How to Break Through the Final Barrier?

The final barrier (laoguan), as the name suggests, is still the gate of the prison. What is the prison? The three realms are the prison, and the world of the five aggregates is the prison. Where is the gate for exiting the prison? It lies in eliminating the view of self and eliminating the grasping of self, and moreover in not clinging even to the tathāgatagarbha as a self; the mind must be empty and pure. This can only be discussed on the basis of having realized the tathāgatagarbha, and therefore it is said to be the third barrier of the Chan school. If one can accomplish this, one can pass through the gate of the prison of birth-and-death, becoming liberated from the three realms and freed from the bondage of the body of the five aggregates. In terms of the Small Vehicle, one would at the very least possess the liberating merit of the third fruit: the mind is liberated, having eliminated the afflictions of craving and aversion; at the end of life, having eliminated the grasping of self and eliminated fundamental ignorance, one has the ability to attain nirvāṇa without remainder. As for meditative concentration, the requirement is merely the attainment of the first dhyāna; a higher level of concentration is not necessary—though of course, the higher the concentration, the better. But it is not, as some people claim, necessary to cultivate the body of the five aggregates to be like a block of wood, or to be able to extinguish it, and so on; that is something only bodhisattvas of several bhūmis, or even the eighth-bhūmi bodhisattva, can cultivate to. Those at or around the third barrier of the Chan school belong to the stages of the ten practices and the ten dedications, still very far from the eighth-bhūmi bodhisattva.