Vow-Power as the Architecture of a Pure Land

I. The Question: Where Does the Land of Bliss Come From?

Anyone who has practiced the recollection of the Buddha knows that there is a Land of Bliss in the West — arrayed with seven jewels, lotus-pools of meritorious water, ground of gold, birds singing in concord. We are familiar with its splendors, and yet hardly anyone stops to press a plainer question: this land — where does it come from?

It was not discovered. Sukhāvatī is not like an island that already existed and only awaited the explorer's arrival; before the Forty-Eight Vows were ever raised, there was no ready-made Land of Bliss waiting quietly out beyond ten trillion buddha-fields. Nor was it built — a Pure Land is not a project in which a design is drawn first and craftsmen then lay it up brick by brick to specification. So if it was neither found nor constructed, how exactly did it come to be?

This paper's answer is: it was accomplished out of one monk's vow. A Pure Land is a place congealed out of a vow. Before the buddha Lokeśvararāja, the monk Dharmākara raised forty-eight vows; then, across five eons of contemplation and immeasurable eons of cultivated merit, that bundle of vows rose tier by tier and filled out layer by layer, until at last it was "accomplished" as a land splendid enough to be reborn into, settled enough to dwell in. The Pure Land, in other words, is the vow congealed, the vow made enterable; and the Forty-Eight Vows are the grammar of that congealing.

The prior paper in this series treated the general sort of vow — the abstract, inexhaustible "I vow to ferry across the boundless beings" held in common by every bodhisattva.¹ That paper closed on the vow's unfinishability: the Four Great Vows are engineered so their terminating condition can never be met, and so the vow never runs dry. The present paper turns from the general to the particular: no longer the abstract frame shared by all bodhisattvas, but one monk's concrete, single-occasion, forty-clause oath; and it asks how a vow can do more than be raised — how it can actually be accomplished into a whole world.

The thesis can be stated at the outset in a single line. The Forty-Eight Vows are not an inventory of the Land of Bliss's features; they are the generative grammar by which vow-power mortgages buddhahood to beings' benefit and then, through eons of merit, burns that vow into a land. What follows first unpacks the grammar of the vow-text (§II), then traces its vertical chain from vow to land (§III), holds up two Western mirrors — worldmaking and possible worlds — to illuminate it (§IV), corrects three readings into which one easily slips (§V), and finally gathers the whole and plants a signpost for the next (§VI).

II. The Canonical Basis: The Grammar of the Vow-Text

2.1 The Self-Binding Conditional: "If, When I Attain Buddhahood… May I Not Take the Perfect Awakening"

To read the Forty-Eight Vows aright, one must first read their syntax. The forty-eight are laid out, from first to last, in a single recurring sentence-form; each vow is a conditional of the shape "If, when I attain buddhahood, [thus-and-so obtains in my land], may I not take the perfect awakening." Take the first vow as the model:²

"If, when I attain buddhahood, there should be in my land the hells, the realm of hungry ghosts, or the animal realm, may I not take the perfect awakening."

Look closely at the structure of that sentence. Its antecedent ("If I attain buddhahood") concerns the maker's own becoming a buddha; its conditional clause ("there should be in my land the three lower realms") concerns one feature of the land; and its consequent ("may I not take the perfect awakening") locks the two together: should the land fail to meet this condition, then I would rather not become a buddha at all. Across the forty-eight, the phrase "if I attain buddhahood" recurs forty-eight times, and each time it binds that enormous thing — my becoming a buddha — to one clause of beings' benefit.

This is the grammatical backbone of the Forty-Eight Vows; this paper names it the self-binding conditional. Its force lies just here: the vow-text is not describing the look of an ideal realm (that would take the declarative form, "my land will be thus-and-so"); it is staking collateral — the maker puts up his own greatest attainment, the perfect awakening, buddhahood itself, as security, pledged against whether beings can be benefited. What the vow shows here is no longer merely an orientation ("this is what I want") but a binding ("if not thus, I do not become"). The claim that "vow-power is the architecture of the land" has its grammatical warrant precisely in this.

