Practice · NianVolume OnePart III · Early Mahāyāna VisionPaper 7 of 31

Constructing the Buddha-Field

中文主題：構築佛國

Author: Shi Huijing 釋慧鏡

Date: Spring 2026

Version: 1.0

ID: NIAN-P07

Abstract

Following P06's location of T0418 as the source of the visionary register in the Chinese reception of recollection-practice, this paper takes up an unresolved question: how does the ontology of the buddha-field (buddha-kṣetra) as a destination develop from T0418's nascent opening into a structurally complete form? The paper argues three points. First, T0418 already possesses a destination-grammar—Amitābha's own direct invitation, "let those who wish to be born in my land always recollect me"; the bodhisattva's explicit question, "what Dharma must I hold to be born in Amitābha's buddha-field"; and the cultivation-to-field causal chain expressed in zhuāngyán zhū guótǔ ("adorning the buddha-lands")—but it lacks a comparative dimension, and Sukhāvatī appears as a given existent rather than as an object of construction. Second, T0313 (the Akṣobhyavyūha) and T0361 (the earliest Chinese translation of a Sukhāvatīvyūha-type sūtra), both rendered in Lokakṣema's workshop within the same period, supply two structurally different answers to T0418's unfinished opening: the Akṣobhya line organizes the buddha-field around bodhisattva self-restraint—the "unshakable" vows of non-anger, non-injury, non-breach—with the field as the outward expression of the bodhisattva's own established non-disturbance; the Amitābha line organizes the buddha-field around salvific reception of others, with the decisive new ontological move being the selection-and-combination operation in which the bodhisattva Dharmākara is shown 210 billion pre-existent buddha-fields and composes his own field from their features through the twenty-four vows. Third, the two lines stand parallel at the ontological level; the eventual East Asian dominance of Sukhāvatī is an institutional-historical outcome, not a doctrinal necessity. Chinese early-Mahāyāna buddha-field imagination was, from its origin, a plural-structured spectrum; reading "Pure Land" as a single received cosmology projects a later outcome onto its earlier layers. The paper concludes with a heuristic dialogue with modal metaphysics (Kripke's possible-worlds semantics, Lewis's modal realism) and three non-reducible differences—teleological, ontological, upgrade-path—that prevent reduction of the buddha-field ontology to formal modal entities.

I. Introduction: When the Buddha-Field Starts to Be Constructed

A Western English-language reader usually meets the concept of "Pure Land" for the first time through the three Pure Land sūtras—the forty-eight vows of the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha (T0360), the sixteen contemplations of the Contemplation Sūtra (T0365), and the description of the Land of Bliss in the Shorter Sukhāvatīvyūha (T0366). Three sūtras, one canonical set, already fully adorned: the reader is taken directly to the finished product, a cosmological edifice with forty-eight carefully arrayed vows, a land of seven jewels, a well-articulated mechanism of rebirth, and a salvific system centered on Amitābha. The problem with this mode of presentation is not that it is wrong—T0360's systematization is indeed complete—but that it implies a temporal misalignment. The fully-formed product of the fourth and fifth centuries is projected backward and taken as what the buddha-field concept was from the beginning.

This projection makes two things disappear from the reader's field of view.

The first. T0418 (the Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra) had already, in Luoyang in 179 CE, opened the doctrinal aperture of Amitābha's buddha-field. P06 treated the visionary face of this sūtra—the seven days and seven nights of seeing Amitābha, the three months of walking meditation, the hermeneutic closure of "the mind is Buddha." P06 closed with an open question: what kind of ontological existent is a buddha-field (buddha-kṣetra)? The starting point of the present paper is to fill out the opening P06 left—and, at the same time, to correct one framing overstep at P06's conclusion. P06 wrote that Sukhāvatī in T0418 "has not yet been elaborated into a destination with its own complete cosmology." The wording is slightly too conservative. Already within T0418, Amitābha himself is made to say, "let those who wish to be born in my land always recollect me"; already within T0418 a disciple asks, "what Dharma must I hold to be born in Amitābha's buddha-field." The grammar of destination is already standing up in T0418; only its cosmology has not yet been developed.

The second—more often passed over in Western Pure Land studies. When early Mahāyāna materials were received in Han China at the end of the second century, the buddha-field concept did not unfold along a single line. The very same translator, Lokakṣema, within a few years of producing T0418, also produced two further sūtras whose structures are parallel but whose directions are different: T0313, the Akṣobhyavyūha-sūtra, centered on the buddha Akṣobhya and his world Abhirati in the east; and T0361, the Wúliàng qīngjìng píngděng jué jīng—one of the earliest Chinese translations in the Amitābha line—which constructs its buddha-field through twenty-four vows. Two sūtras from the same translator, the same workshop, nearly the same years, structurally parallel but organized around different soteriological optimization targets. Sukhāvatī is not a cosmological fact standing alone; it is one branch of a plural spectrum.

This paper argues three things.

First, T0418's buddha-field opening is not "not yet developed" but rather "already opened, not yet structured"; the task of P07 is to trace how this opening is given structure in T0313 and T0361, rather than to treat it as an incomplete embryo of what comes later.

Second, the Chinese early-Mahāyāna buddha-field tradition was dual-lined from its origin—an Akṣobhya line and an Amitābha line—two sūtras rendered within a few years of each other by the same translator in the same workshop, with no sense of "main branch versus side branch." The eventual dominance of Sukhāvatī in East Asian Pure Land schools is the outcome of centuries of institutional development; as an event at the level of ontology, the two lines stand in parallel.

Third, T0361 introduces a decisive new conceptual operation that is not present in T0418: selection and combination. The bodhisattva Dharmākara (in this recension named 法寶藏 Fǎbǎozàng and 曇摩迦留 Tánmójiāliú, both being early Chinese forms) is shown by the buddha Lokeśvararāja 210 billion existing buddha-fields, and he selects the qualities he wants, then combines them into the buddha-field he himself intends to accomplish. In T0418 the buddha-field is something seen as already given; in T0361 it is something constructed as an object to be made. This shift—from received fact to constructible object—is more fundamental than the shift from "no cosmology" to "cosmology." It is a modal transformation in the ontology of buddha-fields itself.

