華嚴經 心要連讀Avataṃsaka Sūtra · Continuous Heart-Essence

Within a single sentence, there is room for the whole Dharma realm.

This preface is not scripture. It is a reader of the scripture setting out two things at the head of the book: how high this sūtra stands, and how this sūtra came to be.

For its height it uses only two words: “this is the secret treasury of all the buddhas, the ocean of the Tathāgata’s nature.” Then, going one step further, comes the deepest pair of lines in the whole preface: “within a single sentence, the boundlessness of the Dharma realm is contained; within a single hair, buddha-lands are set down and it is not cramped.” It is not that they can be squeezed in. It is that there was never any crowding.

For its provenance the preface remembers everything in detail: the version brought over in the Jin, of which for four hundred years “only half a pearl was opened, and the whole treasure was never seen”; the Sanskrit original welcomed from the country of Khotan; the day, month, and year the translating began, and the day, month, and year the fair copying was finished. The life story of a book, with the years and months and the first days of the months all written down.

At the end the author asks herself: if the principle is “without speech and without showing,” why write a preface at all? She answers plainly — ‘unless one borrows words, there is no way for it to be made manifest.’ And so she spoke after all.

Begin, then, from within this one sentence.

The first fascicle of this sūtra does one thing only: it calls the roll.

From “Thus have I heard” down to “equal in all they do” at the fascicle’s end, there is not one question and answer, not one verse, not one person who opens his mouth. The text writes first of how the ground is firm, how the tree speaks Dharma, how the palace contains the Dharma realm in a single thought-moment; then of the one upon the throne whose “wisdom enters the three times and all of them equally”; and then it lists names — forty assemblies: the bodhisattvas as one, plus thirty-nine assemblies from the vajra-holding spirits down to the kings of the Great Sovereign Heaven.

A first-time reader wants to skip it. Do not skip it.

Chengguan adds one sentence at the very end, and it is the key to this roll: the explanations of names and the praises of virtue above are mostly given as the sense makes convenient, spoken according to the differences of kind; but if one speaks of the actual virtues, then there is “not one that they do not have in common.” The fire-presiding spirits are not able only to remove burning distress, and the wind-presiding spirits are not able only to scatter self-conceit — one meaning is tied to each so that you can see clearly, not so that the work can be divided up.

So this is not a register of attendees. This is one and the same awakening, seen from forty angles at once. The mountains have their way of seeing it, the rivers have theirs, the night has its own. The chapter is called ‘The Wondrous Adornments of the Rulers of the Worlds’ — the three worlds each send forth their rulers, who come to adorn this one same event.

Begin, then, from whichever assembly you already recognize.

One hundred and twenty-four who obtain the Dharma (they are gods), and each single one of them obtains only one gate.

You will suppose that this is not enough. Chengguan says it is the other way round: precisely because each obtains one, the inexhaustibility of the Buddha’s virtue is shown — for if there were anyone who could obtain it all, the Buddha’s virtue would have a bottom to it. “The Buddha obtains the whole of it; the ocean of the assembly obtains the several parts.”

So this is not a list of one hundred and twenty-four items. It is one and the same Buddha opening one hundred and twenty-four entrances upon one hundred and twenty-four kinds of capacity. What one of them obtains is the manifesting of boundless buddha-lands within a single pore; what another obtains is “to be like a farming household at its work, sowing the seed and guarding the sprout and the stalk, watching over them in their season so that they come to fruition” — the kind of watching by which a farmer waits upon a single sprout is also a gate of liberation.

The twelve assemblies speak one after another, as though they were queuing up to take the floor. Chengguan says they are not: the gathering of the assemblies and the praising in verse were originally all at one and the same time, and only because writing cannot set everything down at once were they arranged in sequence. The text has an order; the event has none.

And yours? The threshold is set extremely low — the verses of the assembly of the Heaven of the Thirty-Three say: if one can call to mind even a little of the Tathāgata’s merit, or for so much as a single thought look up to him with concentrated mind. One thought: that already is a gate.

One hundred and thirty-one figures, one hundred and thirty-one gates, and not one of them a step.

It reads like a roster, and to skip it is to throw away the eye. The kings of the eight classes and the five kinds of spirits — each reports a single clause, ‘gained the … gate of liberation’, and then the foremost one, sustained by the Buddha’s majestic power, speaks a verse on behalf of the whole host, the verse mostly returning the name at the end (the opening verse of each of the thirteen hosts concludes with no name; the remaining one hundred and eighteen do). Gate and realization are broadly mortised together.

What matters is where the gate opens. For the contentious asuras, the first gate is ‘manifesting as the foremost and surpassing lord within the great assembly’ — the surpassing they contend for is moved onto the body of the Buddha, and only then does the contending die down. For the garuḍas, whose nature is to seize, the first gate is ‘an eye that neither clings nor is obstructed’. For the kiṃnaras, whose work is joy, the second gate exchanges worldly joy for joy in the Dharma. One’s disposition need not be destroyed first and practice taken up after; it is turned around on the spot.

Of the seven night-spirits, Chengguan says they are precisely the good friends on the grounds whom Sudhana visits in the later text. The merits of the grounds need not wait until the road is walked to appear — they were already seated at the very first assembly.

Go in, then, by whichever gate you can walk into today.

One hundred and forty-one gates, and not one of them opens anywhere outside the world.

This fascicle reads like an astonishingly long roster: fourteen classes of spirits — fire, water, sea, river, crops, herbs, forest, mountain, earth, city, the place of awakening, going on foot, the bodily host, the vajra-bearers — thirteen classes of ten each and the spirits of the place of awakening eleven, each gaining one gate of liberation, and the foremost of each class speaking verses. If you read it as a roster, by the third class you will want to skip ahead.

But look how tightly the gate is fastened to the spirit. What the presiding spirits of fire gain is the removing of darkness; what the presiding spirits of rivers gain is the raining down of the Dharma; what the spirits that go on foot gain is the taming of sentient beings in the lifting and the setting down of a foot. Chengguan lays this fastening bare in the passage on the spirits of the place of awakening: since they are the spirits of the place of awakening, what they gain is liberation within the affairs of that place. It is not that a spirit is exalted first and so becomes fit for a Dharma-gate; it is that the very thing he has been doing all along is his gate.

So these one hundred and forty-one gates are not one hundred and forty-one kinds of Buddha-dharma; they are one hundred and forty-one ways in. Fazang put the question on the reader’s behalf: by what right do these miscellaneous classes stand in the ocean of the fruit together with Samantabhadra? His answer: riding a single gate, one has entered the whole ocean.

Of the fourteen classes thirteen are tens, and only the spirits of the place of awakening are eleven — the sūtra itself is not tidy. Numbered lists of dharmas are for the sake of remembering, not for the sake of tidiness.

The thing you did today is the gate.

Thirty gates — and this is not the Buddha's merit cut into thirty portions.

Samantabhadra first enters one gate that is the whole — “he enters the ocean of skillful means that is the inconceivable gate of liberation, he enters the ocean of the Tathāgata's merit” — and only then does he open the ten. Then ten bodhisattvas whose names all begin with ‘Universal’ each attain one gate, and ten bodhisattvas whose names all differ each attain one gate. Chengguan sets down here a single sentence that fixes how the whole fascicle is to be read: all of this is entering the whole by way of the particular, and so each attains one gate of liberation, like the hundred rivers. The hundred rivers are not each a tenth part of the ocean. Each is a road that walks into the ocean.

So there is no need to ask which gate stands highest. The question is which gate you can walk into today.

At the end, out of the adornments of the Tathāgata's lion throne there are born bodhisattvas as many as the dust motes of a buddha-field, ten of them foremost, and one after another they praise — praising the throne, the ground, the palace, the tree, the ten powers, the ten perfections, the ten grounds; and the last of them praises neither the Buddha nor the place, but tells only how differently beings see. Some see the dharma-body, some the form-body, some the wisdom-body, some hear only a voice. What is seen differs. The Buddha does not.

The whole fascicle closes upon eleven occurrences of “each and every one” — and the last of them is “each and every one enters the Tathāgata's gate of liberation,” which is the very gate Samantabhadra entered when the fascicle opened.

Forty questions were asked, and the Buddha said not a word.

The assembly of seas set out its doubts one clause at a time — what is the ground of a buddha, the realm of a buddha, the eye and ear and nose and tongue and body and mind of a buddha, the voice of a buddha, the wisdom of a buddha; and then they cited the twenty seas that the buddhas of the ten directions had already expounded, praying that he too would speak in that way. The World-Honored One did one thing only: he “knew what the bodhisattvas were thinking in their minds,” and then emitted light from between the teeth of his mouth.

The light summoned bodhisattvas from ten places in the ten directions, and each came bearing flowers, trees, pavilions, lion-thrones, curtains, canopies, flaming radiance, and sat down. Then he emitted light from between his brows, pointing out the lord of the preaching; before the Buddha a great lotus suddenly appeared; and from the mark of the tuft of white hair there came forth the bodhisattva Supreme Sound of All Dharmas, who with the ten bodhisattvas after him spoke praises one after another.

