The Ten Vows of the Ten Grounds

I. The Question: Why Is the Start of the Path a String of Vows?

In the path of the bodhisattva as the Avataṃsaka-sūtra lays it out, what a bodhisattva does on first reaching the first ground—the Ground of Joy—is not to give, not to keep the precepts, not to enter meditative absorption, but to raise great vows. A full passage of ten great vows is set right at the entrance to the first ground, like a row of signposts planted where the road begins. This raises a question easy to overlook yet quite basic: why should a path of practice have, for its starting point, a string of vows?

On the ordinary intuition, a vow looks like an item on a to-do list. I vow to make offerings to all buddhas, so I make them; I vow to uphold the true Dharma, so I uphold it; each is carried out and crossed off, and so the path is walked to its end. If that were all, then these ten great vows would be, in structural terms, merely an advance table of contents for "everything the ten grounds practice"—of no independent weight in themselves. What would matter is the practice that follows; the vows would be no more than labels for that practice.

This paper argues the reverse. The ten great vows are not a table of contents for the practice of the ten grounds but its spine: not content the path lists item by item, but the structure that first holds the path up and then steers it the whole way along. The vow is set before practice and leads both practice and the wisdom practice depends on. More decisively still, the last beam of this spine—the "inexhaustible" close of the tenth great vow—does not seal the structure shut. It deliberately leaves it forever open. And so a path is a path not because it will eventually be walked to its end, but because, from the very first, it has been held open by a vow that will never be walked to its end.

The argument proceeds in three layers. Section II returns to the sūtra to see how the ten vows of the Ground of Joy are positioned, in the text's own words, as the vows that come "as chief." Section III adds two commentarial layers—Vasubandhu and Chengguan—reinforcing the claim in turn. Section IV holds up contemporary planning and commitment theory as a mirror, showing that "vow as spine" finds both a near-counterpart in Western theories of intention and one decisive empty slot. Section V corrects three misreadings into which it is easy to slip. Section VI closes on the tenth vow's "inexhaustible" and lays a signpost for the later parts of this volume.

One boundary must be set at the outset. The "ten great vows" treated here are the ten vows raised by the first-ground bodhisattva in the Avataṃsaka's "Ten Grounds" chapter (to make offerings to all buddhas; to uphold the true Dharma; to request the turning of the Dharma-wheel; to practice the bodhisattva's conduct; to ripen beings; to attend upon and serve the buddhas; to purify buddha-lands; never to part from bodhisattvas; to benefit beings; to attain perfect awakening)—and they are not the same set as Samantabhadra's "ten great vows" (to pay homage to all buddhas, to praise the tathāgatas, to make vast offerings, and so on) from the "Conduct and Vows of Samantabhadra." The two sets come from two texts and differ in structure. Samantabhadra's ten belong to Part VI of this volume and are not blended in here. If a reader meets the language of "paying homage to all buddhas" or "making vast offerings" later in this paper, that is the wrong set of vows: this paper speaks throughout only of the ten vows of the ten grounds.

II. The Canonical Basis: The Ten Vows "as Chief"

2.1 The Ground of Joy: Making Vows Is the First Thing on the First Ground

In describing the bodhisattva's attainment of the Ground of Joy, the "Ten Grounds" chapter at once records the raising of ten great vows. The text first sums up the bearing of the first-ground bodhisattva who vows:

"Buddha-children! A bodhisattva dwelling on this Ground of Joy can accomplish such great vows, such great valor, such great works."¹

The phrasing worth noting sets "great vows" beside "great works." The vow is not described as a static disposition of mind but as a "work" that "can accomplish"—something meant to act, to hold up everything that follows. The text then lists the ten great vows one by one, each opening "may all…," "may I uphold…," "may I request…," each reaching across all buddhas, all teachings, all lands, all beings, and each sealed with a formula like "vast as the Dharma-realm, ultimate as empty space, exhausting the future, exhausting all eons." The scope the ten vows take in is stretched to the limit from the start.

2.2 "Taking the Ten Vow-Gates as Chief": The Scriptural Proof of Their Governing Status

But what truly raises the ten vows from "ten wishes" to "spine" is the line that follows. Having listed the ten great vows, the text gathers them up:

"Taking these ten vow-gates as chief, one fulfills a hundred thousand myriad incalculable great vows. Buddha-children! This great vow is accomplished by means of ten 'exhaustion' clauses."²

"Taking the ten vow-gates as chief"—this is the pivot of the section. It does not say "the ten vows are ten among the hundred-thousand-myriad great vows," but "the ten vows are the governing head of those hundred-thousand-myriad vows": the countless particular vows are all fulfilled and gathered up by being held under these ten as their master-thread. Pull one thread and the whole net opens—this is exactly the relation of spine to flesh. The spine is not one part among the body's parts; it is the structure by which every part finds its place. So it is with the ten vows in relation to all of a bodhisattva's particular vows.

