What is the mark of cessation? What is the "mark of cessation"?

E.g. from Kihwa's Commentary on the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment:


  From the standpoint of cultivation and severing, the sequence is from
  coarse to subtle: ceasing, changing, abiding, and arising.
  If you extinguish the mark of cessation, then you have for the first time attained the level of faith.


Is it an abstract entity? If so, how would Dignaga's theory of apoha account for it? 

If not, I think it would be phenomenal, but I don't know what sort of actual thing it could be. I mean, can it studied empirically, like fire, or like consciousness?

Does it matter either way to Buddhist practice or just life in general?



Here's a copy of the text in question:
Here is what's going on in that text:

Bodhisattva "Pure Wisdom" asks "Buddha" to explain the levels and stages of attainment.

Buddha responds with a usual prajna-paramita explanation of emptiness: that Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi has no svabhava, that Bodhisattvas and sentient beings are mere illusory appearances, and that therefore there is nothing like “attainment” or “an attainer”, let alone any such "stages".

He then elaborates on this point by saying that because sentient beings are “thoroughly confused” and are bent on making things up, they can't help themselves but continue to contrive notions like “cessation” or “person who attains cessation” or "a level of attainment", hence the question about levels. When they attain real cessation, like that of the Tathagata, they will clearly see that all these notions are illusory, making the question irrelevant.

The phrase that you are interested in belongs to this line of argument. The exact phrase goes like this: 


  ”Since they have not [mieh] [mieh] illusory activity, they automatically make discriminations.”


(By “discriminations” he means concrete entities and events like “cessation”, “attainment”, “Boddhisattva”, “sentient being”, "a level" etc. By "illusory activity" he means reification, conceptual fabrication, and overgeneralization.)

The word "mieh" means “cessation” or “extinction”. It is not clear why it is repeated twice in the text. My understanding is that it is repeated for emphasis. IMO the meaning of the phrase is: “Since they have not ACTUALLY CEASED the illusory activity” – meaning, that even though some of them may be “advanced” Buddhist students and practitioners, they are still caught up in the habit of reification – and subsequent discrimination and attachment based on that reification. And so they still posit notions of "attainment", "one who attains", "levels" etc. Hence asking wrong question about levels.

That's the basic meaning of the passage. Now, Kihwa (whoever he is) chooses to read that "mieh mieh" repetition as “they have not ceased the cessation”, which he then has to interpret as “ceased the mark of cessation” or “extinguished the mark of cessation”. He then brings in an entire (unrelated) theory of Four Marks, which postulates that each dharma (phenomenon, NOT thought) goes through the four lifecycle phases (“marks”) of arising, abiding, changing (=deteriorating), and cessation. (See Mulamadhyamakakarika for Nagarjuna's take on emptiness of the four phases).

Kihwa says that all samsara is rooted in reification of these “four marks” as something substantial. He argues that in order to stop maintaining our delusion we should stop seeing Arising, Abiding, Changing, and Cessation (of any and all phenomena) as having concrete reality, we should see them as mere conventions, simplifications, arbitrary points of designation. Neither phenomena nor their phases of lifecycle have existence outside of the designating mind.

He goes on to explain that the notion of arising is the subtlest and hardest to stop reifying, while cessation is the easiest. Based on that, he says, we should start by ceasing reification of the notion of cessation (of all entities and phenomena), and then proceed to cease reification of “changing”, “abiding”, and finally “arising”. He then equates attainment of cessation of each of these four, with attainment of the levels of Faith-follower, Arahant, Sage, and The Fruition correspondingly. 

He finishes by making an assertion, that when the Four Marks are completely extinguished, the practitioner returns to “original reality”, i.e. the actual ontological reality where the mind-made phenomena have never really existed. Since they never really existed, cessation of their designated point of cessation is not real either, and nevertheless it happens. All of this argument seems to be needed to support Kihwa’s position that while Buddha of the Sutra says that there is no attainment and cessation, in his, Kihwa's opinion there is still a sense in which a practitioner advances through levels and attains cessation. In other words, a practitioner advances through levels of understanding that there are no levels, and attains cessation of any notion of “cessation” (and other reifications).

To answer your question directly, “mark of cessation” is an arbitrary point designated as the moment when a phenomenon stops to exist. From the perspective of Madhyamaka such point is necessarily empty (=conventional, subjective), as is the point of arising, and the phenomenon itself.

In context of the Sutra speaking about attainment (of Enlightenment) aka cessation (of dukkha, samsara, avidya), this "cessation of [the mark of] cessation" refers to no longer reifying the notion of Enlightenment as something concrete that happens to a person at a point in time, since both the person and the cessation are empty conventional designations. In other words, Enlightenment entails no longer reifying Enlightenment, which has been the Sutra's message all along.

Now, if I can be as bold as to offer a connection with Dignaga's theory of apoha, I would say that it pertains to a relationship between "whatever actually happens in the ontological reality around the time we designate as the moment of cessation" and the (mind-made) designation of cessation. The exact question is, how are the two connected and are they. According to the top-down theory of Dignaga, the conceptually designated event of cessation serves as a conceptual relationaly-isomorphic stand-in for something actually happening in real life. While according to the causal chain theory of Dharmakirti, something in real life caused us to experience that particular locality of events as "cessation", and this causal relationship gives ontological credibility to the designation, however mistaken/simplified/reified it be. If you ask me, I prefer the second theory. The weakness of the standin theory IMO is that it still implies some sort of one-to-one correspondance between the experienced phenomena, the conceptual stand-in, and their ontological correlate. In real life this one-to-one correspondence falls apart under careful examination. The causal chain theory provides a nice and comforting explanation that although our notions and concepts may be reifications, simplifications, and overgeneralizations, their arising in our minds was caused by ontologically real stuff, making them not completely arbitrary and hopefully even partially useful within some boundaries.

In other words, even though cessation and Enlightenment are not something real, there's something real that leads to all these conversations, and the effort to achieve Enlightenment is not in vain.

P.S. I guess the overarching goal of this entire line of thought, is to show the connection between suchness and non-reification. Reification leads to invalid attachment and therefore to dukkha. Reification is samsara. Non-reification leads to suchness which is nirvana.