The ancient worthies call this ‘the answer by displaying a mark’ — the Buddha’s mind is sovereignly free and need not wait upon the raising of words; to manifest one mark is already to answer.

“The Buddha’s body fills the whole Dharma realm, appearing everywhere before all sentient beings.”

Doubt and answer were one and the same mold from the start. Where it is convex is the doubt; where it is concave is the answer.

The one who is about to speak first sits down and says nothing.

The assembly had gathered, and the Buddha had sent forth light to point out who the host of the Dharma was. It was time to begin — and instead the sūtra inserts a whole chapter, writing how Samantabhadra sits down, receives the Buddha’s spiritual power, and enters concentration; how the buddhas of the ten directions come to praise him, give him wisdom, and stroke his crown; and then how he rises from concentration, the great earth quakes slightly, the pores of the buddhas give forth light and speak verses, the assembly joins palms and speaks verses, and at the last asks three questions: how do the lands come to be established? how do the buddhas make their appearance? and what of the ocean of sentient beings?

Through that whole chapter, Samantabhadra does not say a single word.

This concentration has a name twelve characters long: the Tathāgata-womb body of Vairocana of all buddhas. The ancient worthies say that the name is the meaning — the body pervades the ocean of lands, and the lands are within the body; a single dust-mote can hold the boundless Dharma realm, not because the dust-mote is large, but because the dust-mote appears wholly in dependence on that womb.

So the stretch of silence before the teaching is not a ceremony. It is the drawing of a line: ‘the dharma that is spoken comes forth out of the concentration that has been realized.’

“Why is this so? Because to realize that dharma of samādhi is of itself just so.”

It is not that the Buddha was partial to him. It is that once realization is there, what should come comes of itself.

The world is not a stage. It is an answer.

In this chapter Samantabhadra opens ten things: from what conditions a world is formed, upon what it abides, what shape it has, what it takes for its substance, how it is adorned, how it becomes pure, how a buddha appears in it, how long it lasts, how it changes, and — above all this difference — what does not differ. Nine of them speak of difference; one speaks of sameness.

The most important are the sixth and the ninth. The sixth tells how a world becomes clean, and yet the ten items it lists are all the conduct of a bodhisattva — drawing near to good friends, cultivating the pāramitās, contemplating the grounds and entering to abide in them. The ninth tells how a world is transformed, and most of the ten items it lists are a matter of who is living in it — where defiled beings abide it is defiled; where beings give rise to the mind of awakening it is wholly pure; where a buddha appears in the world it is broadly and vastly adorned and purified. The land is not outside the mind, and so the cause of a pure land lies on the ground where the practitioner stands.

“All the many lands are all born following the power of karma; you should contemplate this, for the aspect of their transformation is just so.”

That last thing does not say that difference has disappeared. Difference remains, and yet the substance and nature are equal and the Buddha’s power gathers all in — Chengguan states it with great steadiness: freedom from differentiation does not mean that the lands are all alike when set beside one another; it means that defiled lands and pure lands alike are held complete.

Within a single atom many oceans of lands find room, and yet “each one is set apart with no confusion or overstepping.”

A land is held up by a vow.

Samantabhadra begins from the lowest tier of wind-wheels and works upward to the topmost, Supreme Majestic Radiance Treasury, which holds up a sea of fragrant water; out of that sea opens a great lotus, and the Flower-Treasury World-Sea dwells within it. Then come the encircling mountains, the ground underfoot, the seas within the ground, the rivers between the seas, and the groves between the rivers.

It reads like a diagram of the structure of the cosmos. It is not. Chengguan closes that door at the very beginning: this is ‘provisionally, in terms of a single aspect, spoken of as having bounds and limits’ — for the time being it is told as one aspect so that a person has somewhere to enter, whereas in truth a single tier searched crosswise is already boundless. So do not ask where the wind-wheels are; ask what this tier-upon-tier of holding up is saying. Chengguan gives the answer almost section by section: the wind-wheels are vow, the encircling mountains are precepts, the jeweled ground is concentration, the fragrant rivers are the merits that answer to each moment of mind.

There is a line in the verses: “In every mote of dust in the Flower-Treasury World, in each single mote the Dharma realm is seen.” Fazang later carried it, word for word, into his contemplation treatise, to establish the sense that a mote of dust contains the Dharma realm.

The closest thing to the reader is the last of the jewel-kings: the one that manifests the sea of the karmic recompense of all sentient beings. The adornment of the whole Flower-Treasury, in the end, shows you your own karma.

Samantabhadra asked one question: what sort of worlds dwell in here. And then he began to count.

First he counts the ten senses, then ten instances of resting, twenty of shape, twenty of substance. The latter ten instances of substance are all sound — the sound of the deeds of beings, the sound of the vows of bodhisattvas, the sound of the merit of the buddhas. Worlds are not made of stone; they are made of deeds and vows.

Ten verses gather all this difference into one line: “Though one sees the ten directions entering universally within, in truth there is no coming and nothing entered.”

Then the lens moves in upon the one pearl at the centre: the fragrant-water sea Boundless Wondrous Flower Radiance, upon the sea one great lotus, upon the flower one world-seed, and within the seed twenty tiers of worlds rising one above another.

At the thirteenth tier the sūtra changes its wording. Of the twenty tiers, nineteen say ‘the buddha there is titled such-and-such’; this one alone says “its buddha is precisely Vairocana Tathāgata, the World-Honoured One.” This tier is named Sahā, and it is also one of the few tiers that lack the four words “purely and solely pure”.

So this whole vast stretch of inexpressible adornment comes to rest somewhere very near — you are living on the thirteenth tier, and the root teacher is right here.

One hundred and ninety-four house-numbers, one hundred and ninety-four buddhas.

This fascicle reads like a household register. Ten fragrant-water oceans; on each ocean one cluster of worlds, ranged layer above layer; and of the layers set out in full, six things have to be given — how far it stands from the one below, what it is called, what it looks like, what it rests upon, what is spread over its head, how many worlds encircle it (the lowest layer of all states no distance, and says only “at the very lowest place”); of the layers set out briefly, only the name is left. And the last column every layer has — the name of its buddha.

If you find you cannot read on, it is most likely because you are trying to hold the names in mind. There is no need. This passage is not asking you to know who is who; it is asking you to see one thing: not one layer is empty. One hundred and ninety-four turnings of the page, one hundred and ninety-four times a buddha in the last column.

And there is something weightier still. For every cluster of worlds the sūtra marks a “substance” — and the substance of all ten clusters is sound: the roaring sound of bodhisattva practice, the sound and voice of the ocean of the merit of the buddhas, the sound and voice that proclaims the names of the tathāgatas, the sound and voice born of Samantabhadra’s wisdom. Not one of them is earth. It is not that a piece of ground is there first and the Buddha-dharma then happens upon it; the sound of the Buddha-dharma comes first, and the world stands up leaning upon it.

So those cells are not walls. The sūtra divided one hundred and ninety-four cells, and the buddha of the last cell is named “Unobstructed Light Everywhere Illumining the Dharma Realm” — divided to the very end, it comes to rest upon the word “unobstructed”.

The cells are there to be known by, not to divide with.

The names are too many to remember, and that is just as it should be.

This fascicle first names, one by one, the remaining ten groups of fragrant-water seas — the name of the sea, the name of the world-seed, what sound it takes for its substance, the four levels of worlds above and below with their buddhas. By the time you reach the third group you can no longer remember the first. That is not a failure; it is the method of this passage: let the names and forms drain out of you, and what is left is a single line, “each and every one of them is free, and among them there is no confusion.”

Then the prose gathers it all up in one sentence: all of this rests upon that one great lotus, joined on one to the next, tied into a net of worlds. The meshes of the net each differ, and this is called “each of its own”; mesh and mesh are joined by one and the same cord, and this is called “tied into a net of worlds”; and the mesh itself is empty — the net holds what it holds precisely because the meshes are empty.

Last, one hundred and one verses say it all again. The very first verse points out the eye: “equal to the Dharma realm and without difference.” With that line, the enormous picture just drawn is no longer a picture. The ninety-nine verses between speak of coming to be and breaking down, of suffering and pleasure, of shapes, of light — and all the way they are answering one and the same question: why is each of its own kind? The answer is mind, karma, and the Buddha's vows; not one of the three can be spared.

The last verse says: “within the Dharma realm of the ten directions there is not a being who does not hear it.” It opens saying that the Dharma realm is equal and without difference, and closes saying that within the Dharma realm there is none who does not hear. Those few thousand names in between are there only so that you may hear this one line.

The first five chapters told the fruit to the full; only in the last does the text turn back and say whose cultivation this fruit was.

