藥師琉璃光如來本願功德經 聞名利益

Up to now the vows have been the Buddha’s, made upon the ground of cause. Here the subject changes: what a name does once it has reached a human being.

Five Kinds of Person

Five kinds of person are raised one after another.

The one who cannot let go — who gives as though slicing his own flesh, and will not even spend on himself. The one who has broken something, and broken it by stages: precepts gone, bearing spoiled, view bent, sūtras left unread, and last and hardest to detect, the conceit that grows only in someone who has learned enough. The one who measures himself against others — grudging, envious, self-praising, disparaging, all four together. The one who sets about doing real injury: an enemy’s name written down and made into an image, spirits called in to curse him. And finally the one who has vowed to be reborn in the West and cannot bring his mind to rest.

Five people; five destinations — hungry ghost, animal, hell, servitude, and a next life left hanging.

They are not graded, and none is called the more salvageable. Each is written down, and after each the same name is set.

Twice the Word Briefly

The sentence where things turn wants reading word by word: because in a former human life he had once briefly heard the name of that Tathāgata, now in the evil destiny he briefly calls that name to mind.

Briefly, in the human world, long ago. Briefly, in the evil destiny, now.

The first tells us the hearing was casual — not the receiving of Dharma, only having heard it. The second tells us the recollection was momentary — not sustained mindfulness, only a thing coming back.

Across the five sections, what the sūtra says of hearing stays this light: briefly heard, once heard, come to hear. Nowhere is attention required, nowhere purity, nowhere a quantity.

So light that one wants to supply a threshold on the sūtra’s behalf. None is supplied.

Yet what gets accomplished is very heavy: from the pain of parting with a coin, all the way to giving away head and eyes and hands and feet to whoever asks. The entrance is as low as it can be; the exit is a long way off.

The One Who Is Still Wavering

Strangest of all is the last of the five.

A sūtra of an eastern buddha ends by making provision for someone who has vowed to be born in the West and whose mind is not yet settled — not for the unbeliever, not for the steady believer, but for the one who has already made the vow and whose heart still hangs.

To him the sūtra says: hear this name, and at the hour of death eight bodhisattvas will come and show him the road.

Not fetch him east. Point him west.

One buddha’s name put to work on another buddha’s pure land, and what it repairs is exactly the wavering.

Hesitation is not a fault to be punished; it is a gap. What this passage supplies fills the gap. It does not exchange the person for a better one.

Xuanzang’s translation, T14n0450, from “At that time the World-Honored One further addressed the youth Mañjuśrī” to “thereafter she will never again receive a woman’s body.” The figures in parentheses at the head of each segment give the Taishō page, register, and line.

〔1 · The obstruction of miserliness that will not give〕（0405c11）At that time the World-Honored One further addressed the youth Mañjuśrī, saying: Mañjuśrī! There are beings who do not tell good from evil, who harbor nothing but greed and stinginess, who know nothing of giving or of the fruit of giving; （0405c13）foolish and without wisdom, wanting in the faculty of faith, they heap up much wealth and treasure and guard it with diligence. （0405c14）Seeing a beggar come, their heart takes no pleasure in it, and if they cannot help but give, then in the giving it is as though they were cutting the flesh from their own body, and they grudge it bitterly. （0405c16）And there are measureless miserly and greedy beings who pile up goods and property and will not use them even upon themselves — how much less could they give to father and mother, wife and child, servant and hireling, or the beggar who comes to the door?

〔2 · Falling into the evil destinies and being released by hearing the name〕（0405c18）Those beings, when their lives end here, are born into the realm of hungry ghosts or the destiny of animals. （0405c19）Yet because in a former human life they had once briefly heard the name of the Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata, now in the evil destiny they briefly call that Tathāgata’s name to mind; （0405c21）and at the very moment of that recollection they pass away from that place and are born again among human beings. （0405c21）They gain the recollection of former lives (they remember the life before), they dread the suffering of the evil destinies and no longer delight in the pleasures of desire, they take delight in the practice of giving and praise those who give, they grudge nothing at all of whatever they own, （0405c23）and by degrees they become able to give even head and eyes, hands and feet, blood and flesh and the parts of the body to those who come asking — how much more all other goods.

