藥師琉璃光如來本願功德經 心要連讀

An introduction sets out the time, the place, the audience: the Bhagavān comes to the city of Vaiśālī and stays beneath the Tree of Musical Sound; eight thousand bhikṣus, thirty-six thousand bodhisattvas, and with them kings, great ministers, brahmins, householders, devas, nāgas, yakṣas, humans and non-humans.

Then one person rises and asks something.

Cause and Fruit Are Both in the Title

The Sūtra of the Original Vows and Merits of the Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata.

Medicine Master is a figure — a physician of the world can draw out the suffering of illness in a person’s body, and the name is borrowed to speak of a tathāgata who draws out the suffering of beings. Beryl Radiance speaks of what is clear all the way through, light passing with no blind corner left.

The original vows are the cause; the merits are the fruit.

One title, and both ends of what the sūtra will say are already inside it: vows in the first half, qualities in the second.

Freedom Defined from the Negative Side

The first term of the sūtra text is Bhagavān.

Of old it was opened out into six senses: sovereign freedom, blazing intensity, dignity, renown, auspiciousness, nobility. And the first of them is defined from the negative side — freedom means never being bound to the afflictions.

Not being able to do whatever one likes. Having nothing that can get a hold.

Among the six there is not one that says “great power.”

The Order Inside a Gesture

The sūtra writes the posture of asking as six movements: sustained by the Buddha’s awesome spiritual power, rising from the seat, baring one shoulder, setting the right knee to the ground, facing the Bhagavān, bending the body and joining the palms.

The reading handed down takes each movement to signify something: rising is setting out from the actuality that has been realized; the bared shoulder is being about to do work that benefits and gladdens; the knee on the ground, still in the world; the face toward the Buddha, already tending beyond it. Bending puts away pride, joined palms put away scattering.

Note the two in the middle. Knee on the ground, face toward the Buddha — abiding in the world and going beyond it land on one body at the same moment, not by turns.

Before the asking, this order comes first.

For the Sake of Beings in the Age When the Semblance Dharma Turns

What is asked is three matters: the names of the buddhas, the great vows made of old, the surpassing merits.

But the reason for the asking is in the last clause: for the sake of benefiting and gladdening the sentient beings of the age when the Semblance Dharma turns.

When is the Semblance Dharma? Of old, five hundred years was taken as the measure and the time after the Buddha’s passing divided into three stretches: in the age of the True Dharma, teaching, practice, and fruit are all present; in the age of the Semblance Dharma, teaching and practice remain and the fruit does not appear; in the age of the Final Dharma, only teaching is left.

So the situation of the age when the Semblance Dharma turns is this — the Dharma is still here, people are still practicing, and the realizing of the fruit does not appear.

The eight thousand bhikṣus in that assembly do not need this question. They are in the Buddha’s presence.

This question is asked on behalf of people a thousand years later.

The four translations each write that in their own characters: one as the age when the Semblance Dharma turns, one as the age to come when the True Dharma decays, one as beings of the Semblance Dharma to come. The words differ; the age is the same.

Twice Excellent, and Why Twice

The Buddha praises first: Excellent! Excellent! Mañjuśrī!

Two of them are not a repetition. The distinction drawn of old is exact: one praises the matter asked as worth recording, one praises the asking as coming at exactly the right time. One for the matter, one for the timing.

Then the charge: listen now attentively, ponder it with the utmost care, and I shall speak it for you.

Attentive listening and careful pondering are given separate work too — the one gets the words exactly, the other thinks the meaning through.

Words first, meaning after. The order does not reverse, and half of it will not do.

Still Only a Heading

The direct answer begins from a direction: eastward from here, past buddha-lands as many as ten Gaṅgā’s sands, there is a world named Pure Beryl.

The distance is written as extreme and the name as intimate — Pure Beryl is the very beryl of the title, clear all the way through.

The last sentence of the passage sets the whole thing out in sum: when he was formerly walking the bodhisattva path, he made twelve great vows, that sentient beings might obtain all they sought.

“Obtain all they sought” is, at this moment, still only a heading. What makes it stand has to be handed over below, one vow at a time.