The son of a human king saw a light. He had done nothing in this life; all he had to rely on was “the power of the roots of goodness cultivated in the past” — and at that moment he obtained ten Dharma-gates. Afterward he heard the Dharma, he praised the Buddha, he revealed to the multitude what he had seen; his father the king died, he became a wheel-turning king and gave away a pavilion; his life ran out, he was born in heaven as a god-king, and still he went to see the Buddha. Four buddhas, four identities, one and the same grove.

He said one line: “Just as it is by the shining of the sun's light that one comes in turn to see the orb of the sun itself, so I, by the Buddha's light of wisdom, see the path the Buddha practiced.” — the eye that can see the Buddha was, from the first, given by the Buddha's own light.

Chengguan's determination of why this chapter comes is only twelve graphs — Chengguan says: “Earlier what was set forth was the fruit of this cause; now what is discerned is the cause of that earlier fruit.”

So the adornment of the Lotus-Treasury world was never simply there. Someone, kalpa after kalpa, through several changes of identity, never once changing his mind, cultivated it into being.

The last sentence of the scripture is very plain: “Having obtained this benefit, they came out from the site of awakening and returned to their own places.”

One buddha, ten thousand names — what is in surplus is not he, but we.

What the bodhisattvas asked stirred only once within their minds; the Buddha said not a single word, but only manifested spiritual powers; the one who speaks is Mañjuśrī, come from the ten directions. From beginning to end this chapter is counting names: within one set of four continents “ten thousand in their number,” within one Sahā a hundred koṭis of sets of four continents, and so “names of every kind to the number of a hundred koṭis of myriads,” and farther out still, to the ends of the Dharma realm and the realm of empty space, each is called by its own.

Counted past the point where the mind can form an image, that one sentence comes down — “causing sentient beings each severally to know and to see.” The difference is not on his side. Chengguan says it without the least hesitation: “the sage has no name; it is for the sake of beings that appellations are set up.” The names are many because the diseases are many. A name is the name of a medicine set up for a disease, not a title of honor belonging to the Buddha, and so he adds at once: “they should give rise to no attachment.”

At the end the scripture states its provenance itself: when the World-Honored One was a bodhisattva in days past, it was precisely within discourses of every kind, languages of every kind, faculties of every kind, and kinds of faith and understanding of every kind that he “was brought to maturity”; and today he follows that same old road, and matures others by difference in turn.

The name by which you call him today is the shape of that old bond of causes between you and him. Recognize it, and you need hold it no longer.

One and the same thing is called “offense” here, and in another world it is called “the root of seeking.”

In this chapter Mañjuśrī argues nothing; he only reads out names. Suffering, origination, cessation, path — ten names to a world, eleven worlds one after another, four hundred and forty names set down in a row, and at the end one clause: “conforming to the minds of sentient beings, they all bring them to be tamed.” So the names were never established for the sake of the Dharma; they were established for the sake of people. The Dharma has only one suffering; the doors by which beings can come in are measureless.

Hence the ‘noble’ of the noble truths does not lie in the object but in the wisdom that discerns. The ordinary person has the same suffering and the same origination; he simply does not discern them, and so they do not amount to truths. The object has not been exchanged; the person has.

There is one name worth keeping in mind: the truth of cessation is called “the seal broken.” Scarcely has this set of aggregates ceased when the next is born, like a wax seal pressed into clay, the seal destroyed and the impression at once formed. Practice is not smoothing away the impression on this one piece of clay; it is asking whether that seal has been broken.

At the end the scripture says that in each and every world of the ten directions the four noble truths are expounded. The Sahā is host and the other worlds companions; look from another place, and the other worlds are host and the Sahā is companion.

Four hundred and forty names, and one word: suffering.

The Buddha released light, and then did not say a single word.

The one who speaks is Mañjuśrī: ten segments of verses, one hundred verses in all. The light goes one round further than the last, until it reaches “all the worlds to the end of the Dharma realm and of the realm of empty space.” Reading on, one comes to suppose that the Buddha released light ten times. The ancient masters say it is not so: a single release of light, shining upon all at once; the before and after lie in speech, not in the light. And he made a comparison for it — as the moon shines everywhere upon a hundred streams and is seen in each. The moon does not divide its body; it is the waters that each receive it.

What are those hundred verses doing? From the very first they are taking things apart. To see the Buddha as liberated and free of the outflows — “he is not one with the eye of the realized path”; to see the Buddha by his majesty, his color, his clan — “this is the topsy-turvy view of a diseased eye”; and the last verse will not let one grasp even the “everywhere” — “Just as in empty space there are measureless lands, that come not and go not and yet pervade the ten directions” — what it takes from the comparison is being without support, not being vast.

Hence the chapter is named Awakening by Light. ‘Light’ is the substance, ‘awakening’ is the function; the Buddha's bodily light shines upon events, Mañjuśrī's light of wisdom shines upon principle. And when the shining has gone to its end, the buddha you were holding in your hand has been taken away, layer by layer.

What is left once it has been taken away — that is what the light has shown.

A whole chapter without a single pronouncement: it is all questions.

Mañjuśrī questions nine bodhisattvas one after another, and the nine answer, each in verse; at the end the bodhisattvas turn about and question Mañjuśrī together, and Mañjuśrī too answers in verse — ten rounds of question and answer, and what they ask about is ten faces of one and the same matter: the one and the many. The nature of mind is one; why then are there all these differences? Beings are originally empty; why then does the Buddha teach and transform them? The four great elements have no self; why then are pain and pleasure not the same? What was awakened to is one dharma; why then are measureless dharmas spoken? The field of merit is equally one; why then do the fruits of reward differ? The Buddha's teaching is one; why then is there no immediate deliverance? They receive and uphold the right Dharma; why then are the afflictions not cut off? Wisdom is the foremost; why then are the various practices praised? The buddhas have one path; why then are the buddha-lands not the same? And last of all — what is the realm of the Buddha?

Foremost in Awakening answers earliest and most severely: “Dharmas have no operation, and they have no substantial nature either; for this reason all of them, each and every one, do not know one another.” It is not that they are cold to one another; it is that there was never anyone there knowing anyone. Eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body turn on without cease, “yet there is no one who turns.”

The ancient worthies gave these ten rounds the name ‘the ten profundities,’ and said that they are a single line: it is because one is deluded about dependent origination that teaching is needed; it is from going against or along with that teaching that there is the fruit of deeds; to know deeds one depends on the preaching of Dharma; preaching that perfects goodness rests on the Buddha alone as the field of merit; to accord with the field one must uphold the teaching; the teaching lies in diligent practice; practice needs its auxiliaries; the auxiliaries must come home to the one path; and whoever gains the one path is bound for the realm of the Buddha.

When the asking is done, the scripture draws no conclusion — the Buddha, by his spiritual power, makes the differences among beings in dharma, in deeds, and on down to the differences in the fruit that is their land, appear right there; so in this Sahā world, and so in the ten directions as well.

Ask it all the way down, and then see it with your own eyes.

Foremost in Wisdom asked twenty times “how is one to,” raising up to the full the three kinds of action, the several wisdoms, the several powers, the ten powers, the protection of the kings, refuge and rescue, being the first and being equal only to those without equal — Chengguan counts them as one hundred ten kinds of virtue, and every clause is at the height of the buddha-ground.

Mañjuśrī's answer is only four graphs: “make good use of the mind.”

Then he says no more doctrine, but demonstrates instead with one hundred forty-one affairs: being at home, serving parents, washing the face, chewing a willow twig, relieving oneself, walking up a slope, seeing a thorn tree, begging and meeting an empty bowl, eating coarse and rough food, being betrayed, waking from sleep. To each affair he fits one sentence: “he vows: may all sentient beings.”

What matters is that among these one hundred forty-one affairs not one has been arranged on purpose for cultivation, and not one has been skipped for being too filthy or too small. Whether the object is good or bad never decides whether the vow can be given rise to — when the bowl is empty he vows that their minds be pure and empty of afflictions; when betrayed he vows “may all sentient beings not repay in kind those who act with evil.”

Chengguan puts it straight: “The lifting of the foot and the setting down of the foot are wholly Mañjuśrī's mind, and seeing, hearing, sensing, and knowing are all Samantabhadra's practice.”

The course of a day begins at home and ends at “on first waking from sleep, he vows: may all sentient beings awaken to omniscience and look round upon the ten directions.”

In between, not one stretch is left blank.

Mañjuśrī has finished saying how to use the mind; he turns and asks Foremost in Worthiness: keep on using it that way, and what will grow?

“Faith is the origin of the path and the mother of merits; it nurtures and grows all wholesome dharmas; it cuts off the net of doubt and brings one out of the flood of craving; it opens and shows the unsurpassed path of nirvāṇa.”

One line settles the whole chapter. Origin means the starting point; mother means what can give birth. For the seven hundred and more lines that follow — the seventy-four rounds of ‘if … then …’ locked link into link, the forty-four kinds of light from the hair-pores, each light with its own cause, the ten samādhi-gates manifesting everywhere throughout the ten quarters — everything spoken of is what that one line gives birth to.