II. Canonical Basis

2.1 The Existing Ground of the Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra

P06 dealt in detail with the visionary architecture of T0418. This section marks only the passages from T0418 that are indispensable as the starting platform for §III; the full treatment has been carried out already.

First, Amitābha's own invitation:

"Those who wish to be born in my land—let them always recollect me, recollect me continually without pause; so shall they come to be born in my land."¹

This line occurs in fascicle 1, chapter 2 (Xíng pǐn). The speaker is Amitābha himself (the text is explicit); the addressee is a recollecting bodhisattva. "My land" (wǒ guó 我國) here already denotes a place into which one can be "born" (lái shēng 來生), not merely a background against which abstract buddha-qualities are contemplated. The grammar of destination is already in place.

Second, the bodhisattva's explicit question about the access-method:

"Having seen the buddha, he asked the buddha: 'What Dharma must I hold in order to be born in Amitābha's buddha-field?'"²

The question itself presupposes that Amitābha's buddha-field is reachable by some practice. It does not ask whether Amitābha's buddha-field exists, nor where it is located—it presupposes existence and reachability and asks only by what means.

Third, the vocabulary of adorning the buddha-land:

"Adorning the buddha-lands, through keeping the precepts purely."³

Zhuāngyán zhū guótǔ 莊嚴諸國土 ("adorning the buddha-lands") is a description at the level of buddhānupādhi—the buddha, through his accumulated discipline, concentration, and wisdom, "adorns" the land that will later be his. The locution already links the buddha's cultivation with the cosmological quality of the buddha-land: the texture of the practice determines the texture of the eventual land.

The summary point. T0418 already possesses the syntactic structure of a rebirth-mechanism (destination + means-of-access + cultivation-producing-destination). But in T0418 this structure is scattered: there is no systematic list of vows, no detailed enumeration of buddha-field qualities, and no comparison among candidate buddha-fields prior to buddhahood. The structuring work is the contribution of T0313 and T0361.

2.2 The Akṣobhyavyūha: The Akṣobhya Line

Ā-chù fó guó jīng 阿閦佛國經 (Akṣobhyavyūha-sūtra), translated by Lokakṣema in the Later Han, two fascicles, Taishō vol. 11 no. 313 (in the Ratnakūṭa division). Same translator as T0418, roughly the same period; both Zürcher and Nattier accept this sūtra as a core text of the Lokakṣema corpus.⁴

Narrative structure. In a past age, a thousand buddha-fields to the east, there was a world called Abhirati (妙喜 "Marvelous Joy"), whose buddha was the Tathāgata Mahānetra (Dà-mù rúlái 大目如來). A bhikṣu in Mahānetra's presence made vows—the first of which, and every subsequent one, was a chain of "from now until I attain perfect awakening, if I ever…" undertakings:

"If, toward any human, any flying insect, any crawling creature, I should ever give rise to anger and hatred… until I attain perfect awakening, I will have deceived these buddhas, world-honored ones—the incalculable, innumerable, inconceivable buddhas throughout measureless world-systems who are now teaching the Dharma."⁵

Non-anger is this bhikṣu's first vow. On account of this vow he receives the name Akṣobhya ("Unshakable," "He Who Cannot Be Moved"); Mahānetra himself, together with the gods including Śakra, rejoice at the name. The core narrative of the entire sūtra is built out from this first vow: a chain of never-to-be-broken-until-awakening undertakings—no lust, no killing, no stealing, no false speech, no emission of semen even in dream, never to abandon the monastic robe, never to sit in the teacher's seat when listening to the Dharma, and so on. These together constitute Akṣobhya's saṃnāha-saṃnaddha (sēngnà sēngniè 僧那僧涅, the "great armor of vows" donned by the bodhisattva).

The result. The bodhisattva Akṣobhya, "on account of non-anger, is established in the Akṣobhya state"; his buddha-field is Abhirati; the text states explicitly that Akṣobhya "is right now, in the present, teaching in the world Abhirati." The features of the buddha-field are not elaborated with the density of T0360, but there is already a concrete inventory: "the bodhisattvas there all attain avaivartika"; "the land is purely adorned"; "all women with child give birth in safety; the blind regain sight, the deaf regain hearing."

The summary point. The axial structure of T0313's buddha-field is the bodhisattva's own non-disturbance—the very etymology of "Akṣobhya." The field is the byproduct of that non-disturbance. The focus of the vows is "what I will not do"—no anger, no lust, no theft—not "what I will give to those who come to be born." The soteriological optimization target is the bodhisattva's own self-steadying; the field is its result, not its instrument.

2.3 The Wúliàng qīngjìng píngděng jué jīng: The Early Amitābha Line

Fó shuō wúliàng qīngjìng píngděng jué jīng 佛說無量清淨平等覺經, traditionally attributed to Lokakṣema, four fascicles, Taishō vol. 12 no. 361 (Ratnakūṭa division). The translator attribution has been contested in modern scholarship (Harrison 1987 and Nattier 2008 have variously suggested Zhi Qian or joint translation); this paper does not enter the philological debate and adopts only the minimal consensus: this sūtra belongs to the early Chinese Sukhāvatīvyūha translations produced in the Luoyang-to-Jianye workshops of the late second through early third centuries, with a translation date approximately contemporary with or slightly later than T0418.⁶ It runs roughly parallel to T0313.

Narrative structure. In a past age there was a buddha named Shìráo-wáng 世饒王 (Lokeśvararāja—the standard T0360 correspondence is Shìzìzàiwáng 世自在王). A king, having heard his teaching, left home as a bhikṣu with the name Tánmójiāliú (an early Chinese transliteration of Dharmākara; the same figure is also called Fǎbǎozàng 法寶藏, "Dharma-Treasury," in the sūtra's later sections). The bodhisattva Dharma-Treasury makes a key request to Lokeśvararāja:

"I beseech the Buddha, for my sake, to expound the virtues of the buddha-fields. I shall uphold them, establish myself in them, and by taking on these vows make my own buddha-field the same."⁷

This request is the pivot point of the paper. Dharma-Treasury does not set out to investigate what a buddha-field is on his own; he asks Lokeśvararāja to enumerate the virtues of the existing buddha-fields, and then, from that enumeration, to "take vows to make my buddha-field the same." The buddha-field, as an object to be constructed, as a set of properties that can be selectively replicated, is here made explicit.