As for the "ten exhaustion clauses" by which "this great vow is accomplished," these are the ten parallel sentences that immediately follow—"should… be exhausted, my vow would be exhausted"—which is precisely where the tenth vow's "inexhaustible" close lies; this paper takes it up in Section VI. For now, note only this: the "accomplishment" of the ten vows is defined precisely by ten conditional clauses of "exhaustion," and not one of those conditions, as we will see, ever actually obtains.

III. The Argument: Three Commentarial Layers, Each Reinforcing the Last

The sūtra itself has already established the sense of "as chief." But to see the full force of "vow as spine," two further commentarial layers are needed: Vasubandhu's Daśabhūmika-sūtra-śāstra and Chengguan's Commentary on the Avataṃsaka. The first, in its scheme of "three excellences—vow, practice, fruit," sets the vow before both practice and fruit. The second states outright that "practice and wisdom are steered by the vow," and gathers every buddha-vow under these ten.

3.1 Vasubandhu: Vow Stands First among the "Three Excellences"

In his commentary, Vasubandhu sets up a threefold scheme of "comparative excellence" for the first ground:

"Comparative excellence is of three kinds: first, the excellence of vow; second, the excellence of practice; third, the excellence of fruit-benefit. What is the excellence of vow? The ten great vows."³

Note the order of the three: vow, practice, fruit. This is no arbitrary list but a sequence with direction—vow at the front, practice in the middle, fruit-benefit last. Vasubandhu plainly identifies "the ten great vows" as what "the excellence of vow" refers to. In other words, of all that is excellent on the first ground, the first excellence is not the excellence of practice, nor of the fruit attained, but the excellence of the vow; and the vow can stand at the head precisely because it is the precondition on which practice and fruit unfold. At the commentarial level, this turns the sūtra's "chief" into a structural ordering: vow before practice, practice before fruit.

Vasubandhu goes further, showing that the vow's inner structure is not ten parallel single lines but a self-propagating net:

"Within these ten great vows, each single vow has a hundred thousand myriad incalculable great vows as its retinue."⁴

"Retinue" is exactly the right word. It describes the relation between the ten great vows and the hundred-thousand-myriad particular vows as a kind of kinship and propagation: each great vow is not an isolated line but the head of a clan of vows, gathering beneath it countless child- and grandchild-vows. This says, from the angle of "retinue," what the sūtra says from the angle of "governing head": the sūtra has ten vows governing the myriads; Vasubandhu has one vow generating myriads. A vow is not a flat list but a structure that unfolds layer upon layer and is generative. A spine is a spine precisely in that it can hold up and organize far more than itself.

3.2 Chengguan: Practice and Wisdom Are Steered by the Vow

If Vasubandhu establishes the vow's rank (first among the three excellences), Chengguan, in his Commentary, establishes its function—what the vow does. His judgment is exact:

"To raise the ten great vows is the excellence of vow… herein practice and wisdom, because they are steered by the vow, are therefore the most excellent."⁵

"Practice and wisdom are steered by the vow"—this is the strongest statement, at the functional level, of "vow as spine." It says that the bodhisattva's practice and wisdom are led by the vow. The vow is not merely prior to practice in time (as Vasubandhu has it); it governs, in function, the direction of practice and wisdom: where practice goes, where wisdom is cast, the vow sets for them. This lifts the vow from an event that "happens first" to a guide that is "present throughout." A spine is not present only at the moment it first raises the house; it bears load at every moment the house stands. So with the vow in relation to practice and wisdom: not a starting point that withdraws once raised, but the ridgepole that leads practice and wisdom along the whole way.