2.2 The Self-Oath: The Verse Restatement's "May I Not Become a Fully Awakened One"

If the forty-eight clauses spread the collateral across forty-eight conditions, then the sūtra's verse restatement compresses that same staking-structure into a single comprehensive oath:³

"I have founded a vow surpassing the worlds, and must reach the unsurpassed way; should this vow not be fulfilled, may I not become a fully awakened one."

"I have founded a vow surpassing the worlds" — I set up a vow beyond all the worlds; "and must reach the unsurpassed way" — I am bound to walk through to the unsurpassed buddha-way; and the crux is the last two lines: "should this vow not be fulfilled, may I not become a fully awakened one" — if this vow is not brought to fullness, I swear not to become a buddha. Here is where the vow's power resides: the maker stakes his entire becoming a buddha. The vow, at this point, is no longer a petition or a wish in the ordinary sense (which would only entrust a heart's desire to the future), nor an inventory listing out various splendors (which would only set down a blueprint item by item); it is a collateral-structure that welds "buddhahood" to "the deliverance of beings" — the two stand or fall together, with no third possibility in between.

A point of textual collation deserves to be flagged in passing. The closing line of this verse restatement, in Saṃghavarman's rendering, reads "I swear not to become a fully awakened one" rather than "the perfect awakening" (the following stanza — "For the multitude I will open the Dharma-treasury and broadly bestow the jewel of merit… everywhere relieving the destitute and suffering, I swear not to become a fully awakened one" — uses the same closing form). The two expressions are equivalent in sense here (both name full buddhahood), but the textual fact is as it is, and a citation must not let the hand slip and substitute one for the other. This paper, wherever it touches the verse, follows the base text. The point is purely philological; nothing in the argument turns on drawing a doctrinal distinction between two grades of awakening, and none should be read in.

III. The Argument: Vow-Power Burns the Blueprint into Real Ground

3.1 The Power of the Vow Lies in Its Capacity to "Accomplish"

Gathering up the grammar of §II, one basic judgment can be fixed first: what earns the Forty-Eight Vows the name "vow-power" is not how vast the vowing is or how complete the listing, but that it can accomplish. A vow that halts at the moment of its raising is no different from any fine notion; the singular thing about the Forty-Eight Vows is that they actually burned themselves into a land. This path from vow to land the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha spells out plainly; this paper names it vow-power's vertical generative chain.

The chain has three segments. The first is the vow at the causal stage: before the buddha Lokeśvararāja, the monk Dharmākara gathered up the pure practices of two hundred and ten koṭis of buddha-fields and bound them into forty-eight vows. The second is the eons of merit: having raised the vow, Dharmākara did not fold his hands and wait for it to redeem itself, but across five eons of contemplation and, over immeasurable eons, the cultivation of a bodhisattva's measureless merit, filled the vow with deeds and made it solid with merit. The third is the vow's accomplishment — and this is the most decisive stroke in the whole sūtra.

3.2 The Fulfilment Passage: The Vow Has Been Burned into a Land

The third segment the sūtra brings out through an exchange between Ānanda and the Buddha. Ānanda asks: has the bodhisattva Dharmākara already become a buddha and passed into extinction? Has he not yet become a buddha? Or is he a buddha now, in the present? The Buddha answers:⁴

"The bodhisattva Dharmākara has now already become a buddha and dwells at present in the West, ten trillion buddha-fields from here; his buddha-world is named Peace-and-Bliss. … Since his attaining buddhahood, ten eons in all have passed."

Note the exactness of tense and bearing in these words. It does not say "Dharmākara will become a buddha," nor "there will be a Land of Bliss"; it says "has now already become a buddha," "dwells at present in the West," "ten eons in all have passed since his attaining buddhahood." In other words, the vow at the causal stage and the eons of practice have, by this point, borne fruit: Dharmākara has become the buddha Amitābha, and that land which once existed only inside forty-eight clauses of "if I attain buddhahood" is now a Land of Bliss fully realized, locatable by bearing (out beyond ten trillion buddha-fields, in the West) and datable by age (ten eons a buddha).

This stroke is the pivot of the paper's entire argument. It tells us that the Forty-Eight Vows are not a string of wishes parked in the maker's mouth, but a vow-power that will "burn into" a land. The self-binding conditional "if I attain buddhahood… may I not take the perfect awakening" is, at the causal stage, collateral, a binding; and once eons of merit have filled every one of its consequent clauses, that collateral is redeemed — buddhahood and land come to stand together. Here, for the first time, the vow shows its true power: not merely orientation (aspiration) but the capacity to accomplish (accomplishment). When we say "a Pure Land is the vow congealed," this is the mechanism of the congealing: vow-power is the vertical force that burns a blueprint into real ground.

