Thematic analysis of the Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna (i.e. Qixinlun) can be found in both its ancient and modern commentaries. Such analysis, however, tends to be brief, abstract and unsystematic in those ancient commentaries, and somehow constrained—and thus unnatural and not easily accessible—by the heavy exegetical tradition of the treatise in those modern interpretations. This study seeks to present a new thematic analysis of the treatise, detailed, concrete and systematic on the one hand, and more accessible, on the other hand, in terms of conceptual formulations and methods of reasoning, to modern students of the treatise. It argues that the treatise, while ostensibly presenting the theory or the Dharma of a “Compound-Mind” (i.e. a compound of the absolute and the phenomena), is designed to promote, in both theory and practice, a greater emphasis on the phenomena by identifying it (i.e.“compounding” it) with the absolute.