Chengguan makes a bolder claim still, pushing the reach of this spine to its limit:

"…the ten vows do not exceed these ten… the vow to attain perfect awakening subsumes the twelve great vows of Bhaiṣajyaguru; the vow to purify the land subsumes the forty-eight vows of Amitābha, and so on."⁶

The sense is that the various famous great vows of the Buddhist tradition all fall within the compass of these ten. Bhaiṣajyaguru's twelve great vows can be subsumed under the tenth, the "vow to attain perfect awakening"; Amitābha's forty-eight vows can be subsumed under the "vow to purify buddha-lands." Chengguan here establishes the ten vows of the Ground of Joy as the master-thread of every buddha-vow: however richly the later texts and buddhas may vow, the structure is nothing but these ten vow-gates. If Vasubandhu's "one vow generates myriad retinue-vows" speaks of a single bodhisattva's net of vows, Chengguan's "the ten vows do not exceed these ten" speaks of the whole ocean of Buddhist vows—the one propagating inward, the other gathering outward. Together they fix these ten as the universal spine by which a vow is a vow at all.

So three layers have established "vow as spine" in turn: the sūtra establishes it as "chief" (the governing thread); Vasubandhu establishes its precedence (in rank) and its generativity (in retinue); Chengguan establishes its steering (in function) and its universality (gathering all vows). The vow is not a stretch of the road. The vow is the structure of the road.

IV. Interdisciplinary Bridges: A Commitment "Deliberately Never to Close"

"Vow as spine" now stands secured at the level of sūtra and commentary. This section sets it beside several theories in contemporary Western action philosophy, to see how far this idea can be illuminated in another vocabulary, and where the light cannot reach. A disclaimer first: what follows is heuristic illumination only, not a claim that the Buddhist vow and Western intention-theory are doctrinally equivalent. Their root concerns differ—one is a bodhisattva's vow to liberate all beings exhausting the future, the other a description of how a finite individual acts within a finite life—and the two cannot be reduced to each other. The point of holding up so alien a mirror is only to throw into relief the one most peculiar feature of "vow as spine."

4.1 Planning Theory: Vow as a "Frame for Downstream Reasoning"

In Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987), the action philosopher Michael Bratman advances a well-known thesis: an intention is not merely a prediction about future action but a "building block of plans." Once I have settled on an intention, it ceases to be an option to be reweighed each time and becomes the frame for all my later deliberation—it "frames downstream reasoning," so that my various concrete calculations afterward proceed within the plan already settled, and I need not, and should not, reopen the plan itself at every step.

This has a fairly close echo with "the vow steers practice and wisdom." The first-ground bodhisattva's raising of the ten great vows is much like settling on a master plan: the various particular vows and practice-gates that follow are sub-deliberations carried out within the direction the ten vows frame. The practitioner need not, at each present moment, reopen the question "where, after all, am I going," because the vow framed that direction for the whole road at the very start. "Taking the ten vow-gates as chief, one fulfills a hundred thousand myriad incalculable great vows"—this governing thread and Bratman's "a plan frames downstream reasoning" answer to each other quite exactly in the structural feature of a master frame organizing sub-deliberations. Vasubandhu's "one vow generates myriad retinue" likewise finds here a counterpart in "a plan unfolds into sub-plans."

4.2 The Dischargeable and the Releasable: A Crucial Gap

Yet within this close echo lies a decisive gap—and that gap is exactly where this paper's thesis turns.

A Bratmanian plan is, in its normal case, meant to be discharged: once a plan is achieved, it retires with its task done and is crossed off the inventory of my intentions. The value of a plan lies precisely in its pointing toward a completion that will arrive. A plan that can never be discharged is, for Bratman's theory, defective—it violates the very purpose of a plan as a plan.

Margaret Gilbert's "joint commitment" (On Social Facts, 1989) gives a second model: a commitment constitutes a shared subject; it is not a private resolve but what constitutes "us" as one whole. This has something in common with the boundless bearing of the ten great vows "together with all beings"—the vow does constitute a kind of shared standing between bodhisattva and beings, not an isolated private resolution. But Gilbert's joint commitment is, in principle, releasable, and its parties are finite subjects who can jointly deliberate and agree to release one another.

Christine Korsgaard's "self-constitution" (Self-Constitution, 2009) offers a third angle: action constitutes the agent; through the "practical identity" I take on, I constitute myself as a unified agent. This fits closely with "the bodhisattva is constituted by the ten vows"—a bodhisattva is a bodhisattva precisely as defined by these ten vows. But Korsgaard's self-constitution aims at unifying the present, divided agent into one; its structure has no slot for something "formally open forever."

Each of the three has its strengths, and each shares a common presupposition. Whether Bratman's plan that is "discharged," Gilbert's commitment that can be "released," or Korsgaard's self-constitution that "unifies into one"—each takes some form of completion or closure as the destination of commitment. In all three, a commitment is always set toward a point that will close.