The introduction looks like nothing but scene-setting, and has in fact handed over four things already: what this sūtra is called, how many layers of sense are in the buddha’s title, on whose behalf the asker asks, and in how many sections the answer will come.

And that clause about the age when the Semblance Dharma turns is the place the sūtra leaves open at its very opening.

The passage before gave only a single sentence of summary — he made twelve great vows, that sentient beings might obtain all they sought. Now they are handed over one at a time.

Which Comes First, Vowing or Practicing

Which comes first, the vow or the practice? The old answer is that the vow comes first: the vow yearns out the outline, and practice fills that outline in, portion by portion.

A vow is therefore not the ornament of practice, nor a reflection gathered afterwards. It is the line drawn first — without the line, there is no saying how far practice has to fill.

And one thing lies right on the surface of the wording: every one of the twelve vows is tied to “when I have attained awakening.” What is pledged is not to be done at once; it is tied to the moment of realizing awakening — the vow set up first, the fruit rounded off later, with the whole bodhisattva path lying between.

Of old the twelve vows were read two at a time rather than one by one, making six pairs. This passage is the first two: one pair dividing pure from defiled, one dividing mundane from supramundane.

What the First Four Hand Over

Vow one asks for the buddha’s own body: light illumining boundless worlds, the thirty-two marks and eighty accompanying excellences adorning it. It reads like a request for the buddha’s own attainment.

Vow two writes a body like beryl, clear and translucent within and without, adorned with a net of flame and surpassing the sun and moon — still the buddha-body. And its landing place is: beings in gloom and darkness shall all receive opening and awakening, and shall go wherever their intention turns and do every kind of work. Notice the two layers in that clause: first they understand, then they can move. The use of light is not written as something fine to look at, but as a person in the dark daring to walk and able to work.

Vow three changes the subject to what is eaten, worn, and used. What is to be solved is the most concrete kind of want, and what is brought to bear on it is measureless, boundless wisdom and skilful means — within the body of the vow, food and clothing do not rank below insight. Its closing clause is that no being shall suffer any lack or want; the Sui-period translation renders it, let not one person suffer want or lack — one person. A vow set at that height cannot be discharged with sufficiency on the whole.

Vow four handles two kinds of people: those who took the wrong road, and those whose road is not wrong but narrow. The ones who went wrong are settled within the path of awakening; the ones on the narrow road are established in the Great Vehicle. Both are put in one sentence.

Whose Name Is the Subject at the End

Set the closing clauses of the four vows side by side — all sentient beings just as I am, with no difference; they shall go wherever their intention turns and do every kind of work; let no being suffer any lack or want; I shall establish them all in the Great Vehicle.

Four sentences, and the subject of every one is beings.

The first halves are all writing the buddha: light, marks, a body of beryl, a net of flame, wisdom and skilful means. The second halves all turn outward. Not one vow stops at the buddha-body’s own attainment.

That is the fixed form of a vow, not a flourish of style: what is pledged is one’s own accomplishment, what it returns to is another’s gain.

So the sentence of summary in the passage before, that sentient beings might obtain all they sought, now has something to rest on — it is the sum of the closing clauses of the twelve vows.

Vow-sentences are long, and their first halves are mostly hard to come near, easy to slide past. Stop at the closing clause of each — four vows through, and four very concrete things are left in hand.

The weight is at the end of the sentence, not the beginning.

The first four vows wrote the buddha-body: light, marks, beryl, a net of flame. From vow five the sūtra changes its manner — first the difficulty a person is in, and then the buddha’s name coming into it.

Four Kinds of Difficulty

Vow five is about the precepts. Its upper half is put positively; the weight is in the lower half: should any have broken them, then upon hearing my name they shall regain purity and shall not fall into evil destinies.

“Should any have broken them” is a rare turn in a vow-text. It does not assume that people will hold; it assumes that some will not, and then leaves a road open for those who do not. This section is not in every recension — the old Consecration translation pledges only the keeping of the precepts without turbidity, holding firm and not transgressing, with nothing about “after it is broken.”

To pledge only that all shall keep the precepts in purity sounds more complete; but anyone who has kept precepts knows the hard place is the moment after the break — and the handiest thought at that moment is: since it is broken already, let it go. That thought is exactly what vow five blocks.