〔3 · The five layers of breaking the precepts〕（0405c24）Further, Mañjuśrī! Suppose there are beings who, （0405c25）though they have received the several points of training from the Tathāgata, break the śīla (the precepts); （0405c26）or who, though they do not break the śīla, break the rules of deportment (the standards of bearing and conduct); （0405c26）or who, though unimpaired in both śīla and rules of deportment, （0405c27）yet destroy right view; （0405c28）or who, though they do not destroy right view, cast off wide learning and cannot understand the deep meaning of the sūtras the Buddha has spoken; （0405c29）or who, though of wide learning, give rise to overweening pride (claiming realization where there is none), and because overweening pride covers over their minds hold themselves right and others wrong, dislike and slander the true Dharma, and become companions of the demon.

〔4 · The fool who misleads himself and others〕（0406a01）Fools such as these practice wrong views themselves and cause measureless koṭis (hundreds of millions) of beings to fall into the great pit of peril. （0406a02）Those beings ought to revolve without end in the three destinies of hell, animals, and hungry ghosts.

〔5 · Hearing the name and coming round to the fullness of the threefold precepts〕（0406a03）But if they should hear the name of this Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata, then they will cast off their evil conduct and cultivate the wholesome dharmas, and will not fall into the evil destinies; （0406a05）and supposing there are those who cannot cast off evil conduct and cultivate wholesome dharmas and so do fall into the evil destinies, then by the power of that Tathāgata’s original vow they are made to hear his name briefly before them, （0406a07）and passing away from that place they are born again among human beings, gaining right view and vigour, well tempered in their aspiration, （0406a08）so that they are able to leave the household and go forth into homelessness; and in the Dharma of the Tathāgata they receive and keep the points of training with no transgression; （0406a10）with right view and wide learning they understand the very deep meaning, they part from overweening pride, they do not slander the true Dharma, they are no companions of the demon, （0406a11）and by degrees they cultivate the practices of a bodhisattva and swiftly come to fullness.

〔6 · The recompense of miserliness, envy, self-praise, and disparagement〕（0406a13）Further, Mañjuśrī! Suppose there are beings who are miserly and greedy and envious, who praise themselves and disparage others: they will fall into the three evil destinies （0406a14）and for measureless thousands of years undergo every kind of severe suffering; （0406a15）and having undergone that severe suffering, when their lives end there they come to be born among human beings as oxen, horses, camels, and asses, constantly beaten with the whip, harried by hunger and thirst, （0406a16）and constantly bearing burdens as they go along the road. （0406a17）Or if they do manage to be human, they are born low and mean, made the servants of others, driven and put to labor, never their own masters.

〔7 · The benefit of hearing, recollecting, and taking refuge〕（0406a18）But if in a former human life they had once heard the name of the World-Honored Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha Tathāgata, then by this wholesome cause they now call it to mind again and take refuge with a whole heart. （0406a19）By the Buddha’s spiritual power their sufferings are all released; their faculties are keen and clear, their wisdom wide in learning; they constantly seek the surpassing Dharma and constantly meet with good friends; （0406a21）they cut off the demon’s snare for ever, they break the shell of ignorance (the graph means an eggshell), they dry up the river of the afflictions, （0406a22）and they are freed from all birth, aging, sickness, and death, and from grief, sorrow, suffering, and vexation.

〔8 · The harm of estrangement, litigation, and cursing〕（0406a23）Further, Mañjuśrī! Suppose there are beings who delight in setting others at odds, who quarrel and go to law with one another and trouble both themselves and others; （0406a25）who with body, speech, and mind commit and increase every kind of evil deed, doing one another no good turn but constantly harm, and plotting each other’s ruin; （0406a26）who call upon and summon the spirits of mountains, forests, trees, and graves; who kill living beings to take their blood and flesh and make offerings to yakṣas and rākṣasas; （0406a28）who write down the name of an enemy and make an image of him and lay an evil spell upon him with cursing arts; （0406a29）who by the way of bewitchment and poison-sorcery raise up corpse-demons by spells, to cut short that person’s life and destroy his body.