So faith here is not a beginner's expedient. It “can increase and grow the merit of wisdom”; it “can bring one without fail to the ground of the Tathāgata”; it goes the whole way to the end.

‘Then what is this bit of faith of mine worth?’ Foremost in Worthiness answered that himself, first thing: all he expounds is only “like a single drop of water of the great ocean.” But Chengguan breaks open the hidden sense inside that modest phrase — the patch of space a bird's foot has trodden is no other than the great void; a single mote of dust is no other than the great earth.

At the last the buddhas of the ten quarters appear before him and stroke his crown, saying only: “Excellent! Excellent!”

The second assembly, as Chengguan divides it, ends here.

The Buddha went up to the summit of Mount Sumeru — and he did not take one step away from beneath the tree of awakening.

In this chapter the World-Honored One does not speak a single word of Dharma with his own mouth. He does one thing only: he sets up the ground on which the Dharma of the ten abodes will be spoken further on. And the first sentence of that setting-up is a sentence that will not parse: “not leaving from beneath all the trees of awakening, and yet ascending Sumeru.” The ancient worthies established five explanations of this one sentence; Chengguan cites them one by one and raises three objections — the first objection breaks through the first three explanations, the next is against the fourth, the last against the fifth — and then speaks for himself: the substance of the Buddha is nowhere absent, without going and without coming, while the stimulus of sentient beings has a before and an after. “Where there is stimulus in Jambudvīpa, he is seen at the tree of the path; where there is stimulus in the palace of the gods, he is seen ascending into the heavens.”

He drew a comparison. One moon; three boats upon the clear river watching it together; one boat lies at rest, two set off, the one southward and the other northward. The one going south says the moon travels south with him, the one going north says the moon travels north with him, the one at rest says the moon has not moved — all three are speaking the truth, and the moon has never once divided itself.

So when Śakra adorns the palace, sets out the seat, and thrice says “Welcome,” he is not receiving a guest who has come from far away. Only when the music within the palace has come to rest of itself does he remember — that ten buddhas of the past all once entered this very palace.

‘It is not that the Buddha comes over to you; it is that you become still.’

The Buddha ascended to the summit of Mount Sumeru, sat down, and then did not say a single sentence.

Those who speak are ten bodhisattvas, whose names all end in “Wisdom”; they come from ten worlds whose names all carry “Flower,” and they serve ten buddhas whose titles all carry “Moon.” Each speaks ten verses, a hundred in all. The ancient worthies say that these hundred have a framework — “the first is the general, the remaining nine are the particular”: those ten verses of Dharma Wisdom say why this assembly can be as it is, and the remaining ninety do only one thing, taking apart that “Buddha” you are holding in your hand.

The taking apart is utterly thorough. A hundred thousand kalpas of looking still does not count as seeing; the one who seizes upon marks is “blind and benighted and does not see the Buddha”; even the thought “this one is the Buddha, this one is the most excellent” is determined to be inversion. By the segment of Unsurpassed Wisdom, not even “no-two” is allowed to stand — if one keeps a view of no-two, then two is formed again.

What, then, is left? The last of them, Firm Wisdom, suddenly turns back and says: if the buddhas and the bodhisattvas did not appear in the world, “there would not be one sentient being able to attain peace and joy.”

What grows out of all this taking apart, at the last, is not knowledge and views; it is “pure faith increasing the more.” And only so does the next chapter dare to open its mouth and teach the ten abodes — first know what it is that is abided in, and then those ten names are not merely ten names.

To abide is not to stop; it is to stand firm.

The bodhisattva Dharma Wisdom enters concentration; the Buddhas of the ten directions, all bearing the same name, Dharma Wisdom, appear together before him, stroke the crown of his head, and charge him to speak the ten abodes: first arousing the mind, preparing the ground, cultivation, noble birth, perfected skillful means, the rectified mind, non-retrogression, childlike purity, princehood, consecration. Ten steps, each of two portions — ten things already stood firm in, and ten dharmas to be learned for the step above; two hundred gates in all.

The exhortation portions of the ten abodes all close with one and the same sentence: “Whatever dharma he hears, he understands of himself, not through the teaching of another.” That is the test. When the station has truly been reached, what is heard opens of itself; if another must still make it plain for you, you have not yet stood firm.

The ancient masters place the ten abodes after the ten faiths and before the ten practices, and call them the lower of the three worthies — that is the outline of Chengguan's lineage. The sūtra itself says only one sentence: “The Buddhas of the past, the future, and the present have spoken, will speak, and now speak them.” This is the public highway, not one master's private arrangement.

The hardest is the first step. Of the one hundred verses, the abode of first arousing the mind alone takes forty-six.

“The merit of arousing the mind cannot be measured; it fills the whole realm of beings”

The robe has already been dyed, the household already left — and still there is one more sentence to ask: “how does one attain purity of brahmacarya?”

Dharma Wisdom gave no definition. He gave ten places in which to go looking: body, bodily action, speech, verbal action, thought, mental action, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Saṅgha, the precepts. And the way of looking is a single sentence — if this one thing were brahmacarya, what would follow?

So the body turns out to be a corpse and a swarm of worms; bodily action turns out to be walking, standing, sitting, lying down; speech turns out to be lips, tongue, throat, and mouth; thought turns out to be sleep, dreams, and conjuring tricks. Even the Buddha, the Dharma, the Saṅgha, and the precepts are pressed item by item: is form the Buddha? Is nirvāṇa the Dharma? Is the fruit of stream-entry the Saṅgha? Is the ordination platform the precepts?

All ten places come up empty. Yet the conclusion is not that there is no brahmacarya — “because the dharma that is brahmacarya cannot be obtained … this is what is called pure brahmacarya.”

The ancient worthies say it flatly: the precepts too are made of many conditions; to rouse a mind that keeps the precepts and grab hold of them is precisely what is called delusion turned upside down.

The last sentence is the eye of this chapter: “at the time of the first arousing of the mind one attains unsurpassed perfect awakening.”

Chengguan altered the reading of one word only — this “arousing” is the arousing of what opens out, not the arousing of what starts up.

It is not that the road is being travelled fast. It is that there was never a road to travel.

Someone asks: a person who has just this moment stirred the thought of becoming a buddha — how much merit has he?

Dharma Wisdom gives no figure. He says ten “hards” first, and then raises, one after another, ten and more comparisons so vast they have no edge — making offerings to all the sentient beings of the ten directions for a whole kalpa, and teaching them besides to keep the precepts, to cultivate dhyāna, to realize the four fruits and on to the way of the pratyekabuddha; passing beyond asaṃkhyeyas of worlds in a single thought, and a hundred persons walking so; knowing in a single thought the whole number of kalpas of the formation and destruction of the worlds; knowing to the end the understandings, faculties, desires and delights, means, minds, deeds, and afflictions of all sentient beings; making offerings to countless buddhas and countless beings, and after the buddhas' extinction raising countless jeweled stūpas for them besides. Each time he raises one, he sets the one before it down — “set this simile aside for the moment,” “set this simile aside again.” And the closing words of every one of them are the same:

“It does not come up to one part in a hundred, does not come up to one part in a thousand, does not come up to one part in a hundred thousand, and so on until it does not come up even to one part of the upaniṣad fraction.”

It is not that the merit of arousing the mind is the larger figure. Of those worlds and those kalpas the scripture says every time that “the limit can be known”; of the roots of goodness of arousing the mind it says that “none can know the limit.” What can be reckoned and what cannot were never of one kind to begin with.

Why? Because those fruits and retributions were born out of the arousing of the mind in the first place — “the mind of awakening is the root of the ten powers”; the fruit of the two vehicles and the joys of humans and gods, “there is none that does not come from the first arousing of the mind.”

Having spoken a whole fascicle full of vast merit, at the very end there is one sentence: “this bodhisattva who has first aroused the mind has not, with regard to the three times, the least thing attained.”

And so this chapter comes to rest not upon praise, but upon one word, “quickly”: “one ought quickly to arouse the mind of awakening.”

The merit has already been accomplished — and then what?

The preceding chapter praised the merit of the first arising of the mind to the very end of what human speech can say. The opening sentence of this chapter simply asks the next question: those bodhisattvas, “within the Buddha's teaching, how are they to cultivate?” The ancient masters say it straight — what was set forth earlier is the merit accomplished at one's own station; what is discerned here is the practice of pressing on to what comes after. So this chapter does not expound states attained; it opens a work-list: fourteen rounds of ten dharmas, one round after another.

There is only one general gate, and it is called ‘non-negligence’. Guarding the precepts, putting away delusion, being upright, not turning back, constantly recalling the mind one first aroused — and the last of them is “constantly to observe well the force of one's own continuum,” to look back and see whether the force of one's own thoughts is still there. Out of this open the making of the buddhas rejoice, the swift entry into the grounds, the purity of all that one practices, the pure vows, the inexhaustible treasuries, the purity of the ten perfections, the ten adornments, on to the ability to act as a great master of the Dharma. Midway stands the sentence that is the pivot of the whole chapter: “He knows that all dharmas are his own mind, and yet he clings to nothing” — to know that they are one's own mind, and at the same time not to take that mind for something that can be grasped.