Vow six is about the body. The sūtra lists thirteen things in one breath: ugly, dull and stupid, blind, deaf, mute, speechless, crippled in the limbs, unable to walk, hunchbacked, leprous, deranged. And the four members of the fruit-clause reverse, one by one, the four classes above. The vow answers item by item; it is not one loose sentence saying everything is better.

Vow seven is about illness. None to save them and nowhere to turn, without physician or medicine, without kin or home — none to save is that no one can pull you out of the illness, nowhere to turn is that even when it passes there is no place to go. When a person is gravely ill, what is missing is often not only the means of treatment. The sūtra writes the two layers apart, and gives according to both.

Vow eight is about the body of a woman, and its conditional clause must be read closely: those upon whom it acts are not all women, but the one who conceives an extreme weariness of it and vows to cast off the body of a woman. The sūtra itself sets a limit whose gate is her own willing.

One and the Same Thing, Four Times Over

Put the closing clauses of the four vows side by side: upon hearing my name they shall regain purity; upon hearing my name they shall all become well-formed and quick of understanding; let my name but once pass their ear, and their illnesses shall all be removed; upon hearing my name she shall be turned from woman to man.

Four vows, four hearings of the name. And in vows one through four, not one.

The twelve vows change direction here. The first half wrote what that world is like after he becomes a buddha; from vow five the sūtra means to hand over how this reaches a person — by a name being heard.

One and the same thing said four times over is not a turn of style. It is a pivot. The later stretches on the benefits of hearing the name, on making offerings and being guarded, on rescue, deliverance, and the prolonging of life all grow out of it.

Why This Passage Uses No Comparisons

Vow two wrote the buddha-body with beryl, with a net of flame, with “surpassing the sun and moon” — figure upon figure. This passage, writing human difficulty, has not one simile in all four vows.

A broken precept is called a broken precept, blindness and deafness are called blindness and deafness, no physician and no medicine is called no physician and no medicine.

Only what one has never seen needs a comparison; what one is already inside does not. Figures for the buddha, none for the human — that is the measure of this passage.

Arriving at the middle of the twelve vows, what is touched is not “if anyone suffers,” but the one who broke a precept, the one missing a faculty, the one ill with no one to care, the one who has had enough and wants a different body.

For a vow to come down upon a person, it has first to recognize that person.

With this passage the twelve vows are finished. What comes after the finish is new twice over: the land itself is described, and someone is asked to make a vow of his own.

Where the Last Four Vows Come Down

Both of the things vow nine gets a person out of have names: the demon’s snare and net, the dense forest of evil views. What marks a net is that the road is still open at the moment of walking in; what marks a dense forest is that it bars nobody and simply cannot be walked out of. Hence the action of this vow is not breaking but carrying: a person is led out and set down elsewhere.

Vow ten writes the human being under the king’s law — the cord, the whip, the prison, the execution ground. The other sufferings had a remedy: sickness treated, want relieved, a crooked view straightened. This one has its source in human authority itself. So the vow names expressly what the release is founded upon: the merit and awesome spirit of the Buddha. And what it promises is release from grief and pain, not escape from execution. At its hardest place the sūtra stops short of saying everything.

The final two vows come back to eating and clothing. Vow eleven begins from the cause: nobody turns bad and then goes hungry; he goes hungry and then does those things. What is given arrives in two stages — the body filled first, the savor of Dharma only after. Vow twelve writes poverty without using the word: mosquitoes and gadflies, cold and heat, day and night, and a body with no layer over it.

One Sentence That Takes the West for Its Measure

The land is written from what it lacks: no women, no evil destinies, no sound of suffering. Take away the sources of suffering one at a time; the remainder is what deserves the name of adornment.

And within it stands a sentence found nowhere else in the sūtra: it is likewise as the Western World of Ultimate Bliss, in merits and adornments equal and without difference.

The Eastern Pure Beryl, measured by the sūtra itself against the Western Ultimate Bliss. Nobody later put the two together.

How the measuring is done also repays attention. Neither is said to surpass the other; the words are equal and without difference. A place the hearer may already know is raised in order to reach a place he does not.

