, beings of other lands, non-human beings of ghost and spirit kinds, hell beings, some asura kinds and a small portion of animal kinds, as well as bodhisattvas and arhats with superknowledges. Beings possessing form refers to beings of the desire realm and the form realm that have a material body. The material body is also called the aggregate of form (rūpa)—the physical form that begins from entering the womb as a fertilized egg and continues until birth and final death. Because the ālayavijñāna and the first seven consciousnesses dwell in and sustain the material body, the body can perform the various bodily, verbal, and mental actions and karmic activities; this is called the aggregate of form. Otherwise, it would be merely a corpse and an insentient thing, such as plants and minerals.