4.3 The Missing Slot: A Deliberately Built Non-Closure

And this is the empty slot on the map of Western commitment theory where the ten vows of the ten grounds come to rest.

The tenth great vow—the "vow to attain perfect awakening"—closes with a passage of the "inexhaustible" (treated fully in the next section): should the realm of beings, the world, the realm of empty space, and the rest come to an end, then my vow would end; yet these cannot be exhausted, and so the wholesome root of this great vow cannot be exhausted either. The tenth vow, in other words, deliberately sets its own "terminal condition" upon a state of affairs that in principle can never obtain. This is not because the bodhisattva's strength falls short of the finish line; it is that, by its very design, the vow has written "never to close" into its structure.

Back to the vocabulary of the three theories: each has a slot for "framing downstream reasoning" (which the vow fills entirely), but none has a slot for "a frame deliberately built never to close." For Bratman, a plan that never completes is defective; for Gilbert, a commitment is in the end releasable; for Korsgaard, self-constitution tends toward unification. A commitment whose completion is the never-obtaining of its terminus finds no fitting cell in three theories whose destinations are completion, release, and unity.

This does not show the Western theories "wrong"—what they describe is the normal case of how a finite individual acts within a finite life, and within that range they are accurate. It shows only that the structural slot the ten vows occupy is one not yet marked on the grid of these theories. The deepest reason the vow can serve as "the spine of the path" rather than "a checklist along the path" is just this: a checklist gets crossed off; a spine does not. And the last beam of this spine is deliberately welded so as never to close.

V. Corrections of the Middle Way

This paper touches on several misreadings easy to slide into. Three are corrected here, to mark the boundaries.

❌ Misreading one: conflating the ten vows of the ten grounds with Samantabhadra's ten great vows. This is the first boundary set at the paper's opening, restated here. The ten vows of the ten grounds (to make offerings to all buddhas, to uphold the true Dharma, to request the turning of the Dharma-wheel… to attain perfect awakening) come from the Avataṃsaka's "Ten Grounds" chapter and are raised by the first-ground bodhisattva. Samantabhadra's ten great vows (to pay homage to all buddhas, to praise the tathāgatas, to make vast offerings… to dedicate all universally) come from the "Conduct and Vows of Samantabhadra" and belong to Part VI of this volume. The two sets come from two texts, differ in their listing, and differ in structure; they cannot stand in for one another. Although Chengguan says "the ten vows do not exceed these ten" and that "the vow to attain awakening subsumes Bhaiṣajyaguru, the vow to purify the land subsumes Amitābha," that says the particular vows of later buddhas can be structurally subsumed by the ten vows of the Ground of Joy—not that Samantabhadra's ten are the ten vows of the ten grounds. Subsumption is not identity.

⚠️ Correction two: "as chief" and "the excellence of vow" mean structural precedence, not sole value. To say the vow stands first among the three excellences of "vow, practice, fruit," and that "practice and wisdom are steered by the vow," speaks of the vow's leading position in structure and function—by no means that practice and wisdom may be omitted, or matter less than the vow. A vow not realized in practice is only an empty vow; wisdom not led by the vow leaves practice without direction. The three form one linked structure—the vow leads practice, practice rests on wisdom, wisdom ripens into fruit—and the vow stands first only as regards the function of setting direction, not to demote practice and wisdom to dependents. The reader must not slide from "the excellence of vow" into a "vow-only" doctrine.

⚠️ Correction three: the tenth vow's "inexhaustible" is a structural feature, not a motivational slogan. The line to come—"because the realm of beings cannot be exhausted, neither can the wholesome root of this great vow"—is easily misread as a rousing banner, as if to say "never give up, hold on to the end." But the weight of the line lies not in heightened feeling but in logical precision: it states the structure of a vow's terminal condition—the terminal condition is set upon a state that never obtains, and so the vow is, in logic, inexhaustible. Read as a motivational slogan, it loses its real edge: the vow's inexhaustibility is not propped up by willpower but guaranteed by structure. The unfolding of this "inexhaustible" into "moment after moment without break" belongs to later parts of this volume; this paper marks only its structural placement in the tenth vow and does not develop its meditative sense.

One further boundary should be noted in passing. The text of the fourth great vow (to practice the bodhisattva's conduct) contains the language of the "six characteristics"—whole and part, same and different, forming and dissolving. The exegesis of the six characteristics has its own home elsewhere (in the giving-gate papers of this series); even where this paper quotes the fourth vow in full, it does not develop the six characteristics doctrinally, taking only the vow's structural place as one of the ten.