The Turn Passes to the Listener

Two bodhisattvas stand foremost in that land, one named Sunlight Universally Shining and one named Moonlight Universally Shining. Vow two had said that the buddha-body is adorned with a net of flames surpassing sun and moon; here the two who serve that Buddha carry the sun and the moon in their names.

Their office is to uphold the treasury of that Buddha’s true Dharma. What carries the Dharma forward is not the vow but the presence of someone holding it.

Then the closing sentence, which is an exhortation: one should vow to be born in that buddha’s world.

Twelve vows spoken and a land described, and only now does the sūtra address whoever is listening. Everything up to here has been what I shall do — that was the Buddha vowing. This is you should vow — the turn has come round.

A text that has been saying the word vow for so long lets go of it here.

As for the two ends of the twelve vows themselves: the first asks that beings be no different from the Buddha, the twelfth that whatever their heart delights in be made complete. One end is level with a buddha; the other is whatever the person happens to like. Ordinary daily things stand last not because they weigh least, but because they are where the vows are meant to land.

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.

Offering Has Its Stages

The offering taught here works inward, one stage at a time.

Goods come first: the image made, the seat spread, flowers scattered, incense burnt, pennants and banners set up — visible things, and things that can be paid for.

Right practice comes next: seven days and seven nights of the eight-precept fast, pure food, bathing, new garments; and the real content of this stage is the even mind of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity raised toward every being. By now the offering is no longer in front of a buddha but inside one’s own mind. What the passage before said miserliness and envy block is exactly these four — one passage names the obstruction, the other the cultivation, and the terms are the same.

Last come the three deeds: drums, music, hymns, circumambulation to the right; reciting the sūtra, pondering its meaning, expounding it — body, speech, and mind all engaged.

Outward inward. No stage is said to be dispensable.

What Is Wanted, What Is Loathed, What Is Feared

What is gained also falls into three.

First what is wanted: long life, wealth, office, children. The four things people actually go after; the sūtra strikes out none of them and is shy of none.

Then what is loathed: bad dreams, ill omens, strange birds, a hundred prodigies — all of it vanishing away, unable to trouble.

Then what is feared: water, fire, sword, poison, precipices and savage beasts, venomous snakes and scorpions, and invasion from another country, and bandits in revolt.

The list starts where desire starts and stops where fear stops.

The Buddha Turned Round and Asked

More than half the sūtra told, the Buddha turns back to Ānanda: this is the very deep field of practice of the buddhas, hard to understand and hard to fathom — do you believe it?

Ānanda answers with a simile that concedes a great deal: these orbs of sun and moon could be made to fall, the king of mountains could be made to topple, and still what the buddhas say would not be otherwise.

Give away the hardest thing in the world first, and then name something less movable still.

Then he speaks the doubt for another sort of person, and speaks it bluntly: some will hear this and calculate — how should reciting the name of one buddha gain so great a benefit as that?

One name; how could it be worth so much.

That is the doubt the earlier “briefly heard” leaves behind. With a threshold that low, a person will mutter. Nothing is evaded: the sentence is allowed to stand in full.

Low Enough to Do, High Enough to Baffle

Two answers are given.

The first: for one who receives and keeps it whole-heartedly and does not doubt, falling into an evil destiny is simply not a case that arises.

The second admits the difficulty — śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas who have not ascended the grounds cannot believe and fathom it as it is; only the bodhisattva bound by one more birth can.

Doing it asks no more than a brief hearing; understanding it is beyond a bodhisattva not yet on the grounds.

One and the same sūtra, with its entrance as low as an entrance goes and its comprehension out of reach of śrāvakas. That is no contradiction — three difficulties follow at once: a human body is hard to obtain, faith and reverence toward the Three Jewels are hard to obtain, and hearing this buddha’s name is harder still.

And the hardest of the three is the one that needs no prior understanding to occur.

Hence the Buddha’s word that Ānanda’s being able to receive it now is the awesome power of the Tathāgata — belief is not reasoned into place; it is held up.

The closing sentence fixes the measure: a kalpa runs out; that buddha’s practices and vows and skilful means do not.

The Buddha had only just finished saying that this teaching is hard to believe when a bodhisattva in the assembly rose — Rescue-and-Deliverance by name. What he goes on to give is not doctrine; it is a set of things a pair of hands can manage.

