Offerings, Stretched Until There Is No Edge

8.2 Offerings, Stretched Until There Is No Edge

At the close of the Avataṃsaka there is a passage that countless people across the Chinese world chant morning and evening—the ten great vows of Samantabhadra. Paying homage to all Buddhas, praising the Tathāgatas, the vast cultivation of offerings, repenting karmic obstructions…ten in all. The third, the vast cultivation of offerings, is the very "giving" of this book, stretched to its widest reach.

The word "vast" means to burst every edge. How is the stretching done? In three directions.

Bursting the Edge of "Whom": Offering to All Buddhas

Look first at whom the offering goes to. The sūtra opens by establishing a scope too vast to imagine:

"Throughout the entire realm of dharma and realm of space, in every mote of dust of all the Buddha-fields of the ten directions and three times, in each and every mote there are Buddhas numerous as the motes of dust of all worlds…and I, by the power of Samantabhadra's vow of practice, give rise to profound conviction, to knowledge and vision made manifest before me, and with all the most excellent articles of offering I make offering."

Not an offering to one Buddha, or to the Buddhas of one place, but to all Buddhas—measureless, numberless—through all space and across the whole dharma-realm. Bhaiṣajyarāja's burning of the body, earlier, was an offering to one Buddha (the Buddha Pure Bright Virtue of Sun and Moon); here Samantabhadra bursts the edge of "whom" wide open—stretched out to all Buddhas.

Bursting the Edge of "How Much": Lamp-Wicks like Sumeru

Next, the measure of the offering. The offerings Samantabhadra uses are these:

"Clouds of flowers, clouds of garlands, clouds of celestial music, clouds of celestial parasols and canopies, clouds of celestial garments, celestial incense of every kind, anointing-incense, burning-incense, powdered-incense—clouds such as these, each in magnitude like the king of mountains, Sumeru. And I kindle lamps of every kind—butter-lamps, oil-lamps, lamps of every fragrant oil—each lamp-wick like Mount Sumeru, each lamp's oil like the waters of the great ocean."

Flowers, incense, lamps—the offerings themselves are ordinary. But Samantabhadra projects their measure onto the scale of the cosmos: one flower as large as Mount Sumeru; the wick of one lamp as tall as Mount Sumeru; the oil of one lamp as plentiful as a sea.

This is no rhetorical heaping-up. It is saying one thing: since the offering now reaches every Buddha throughout the dharma-realm, what is offered must also be stretched to a scale that matches the dharma-realm—this end boundless, that end boundless too, so that the two ends can answer each other.

Bursting the Edge of Time: Thought after Thought Continuing, Without End Forever

The third direction is also the deepest—time. How long does this offering go on before it stops? The sūtra closes the passage with words of tremendous force:

"This vast and most excellent offering: when the realm of space is exhausted, when the realm of sentient beings is exhausted, when the karma of sentient beings is exhausted, when the afflictions of sentient beings are exhausted—then this offering of mine would be exhausted. But because the realm of space, and so on to the afflictions, cannot be exhausted, this offering of mine likewise is without exhaustion: thought after thought continuing without interruption, the actions of body, speech, and mind without weariness."

It means: only when space itself is emptied out, when all beings have been delivered, when the karma of beings is finished, when the afflictions of beings are cut off—only then would this offering of mine stop. But space, beings, karma, afflictions—these will never be exhausted; and so this offering of mine will never be exhausted either—thought after thought continuing, not a moment's break, in body, in speech, in mind, never wearying.

You see, Bhaiṣajyarāja's offering, however heroic, was still one body, one time—when that act was done, it was done. Here Samantabhadra bursts the edge of time completely: offering becomes a long river with no beginning and no end, unbroken thought after thought, as long and as inexhaustible as the dharma-realm itself.

The True "Vast" Is a Vast Mind, Not a Quantity of Things

But there is one point here that must be seen most clearly, or else "the vast cultivation of offerings" gets read as a contest of who offers more, who offers bigger.

Generation after generation, the patriarchs who explain this passage point out one thing again and again: the weight of this "vast and most excellent offering" rests not on the things offered, but on the mind that offers. Master Chengguan says it plainly—all these "most excellent offerings" are, in the end, "the very contemplative practice spoken of before": they are that contemplative cultivation itself. In other words, the true vast cultivation of offerings is practice itself—it is you, with an awake, watching mind, contemplating one flower, one stick of incense, until it fills the whole dharma-realm as an offering to all Buddhas. Whether the offerings are great or small, many or few, is secondary; whether the mind can be this vast, this unbroken—that is the crux.

So Samantabhadra's offering, "thought after thought continuing, without end forever," is not asking you to go and actually burn a lamp the size of Mount Sumeru. It is asking for your mind—in each present moment, thought by thought, to offer with this contemplation, this reverence. When the mind is vast, one small stick of incense, one small lamp, fills the whole dharma-realm then and there; when the mind is narrow, offerings piled as high as Sumeru cannot offer up this "vastness."

And this joins back onto the main thread of the whole road: in the end, what matters is still that mind—behind the loosened hand, the mind that has loosened, opened wide, and turns, thought after thought without break, toward all Buddhas and all beings.

Walking On

Offering has been stretched until there is no edge—no edge to whom, no edge to how much, no edge to time.

Yet at the very end of this passage on the vast cultivation of offerings, Samantabhadra says one thing that draws a distinction through all this boundless, measureless offering. He says: among all these offerings, there is one kind that is supreme.

That line is the most famous teaching on offering in the Chinese world—"Among all offerings, the dharma-offering is supreme." What does it really mean? In the next chapter, we look closely.