〔9 · Hearing the name, and those evils cannot harm〕（0406b01）If these beings should hear the name of this Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata, then none of those evils can do them harm. （0406b02）All of them, each toward the other, give rise to a mind of loving-kindness, to benefit and to ease, without any intent to injure or vex and without any mind of dislike and hatred; （0406b04）each is glad and content, and gives rise to contentment with what has fallen to him, so that they no longer encroach upon one another but do one another good.

〔10 · The fourfold assembly keeping the fast, vowing birth in the West, but not yet settled〕（0406b05）Further, Mañjuśrī! Suppose there are the four assemblies — bhikṣus, bhikṣuṇīs, upāsakas (laymen), and upāsikās (laywomen) — （0406b07）together with other good sons and good daughters of pure faith, （0406b08）who are able to receive and keep the eight-precept fast, whether for a year or for three months, and to receive and keep the points of training; （0406b09）and who with this root of good vow to be born in the Western World of Ultimate Bliss, before the Buddha of Measureless Life, there to hear the true Dharma, but whose minds are not yet settled. （0406b10）If such a one hears the name of the World-Honored Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha Tathāgata, （0406b11）then at the time of death eight bodhisattvas will come by their spiritual powers and show him the road, （0406b12）and in that world he will be born spontaneously, transformed, within flowers of many colors made of massed jewels.

〔11 · Or birth among the gods, and a return in the end to the human world〕（0406b13）Or there are those who by this are born among the gods; and though born among the gods, their original root of good is not yet exhausted, and they will not be born again in any of the other evil destinies. （0406b15）When the lifespan among the gods is done they are born again among human beings, perhaps as a wheel-turning king who rules the four continents, sovereign in awesome virtue, establishing measureless hundreds of thousands of beings upon the path of the ten wholesome deeds; （0406b17）or they are born into a great house of the kṣatriyas, the brahmans, or the householders, with wealth and treasure in abundance and storehouses brimming over, upright in form and feature, complete in kindred, clever and wise, brave and strong and mighty as a great champion.

〔12 · A woman who hears the name receives no further woman’s body〕（0406b19）And if it be a woman who hears the name of the World-Honored Medicine Buddha Tathāgata and receives and keeps it with a whole heart, thereafter she will never again receive a woman’s body.

The twelve vows were made by the Buddha upon the ground of cause. From this passage onward the sūtra turns to another matter altogether — what happens when that name reaches a human being.

This long passage has five sections. Ancient Traces on the Sūtra of the Original Vows of the Medicine Buddha, composed by the śramaṇa Taehyŏn of Ch’ŏnggu, reads the five sections as the removing of five kinds of obstruction: “within it there are five, because they cause those who hear to remove five kinds of obstruction: to giving, to precepts, to cultivation, to the path of the ten wholesome deeds, and to birth in a place of joy.” Giving, precepts, cultivation, the ten wholesome deeds, birth in a place of joy — five gates.

And for every section he uses one and the same frame: first what the obstruction is, then where it lands a person, and only then what follows upon hearing the name — “this has three gates: first, the gate disclosing the obstruction’s own nature,” next the gate showing its harm, last the gate of the benefit of hearing the Buddha’s name.

Five sections, five obstructions, one form throughout.

The First Gate: Cannot Bear to Part with It

The first section writes of miserliness. The sūtra does not begin from the merit of giving; it begins from a person’s mind: “there are beings who do not tell good from evil, who harbor nothing but greed and stinginess, who know nothing of giving or of the fruit of giving.”

Then it gives a very exact simile: “seeing a beggar come, their heart takes no pleasure in it, and if they cannot help but give, then in the giving it is as though they were cutting the flesh from their own body, and they grudge it bitterly.”

As though cutting the flesh from their own body. Not that they do not give, but that giving hurts. This sentence describes the forced kind of giving — the hand has opened, the mind has not.

Then a layer deeper: “they will not use them even upon themselves — how much less could they give to father and mother, wife and child, servant and hireling, or the beggar who comes to the door?” Not even upon themselves. Miserliness carried to its limit is not stinginess toward another; it is stinginess toward oneself as well.