Lokeśvararāja's response is decisive:

"The Buddha then, for his sake, selected from the 210 billion buddha-fields the features of gods, humans, and realms—good and bad, beautiful and ugly—and displayed to him what was in accord with his wish, to be given to him."⁸

Two hundred and ten billion buddha-fields—a concrete, plural, comparatively observable catalogue—are displayed to Dharma-Treasury for him to select the features he wants. In what follows, the bodhisattva "made the twenty-four-vow sūtra and upheld it"—the twenty-four vows become the blueprint of the buddha-field he is to construct.

Among the twenty-four vows, the optimization center differs radically from the Akṣobhya vow-family:

"(1) When I have become a buddha, let there be in my land no hells, no beasts, no hungry ghosts, no flying insects or crawling creatures; if this vow is fulfilled, I shall become a buddha; if this vow is not fulfilled, I shall never become a buddha. (2) When I have become a buddha, let those beings born in my land, after leaving my land, never again fall into hells, hungry-ghost realms, or animal birth; if anyone born there should so fall, I shall not become a buddha."⁹

The first vow is absence of evil destinies in the land (a residential condition designed for those who will come to be born there); the second vow is permanent non-regression for those born in the land (a soteriological guarantee designed for those who will come). The focus is not "what I will not do" but "what I will provide to those who come to be born in my land." The majority of the twenty-four vows describe the inhabitants of the land, or those from the ten directions who come to be born: all of golden color, all possessed of supernormal faculties, all destined for parinirvāṇa, all leaping in joy upon hearing my name, all met by the buddha in flight at the moment of death. The field is designed for the reception and rescue of others.

T0361's 24-vow system is shorter than T0360's 48-vow system, but the architecture is already complete: each vow opens with "When I have become a buddha…" and closes with "if this is not fulfilled, I shall not become a buddha." This conditional-vow format (the "if-not-X-then-not-buddhahood" formula) is the skeleton of the entire Amitābha-line vow tradition. The 48-vow version expands, refines, and locally adds (for example, the eighteenth vow's "even ten recollections" clause); it does not rebuild.

2.4 The Zhi Qian Recension

Fó shuō Āmítuó sānyé sānfó sàlóu fó tán guòdù réndào jīng 佛說阿彌陀三耶三佛薩樓佛檀過度人道經, translated in the Wu kingdom by the Yuezhi lay translator Zhi Qian 支謙, two fascicles, Taishō vol. 12 no. 362, dating to approximately the early third century. It is another Chinese translation from the same Sukhāvatīvyūha text-family as T0361. The narrative structure runs closely parallel; Ānanda's question is almost word-for-word shared with T0361:

"One should only recollect the past buddhas, the future buddhas, and the buddhas of the other quarters now presently teaching the Dharma."¹⁰

T0362's existence confirms that T0361 is not a solitary witness: the same Sukhāvatī proto-cosmology was rendered at least twice in the Chinese translation workshops of the second and third centuries, forming a stable early text-cluster. The number of vows varies slightly between T0361 and T0362 (across recensions, from 24 to 26), and T0360 eventually settles on 48. But the core structure is consistent: Dharmākara is shown many buddha-fields, selects from them, constructs his own field, and makes his vows in the conditional-vow format.

2.5 A Terminological Note: The Late Stabilization of "Pure Land"

The four sūtras cited above (T0418, T0313, T0361, T0362) use the following principal vocabulary for "buddha-field" in preliminary sampling:

Sūtra	Principal terms	"Pure Land" (jìngtǔ 淨土) as a stabilized technical term?
T0418	fó guó 佛國, guótǔ 國土, fó chà 佛剎, zhū chà 諸剎, zhuāngyán zhū guótǔ	No
T0313	fó chà, guótǔ, Abhirati, yán-jìng fó chà 嚴淨佛剎	No
T0361	fó guó, guótǔ, wúliàng qīngjìng 無量清淨, zhū fó guó 諸佛國	No
T0362	fó guó, guótǔ, tāfāng fó guó 他方佛國	No

"Pure Land" (jìngtǔ) as a bound technical term does not yet stabilize in this early layer of Chinese translations. The verb-object phrase "purely adorning" (yán-jìng), and the expression "immeasurable purity" (wúliàng qīngjìng) as part of a buddha-name, do appear; but the standalone term jìngtǔ has not yet become fixed. This paper therefore adopts buddha-field (buddha-kṣetra) as its primary analytic term, and reserves "Pure Land" for the technical vocabulary of T0360 and later Chinese tradition. The choice helps to prevent a later terminology from being retrojected onto earlier texts that do not yet use it.

III. Central Argument

3.1 The Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra as the Nascent Opening of Buddha-Field Ontology

P06 argued that T0418 introduced the visionary register, that it established the three-fold semantics of "presence" (temporal immediacy, spatial facing, cognitive immediacy), and that it welded visionary seeing to śūnyatā self-deconstruction from the first. The present section adds a dimension that P06's conservative framing left partially shadowed: T0418 not only opened the visionary samādhi, it simultaneously opened the grammatical structure of the buddha-field as a destination to which one can be born.

As §2.1 showed, T0418 already carries three destination-grammar elements:

The buddha's own act of invitation ("Those who wish to be born in my land, let them always recollect me");
The bodhisattva's explicit question about the access-method ("What Dharma must I hold in order to be born in Amitābha's buddha-field?");
The cultivation-to-field causal chain ("Adorning the buddha-lands, through keeping the precepts purely").

Taken together, the buddha-field in T0418 is already an object into which one can be "born" (shēng 生), toward which one can "go" (wǎng 往), and which can be reached by "holding certain Dharmas" (chí hé děng fǎ 持何等法). This is not the embryo of a cosmology; it is the doctrinal grammatical skeleton of a cosmology.