No Officers Come to Fetch Him

The marks of a man near death are written very close up: long sick and wasted thin, unable to eat or drink, seeing all directions dark, the marks of death appearing before him. All directions dark: this is not the lamplight of the room, it is the world inside his eyes.

He then lies where he lay, and sees Yama’s messengers lead his consciousness before the Dharma King; and every man has a co-born spirit which has written down all that a life has done, offense or merit, and hands it up.

A very weighty judgment was passed here long ago. Those four — the messenger, his own consciousness, the Dharma King, the co-born spirit — are all image-objects manifested by this sick man’s own mind-consciousness.

No troop of officers has come for him. A man, at the hour when the marks of death appear, finds these four rising in his own mind. Why the co-born spirit bears that name is explained too: it is the root consciousness that came into being together with this body, so that the account it keeps lies nowhere but in his own consciousness.

Reading it this way makes nothing light. Were those four to come from outside, one might hope to dodge them; arising within one’s own consciousness, there is nowhere left to dodge.

And the name Yama is in Chinese ‘quiescing’ — his office is not punishment but bringing a man to see, so that he stops. Belonging to the realm of ghosts, he is called Dharma King all the same.

One Cures Darkness, One Cures Sinking

Five things lie within the reach of the kin: refuge in that buddha, the inviting of monks, the reciting of this sūtra, the lighting of lamps, the hanging of banners.

Why lamp and banner? The sense is taken straight from the graphs: the lamp for its brightness, the banner for its leading. Two things stand to be rescued — darkness, and sinking. What cannot be seen wants a lamp; what has gone under wants a banner to raise it.

Why seven tiers, why five colors? Here the commentator says something exceedingly honest: the sūtra gives no reason. He marks off what follows as inference, and only then offers the seven branches of offense and the five directions.

Not knowing, say so; inferring, say first that you infer.

The One Who Comes Back Is Not the Same

For the return of consciousness the figure used is a dream: out as into a dream, back as from waking, with the fruits of wholesome and unwholesome deeds remembered and known for oneself.

The weight falls in the line that follows: having seen it with his own eyes, from then on, even at the peril of his life, he makes no evil karma.

More than a breath is being prolonged here. A few added years spent making the same karma would save a life and not a man.

A Single Lamp Will Do

Asked how they are made, the answer is exceedingly concrete: recitations, lamps, images, the length of the banner, creatures released — within one prescription the number forty-nine falls five times.

A reader gets this far and thinks: not possible.

The ancients saw that thought and set a line of scripture against it — for one who is poor, a single lamp too brings it to completion — recalling that the sūtra had itself said, so far as their strength allows.

A number of that kind states completeness, not admission.

Release the Prisoners, Then Make the Offering

Extended to a country, the same method meets seven calamities: plague, invasion, revolt, portents among the stars, eclipses, rains out of season, drought past its season.

What the king is asked for first is no altar. He is to raise a mind of loving-kindness and compassion toward all beings and pardon those held in bonds — the prisoners go out first.

Pardon the men in the gaols; the offering by the method above comes after. That order is set down without ambiguity.

What follows is unspectacular: rain in season, grain ripening, beings free of sickness and glad. Harvest and quiet, not a marvel.

King and commoner get one method. None is set apart for a throne.

Increase Means Not Dying Untimely

Ānanda asks: the span is used up, so how can anything be added?

Nothing in the allotment is altered by the answer. It puts back a single question: have you not heard the Tathāgata say that there are nine untimely deaths?

Increase, here, means not dying untimely. A lifespan still unspent and cut through midway is what the word untimely names; merit does not stretch a fixed allotment, it removes the cut.

The first of the nine is written at the greatest length, and the greater part of it runs this way: heterodox masters believed, misfortune divined after, creatures killed for petitions, all in hope of lengthened years — and in the end they cannot get it.

Killing for the sake of longer life: the sūtra does not stop at calling it useless. It says that this very thing has become the untimely death.

A Seat Left Empty for a Whole Sūtra

The introduction divides the sūtra’s long question-and-answer into five accomplishments, and after the fourth — the Tathāgata’s teaching of the Dharma — there stands one more, called the yakṣas’ requital of kindness. From beginning to end it never appears.