3.3 Original Vow-Power: The Generative Cause of Land and Merit

If the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha displays this generative force by way of narrative (the fulfilment passage), Vasubandhu's Treatise on Rebirth names it outright in a single verse:⁵

"Beholding the Buddha's original vow-power, none who meet it pass by in vain; it can swiftly fill the great jewel-ocean of merit."

The verse's keywords are the three-character "original vow-power" and the active verb "it can." Vasubandhu does not read original vow-power as a static background condition but as an active force — it "can" cause those who meet it swiftly to fill the great jewel-ocean of merit; it is the generative cause of the land's splendor and the practitioner's merit. The line "none who meet it pass by in vain" especially repays attention: of those who truly meet this original vow-power, not one meets it idly, to no effect — and a power is a power precisely in that it does something real to what it meets, rather than merely sitting there to be picked up at will.

Reading the fulfilment passage together with the original-vow-power verse, a complete picture appears: the vow (self-binding conditional, self-oath) → eons of merit → the vow accomplished as a splendid land; and what runs through the whole and drives its tier-by-tier ascent is just this "original vow-power." The land is neither a ready-made thing discovered nor a finished product designed and engineered, but something vowed into being. The Pure Land is precisely because this power vowed it into being.

IV. Interdisciplinary Bridges: The Made World and the Vowed World

To make the claim — that a Pure Land is congealed out of a vow — sharper still, two strands of recent Western discussion about "how a world comes to stand" offer two complementary mirrors.

A likeness: a world is made, not found. In Ways of Worldmaking, the philosopher Nelson Goodman advanced a well-known claim: the various "worlds" we talk about are not found ready-made but are made — worldmaking — through symbolic, constructive activities; art has its world-version, science has its world-version, and there is no single neutral, ready-made world waiting to be discovered. This position vindicates the paper's thesis: the Pure Land is exactly a "made world," not a world that "was there all along, waiting to be reached." On the root point — that a world is made, not picked up — Goodman and this paper are in accord.

But the focus of this mirror must be corrected at once. Goodman's worldmaking is cognitive and symbolic: it concerns how different systems of description construct different world-versions, and its ground-tone is epistemological. Vow-power's worldmaking is soteriological and ontological: the Forty-Eight Vows plus eons of merit congeal not a "version," not a system of description, but an actual land that can be reborn into and dwelt in. What the vow makes is not just a way of seeing the world but a place of being that can receive sentient beings. The mirror can reflect the outline "a world is made," but it cannot reflect the depth "burned by vow-power and merit into a real land."

A contrast: not a possible world that "exists already," but a world actualized by vow-power. Set against Goodman is David Lewis's modal realism. Lewis holds that all possible worlds are, like our own actual world, concretely and really existing, independent of any mind — they are not actualized by anyone; they were always there. Hold the Pure Land up to this mirror and the difference leaps out: the Pure Land is precisely not a Lewisian, "already-existing" possible world. It is not some ready-made world subsisting on its own before and outside the Forty-Eight Vows, merely happening to be "selected" by Dharmākara's vow; it is actualized by the Forty-Eight Vows and original vow-power. The gap between "a possible world that exists already" and "a world brought into being by a vow" is exactly what throws into relief the thing this paper means to isolate — vow-power as the power of actualization. The vow did not pick one out of many ready-made worlds; it burned a splendor that did not yet exist into existence.

A foil to be refused: the Pure Land is not a designed utopia. There is a third mirror, to be used by way of refusal. It is easy to read the Forty-Eight Vows as a "design specification for a Pure Land" — as though Sukhāvatī were first precision-designed (this clause stipulating no three lower realms, that clause stipulating beings golden in form, this one stipulating measureless lifespan) and then engineered to spec, like the meticulously planned commonwealth of Thomas More's Utopia. This reading must be blocked here.