But T0418's opening has one structural deficiency: it lacks a comparative dimension. Sukhāvatī, as named in T0418, is a given existent—Amitābha is already teaching inside it, and the practitioner's task is to see him through pratyutpanna-samādhi. Where Sukhāvatī's features come from, why they are these features rather than others, why Amitābha is called Amitābha, and what the other buddha-fields in the ten directions are related to this one—these questions T0418 neither asks nor answers. It opens the door but does not supply a floor plan for the space behind it.

T0313 and T0361 each, in different ways, supply floor plans.

3.2 The Akṣobhyavyūha's Akṣobhya Line: A Buddha-Field Axially Organized Around Self-Restraint

T0313 responds to T0418's opening on two levels.

First, the semantic correspondence between buddha-name and buddha-field. "Akṣobhya" means "Unshakable"; "Abhirati" means "Marvelous Joy." These names are not arbitrarily chosen; they each index the core property of the field. And this property derives directly from the bodhisattva's initial vow—non-anger. Because of non-anger, the name Akṣobhya; because of Akṣobhya's self-steadiness, the land is purely adorned; because of pure adornment, the land is named Abhirati. The bodhisattva's vow-property → the buddha's name-property → the land's name-property is a traceable derivational chain.

Second, the field as the structural externalization of self-discipline. T0313's vows are almost all negative formulations: "I will not be angry, I will not be lustful, I will not steal, I will not lie, I will not emit semen even in dreams, I will not sit in the teacher's seat when hearing the Dharma, I will never abandon the robe, I will in every life be a monastic…" These negative vows aggregate into a settled, self-restrained, non-disturbable bodhisattva subject; the land that results when this subject eventually attains buddhahood is the outward continuation of that subjective settling. The land's qualities are a byproduct of the bodhisattva's practice; they are not a product the bodhisattva is designing in advance for other people.

The soteriological optimization target: self-steadiness. The welfare of the land's inhabitants (as in the passages about safe childbirth, the blind regaining sight, the deaf regaining hearing) are mentioned as meritorious consequences—but they are not the focus at the moment of vow-making. Those benefits appear in the description of the three-thousandfold world-system's auspicious signs at the moment Mahānetra gives Akṣobhya his prediction of buddhahood, not in the clauses of Akṣobhya's own vows.

3.3 The Wúliàng qīngjìng píngděng jué jīng's Amitābha Line: A Buddha-Field Axially Organized Around Salvific Reception, with a Constructional Ontology

T0361's response to T0418 takes an entirely different road.

First, the request-for-enumeration structure. Dharma-Treasury's first gesture is not to make vows on his own, but to ask the Buddha to enumerate the virtues of the existing buddha-fields for him—"I beseech the Buddha, for my sake, to expound the virtues of the buddha-fields. I shall uphold them, establish myself in them, and by taking on these vows make my own buddha-field the same." This gesture does not exist in T0313's narrative; Akṣobhya proceeds from his own direct resolve to vow-making, without passing through a survey-of-existing-fields stage. Dharma-Treasury, by contrast, treats the buddha-field from the outset as a category that can be surveyed, and then makes his own selection from the results of the survey.

Second, the 210-billion-fields selection operation. Lokeśvararāja's response legitimizes Dharma-Treasury's gesture as a concrete cosmological operation:

"The Buddha then, for his sake, selected from the 210 billion buddha-fields the features of gods, humans, and realms—good and bad, beautiful and ugly—and displayed to him what was in accord with his wish, to be given to him."

This sentence decomposes into five steps:

(a) The 210 billion buddha-fields are a pre-existent plural catalogue;
(b) Each buddha-field has assessable properties ("the features of gods, humans, and realms—good and bad, beautiful and ugly");
(c) Lokeśvararāja selectively displays these to Dharma-Treasury;
(d) Dharma-Treasury selects from among them what is in accord with his wish;
(e) What is selected is "given to him"—transmitted as the blueprint for his future buddha-field.

These five steps establish a wholly new layer of buddha-field ontology: the buddha-field is an object that can be selected, combined, and designed. It is no longer only the target of a visionary attention (as in T0418), nor only the byproduct of the bodhisattva's self-discipline (as in T0313); it is now a constructed object arrived at by intentional design, comparative grounding, and selective choice.

Third, the outward-optimization of the twenty-four vows. §2.3 listed the first two vows. Surveying the vows more broadly: no evil destinies in the land; no lust in the land; all who hear my name in the ten directions leap in joy to be born in my land; the buddha flies to meet those dying elsewhere; all those born in my land attain parinirvāṇa—across the twenty-four, the subject of the vow is in most cases the inhabitants of the land or those from the ten directions who come to be born, not the bodhisattva himself. This stands in direct contrast to T0313's self-discipline focus.

The soteriological optimization target: the salvation of others. The land's properties are designed as a salvific apparatus for those who will come. The bodhisattva's self-discipline is the precondition, not the focus.

3.4 The Two Lines Compared: Two Optimization Vectors

The two lines set side by side:

Dimension	T0313 Akṣobhya Line	T0361 Amitābha Line
Bodhisattva's opening action	Direct vow of self-restraint	Request that the Buddha display the virtues of existing buddha-fields
Subject of the vows	"What I will not do" (bodhisattva himself)	"What the inhabitants of my land are to be" (those who come)
Buddha-field ontology	Byproduct of bodhisattva self-restraint	Constructed by selection-and-combination
Semantics of the buddha-name	Akṣobhya ("Unshakable"): bodhisattva's own property	Amitābha ("Immeasurable"): a property of land / lifespan
Semantics of the land-name	Abhirati ("Marvelous Joy"): the bodhisattva's self-delight	Sukhāvatī ("Bliss"): happiness designed for the inhabitants
Soteriological optimization	Self-steadying	Salvation of others
Access-mechanism	Learning the practice of the bodhisattva Akṣobhya	Those who hear my name leap in joy to be born + buddha's reception in flight at death

The key observation: the two lines were rendered into Chinese by the same translator within a few years of each other. This fact dissolves any reading of the dual-line arrangement as the accidental co-presence of "different traditions." At the very beginning of the Chinese transmission history, the two paths were brought together into the Chinese sphere—the same workshop, the same linguistic repertoire, the same reading public. Lokakṣema and his workshop evidently produced, in the same span of time, both the Akṣobhya sūtra and the early Amitābha-line material, and in the same span the Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra that connects Amitābha with visionary samādhi. The Chinese early-Mahāyāna imagination of the buddha-field was from the beginning plural, parallel, and structurally contrastive.