The last simile is the lightest, and also the weightiest:

“Suppose there is a medicine named Well-Seen: beings who see it have every poison removed.”

Some medicines have to be taken; this one only has to be seen.

The Buddha is about to go to the Yāma Heaven — and he has not taken one step away from beneath the tree of awakening, nor away from the summit of Mount Sumeru where the ten abodes have only just been expounded.

In this chapter the World-Honored One does not speak a single sentence of Dharma with his own mouth. He does one thing only — he sets up the ground on which the ten practices will be expounded further on. The scripture says: “The World-Honored One, not leaving from beneath all the trees of awakening and the summit of Mount Sumeru, went toward the Palace of Jeweled Adornment in that palace of the Yāma Heaven.” What he does not leave is, this time, two places; and further on, in the ascent to Tuṣita and the ascent to the Heaven of Free Enjoyment of Others’ Emanations, they will only go on accumulating.

Chengguan points out here something that others would not notice: in the Sanskrit text there was no graph “ascend” at all; what stood below was the two graphs “spiritual transformation,” and it was the translator who rendered spiritual transformation as ascending. So “ascend” was never a walking across.

The heavenly king, seeing the Buddha coming from afar, thereupon conjured up a lion seat of the Treasury of the Jeweled Lotus Flower, and adorned it with a million tiers of steps, a million nets of gold, a million hangings and canopies. Why a million? Chengguan says only four graphs: because the stage gradually increases. In the last assembly, ten thousand; in this assembly, a million. Only when the seat was ready did he open his mouth and invite the Buddha to stay — first prepare the place, then invite the person.

And the last sentence is this: this palace suddenly became vast and capacious, like the dwelling places of those hosts of gods. The palace was not stretched wider; it could hold them all from the first.

‘It is not that the Buddha comes over; it is that this place has been made ready.’

The Buddha took his seat in the palace of the Yāma heaven, and once again did not say a single sentence.

Those who speak are ten bodhisattvas, whose names all carry “Grove”; they come from ten worlds whose names all carry “Wisdom,” and they serve ten buddhas whose titles all carry “Eye.” The wisdom accomplished in the preceding assembly has become, in this assembly, the ground upon which practice depends — feet alone will walk, but without eyes they will walk astray.

The ten segments of verse take things apart more deeply segment by segment: from the pervasion of “in every place in the ten directions they all say that the Buddha is here,” to “all dharmas are unarisen,” to “the world and what is not the world are only a difference of names,” to “the body is not the Buddha, and the Buddha is not the body.”

At the ninth the taking apart turns. The bodhisattva Awakening Grove is the only one of the ten of whom the text says not “contemplated everywhere the ten directions” but “contemplated throughout the ten directions,” and he speaks the line of the whole sūtra that is most remembered — “the mind is like a skilled painter, able to paint all the worlds” — and then closes with: “If a person wishes to know fully all the buddhas of the three times, he should contemplate the nature of the Dharma realm: all is made by mind only.”

Chengguan determines these ten verses to be what “displays consciousness-only in its complete portion.” Do not be quick to read that as ‘the world is something I have thought up’ — the third verse blocked it in advance: “within the mind there is no painting, and within the painting there is no mind; yet apart from the mind no painting can be found.” Not identical, and not apart.

What matters lies in the fifth verse: the painter “cannot know his own mind, and yet it is because of the mind that he paints.” Everything you are experiencing at this moment has been painted precisely under the condition that you do not know your own mind.

And so the last of them, Knowing Grove, dares to take the expounding of the Dharma apart as well: “The buddhas have no dharma; where would the Buddha have anything to expound?” — even the thought ‘the Buddha expounded this for me’ is set back upon your own mind. The gate of the ten practices is entered from just here.

Abiding is standing firm; practice is moving on once one stands firm.

The bodhisattva Merit Grove enters concentration; the buddhas of the ten directions, all alike named Merit Grove, appear together before him and stroke his crown, prompting him to speak the ten practices: joy, benefiting, non-opposition, unbending, without deluded confusion, good manifestation, non-attachment, hard to attain, good dharmas, the real.

The names of the ten practices are listed by the sūtra itself; the pairing of the ten practices with the ten perfections, and their placement after the ten abodes and before the ten dedications, belong to the outline of Chengguan’s line.

Practice is not a matter of how much one does. The first words the sūtra opens with speak not of deeds but of substance: “A bodhisattva’s practice is inconceivable, equal to the Dharma realm and the realm of space.”

Every one of the practices sets up an extremely hard situation to test it. Those who come begging want no wealth but the flesh of his body; those who come to confuse him are not one demon but countless demons, each bringing countless goddesses; those who come to revile him speak with every mouth ten kinds of hateful words and hold weapons in every hand, through asaṃkhyeya kalpas without a pause. And the place of testing is one thing only — whether the mind moves.

The eighth, the practice hard to attain, strings three similes together. The most important is the ferryman: he does not abide on this shore, does not abide on the far shore, does not abide in midstream. The first two non-abidings anyone can say; the third is hard — not halting at the position of ‘I am ferrying living beings across’.

When it reaches the tenth practice, what the sūtra gives is not a tenth thing but a single phrase: “entering the Dharma realm of Indra’s net”. One jewel manifests all jewels. Here the ten practices gather one another in, and the first nine are all inside.

“The dāna-pāramitā already fulfilled, adorned with the marks and signs of a hundred merits”

A storehouse fills up; the thing one is in the middle of doing does not.

This chapter has no opening scene — the bodhisattva Merit Grove takes up the thread of speech from the preceding chapter, and a single word, ‘again’, joins it on; nor are there any verses: it is prose throughout, and when the speaking is done it simply closes. What is spoken is ten things: faith, the precepts, shame, abashment, learning, giving, wisdom, mindfulness, retention, eloquence. From being able to believe, through to being able to expound it to others.

The strange thing is that the chapter title reads ‘the ten inexhaustible treasuries’, and yet not one of the ten names in the text carries the word ‘inexhaustible’. The two words ‘inexhaustible’ are first explained by the scripture itself only at the treasury of wisdom — ten kinds of what cannot be exhausted, and every one of them is set against something measureless: what is heard is measureless, the meaning of the phrases is measureless, the Dharma realm is boundless, beings are measureless. It cannot be finished, and therefore it stays alive.

The last sentence of the treasury of eloquence is the most direct of all:

“The number of the kalpas may be exhausted, but the meaning of one letter and one phrase is hard to exhaust.”

However long time runs, it is still a number; and a number has an end.

The closing passage gives ten ‘inexhaustible dharmas’. The first is “because they benefit all beings,” and the tenth is “because they understand clearly that all dharmas are like an illusion.” The one end is the most concrete, the other the most empty. Take away the first, and being like an illusion becomes an excuse for doing nothing; take away the last, and the benefiting of beings will be carried on until it runs dry.

The Buddha has moved house for the third time, and this time the places he has not left are three.

The scriptural text says: “not leaving from beneath this tree of awakening, nor the summit of Sumeru, nor the palace of the Yāma Heaven, and yet going to the hall in the Tuṣita Heaven adorned with all wondrous jewels.” When he ascended to the Trāyastriṃśa Heaven what he did not leave was one place; when he ascended to the Yāma Heaven it was two; this time it is three; and further on, when he ascends to the Heaven of Free Enjoyment of Others' Emanations to speak the ten grounds, there will be one place more. What is not left keeps accumulating — and this is the way this scripture walks.

In this chapter the World-Honored One does not speak one sentence of Dharma. The heaven-king sees the Buddha coming from afar, and first spreads the seat, then adorns the hall, then raises up offerings, preparing all the way to the end before he opens his mouth to invite the Buddha to dwell there. First the place is prepared; only then is the person invited.

And the scale of the preparing the scriptural text writes out in a number: the three graphs meaning “a million koṭis” are used in the whole chapter three hundred and two times. Chengguan counted them, and said that “in all there are three hundred and two kinds of ‘a million koṭis’,” and he gave one sentence of reason only: “because the stage increases upon the million of the ten practices.” The preceding assembly, speaking the ten practices, used “a million”; this assembly, speaking the ten dedications, uses “a million koṭis.” The number is not there for one to reckon up; it is there for one to see the increase.

The last segment shows the stage most of all. In the assemblies before this, as soon as the Buddha arrived the music of the heavens came to rest; but the scriptural text of this assembly says: the music and the songs of praise blazed on without ceasing, and yet the heaven-king's mind was without disturbance. Chengguan's explanation is four graphs only — motion and stillness are not two.

‘It is not that stillness means turning the sound off.’

The Buddha sat in the palace of the Tuṣita Heaven, and once again he did not say a single sentence.

