The Four Gāthās of the Diamond Sūtra as a Soteriological Trajectory

This paper analyzes the four gāthās of the Diamond Sūtra as a continuous soteriological trajectory rather than as isolated poetic summaries or paradoxical doctrinal statements. Prevailing interpretations often read these verses as ethical exhortations, linguistic negations, or illustrative metaphors concerning emptiness. Such readings, however, tend to fragment the internal logic of the text and obscure how the gāthās function within practice. Departing from proposition-centered interpretation, this study approaches the gāthās as structurally ordered practice devices operating under conditions of oral transmission and recitative repetition. It argues that the four gāthās collectively implement a sequential structure of goal articulation, method regulation, verification, and corrective reorientation. "應無所住而生其心" establishes non-abiding as a governing method rule; "若以色見我 以音聲求我…" blocks sensory verification and identity fixation; the metaphor cluster "如夢幻泡影…" operates as a reiterable corrective against the substantialization of marks (相) and the four identity assumptions (四相). By reading the gāthās as a unified trajectory rather than independent verses, the paper shows that the Diamond Sūtra embeds an internal mechanism for anticipating, detecting, and correcting errors arising within practice itself. This structure allows the text to function not merely as doctrinal instruction but as a self-regulating practice framework. The analysis presented here serves as a foundational study for subsequent comparative work, particularly in relation to the Heart Sūtra. It provides the expanded structural model against which the constraint-compressed form of the Heart Sūtra can be understood, thereby contributing to a reconstructed account of prajñā as an operation of regulated observation rather than a static doctrine of emptiness.