The subsequent dominance of Sukhāvatī in East Asian Pure Land schools—especially the systematization of name-recitation rebirth from Shandao onward—has obscured this plural origin. But as an event at the level of ontology, the Akṣobhya line and the Amitābha line are two parallel structural answers to the field-opening T0418 left behind; they are not a main line with a side branch.

An extension of P06's three-sense framework. P06 §3.5 located sense C of niànfó sānmèi (Mahāyāna visionary) in T0418. The present chapter goes one step further: at T0313 / T0361 sense C differentiates into two branches. The object-buddha of the visionary seeing can be either a self-restraint-type buddha (Akṣobhya) or a salvific-reception-type buddha (Amitābha). This differentiation has direct consequences for how the eight great Mahāyāna sūtras of Part V will each treat niànfó—the niànfó of the Śūraṅgama (P12), the niànfó of the Lotus (P13), the "all buddhas' mind is foremost" of the Laṅkāvatāra (P17)—all can be further localized within this dual-line frame.

IV. Interdisciplinary Bridge: Possible-Worlds Semantics and Buddha-Field Ontology

The contemporary field of analytic philosophy most productively in dialogue with T0361's 210-billion-fields operation is modal metaphysics—and specifically the tradition of possible-worlds semantics. The interlocutors of this section are Saul Kripke's Kripke semantics (in the two foundational 1959 and 1963 papers published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic and Acta Philosophica Fennica) and David Lewis's modal realism (developed most fully in On the Plurality of Worlds, 1986).¹¹

The central insight of Kripke semantics is to formalize modal claims ("possibly," "necessarily") as quantification over a set of possible worlds: "necessarily P" means "P holds at every accessible world," and "possibly P" means "P holds at some accessible world." Possible worlds are treated as a formal domain, with each world a maximally consistent set of states of affairs. Lewis's modal realism goes further: possible worlds, on his account, concretely exist—they are not merely formal devices but actual alternative universes, ontologically on a par with our own actual world.

This framework enters into three levels of observable structural dialogue with T0361.

Level one: the 210 billion buddha-fields as a modally plural domain.

T0361 states that 210 billion buddha-fields exist simultaneously, each with its own combination of properties. Dharma-Treasury's access to these fields is by way of Lokeśvararāja's enumerative display—and this gesture is structurally isomorphic to the accessibility relation in Kripke semantics: not every world is accessible from a given world, but where accessibility does obtain, the properties of that world can be evaluated. The access that Dharma-Treasury obtains is comparative—he does not view one buddha-field in isolation, but surveys the "good and bad, beautiful and ugly" of many at once; this has a formal parallel to comparative modal claims ("in some worlds, X is more F than Y") in possible-worlds semantics.

Level two: buddha-field construction as the inverse of counterpart-composition.

Lewis's counterpart theory holds that identity across worlds is not literal identity but a counterpart relation—my counterpart at world W is the entity at W that is most similar to me and that represents me in the modal claims we make about W. Dharma-Treasury's constructive operation can be read as the inverse of this: he is not looking for his counterpart in an existing world, but taking properties from multiple worlds and composing them into a new world that has not yet been realized. The status of this new world is future—it is the world that will be realized when the bodhisattva attains buddhahood—but its possibility is already underwritten by the property-stock of the 210 billion pre-existent worlds. The operation is a composition-from-counterparts rather than an identification-across-counterparts.

Level three: selection as a case study in modal epistemology.

A central question in contemporary modal epistemology is: how do we know which worlds are possible? One of Kripke's responses proceeds by way of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori necessity. T0361 offers a Buddhist response to the same question: the buddha's omniscience (sarvajñatā) as the source of modal knowledge. Lokeśvararāja is able to display the 210 billion buddha-fields' qualitative properties not because he has logically derived them, but because he has direct epistemic access to those worlds. Dharma-Treasury's selection is built upon this direct access—selection is a response to a given catalogue, not speculation.

⚠️ Three Non-Reducible Differences

The three levels of structural convergence do not make the two discourses the same. Three structural differences must be named.

Teleological difference. The modal metaphysics of Kripke and Lewis serves the goals of analytic philosophy: clarifying the logical form of modal statements, handling intentional objects (such as the status of fictional characters at possible worlds), providing a formal foundation for the semantics of natural language. T0361's soteriological aim is final buddhahood and the liberation of sentient beings—Dharma-Treasury's selection is made in order to construct a field capable of rescuing innumerable beings; it is not aimed at the logical form of anything. The two teloi are not interchangeable.

Ontological difference. Lewis's modal realism presupposes that possible worlds concretely exist on equal footing, without ontological priority relative to the actual world. T0361's buddha-field ontology presupposes dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) as its root ontology—buddha-fields are plural and constructable, but their existence is still within the net of dependent origination, co-established by the buddha's vow-power, his accumulated merit, and the karmic resonance of sentient beings. To read buddha-fields as concretely existing parallel universes is to lose the vow-ontology structure (the field is established as an adhipati-pratyaya consequence); to reduce them to mere modal alternatives is to lose the dependent-origination commitment.

Upgrade-path difference. Possible-worlds semantics has no upgrade path—deeper engagement with the system will not deliver one into some ultimate state; it is a descriptive / formal instrument. T0361's buddha-field construction is a concrete stage of the bodhisattva path—from Dharma-Treasury's request, to selection, to vow-making, to kalpas of cultivation, to buddhahood, to the establishment of the field, to the reception of sentient beings—this is a complete soteriological trajectory. The trajectory cannot be derived from the modal-semantics frame and cannot be replaced by it.