Only in the last passage but one, when twelve yakṣa generals stand up, does anyone sit down in that seat.

And the first thing they say is not what they mean to do; it is what they have already received: by the Buddha’s power they have heard the name of the World-Honored One, and they have no more dread of the evil destinies.

The heading reads requital of kindness. It does not read guarding the Dharma.

The Ones Who Rise Are the Ones Guarded Against

In the introduction’s roll of the assembly, yakṣas come after the gods and the nāgas; among the twelve vows they are not among those the vows are made for. Where the sūtra tells the marks of a realm at peace, one item is that no violent yakṣas or other spirits trouble sentient beings — there, they are on the side of what is guarded against.

Now this same company says: to the end of this bodily life we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Saṅgha, and we vow to shoulder all sentient beings.

To shoulder is to take the load onto one’s own back. The first to vow of their own accord to guard others are neither gods nor bodhisattvas.

Following the Person, Not Keeping the Place

Earlier the four great heavenly kings all came to that place: what was guarded was where the sūtra lay. Here it is that person who is guarded: the one who upholds the name.

One keeps a place; one follows a man. Wherever he goes, the guard goes with him.

That Cord Is Meant to Be Untied

With a five-colored cord, knot our names; and when the wish has been obtained, then untie the knot.

Untied once the wish is full. The small observance carries its own ending, and nothing is said about leaving it tied.

Kindness Is Requited upon Living Beings

Twice in the whole sūtra the Buddha says “Excellent! Excellent!” — once for the one who asks for the Dharma, once for those who guard it.

And the second time the praise is a conditional sentence: if you would requite the kindness of that World-Honored One, then constantly benefit and bring ease to all sentient beings in just this way.

Requital is not turning back to make offerings to that buddha. It is repaying the kindness upon living beings.

At the very end Ānanda asks two things: what is this Dharma-gate called, and how is it to be upheld?

One Name, One Thing

The Buddha gives three names, each pointing at its own place.

Original vows and merits — cause and fruit: the vow is the cause, the merit the fruit.

The twelve spirit generals benefiting sentient beings, the spirit-spell of the knotted vow — who it is that keeps watch; and the knot in “knotted vow” is that five-colored cord of the passage before, tied and then undone.

The uprooting of all karmic obstructions — what is taken away. What Mañjuśrī asked for when he first opened his mouth in the introduction was precisely that those who hear should have their karmic obstructions dissolved. A question at the head and an answer at the tail, with the whole sūtra lying between.

The Titles Were Taken from Here

The titles of the successive translations each took one of these three: the Song-age version the third, the Sui version the first in abbreviated form, Xuanzang’s the first in full as the title of the whole.

Only at the closing passage does one learn where the title on the first line came from.

To Ask the Name Is to Ask How to Hold It

Ānanda asks two things; the Buddha seems to answer one. The second is answered in four words: thus should it be upheld.

To receive and hold it in accordance with the dharma the three names point at — that is the way of upholding.

A name is not lettering on a cover. The three names point each at one thing, and to act by those three things is to hold the sūtra.

Two Sentences Not Far Apart

The assembly at the close is listed more fully than at the introduction: there only gods, nāgas and yakṣas were raised, here the eight classes are all present. One company, seated from first to last.

And the closing words are that they were greatly gladdened, and received it in faith and put it into practice.

In the passage just before, the Buddha had said that śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas not yet ascended the stages cannot believe and understand it as it is.

One sentence says it is hard to believe, the next says it was received in faith, and only a few lines lie between. The sūtra offers no explanation.

A Man in the Winter of Guangde’s Second Year

After the end-of-scroll title the canon still keeps a line that does not belong to the sūtra — a man named Jia Chongjun, who on the fifteenth day of the twelfth month of the second year of Guangde set his mind on copying one scroll of the Medicine Buddha Sūtra, and prayed for peace.

This is not scripture. Yet it falls after a passage about how the sūtra is to be upheld.

The sūtra said, thus should it be upheld; and more than a thousand years ago someone upheld it in the way that was his — copied a scroll, wrote the date, wrote what he wished for.

What he wrote was the short title of three graphs, not the full one. And the old manuscript whose end-of-scroll title the collation notes record gives the short form here as well.