VI. Conclusion: Completion as Never Closing

The core finding can be restated in a line: the ten great vows of the Ground of Joy are not a to-do list for the practice of the ten grounds but the architectural spine of that practice—prior to practice (Vasubandhu's "excellence of vow" first among the three), steering practice and wisdom (Chengguan's "practice and wisdom are steered by the vow"), and governing the myriad particular vows (the sūtra's "taking the ten vow-gates as chief," Vasubandhu's "one vow generates myriad retinue," Chengguan's "the ten vows do not exceed these ten"). The most peculiar feature of this spine is that its last beam is deliberately welded never to close. The tenth great vow ends the whole with a passage of the "inexhaustible":

"Should the realm of beings be exhausted, my vow would be exhausted; …but because the realm of beings cannot be exhausted… the wholesome root of this great vow has no exhaustion."⁷

This line locks the whole spine into a frame that never closes. Its form is a conditional—"if A is exhausted, then my vow is exhausted"—but the condition A it sets (the realm of beings, and on to the world, the realm of empty space, the Dharma-realm) is a state of affairs that in principle cannot be exhausted. So the consequent of this conditional (my vow is exhausted) is never triggered, and the vow is, in logic, without a time of exhaustion. The vow goes uncompleted not because it "happens" to fall short of the finish line, but because from the very first it set the finish line in a place that will not arrive. "Completion as never closing"—this is the capstone line of the ten-vow spine, and the deepest resting place of "vow as the spine of the path."

A common misreading of the word "exhausted" must be corrected here. Vasubandhu has already parsed it for us:

"That this matter is said to be 'exhausted' shows it to be unbroken to the end, not a moment-by-moment ceasing."⁸

That is, the "exhaustion" spoken of in the sūtra means "continuing unbroken to the exhausting of the future" (unbroken-to-the-end), not "ceasing from moment to moment" (moment-by-moment ceasing). The "exhausted" of "inexhaustible" is not the exhaustion of extinction but the "exhausting of the future" that stretches on to no end. The vow's inexhaustibility is therefore not a weary "not yet over" propped up by effort, but a "forever continuing" that is so by structure.

As a guide for practice, this structural reading dissolves a common difficulty. Facing a great vow like "beings are numberless; I vow to liberate them all," a practitioner readily feels a Sisyphean futility—since the liberating can never be finished, is the vow not doomed to failure? The spine-reading answers: the vow's non-completability is not its failure but the very locus of its character as practice. A checklist that gets crossed off retires the day it is finished; a spine that never closes can, just because it does not close, hold up the road and steer practice and wisdom exhausting the future. The power of a vow as vow lies not in its eventually being cashed out but in its forever setting direction.

An open question left for later. This paper establishes the structural face of the ten vows as "the spine of the architecture," but the capstone beam—the tenth vow's inexhaustibility, and how it is actually held up in the meditative "moment after moment without break"—awaits its full unfolding in the later parts of this volume, where the "non-completability" of the four great vows and the "moment-after-moment continuity" of Samantabhadra's conduct-vows are taken up. This paper sets only its structural placement, laying a signpost: when the structural feature "the vow never closes" moves from the static description of "the spine of the ten grounds" to the dynamic practice of "moment after moment without break," how will it turn a single "point of raising" into a "line continuing to the exhausting of the future"? That question is left for later.

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References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

• Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra (Avataṃsaka-sūtra, eighty-fascicle recension), fascicle 34, "Ten Grounds" chapter. Trans. Śikṣānanda (Tang). Taishō vol. 10, no. 279.
• Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra (Avataṃsaka-sūtra, sixty-fascicle recension), fascicle 23. Trans. Buddhabhadra (Eastern Jin). Taishō vol. 9, no. 278.
• Daśabhūmika-sūtra-śāstra, fascicle 3. Composed by Vasubandhu (Tianqin); trans. Bodhiruci et al. (Later Wei). Taishō vol. 26, no. 1522.
• Commentary on the Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra, fascicle 34. By Chengguan (Tang). Taishō vol. 35, no. 1735.

II. Modern Scholarship

• Bratman, Michael E. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Gilbert, Margaret. On Social Facts. Princeton University Press, 1989.
• Korsgaard, Christine M. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford University Press, 2009.