It should be said honestly: to read the Forty-Eight Vows as a designed artifact — analyzing their distribution across the axes of the "receptacle world" and the "world of beings," classifying and proportioning their several kinds of splendor — is a legitimate angle, one already handled in dedicated studies, with its own value; this paper neither restates nor disputes it.⁶ What this paper asks is exactly the vertical question that the "design" angle brackets out: even if we list every specification of the Pure Land with perfect clarity, one question still hangs unanswered — how does vow-power burn this specification-sheet into a real land? Design can tell you what the blueprint looks like; it cannot tell you how the blueprint comes true.

And between the Forty-Eight Vows and ordinary design there runs a line the designer can never cross: a designer never mortgages his own attainment into the thing he designs. An architect designs an ideal city; if the city is never built, he remains an architect. A utopian sketches an ideal commonwealth; if the commonwealth never exists, the sketcher is none the worse. Dharmākara alone is otherwise — "if I attain buddhahood… may I not take the perfect awakening": he stakes his own becoming a buddha on the land's coming to stand. What makes the vow more than a blueprint is just this clause of self-mortgage, and a blueprint mortgages nothing. Vow-power, as a power of worldmaking, has its root generativity in this self-mortgaging orientation — neither found (Lewis), nor merely symbolically constructed (Goodman), nor designed (utopia), but vowed into being. It is worth marking that no Western frame on offer reads "staking one's own buddhahood in order to generate a land" as a species of worldmaking; that move is the Dharma's own.

V. Corrections of the Middle Way

This section marks three readings into which one easily slides (using ❌ for a doctrinal swerve, ⚠️ for a textual trap), as boundary-stakes for holding the middle.

❌ The Forty-Eight Vows are not an "inventory of amenities." The most surface-level misreading takes the Forty-Eight Vows for a feature-catalog of the Land of Bliss — as though each clause itemized "what this land has and lacks," the way a property listing tallies a development's amenities. This reading drops the most important thing in the vow-text: its closing clause. Every vow goes beyond description ("in my land there is thus-and-so") and ends with "…may I not take the perfect awakening" — it is not enumerating the land's advantages but staking buddhahood on those advantages' coming to be. To read "if I attain buddhahood… may I not take the perfect awakening" as "a list of this land's amenities" is to mistake a contract of surety, with life and death at stake, for a tourist brochure. The vow is not an inventory, because an inventory never puts up the lister's whole estate and person as security.

❌ This paper does not redo "design analysis"; what it asks is vertical generation. The second thing to keep clear is not a misreading but a division of labor. As the previous section said, to study the Forty-Eight Vows as a designed object — classifiable, proportionable, analyzable — is a self-sufficient and effective cross-sectional angle, already treated in dedicated work.⁶ This paper does not repeat that apparatus of the receptacle/beings dual axes, the classification of splendors, the calculation of proportions; it runs the orthogonal direction — a vertical generativity: how the vow, through eons of merit, is "accomplished" from a causal-stage oath into the splendor of the fruition stage. The cross-section asks "what the Pure Land was designed to be like"; the vertical asks "how this design was burned into truth." The two do not contend for the same ground; each holds its own axis. If the reader finds this paper silent on design-classification, that is not an oversight but a deliberate yielding of the floor.

⚠️ "The 18th vow = the chosen primal vow, the rest mere expedients" is not a reading native to the sūtra-text. The third is a textual trap easy to step on. Later tradition — most conspicuously in the later elaboration of Japanese Shin Buddhism — developed a widely influential reading that singles out the eighteenth of the Forty-Eight Vows ("If, when I attain buddhahood, the beings of the ten directions, with sincere mind and joyful faith wishing to be born in my land, down to ten recollections, are not born there, may I not take the perfect awakening — excepting only those who commit the five heinous deeds or slander the true Dharma")⁷ and elevates it alone as "the primal vow among primal vows," Amitābha's real choice, treating the other forty-seven as expedient, as supporting cast. This position has its own context and weight in the history of doctrine, but it must be stated plainly: it is not a reading native to the text of the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha itself. In Saṃghavarman's rendering, the forty-eight vows are laid out flatly in parallel, uniform in sentence-form, forty-eight self-binding conditionals; the text itself does not single out one vow as primary and the rest as subordinate. Where this paper touches the eighteenth vow, it takes the vow-power structure it shares with all the rest — staking buddhahood on beings' rebirth; the further claim that "down to ten recollections" functions as the entry-threshold for rebirth is handled in dedicated work and not redone here.⁸ On any discrimination of a "chosen primal vow," this paper aligns throughout with the verdict "this is later interpretation, not the sūtra's native reading," and never writes it as the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha's own position, lest it contradict itself.