Those who speak are ten bodhisattvas, whose names all carry the word “Banner”; they come from ten worlds whose names all begin with the word “Wondrous,” and they serve ten buddhas whose titles too all carry the word “Banner.” Chengguan says that the first sense of “Banner” is standing out high — the stations of the three worthy stages have here come to their summit.

The lord of the assembly, Vajra Banner, at his very first word takes away both ends at once: “The Tathāgata does not appear in the world, nor is there any nirvāṇa; it is by the power of his original great vow that he manifests this dharma of sovereign freedom.” Ten segments and a hundred verses, and from here on they do only one thing — they take away, one thing at a time, whatever can still be grasped hold of in that word “Buddha”: form and sound, coming and going, inner and outer, one and many; and at the last they take away even the day: “The Tathāgata's attaining of awakening is truly not tied to a day.”

Do not be in haste to read this as ‘then there is nothing at all.’ Wisdom Banner's simile of the moon has already blocked that: the moon is stamped upon ten thousand rivers, and “though the images are measureless, the moon itself has never been two”; and the very next verse says at once “neither one nor yet two” — not even “one” is left standing for you.

Constellation Banner asks three times over: “Who is able to conceive of the Buddha? Who is able to see the perfect awakening? Who is able to manifest the most excellent one?” Six verses answer them one question at a time, and then the last verse wipes the answers away as well — perfect awakening passes beyond language, and it is only by borrowing language that it is spoken of.

Dharma Banner closes with the weightiest line of all: “Rather would one constantly and fully undergo all the sufferings of every world than be far from the Tathāgata and not behold his power of sovereign freedom.” Taken apart to the very end, this is not something cold. After this chapter comes the Ten Dedications.

Eight hundred graphs and more, and not one sentence of the proper exposition has yet begun.

Vajra Banner entered a concentration whose name is “the samādhi of the bodhisattva's light of wisdom.” The buddhas of the ten directions appeared before him, and every one of those buddhas was named Vajra Banner. They spoke a very long passage: why we sustain you, what the sustaining is to accomplish, how you should speak this Dharma, what we give you — and then each with the right hand stroked the crown of his head.

The most important sentence is the question the buddhas set themselves: “Why is this?” — and their own answer: “Because of the power of the roots of goodness by which he entered this samādhi.”

The sustaining is not a favor bestowed at random. It is a correspondence that has a cause.

When the stroking of the crown was done, he rose out of the concentration, and the first sentence out of his mouth is not about dedication but about vow — “a bodhisattva-mahāsattva has an inconceivable great vow that fills the Dharma realm and is universally able to rescue and guard all sentient beings.”

Only when the vow stands firm first is there anything to turn. Chengguan, explaining the two graphs of “dedication,” says that to dedicate is to turn and to direct is to tend toward: one turns one's own ten thousand practices over and makes them tend toward three places.

Then he asks himself: how many kinds are there?

Ten kinds. The names once told over, the prologue is at an end.

The text of the ten dedications that follows is all inside these ten names.

Of the ten dedications, only the first has a name as long as a sentence.

It is because this station has to do two contrary things at once: really to lift sentient beings out, and at the same time not to allow even one mark of ‘a sentient being’ to stand in the mind. Without the first half, the dedication is empty talk; without the second, the dedication becomes a fresh bondage. Chengguan says it plainly — great compassion widely relieving is what is called rescuing and guarding; only great wisdom without attachment is what is called being free of the mark.

Where merit is to be put — of this the passage gives something close to a definition: “If there are roots of goodness but one does not wish to benefit all sentient beings, that is not called dedication; take any single root of goodness whatever, and only when it universally takes sentient beings as its object is it called dedication.” The measure is not how large the roots of goodness are, but how universal the object is. The scripture says, ‘though the roots of goodness be few, they universally gather in sentient beings’: few is dedication too.

The heaviest words are in the passage on undergoing suffering in their place: “I would rather undergo such manifold suffering alone than have sentient beings fall into the hells.” Making one's own body the pledge — a pledge is something pawned, not a figure of speech.

And at the end, twenty-one clauses close one after another with the word ‘dedicating’, taking the marks apart until only suchness is left. And when the taking apart is done, the liberating of sentient beings still goes on “without ever resting.”

Now enter this dedication.

The name of this dedication tells neither what is dedicated nor what it is dedicated to.

It says only one word: indestructible. And what is it that is destroyed? The scripture answers as soon as it opens its mouth — ten clauses of “gains an indestructible faith.” So this dedication is named not from the goodness that dedicates but from the faith that dedicates.

And “indestructible” has two layers. The layer on the side of phenomenon is easy enough: faith holds, and does not fall back. The hard one is the layer on the side of principle. Chengguan cites the Benye jing: ‘Contemplating that all dharmas have only function and only name, in thought after thought they do not abide, and therefore it is called indestructible.’ — Not abiding in thought after thought is plainly the mark of destruction; how has it turned into the reason for being indestructible? Because destruction can be spoken of only where there is something that abides. Where nothing abides, there is nothing there to be destroyed.

So however firmly one believes on the side of phenomenon, it can still be destroyed; only when phenomenon and principle both run through is it truly indestructible.

At the end of the ten clauses of faith the scripture does not come to rest upon the supernormal powers of the buddhas, but upon “toward the practice of skillful means of all bodhisattvas he gains an indestructible faith” — Chengguan says this is a raising again of the dharma of practice, intended to gather in altogether the dharma of principle, that is, to have faith in suchness. Faith goes round a circle and comes back to the nature of the dharmas.

Faith stands, and only then are there roots of goodness to plant; the roots of goodness are planted, and only then is there something to dedicate.

Let faith go this far for now.

How could a bodhisattva ever be “equal to all buddhas”?

What is equalled is not the buddhas' fruit but the buddhas' way of doing it. The sutra says he “follows and studies the path of dedication of the world-honored buddhas of the past, of the future, and of the present” — however the buddhas of the three times dispose of their own roots of goodness, just so does he dispose of his.

And so this dedication sets out from the highest place and yet comes to rest in the lowest: on one side he vows that the joy of the buddhas may “turn and increase yet further,” and on the other he makes a vow even when he “gives to an animal so much as a single ball or a single grain of food.” Things have a great and a small; vows have no great and small.

And so too it is not afraid of the household. “He dwells in the house together with wife and child, and yet has never for a moment cast away the mind of awakening” — dressing, eating, washing, sleeping and waking: the sutra counts them off one item at a time, and then says that “his mind constantly dedicates and directs them to the path of Sarvajñā.” Dedication is not the last three minutes of the liturgy.

And when it is carried through to the end, even the dedication is set down: “Though it is for the sake of the flock of beings that he dedicates, yet in the dedication there is nothing to which he clings.”

Take up, then, the study of this dedication.

A root of goodness has no feet. How, then, does it ever “arrive” at every place?

The fourth dedication changes only the name: reaching every place. The sutra itself gives two similes. The first is “just as the true limit is such that there is no place it does not reach” — the principle is taken as the simile for the practice: the reason the principle is everywhere is that it occupies no one position. The second is “just as there is no self, and it universally gathers in all dharmas” — the reason a root of goodness can gather in everything is likewise that it sets up no ‘mine.’

That long string of offerings in the middle, running from countless canopies of fragrance all the way to palaces of maṇi jewels, reads like sheer accumulation. But immediately after it comes a sentence that turns the hand over: “using the unobtainable as his means, he does not, within karma, discriminate its recompense, nor, within the recompense, discriminate the karma.” When you do it, you keep no accounts; when you receive it, you claim no credit. The vast offering and the contemplation of emptiness have no before and after — Chengguan calls this ‘following marks and being apart from marks with no before and after.’

Lest anyone hear it awry, the sutra stops up the gap itself: he is able not to destroy any karma. The contemplation of emptiness may not be used to abolish cause and effect.

The last ten clauses, the fruit of the station, carry the word “reach” through to the end: it is not a matter of walking everywhere, but of “within a single pore entering universally into all worlds,” of “within each and every thought-moment all the buddhas being present before him.” One place is every place.

Begin, then, by dedicating the nearest good deed of all.

The fifth dedication is called “the treasury of inexhaustible merit,” and yet the roots of goodness it takes up to dedicate come, when they are counted, to only eight clauses.

Repentance · reverent salutation · exhortation to teach · hearing the Dharma, together with a fourfold rejoicing — that is all of them. Eight clauses are a limited thing; where, then, do the two graphs “inexhaustible” come from? Chengguan answers straight out: what is inexhaustible is not the roots of goodness but the object that is met. Put those eight clauses inside “the buddhas of the three times,” “all sentient beings,” “the whole Dharma realm and the whole realm of empty space,” and a limited thing, once it touches the limitless, becomes limitless along with it.