The harm is that “those beings, when their lives end here, are born into the realm of hungry ghosts or the destiny of animals.”

And the sentence of the turn deserves reading word by word: “because in a former human life they had once briefly heard the name of the Medicine Buddha, the Tathāgata of beryl radiance, now in the evil destiny they briefly call that Tathāgata’s name to mind.”

Twice the word briefly. Once briefly heard in a former human life; now briefly recalled in the evil destiny. The first tells us that the hearing at the time was not solemn; the second tells us that the present recollection lasts no longer than an instant.

The sūtra has not required that the hearing be attentive or the recollection pure. It says only: it happened once, and now it has come back to mind.

Reading here, one is inclined to add weight on the sūtra’s behalf, to feel that there ought to be a threshold. Two occurrences of the word briefly stand there, and nothing has been added.

And the course after hearing the name is gradual: first the recollection of former lives and the dread of the evil destinies, then delight in giving and praise for those who give, and at last “by degrees they become able to give even head and eyes, hands and feet, blood and flesh and the parts of the body to those who come asking — how much more all other goods.”

From “cutting the flesh from their own body” to “blood and flesh and the parts of the body given to those who come asking” — the same flesh, once the pain of what cannot be parted with, and now what can be handed over. The head and the tail of this section use the same word.

The Second Gate: Five Layers After the Break

The second section writes of breaking the precepts, and the way it writes is most unusual — five layers, each a step back from the last:

“though they have received the several points of training from the Tathāgata, they break the śīla”; “some, though they do not break the śīla, break the rules of deportment”; “yet destroy right view”; “but cast off wide learning and cannot understand the deep meaning of the sūtras the Buddha has spoken”; “some, though of wide learning, give rise to overweening pride, and because overweening pride covers over their minds they hold themselves right and others wrong, dislike and slander the true Dharma, and become companions of the demon.”

The precepts broken is the first layer. The precepts unbroken but the bearing spoiled is the second. Both of these sound and the view crooked is the third. The view not crooked but unwilling to learn widely, unable to read the sūtras, is the fourth.

And the fifth layer wants the most attention: learning widely, and then overweening pride.

The first four are lacks; the fifth is the disease that comes after fullness. Much is learned and pride is born of it, and once pride is up there follows “holding themselves right and others wrong,” and then dislike and slander of the true Dharma, and companionship with the demon. The sūtra puts this layer last not because it is the lightest but because it appears last — it can only grow after the other four have been made good.

This layer stands unusually close to one who reads sūtras. The first four are lacks we admit readily; the fifth can only be committed after learning enough.

The next sentence is heavier still: “and cause measureless koṭis of beings to fall into the great pit of peril.” Here it is no longer self-deception but the misleading of others.

The reading handed down assigns the five layers to three places: precepts and rules of deportment to the obstruction to the restraint precepts; right view, wide learning, and overweening pride to the obstruction to the precepts embracing wholesome dharmas; and the last sentence, the misleading of others, to “the obstruction to the precepts embracing sentient beings.”

These three names are precisely the “complete in the threefold precepts” pledged in vow five. What the vow set out to accomplish in the threefold precepts is here listed item by item on its reverse side. A sūtra says in its earlier part what it will give, and in its later part how that very thing gets lost.

The Third Gate: Miserly, Envious, Self-Praising, Disparaging

The third section lists four things: “miserly and greedy and envious, praising themselves and disparaging others: they will fall into the three evil destinies.”

The reading handed down matches these four one by one to the four measureless minds: “here miserliness and greed can obstruct the cultivation of loving-kindness, because they do not give joy. Envy obstructs sympathetic joy, because it does not rejoice with others. Self-praise and disparagement obstruct compassion, because they can vex and injure. And the three together obstruct the nature of equanimity, because they are defiled.”

Miserliness blocks loving-kindness — loving-kindness gives joy, miserliness does not give. Envy blocks sympathetic joy — sympathetic joy rejoices with others, envy does not. Self-praise and disparagement block compassion — compassion draws out suffering, disparagement adds to it. And all three block equanimity at once, because all three are defiled.