VI. Conclusion

The thesis, restated. A Pure Land is not a place that merely happens to exist somewhere; it is a place congealed out of a vow. The Forty-Eight Vows are not an inventory of the Land of Bliss's features but the generative grammar by which vow-power mortgages buddhahood to beings and then, through eons of merit, burns that vow into a land — "if I attain buddhahood… may I not take the perfect awakening": each vow stakes the maker's own becoming a buddha on beings' benefit; the verse restatement "should this vow not be fulfilled, may I not become a fully awakened one" pushes that staking to its limit. And when eons of merit have filled every consequent clause, that bundle of vows is "accomplished" as the Land of Bliss, now in the West, ten eons since its buddha attained awakening. Here, for the first time, the vow shows its true power: not merely orientation, but the capacity to accomplish. In one line: the Pure Land is a land burned out of vow-power.

A direction for practice. From this a directional pointer follows. Facing the Land of Bliss, one need not take it only as a ready-made place of ease, waiting for me to be reborn and enjoy it; more worth realizing is that every measure of that land's splendor is congealed out of a bundle of vow-power and eons of merit — that behind it stands a "if not thus, I do not become a buddha" mortgage. Realizing this, the buddha one recollects and the land one vows toward are no longer two things: the very buddha I keep in mind is the very buddha into whose land I vow to be born; recollection and vow arise here in mutual dependence, each the inside of the other. (As for the practice of buddha-recollection and the calling of the name themselves, the gate of recollection has its own dedicated treatment, not rehearsed here.)

An open question. Yet the paper also leaves, at its close, one question still unanswered. This paper has treated how a vow "accomplishes" a land — vow → land, one face of vow-power. But however vast the vow and however splendid the land, if beings have no way to "board" it, no way to be joined to it, then is this accomplished Land of Bliss not still one bodhisattva's private affair? Tanluan saw this thorn long ago: "Were it not for the Buddha's power, the forty-eight vows would have been founded in vain."⁹ If vow-power can accomplish a land (vow → land), then how is this accomplished land boarded by beings (land ← practitioner)? How does this accomplished original vow-power open toward, and get caught by, the one who practices? That question reaches into a deeper grammar of "Other-Power" and "delivery"; this paper only sets its marker and lays its road. The detail is reserved for the next paper, The Grammar of Other-Power and Delivery.

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References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

• Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha (Fo shuo wuliangshou jing), trans. Saṃghavarman (Cao-Wei), Taishō vol. 12, No. 360.
• Treatise on Rebirth (Wuliangshou jing youpotishe yuansheng ji / Wangsheng lun), composed by Vasubandhu, trans. Bodhiruci (Yuan-Wei), Taishō vol. 26, No. 1524.
• Commentary on the Treatise on Rebirth (Wangsheng lun zhu), commentary by Tanluan, Taishō vol. 40, No. 1819.

II. Modern Scholarship

• Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. (Worlds are "made," not "found.")
• Lewis, David. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. (Modal realism: the independent self-existence of possible worlds.)
• More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516. (The planned ideal commonwealth, as a foil for the "designed world.")

III. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Short title	Full title	Taishō no.	Author / Translator
Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha	Fo shuo wuliangshou jing	T0360《佛說無量壽經》(大經)Larger Sukhāvatī-vyūhaT12, No. 360Saṃghavarman / Kang Sengkai (Three Kingdoms, ca. 252 CE — attributed; modern scholarship debates)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 12)	trans. Saṃghavarman
Treatise on Rebirth	Wuliangshou jing youpotishe yuansheng ji	T1524《無量壽經優波提舍願生偈》(往生論)Sukhāvatī-vyūha-upadeśa (Vasubandhu)T26, No. 1524Bodhiruci (Northern Wei, 529–543 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 26)	Vasubandhu, composed / Bodhiruci, trans.
Commentary on the Treatise on Rebirth	Wangsheng lun zhu	T1819《梵網經菩薩戒本疏》(義寂)T40, No. 1819Yijaek (Silla, ca. 7th c. CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (vol. 40)	Tanluan, commentary