The structure of this section is therefore in two halves. The first half adorns to the utmost — the buddha-lands of the three times, the twenty-nine names of buddha-lands, the eleven kinds of implement of adornment, the great bodhisattvas filling them full; the second half takes it apart clause by clause — “he does not discriminate lands and their adorning purification” takes apart the adorning of lands just set out, and “he does not discriminate sentient beings and their taming” takes apart the delivering of beings just set out. To adorn and yet not cling to the adorning is the very bone of this treasury.

The most essential sentence stands at the end: “when the bodhisattva-mahāsattva dedicates all his roots of goodness, he obtains these ten kinds of inexhaustible treasury.” It is at the time of dedicating, not after the dedicating. A treasury is not a stock in store, for a stock gets used up; a treasury is a responding — “because, according as there is anything needed, all the implements of ease are entirely obtained.”

One and the same good deed, dedicated to oneself, has an end; dedicated to the Dharma realm, it is inexhaustible on the spot. The verses say it most plainly of all: “he enters the treasury of inexhaustible merit; past, future, and present, it is constantly without end.”

Hand the thing over, and only then do you learn what it was pointing at.

The sixth dedication; the name the sutra itself gives it is “the dedication that accords with and makes firm all roots of goodness.” The speaker is the bodhisattva Vajra Banner, asking and answering himself, twenty-nine segments in one breath, without a single line of verse.

Its style is a three-part cycle: what was given, how may all beings fare, and a last sentence, ‘this is the bodhisattva-mahāsattva's dedication of roots of goodness at the time of giving such-and-such.’ Among the twenty-nine segments, the one on medicinal decoctions alone has no “this is” sentence — recorded here in accordance with the actual text of the Taishō.

What must be kept in view is that thread. Giving food, he vows for the food of wisdom; giving clothing, for the clothing of shame and modesty; giving lamps, for measureless light. The thing given is not an item of good conduct; it is the ground of a simile — the one thing handed over is used on the spot to point out a dharma.

It runs from a single mouthful of rice up to the royal station, up to the jeweled crown on the head and the bright pearl in the topknot, and at last to the people in the prison and the condemned man at the execution ground — where the bodhisattva “gives up his own body and undergoes it in that one's place.” From the easiest thing to relinquish to the hardest, the order skips no rung.

‘The station of the ten dedications,’ ‘following marks,’ ‘apart from marks’ — the sutra says none of these names; they are Chengguan's outline.

First see which segment you are stuck at.

“With this unfirm body he purchases the firm body.”

Twenty gateways of giving are spoken through in one breath. In the first seventeen what is let go is always some portion of one's own body — the topknot with the skin, the eyes, the ears and nose, the teeth, the tongue, the head, the hands and feet, the blood, the marrow and flesh, the heart, the intestines and kidneys and liver and lungs, the bones, the skin, the fingers, the fingernails, together with throwing himself into a fire pit for the sake of seeking the Dharma and undergoing in the stead of evil men the suffering that is theirs; in the eighteenth he lets go of every land and city within the seas; and the last two gateways no longer let go of himself at all, but turn instead to putting an end to killing and to rescuing those whose bodies have been maimed.

Across the whole section stand a hundred and eighty-seven clauses of “May all sentient beings,” and not one of those vows asks anything for himself. What is let go is a portion of mine; what is vowed for is the whole of theirs — ‘roots of goodness are called firm only when they are not kept on one's own side of the account’: as for the name dedication, the sutra has already said it out to the end by itself.

There are two sentences to keep in mind. One is in the gateway of giving the skin: when the man who comes begging comes holding a sharp knife, the bodhisattva goes out to meet him and brings him in, lays out a seat and asks him to sit, and says, “this one who has come begging is very hard to meet with” — without him this vow would have nowhere to be accomplished. The other is in the gateway of throwing himself into the fire pit: “Marvelous! The true Dharma is very easily gotten” — take the suffering of the evil destinies through measureless kalpas as your denominator, and one jump into a fire pit is cheap indeed. The price a person will not pay is usually only a matter of having taken the denominator too small.

And one more sentence to keep in mind: ‘inner wealth’ and ‘the sixty gateways’ are not names the sutra gives itself; they are Chengguan's outline-divisions of this section.

Look first at which portion of yourself you can actually let go of.

Give to the very end, and the giving is no longer to be seen.

The earth, servants, the royal throne, the capital city, wife and children, house and home, gardens and groves, the great assembly of giving — gate after gate down to the last gate, where the scripture at the last speaks of all the goods that sustain life together, and even omits the concluding sentence, letting the general conclusion carry it off.

At the general conclusion there is a scene: from the ten directions all who beg have come, and the bodhisattva at the sight of them is “as at the sight of a good friend.” Then the joys of the nine kings are measured against it, counted off from Śakra all the way to the Pure Abodes — added together they “could not match” that one thought of gladness.

Then it turns. The scripture asks itself: “by what meaning is it called dedication?” It answers in ten clauses, and each clause “reaches the further shore.” To ‘dedicate’ is to turn, and to ‘direct’ is to tend toward; while there is a self it takes will, and when there is no self it is natural. And so being free of marks is not a failure to dedicate; it is the most thoroughgoing dedication — and it does not stay its hand: “he fully knows that all the conditions of action are like a dream, that sounds are like an echo, that sentient beings are like shadows, and that all dharmas are like an illusion, and yet he does not break the power of the deeds of causes and conditions.”

The closing line of the verses is the measure of the whole passage: “just as the nature of dharmas pervades all, so too is it with the bodhisattva's dedication.”

When someone comes to ask something of you, what is the first thought.

This dedication does not begin with dedicating. It begins with taking stock.

Its name is “according equally with all sentient beings,” yet the scripture first counts out, clause by clause, the roots of goodness that are to be dedicated — “small roots of goodness, great roots of goodness, broad roots of goodness, many roots of goodness” — and counts as far as thirty-one clauses. What is in your hands: count it up first.

The graph “equal” runs through both ends. Chengguan says: the sentient beings who are accorded with are of themselves without marks and equal, and the mind that does the according is equal too when its light falls on them. It is not that I, from up above, treat people equally.

The hardest sentence lies in the passage on giving: “Suppose there were one person who, for all the kalpas of the future, came constantly to beg.” That treasures should fill numberless worlds is not hard to imagine; what is hard is that the same one person keeps coming until the kalpas are exhausted, and that you “never grew weary and took rest.”

At the end, ten “does not cling” clauses are given. The first nine are still relinquishing; the tenth, “he does not cling to there being no dharmas at all,” relinquishes the very standpoint of relinquishing. The verses say it more cleanly still — “constantly, of all dharmas he makes no duality, nor does he make of them a non-duality.”

If you cannot hold this long section in mind, holding the first verse is enough — merit, down to a single moment's practice, can all be dedicated without any border.

One sentence said a hundred times over; the sutra is not afraid you will find it tiresome.

“Just as suchness pervades all places and is without bound, so too is the dedication of roots of goodness: it pervades all places and is without bound.” — and then one virtue is exchanged for another and it is said again; exchanged once more, and said again. A full hundred times.

What those hundred times have to say is in fact only one thing: dedication is not the carrying of merit from here to there. Whatever suchness is like, that is what the dedication of roots of goodness is like, because it was of one substance with suchness from the start. You are not transferring an account; you are recognizing.

That is why the question in this section is put differently from the others. The other sections ask “what is it to” — how one dedicates; this one asks “what is” — what it is.

Suchness pervades the night, and pervades the day as well; half a month and a month, a year or an eon, all abide within it; and so the sutra says that the dedication of roots of goodness is likewise, “through every night it sends forth a great radiance and performs the work of a buddha.” That stretch of time in the night, no more than any other, may be let pass in vain.

The last sentence comes to rest here: “ultimately pure, it does not keep company with any of the afflictions.”

So much, then, for the eighth.

One phrase, used sixty-one times.

“With a mind of liberation without attachment and without bondage” — and what follows each repetition is different: accomplishing the bodily activity of Samantabhadra, purifying the verbal activity of Samantabhadra, adorning the ten directions with a single flower, holding within a single hair-tip all the lands throughout empty space, knowing forty-eight kinds of conception in a single thought. The eight graphs at the head of the sentence never change.

So this is not sixty-one assignments; it is the sixty-one faces of a single thing. Being without attachment and without bondage is not standing empty-handed; it is having one's hands freed — it is precisely because he does not clutch that he can do so much.

Having done it all, the sutra turns back and loosens the hand as well: “he does not discriminate self or other, does not discriminate the thing given or the one who receives what is given.” So vast an estate has been dedicated away; if there still remains an ‘I am dedicating,’ then the whole of it is within bondage. Chengguan says it with the least effort of all: ‘because the mind is unbound, body and the rest are now all without bondage or attachment.’ Ten places are liberated; only one place is loosened.

This station vows not to become a buddha but to become Samantabhadra — because Samantabhadra, ‘having attained the way, does not abandon the practice of the cause,’ and does not seek an early conclusion.

It does not matter if you cannot finish reading the vast sixty-one clauses; the two lines of verse at the very end are the gate given to you: “if a person is able to cultivate this dedication, then he is studying the way that the buddhas practice”

And with this mind, dedicate.