Three block one apiece, and together they block the fourth.

This matching turns a sentence that looks like mere reproach into a table one can consult: if loving-kindness will not arise, look and see whether you are miserly; if joy in another’s good will not arise, look and see whether you are envious. The name of the sickness and the name of the medicine correspond one to one.

The recompense is written very concretely: in the next life “born as oxen, horses, camels, and asses, constantly beaten with the whip, harried by hunger and thirst,” or human but born low and mean, made a servant and driven at labor.

And in the string of things gained after hearing the name, the last two clauses use similes: “breaking the shell of ignorance, drying up the river of the afflictions.” The graph 㲉 is an eggshell. Ignorance is like a shell that wraps a creature entirely — what is inside the shell does not know what is outside, because it has never seen it. The afflictions are like a river, flowing, apt to rise and cover.

The one must be broken, the other dried up. Dealing with a shell and dealing with water were never the same kind of effort.

The Fourth Gate: The Methods People Use to Harm

The fourth section writes the worst of what passes between people: “delighting in setting others at odds, quarreling and going to law with one another, troubling both themselves and others,” and then the summoning of the spirits of mountains, forests, trees, and graves, the killing of living beings to take blood and flesh for offerings, and “writing down the name of an enemy and making an image of him and laying an evil spell upon him with cursing arts,” and further, bewitchment and poison-sorcery and corpse-demons raised by spells.

The sūtra does not shy from these matters; it sets them down one by one.

And of the effect of hearing the name it says only one sentence: “none of those evils can do them harm.”

What it says next must be seen clearly. It does not say that those who work the cursing arts will meet with retribution. It says — “all of them, each toward the other, give rise to a mind of loving-kindness, to benefit and to ease, without any intent to injure or vex and without any mind of dislike and hatred”; each is glad and content, contented with what has fallen to him, no longer encroaching upon one another but doing one another good.

The side that meant harm is turned as well. What this section removes is “the obstruction to the path of the ten wholesome deeds,” and the accomplishment of the ten wholesome deeds does not lie in one party prevailing over the other, but in neither party harming any longer.

The Fifth Gate: Vowing Birth in the West with an Unsettled Mind

The fifth section is the most unexpected of all.

It speaks of the four assemblies and of good men and women of pure faith who are “able to receive and keep the eight-precept fast, whether for a year or for three months,” and who with this root of good vow “to be born in the Western World of Ultimate Bliss, before the Buddha of Measureless Life, there to hear the true Dharma, but not yet settled.”

— Vowing birth in the West, and the mind still will not settle.

This is a sūtra of an eastern buddha, and here it makes provision for one who vows birth in the West. And the one provided for is not the person of firm faith either: it is the person who has made the vow and yet sways, who is not himself sure he will get there.

The measure of this provision is very fine — not for one who does not believe, nor for one whose belief is steady, but for the one who has already vowed and whose heart still hangs. If you stand in that place, this section is written for you.

To such a one the sūtra says: if he hears the name of the Medicine Buddha Tathāgata, then “at the time of death eight bodhisattvas will come by their spiritual powers and show him the road,” and in that world he will be born spontaneously, transformed, among the flowers of massed jewels.

What the eight bodhisattvas come to do is to show him the road. Not to receive him eastward, but to point the way west.

One buddha’s name, used upon another buddha’s pure land; and what it makes good is exactly the “not yet settled.”

After the Five Sections

The five sections walked through, look back at the key.

The people written of in the five sections are all different: the miser, the precept-breaker, the envious, the one who lays curses to harm, the one who has vowed and cannot settle his mind. Five sicknesses, five destinations.

And what works in every section is one and the same thing — hearing the name. In the first section it is “had once briefly heard”; in the second, “should hear the name of this Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata”; in the third, “had once heard the name of the World-Honored Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha Tathāgata”; in the fourth, “should hear the name of this Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata”; in the fifth, “hears the name of the World-Honored Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha Tathāgata” — and at the close of the fifth, a woman’s hearing of the name is set apart in a sentence of its own. Six sentences of hearing the name in this passage.