A Specific Warning for Western Readers

A certain genre of recent comparative philosophy has attempted to read Buddhist cosmology as "Buddhist possible-worlds theory," in part to offset Western philosophy's long neglect of Buddhist cosmology as a philosophical topic. The gesture is well-intentioned, but if taken too far it demotes the salvific commitment of the buddha-field to a case study for formal ontology. The present chapter uses the Kripke / Lewis framework only as a heuristic—to let Western readers see that the 210 billion buddha-fields is not an instance of "ancient religious exaggeration" or "the magical thinking of religion," but an ontological proposal with an explicit structural logic. But it does not reduce the buddha-field to a modal entity.

This warning continues the Thompson-dialogue structure of P06: borrow a contemporary academic framework as a heuristic pairing, never as a theoretical substitution.

V. Middle-Way Corrections

❌ Correction one. "Pure Lands = the East-Asian Buddhist equivalent of the Christian Heaven." Mistaken. There are at least three structural differences. First, the Christian Heaven is a single destination established by God as creator; buddha-fields are the plural result of innumerable bodhisattvas making their own vows—T0361 explicitly refers to a pre-existent catalogue of 210 billion buddha-fields. Second, access to the Christian Heaven is through faith and grace; access to Sukhāvatī presupposes concrete practical conditions (hearing the name, recollecting the buddha, making vows, and finally being reborn). Third, the Christian Heaven is a final resting place; Sukhāvatī is an avaivartika-bodhisattva platform, whose purpose is still final buddhahood and the subsequent establishment of each bodhisattva's own buddha-field—it is not a terminus. Reading Pure Lands as "Eastern Heaven" is a long-standing framing error in Western Pure Land studies and should be avoided.

❌ Correction two. "210 billion buddha-fields is religious exaggeration or magical thinking." Mistaken. The number in T0361 is not rhetorical hyperbole but an ontological proposal—namely, that the catalogue of buddha-fields is incommensurable in scale with any finite terrestrial comparison set. The proposal belongs to the same class of structural moves as the cosmic scale of the Daśabhūmika chapter of the Avataṃsaka, or the temporal scale of the Magical City parable of the Lotus: they use incommensurability of order of magnitude to mark that the ontology in question belongs to a different category from the phenomenal world. To demote such moves to rhetorical hyperbole is to misread ontology as rhetoric.

❌ Correction three. "Akṣobhya's buddha-field is Amitābha's less-famous sibling, a minor variant." Mistaken. §3.4 has already shown that the two lines differ structurally in their soteriological optimization targets: the Akṣobhya line optimizes for the bodhisattva's own self-steadying, the Amitābha line optimizes for the salvation of others. The eventual East Asian dominance of Sukhāvatī is an outcome of institutional history, not the embodiment of a doctrinal hierarchy. Reducing Akṣobhya to a "sibling" is a way of using the influence of the later tradition to retrofit a subordinate position onto the earlier texts—it is a form of anachronism.

⚠️ Caveat one. The dialogue with Kripke / Lewis modal metaphysics is heuristic, not a theoretical equivalence. The three non-reducible differences (teleology / ontology / upgrade path) constitute a structural boundary. In particular, if Lewis's concrete modal realism were directly mapped onto the buddha-field, the core commitment of dependent-origination ontology would be lost—buddha-fields are plural and constructable, but their existence remains within the dependent structure of adhipati-pratyaya and the karmic resonance of sentient beings; they are not brute concretely coexisting universes.

⚠️ Caveat two. The claim that the two lines are parallel at the level of ontology does not imply that Akṣobhya and Amitābha had equal uptake in later East Asian practice. As a historical matter, the Amitābha lineage from Shandao onward became absolutely dominant in East Asia; the Akṣobhya lineage had little independent development in Chinese tradition (Japanese Esoteric Buddhism preserves him as the eastern direction-buddha of the Vajradhātu maṇḍala). The structural dynamics of the uptake asymmetry will be addressed in Part VI; the present chapter does not underwrite that later history.

VI. Conclusion

A structural completion of buddha-field ontology has taken place. In Luoyang in 179 CE, T0418 opened the grammatical aperture of the buddha-field as a destination—Amitābha's own invitation to be born in his land, the bodhisattva's question about the access-method, the vocabulary of adorning the buddha-lands—but the opening lacked a comparative dimension, and Sukhāvatī appeared as a given existent rather than as an object of construction. Within a few years on either side of T0418, T0313 and T0361 were rendered by the same translation workshop, each supplying structural content to that opening along a different soteriological optimization vector: the Akṣobhya line axially organized around self-restraint, with the buddha-field as the outward expression of the bodhisattva's established non-disturbance; the Amitābha line axially organized around salvific reception, with the buddha-field as a salvific apparatus composed by selection-and-combination—introducing the decisive new ontological operation of "selecting what one wishes from 210 billion buddha-fields."

For the practitioner, directly. Western readers (and contemporary Chinese-speaking readers) facing the concept of "Pure Land" need to see two things. First, this concept is not the Buddhist counterpart of the Christian Heaven, nor a magical projection of religious imagination, but an ontological proposal with structural logic, historical development, and doctrinal warrant. Second, this concept was never single-lined: Chinese early-Mahāyāna materials brought in two buddha-field paths simultaneously, whose soteriological optimization targets are structurally different. The later dominance of Sukhāvatī is institutional history, not doctrinal necessity. For concrete practice, this means that the "buddha recollected" in niànfó is not pre-stamped as a single type. It may be an Akṣobhya-style paradigm of self-restraint; it may be an Amitābha-style refuge of salvific reception; it may be one of the other buddha-faces highlighted among the eight great Mahāyāna sūtras of Part V. Which of these parallel paths one takes depends on which kind of soteriological momentum the practitioner presently needs.