III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Short title	Full title	Taishō no.	Author / translator
Avataṃsaka (80)	Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra (eighty-fascicle)	T0279《大方廣佛華嚴經》(八十華嚴)Avataṃsaka-sūtra (80-fascicle)T10, No. 279Śikṣānanda (Tang, 695–699 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 10)	trans. Śikṣānanda (Tang)
Avataṃsaka (60)	Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra (sixty-fascicle)	T0278《大方廣佛華嚴經》(六十華嚴)Avataṃsaka-sūtra (60-fascicle)T9, No. 278Buddhabhadra (Eastern Jin, 418–420 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 9)	trans. Buddhabhadra (Eastern Jin)
Daśabhūmika-śāstra	Daśabhūmika-sūtra-śāstra	T1522《十地經論》Daśabhūmika-sūtra-śāstraT26, No. 1522View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 26)	Vasubandhu; trans. Bodhiruci et al. (Later Wei)
Avataṃsaka Commentary	Commentary on the Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra	T1735《大方廣佛華嚴經疏》T35, No. 1735View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 35)	Chengguan (Tang)

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Cross-References

• The standing of the perfection of vow (vow as the eighth of the ten perfections, ascendant on the Immovable Ground): see the preceding paper of this Part, Vow as the Eighth Perfection (PRANIDHANA-P06). The present paper carries that "standing of the vow" forward and lands it as the "spine of the vow" at the starting point of the ten grounds.
• The giving-face of the Ground of Joy: the giving of the Ground of Joy (the threshold of entry) belongs to the giving-gate papers of this series; the present paper shares the same ground but takes its "vow-face" (the spine of the ten grounds), leaving the giving-face to those neighbors (cross-referenced, not re-taught).
• The six characteristics (whole and part, same and different, forming and dissolving): the language of the six characteristics within the text of the fourth great vow has its exegetical home in the giving-gate papers of this series; the present paper quotes the fourth vow but does not develop the six characteristics.
• The unfolding of "inexhaustible / moment-after-moment continuity": the dynamic, meditative face of the tenth vow's "inexhaustible" carries forward from the repentance-gate papers of this series and awaits fuller treatment later in this volume, where the "non-completability" of the four great vows and the "moment-after-moment continuity" of Samantabhadra's conduct-vows are taken up; the present paper sets only its structural placement.

Footnotes

1. Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra (eighty-fascicle recension), fascicle 34, "Ten Grounds" chapter 26, part 1, Ground of Joy. Taishō vol. 10, no. 279, p. 181b. ↩

2. Ibid., p. 182b. The "ten exhaustion clauses" refer to the ten parallel sentences that follow—"should… be exhausted, my vow would be exhausted"—the locus of the tenth vow's "inexhaustible" close (see note 7). ↩

3. Daśabhūmika-sūtra-śāstra, fascicle 3, composed by Vasubandhu (Tianqin), trans. Bodhiruci et al. (Later Wei). Taishō vol. 26, no. 1522, p. 138b. ↩

4. Ibid., p. 141a. ↩

5. Commentary on the Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra, fascicle 34, by Chengguan (Tang). Taishō vol. 35, no. 1735, p. 761b. ↩

6. Ibid., p. 764d. Here Chengguan establishes the ten vows of the Ground of Joy as the master-thread of every buddha-vow, holding that Bhaiṣajyaguru's twelve vows can be subsumed under the vow to attain perfect awakening, and Amitābha's forty-eight vows under the vow to purify buddha-lands. ↩

7. Mahāvaipulya-buddhâvataṃsaka-sūtra (eighty-fascicle recension), fascicle 34. Taishō vol. 10, no. 279, p. 182b. The quotation here is an abbreviated form of the conditional; its full parallel runs through ten clauses covering the world, the realm of empty space, the Dharma-realm, the realm of nirvāṇa, the realm of buddhas' appearing, the realm of tathāgata-wisdom, the realm of mind's objects, the realm of the objects entered by buddha-wisdom, and the realm of the turning of the world, the turning of the Dharma, and the turning of wisdom—each running "should… be exhausted, my vow would be exhausted; but because… cannot be exhausted, the wholesome root of this great vow has no exhaustion." The sixty-fascicle recension, fascicle 23 (Taishō vol. 9, no. 278, p. 545b), gives a numbered variant rendering—"first, beings cannot be exhausted… so too the wholesome roots of my vows cannot be exhausted"—differing in wording but not in sense; the eighty-fascicle recension is followed here. ↩

8. Daśabhūmika-sūtra-śāstra, fascicle 3. Taishō vol. 26, no. 1522, p. 141b. ↩