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Cross-References to Other Papers in the Series

This paper carries forward from the prior paper The Unfinishable Vow (P10, which sealed Part IV), turning from the abstract general vow of the Four Great Vows to the concrete particular vow of Amitābha's original vows, and opening Part V (The Primal Vows of Amitābha). It establishes a vertical account of vow-power's accomplishment (vow → land), taking three witnesses — the self-binding conditional of the Forty-Eight Vows, the vertical chain of the vow's accomplishment, and Vasubandhu's original-vow-power verse — to argue how vow-power burns a blueprint into real ground. The cross-sectional design analysis of the Forty-Eight Vows, and the entry-threshold claim about the eighteenth vow's "ten recollections," belong to other treatments and are not redone here; the "being boarded" face of Other-Power and original vow-power (land ← practitioner), with Tanluan's "were it not for the Buddha's power, the forty-eight vows would have been founded in vain" as its suture-line, is handed to the next paper, The Grammar of Other-Power and Delivery. The merit-transfer pair of the "going-forth" and "returning" aspects is reserved for Part VI, and the question of vowing with a mind of nothing-to-attain (the vow and emptiness) for later in this volume. The practice of buddha-recollection and the calling of the name has its own dedicated treatment and is not touched here.

Footnotes

1. See the prior paper in this series, The Unfinishable Vow (Part IV, P10). That paper treated the general skeleton of the Four Great Vows and closed on "the vow's unfinishability" — its terminating condition designed never to be met, so the vow never runs dry; it laid the ground for the present turn from the general vow to Amitābha's particular vow. ↩

2. Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha (Fo shuo wuliangshou jing), fascicle 1, trans. Saṃghavarman (Cao-Wei), Taishō vol. 12, No. 360, p. 267c. The first vow, which is also the syntactic paradigm of the self-binding conditional for all forty-eight (the phrase "if I attain buddhahood" occurs forty-eight times across the vows). ↩

3. Same source, fascicle 1, p. 269b. The opening stanza of the verse restatement. ★ The base text reads "I swear not to become a fully awakened one," not "the perfect awakening"; the following stanza ("everywhere relieving the destitute and suffering, I swear not to become a fully awakened one") uses the same form. A citation must not alter it. The two expressions are equivalent in sense (both name full buddhahood); no doctrinal distinction is to be read in. ↩

4. Same source, fascicle 1, p. 270a (the Ānanda exchange; the fulfilment passage). The phrase "ten eons in all have passed since his attaining buddhahood" marks the vow as having been accomplished, from a causal-stage oath into a fruition-stage land. ↩

5. Wuliangshou jing youpotishe yuansheng ji (the Treatise on Rebirth, Wangsheng lun), composed by the bodhisattva Vasubandhu, trans. Bodhiruci (Yuan-Wei), Taishō vol. 26, No. 1524, p. 231a. The "original vow-power" verse, whose active "it can" marks vow-power as the generative cause of land and merit. ↩

6. The cross-sectional analysis of the Forty-Eight Vows as a "designed object of splendor" — their distribution across the receptacle-world / beings-world axes, the classification of Vasubandhu's twenty-nine splendors in the Treatise on Rebirth, the proportioning of the several kinds, and so on — is treated at length elsewhere in this project, and is not redone here; wherever design-classification is at issue, it is pointed to that dedicated treatment. The present paper runs orthogonal to it, taking only the vertical-generation side. ↩ ↩²

7. Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha, fascicle 1, p. 268a. The text of the eighteenth vow. This paper takes the vow-power structure it shares with the rest — staking buddhahood on beings' rebirth. ↩

8. The claim that "down to ten recollections" functions as the entry-threshold for rebirth is handled in dedicated work elsewhere in this project and not redone here. ↩

9. Wuliangshou jing youpotishe yuansheng ji zhu (the Commentary on the Treatise on Rebirth, Wangsheng lun zhu), commentary by Tanluan, Taishō vol. 40, No. 1819, p. 844a. This is the suture-line closing the present paper and opening the next; its "Other-Power / the original vow-power being boarded" face is reserved for detailed treatment in the next paper. ↩