The open question. This paper has treated the buddha-field ontology transition from T0418 to T0361, but there is another transition parallel to it that has not yet been addressed—a transition of verb. From T0418's "always recollect me" (cháng niàn wǒ 常念我) and "niànfó" to T0361's "all those who hear my name leap in joy to be born" and "those who hear my name will rightly turn toward the Way." T0361's seventeenth vow states explicitly: "Let my name be heard in the buddha-fields of the eight directions, above and below, innumerable in number; let all gods, humans, and crawling creatures who hear my name leap in joy to be born in my land." The verb of access has shifted from "recollect" (niàn) to "hear the name" (wén míng 聞名), a passive-receiving gesture. This verb shift—from recollection to invocation, from niàn to chēng 稱—is the pivotal doctrinal joint by which the Chinese Pure Land tradition moves from the T0418-type visionary niànfó to Shandao-type name-recitation rebirth. The next paper, P08, will take up this verb shift: between T0361's twenty-four vows and T0360's forty-eight vows, between Dharmākara's vow-making and Shandao's name-recitation mechanics, how does niàn yield to chēng? Or—more accurately stated—how do recollection and invocation form a dynamically coupled pair in the history of Chinese niànfó?

Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsambuddhassa.

References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

Chinese canonical translations (Taishō Tripiṭaka)

Bānzhōu sānmèi jīng 般舟三昧經 (three fascicles), translated by Lokakṣema in the Later Han (179 CE, Luoyang). Taishō vol. 13, no. 418. P06 primary source; here cited as the destination-grammar baseline.
Ā-chù fó guó jīng 阿閦佛國經 (Akṣobhyavyūha-sūtra), translated by Lokakṣema in the Later Han. Taishō vol. 11, no. 313, two fascicles. Primary source of this chapter (Akṣobhya line).
Fó shuō wúliàng qīngjìng píngděng jué jīng 佛說無量清淨平等覺經, translated by Lokakṣema in the Later Han (attribution contested; see note ⁶). Taishō vol. 12, no. 361, four fascicles. Primary source of this chapter (early Amitābha line).
Fó shuō Āmítuó sānyé sānfó sàlóu fó tán guòdù réndào jīng 佛說阿彌陀三耶三佛薩樓佛檀過度人道經, translated by Zhi Qian in the Wu kingdom. Taishō vol. 12, no. 362, two fascicles. Recension witness for T0361.
Wúliàng shòu jīng 無量壽經 (the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha), traditionally ascribed to Saṅghavarman of the Cao-Wei (attribution contested). Taishō vol. 12, no. 360. Cited here as a Part IV preview.
Guān wúliàng shòu jīng 觀無量壽經 (Contemplation Sūtra), translated by Kālayaśas in the Liu-Song. Taishō vol. 12, no. 365. Part IV preview.
Āmítuó jīng 阿彌陀經 (the Shorter Sukhāvatīvyūha), translated by Kumārajīva in the Later Qin. Taishō vol. 12, no. 366. Part IV preview.
Sìshí'èr zhāng jīng 四十二章經, Taishō vol. 17, no. 784. P05 primary source; cited here as the register-inheritance background.

Pāli canonical sources (inherited baseline from Part I)

The buddhānussati baseline and the upacāra / appanā boundary established in Part I (P01–P04) are inherited in §III as the background against which the structural move of T0313 / T0361 is read; no fresh Pāli primary citations are introduced in this chapter.

II. Modern Scholarship

Harrison, Paul. The Samādhi of Direct Encounter with the Buddhas of the Present: An Annotated English Translation of the Tibetan Version of the Pratyutpanna-Buddha-Saṃmukhāvasthita-Samādhi-Sūtra. Studia Philologica Buddhica, Monograph Series V. Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1990.
Harrison, Paul. "Who Gets to Ride in the Great Vehicle? Self-Image and Identity Among the Followers of the Early Mahāyāna." Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 10.1 (1987): 67–89.
Harrison, Paul. "Women in the Pure Land: Some Reflections on the Textual Sources." Journal of Indian Philosophy 26 (1998): 553–572.
Kripke, Saul. "A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic." Journal of Symbolic Logic 24.1 (1959): 1–14.
Kripke, Saul. "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic." Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963): 83–94.
Lewis, David. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han 東漢 and Three Kingdoms 三國 Periods. Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica X. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2008.
Williams, Paul. Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2009.
Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. 3rd ed. Leiden: Brill, 2007 (orig. 1959).

III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Abbr.	Full title	Catalogue no.	Translator / author	Use in this paper
T0418	Bānzhōu sānmèi jīng (three fascicles)	Taishō T13 No. 418	Lokakṣema (Later Han, 179 CE)	P06 primary; §2.1 / §3.1 baseline
T0313	Ā-chù fó guó jīng (Akṣobhyavyūha)	Taishō T11 No. 313	Lokakṣema (Later Han)	Primary source (Akṣobhya line)
T0361	Fó shuō wúliàng qīngjìng píngděng jué jīng	Taishō T12 No. 361	Lokakṣema (Later Han; attribution contested)	Primary source (early Amitābha line)
T0362	Fó shuō Āmítuó sānyé sānfó sàlóu fó tán guòdù réndào jīng	Taishō T12 No. 362	Zhi Qian (Wu)	§2.4 recension witness
T0360	Wúliàng shòu jīng	Taishō T12 No. 360	Trad. Saṅghavarman (Cao-Wei)	Part IV preview
T0365	Guān wúliàng shòu jīng	Taishō T12 No. 365	Kālayaśas (Liu-Song)	Part IV preview
T0366	Āmítuó jīng	Taishō T12 No. 366	Kumārajīva (Later Qin)	Part IV preview
T0784	Sìshí'èr zhāng jīng	Taishō T17 No. 784	Kāśyapa Mātaṅga / Zhu Falan	P05 register background

IV. Cross-Reference to Series Papers

Referenced paper	Section	Invoked at	Function
NIAN-P04	Recollection and the Jhānas	§3.4	Extension of the three-sense framework of niànfó sānmèi (A / B / C) into the dual-line structure
NIAN-P05	The Early Niànfó Sūtra Before the Word	§I	Inheritance of the Chinese register-jump thesis
NIAN-P06	Seeing the Buddhas Face to Face	§I, §2.1, §3.1, §IV	Destination-grammar baseline; three-fold semantics of presence; continuation of the interdisciplinary dialogue structure
NIAN-P08	From Recollection to Calling	§VI	The verb shift niàn → chēng
NIAN-P09	The Forty-Eight Vows	§I, §2.3, §VI	T0360 48-vow system
NIAN-P10	The Sixteen Contemplations	§I, §VI	T0365 system of contemplations
NIAN-P11	The Shorter Sūtra and the Single Name	§I, §VI	T0366 description of Sukhāvatī
NIAN-P12	The Śūraṅgama	§3.4	Location of the Mahāsthāmaprāpta chapter's niànfó within the dual-line frame
NIAN-P13	The Lotus	§3.4	Location of the name-calling of the Universal Gateway chapter within the dual-line frame
NIAN-P17	The Laṅkāvatāra	§3.4	Location of "all buddhas' mind is foremost" within the dual-line frame
NIAN-P22	Shandao's Settling of the Name	§V Caveat 2, §VI	The systematic uptake of name-recitation rebirth and its relation to the present chapter's ontological parity thesis