Five different gates, and one and the same key.

This is exactly the pivot laid down as the twelve vows entered their second half: from vow five onward, hearing the name becomes a standing sentence of the vow-text — four times in vows five through eight, three more in vows ten through twelve; vow nine alone has no such sentence (getting out of the dense forest depends on being drawn out, not on hearing the name). There it was still only one sentence within a vow; here it has become the bone of five sections.

And what the sūtra asks of “hearing” stays light throughout — briefly heard, once heard, come to hear. So light that one doubts whether it can be enough. The sūtra offers no defense of it; it simply sets out the five hardest situations there are and places the same sentence after each of them.

Transmission — Two Different Sūtras, Divided Into Five the Same Way

The above is the meaning of the passage itself. Below, three auxiliary eyes shine upon it from the side — a mirror is not the sūtra, only the same passage seen through three ways of reading. And this passage is where the three auxiliary eyes are complete for the first time: through the four preceding units, the scroll that glosses the Sui recension had no text at all.

Ancient Traces on the Sūtra of the Original Vows of the Medicine Buddha (composed by the śramaṇa Taehyŏn of Ch’ŏnggu) glosses Xuanzang’s recension. The five obstructions, the three gates, the pairing with the threefold precepts, the pairing with the four measureless minds — the whole frame above comes from here. His way of reading this passage is to set up one frame and apply it over and over: all five sections use the three gates of the obstruction’s own nature, its harm, and the benefit of hearing the Buddha’s name, so that a reader who has reached the third section already knows how the fourth will open out. The use of writing this way is that it makes the sameness of structure among the five sections visible — five different sicknesses, one structure of pathology.

The other anonymous commentary recovered at Dunhuang (T85n2767) glosses the Sui recension of Dharmagupta, and its surviving portion begins precisely with this long passage. It too divides the passage into five: “it divides into five. First, curing much greed. Second, curing the breaking of precepts. Third, curing envy. Fourth,” curing estrangement; fifth, curing the unsettled.

Set the five of the two houses side by side:

Removing the obstruction to giving answers to curing much greed; removing the obstruction to the precepts, to curing the breaking of precepts; removing the obstruction to cultivation, to curing envy; removing the obstruction to the ten wholesome deeds, to curing estrangement; removing the obstruction to birth in a place of joy, to curing the unsettled.

The boundaries of the five sections agree between the two houses entirely.

The weight of this lies here: the recensions the two glossed are not the same translation, and the terms they use are not the same — one says “removing the obstruction to such and such,” the other says “curing such and such” — and yet they set the knife down in the same places. The division is no private opinion of one house; it is the grain of the sūtra itself.

Where they differ is in density. Ancient Traces uses the same three gates for all five sections; this scroll sets up its own number for each — “as to the first text, the text divides into six. First, another” begging and being grudged, second, not relieving kin and cause, third, taking birth according to deed, fourth, hearing the name and being rescued, fifth, all receiving the fulfilment of the vow, sixth, delighting in bounty without weariness; “second, curing the breaking of precepts: the text divides into eight”; “third, curing envy: the text divides into four”; “fourth, curing estrangement: the text divides into four”; “fifth, curing the unsettled: the text divides into seven.” Six, eight, four, four, seven — a number to each section, and no frame applied.

One road sees sameness of structure by using a single frame; the other sees difference by subdividing section by section. The two outlines stand recorded together, with no reconciliation imposed.

This scroll also tells stories. Glossing “not telling good from evil” in the first section, it cites an affair from the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya: a bhikṣu was practicing meditation beside a pool, and the dragon in the pool, revering his virtue, coiled about him to guard him; the bhikṣu felt disgust in his heart and wanted to drive the dragon away. — A grudging heart need not be about property alone.

As for the scroll that glosses the Consecration recension (T85n2766), its surviving text runs from the history of the Abhidharma treatises down to the exegesis of the twelve vows; for this long passage on the benefits of hearing the name there is no text. Searched and not found, and so recorded as not found.

And the sūtra itself sets up no frame and makes no subdivisions. It only writes out five kinds of person, and after each of them places one and the same name.