Footnotes

T0418, fascicle 1, Xíng pǐn 行品 chapter 2. "Thus, Bhadrapāla! A bodhisattva in this land, hearing of the buddha Amitābha, recollects him again and again; on account of this recollection, he sees the buddha Amitābha. Having seen the buddha, he asks the buddha: 'What Dharma must I hold in order to be born in Amitābha's buddha-field?' Then the buddha Amitābha speaks to the bodhisattva: 'Those who wish to be born in my land, let them always recollect me, recollect me continually without pause; so shall they come to be born in my land.'" The passage appeared in P06 as the dialogic background to the visionary seeing of the buddha; this chapter foregrounds Amitābha's own first-person invitation within it as the primary textual evidence for the destination-grammar. ↩
Ibid., T0418 fascicle 1, Xíng pǐn chapter 2. The bodhisattva's explicit question about the access-method occurs in the same passage as ¹. The very question presupposes the ontological status of Amitābha's buddha-field as a reachable destination; this presupposition is already in place at the T0418 layer. ↩
T0418 fascicle 1, Wèn shì pǐn 問事品 chapter 1. A line within the long passage of bodhisattva-virtues addressed by Bhadrapāla. The phrase zhuāngyán zhū guótǔ 莊嚴諸國土 ("adorning the buddha-lands") later becomes the standard verb-object locution in Chinese Buddhist tradition for the purification of the buddha-field; its early appearance is already attested in T0418. ↩
Ā-chù fó guó jīng (Akṣobhyavyūha-sūtra), translated by Lokakṣema in the Later Han, Taishō vol. 11, no. 313, two fascicles (in the Ratnakūṭa division). Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden: Brill, 2007, orig. 1959), and Nattier, A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations (Tokyo: IRIAB, 2008), both list this sūtra as a core text of the Lokakṣema corpus. Chapter 1, Fāyì shòuhuì pǐn 發意受慧品. The Chinese title renders the name on two registers: "Akṣobhya" (Ā-chù) transliterates Akṣobhya ("unshakable"), and "buddha-field" (fó guó) translates buddha-kṣetra. ↩
T0313, fascicle 1, Fāyì shòuhuì pǐn chapter 1. This passage is the first vow (the vow of non-anger) made by the bodhisattva Akṣobhya—at that time still a bhikṣu—in the presence of the Tathāgata Mahānetra. "Sàyún ruò" 薩芸若 transliterates sarvajñā (omniscience). "Sēngnà sēngniè" 僧那僧涅 (saṃnāha-saṃnaddha) is the metaphor of the armor of vows donned by the bodhisattva; it is a typical term for the early Mahāyāna bodhisattva's initial resolve. ↩
Fó shuō wúliàng qīngjìng píngděng jué jīng, currently ascribed in the received tradition to Lokakṣema (Later Han), Taishō vol. 12, no. 361, four fascicles (in the Ratnakūṭa division). Modern scholarship has contested the translator attribution: Paul Harrison, "Who Gets to Ride in the Great Vehicle? Self-Image and Identity Among the Followers of the Early Mahāyāna," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 10.1 (1987): 67–89, and Nattier 2008, have both suggested either Zhi Qian rather than Lokakṣema or joint translation as the actual origin. Paul Harrison, "Women in the Pure Land: Some Reflections on the Textual Sources," Journal of Indian Philosophy 26 (1998): 553–572, contains related discussion. This chapter does not enter the philological argument and relies only on the consensus minimum: the range of translation date (late second through early third century) and the translation milieu (the Lokakṣema workshop at Luoyang and its immediate successors). Within that range no major scholarly disagreement obtains. ↩ ↩²
T0361, fascicle 1. Dharma-Treasury (Fǎbǎozàng 法寶藏, an early Chinese form of Dharmākara, also given as Tánmójiāliú 曇摩迦留) makes this request of the buddha Lokeśvararāja (Shìráo-wáng 世饒王; later rendered in T0360 as Shìzìzàiwáng 世自在王). T0362 (Zhi Qian) contains a structurally parallel request; T0360 develops it into a longer dialogic passage; the Sanskrit Sukhāvatīvyūha has the corresponding scene. ↩
T0361, fascicle 1. Lokeśvararāja's canonical statement of the enumeration of the 210 billion buddha-fields for Dharma-Treasury. The corresponding passage in T0362 is slightly different; T0360 subsequently expands the number to "210 billion buddha-lands." This passage is the core citation of §3.3. ↩
T0361, fascicle 1, vows (1) and (2) of the twenty-four. The conditional-vow format ("if this vow is not fulfilled, I shall not become a buddha") runs through all twenty-four vows and is the skeleton format of the Amitābha vow-family; in T0360's forty-eight-vow version the format is preserved, expanded, and refined, but the syntax is continuous. ↩
T0362, fascicle 1. Translated by Zhi Qian, the Yuezhi lay translator working in the Wu kingdom. Ānanda's question shows substantial verbal overlap with the corresponding passage in T0361 fascicle 1, which is direct textual evidence that the two sūtras belong to a single Sukhāvatīvyūha text-cluster. ↩
Saul Kripke, "A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic," Journal of Symbolic Logic 24.1 (1959): 1–14; "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic," Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963): 83–94. David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Kripke semantics is the standard formal semantics for modal logic; Lewis's modal realism is one of the most ontologically radical interpretive positions in the possible-worlds tradition. This chapter takes only their methodological inspiration and does not transplant their full theoretical commitments. ↩

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