Of the first nine dedications, every one still lets you point to which root of goodness is being dedicated. At the tenth the scripture changes its way of speaking — “as the Dharma realm is measureless, so too is the dedication of roots of goodness, and the wisdom obtained is in the end without measure.”

It is not that the roots of goodness are dedicated over to the Dharma realm. It is that once the roots of goodness are dedicated, their measure is the measure of the Dharma realm.

And so this station does not set out from the giving of wealth; it sets out from “abiding in the station of a Dharma master and practicing the giving of Dharma at large.” The last step of the three worthy stages is to stand up into the seat of one who speaks the Dharma — and the scripture, immediately after, sets down the hardest question there is: “if he is not himself pure in the practice of purity, he cannot cause another to attain purity.”

From there it presses outward the whole way — the twenty vows that beings become Dharma masters, the forty-four kinds of voice, the ninety-four things of jeweled adornment; and then it draws back in the whole way — “he does not dedicate by way of clinging to dedication,” so that not even the dedicating may be seized.

The last twenty-nine clauses each read “dedicating by abiding in the measurelessness of the Dharma realm.” Only here does it become plain that dedicating to the true limit is not a sending of something off elsewhere; it is an abiding where one stands.

The concluding sentence is written “the tenth, the dedication of abiding in the measurelessness equal to the Dharma realm” — one graph more than the other nine stations, the graph for abiding.

The ten dedications are finished, and the great earth quakes.

The scripture gives its own reason, two of them side by side: “by the spiritual power of the Buddha, and because the Dharma is so.” The latter is the crux — the Dharma is of itself thus, and so it appears thus. Not a reward, not a seal of approval.

Then a company comes to bear witness. Not buddhas, but bodhisattvas — of the same name as the one who expounds, all called Vajra Banner. The sentence they speak is the eye of this passage:

“Good indeed! Good indeed! Son of the Buddha! You are well able to expound these great dedications.”

And they add one strict sentence: what is expounded in the ten directions has “words and the sense of the sentences likewise so, neither increased nor diminished” — not that the general purport is the same, but that not one graph is more and not one graph is less.

At the last, ninety-four lines of verse. Of the final nine verses Chengguan says they ‘run through all ten dedications’: the practices of the six perfections that follow marks, and the sentence free of marks, “just as the Dharma realm is without discrimination,” are set down side by side — both sides are wanted.

The last two verses use the impossible to set it off: sentient beings may be counted, the measure of the mind may be known, a hair may measure space, the multitude of lands may be ground to dust —

“Such sons of the Buddha, great seers — the practices and vows in which they dwell none can measure.”

To speak of what cannot be measured is to make people practice.

He spoke ten names, and then he stopped speaking.

The assembly waited for the explanation; what came was silence. So one asked, and asked again, and asked a third time, and at last all the bodhisattvas asked together; and even the Buddha came forward — not opening his mouth, but sending out a single light from between his brows.

Only then did Vajragarbha consent. Yet the first thing he did on opening his mouth was to say again how hard this Dharma is to speak: ‘Like the track of a bird in the sky, hard to set forth and hard to point out.’ And at the end he would grant only this: ‘I now speak of only a small portion.’

The deepest passage of a great sūtra was drawn forth in this way. Watch, then, how they asked for it.

Gold in the fire, brighter with every firing.

Five fears lie at the bottom of the human heart: of being unable to make a living, of a bad reputation, of dying, of falling after death, of a crowd’s imposing power. This ground tells of someone stepping for the first time truly into the position of a noble one — the moment that mind with great compassion as its forerunner is raised, he ‘passes beyond the stage of the ordinary person and is born into the family of the Tathāgata’; and the five fears fall away all at once, because the “self” that was doing the fearing fell away first.

He makes ten great vows, and every one of them closes with the same line: “vast as the Dharma realm, ultimate as space, to the end of the future through all the numbers of kalpas, without ceasing.” After the ten vows he sums them up again with the ten clauses of exhaustion: were the realm of sentient beings to have an exhausting, only then would this vow have one — and the realm of sentient beings cannot be exhausted.

The gladness of one who will never again be afraid. Enter this ground.

The gold is already gold, and still it must go into the alum and be boiled once more.

The fire of the first ground removes the dirt on the outside of the gold; the alum of this ground removes the dimness inside the body of the gold. That is why this ground is not called the ground of keeping the precepts but the Stainless Ground — it is not that ten rules are held fast, but that the mind able to break them has dissolved first. The sūtra speaks of the ten courses of good action, and crowns the first nine of them with the one word “by nature”: “by his very nature he leaves all killing far behind,” “by his very nature he does not steal.” One’s nature is of itself so; it is not a gritting of the teeth.

Once the stain is gone, the precepts are no longer a wall but a garden — the sūtra says, ‘taking the ten courses of good action as a park of Dharma, loving it and abiding in it at ease.’ To dwell inside it is happiness, and so one wants to draw others in to dwell there too.

One and the same act of not killing may purchase no more than a single lifetime among humans or gods, or may run straight through to the ground of a buddha: ‘the paths of the pratyekabuddha, the śrāvaka, and the buddha-vehicle are all accomplished by means of the ten courses of good action.’ The difference lies not in the deed but in the mind that raises it.

Enter, then, this ground.

The light is not on the body; it is the mind lighting up inside.

This ground sees the world through to the bottom: impermanent, suffering, impure, decaying, arising and ceasing in an instant — ‘not one of the three times gives a place to stand’. Yet the one who has seen it through does not turn and walk away — instead he gives rise to ten kinds of pitying mind, because the more thoroughly one sees, the better one knows where others are trapped.

Then he traces the matter back: to deliver sentient beings is not apart from unobstructed wisdom of liberation; and tracing back to the very end, it all comes to rest on four words — “skillful and extensive learning”. The highest wisdom stands with its feet on plain, honest listening. So he is willing to trade a throne for a single verse, and his life for a single phrase.

He has sat the eight concentrations and gained the superknowledges, and still he “practices without taking delight or attaching” — even the concentration he cultivated himself he will not permit to become a home.

True gold is refined: “its weight is not lessened, and it turns brighter and purer.” What is cut off is the dross, not you. Enter this ground.

Gold refined until it can be made into a vessel; only then does the jewel’s light shine out.

The ground before this cultivated concentration to the full, and yet it left two sticks of firewood behind, the two that look most like merit — attachment to the savor of concentration, attachment to a Dharma smoothly understood. This ground burns them up. What it uses is no extraordinary gate of practice; it is the plainest things there are: the four stations of mindfulness, the four right eliminations, the five faculties and the five powers, the seven factors of awakening and the eight branches of the path; and five of the seven sets close with one and the same line — “relying upon disgust, relying upon dispassion, relying upon cessation, and dedicating it toward equanimity.” In the first three clauses there is no difference from the two vehicles; the fourth clause is the watershed.

Wisdom here stands up like fire, and so the name is Flame. And the fire can burn because the firewood it burns is just that pile one is least willing to give up.

One who dwells on this ground “mostly becomes a king of the Suyāma Heaven”, and what he does is one thing only: to remove the view of a body for sentient beings — the very thing he himself has only just left behind. Enter this ground.

To have seen through it all, and still be willing to come back and learn the affairs of the world one by one — that is what is called hard.

On the four grounds before this he gained world-transcending wisdom, and the smoothest next step is not to want to come back: birth-and-death is suffering, nirvāṇa is ease. What this ground has to cut off is just that partiality. And so the text says on one side, “he knows as it really is that this is the noble truth of suffering,” and on the other, “of the worldly arts there is not one he does not take up and practice” — letters and reckoning, medicine and calendrical lore, song and dance, gardens and pools, every one of them to be studied. What is true and what is worldly: two wisdoms contrary in their nature, and this ground joins them together — hence the name ‘Hard to Conquer’.

There is one limit set upon this studying, and the text sets it itself: “only that it should do no harm or vexation to sentient beings; for the sake of their benefit he sets it all forth, gradually bringing them to abide in the unsurpassed Buddha-Dharma.”

And however deep the wisdom of the truths, he still admits it honestly: “he knows by the power of the wisdom of faith and understanding, not by the power of ultimate wisdom.”

Like true gold polished with a wondrous gem, brighter the more it is polished; like a lotus in the water, with not a drop clinging to it. Enter this ground.

When you have looked at the twelve links a tenth time, prajñā is already there before your eyes.

On the fifth ground one contemplates the four truths: suffering and its origin are the defiled, cessation and the path are the pure. However well one contemplates, there still stands in the mind a ‘this side is dirty, that side is clean.’ This ground first sets the defiled and the pure down together — the ten equalities — and only then goes to look at the chain that binds a person.

Looked at to the bottom, what is seen is this: deeds are the field, consciousness the seed, a single tree of suffering growing of itself, and ‘there is no one inside directing it.’ Look one layer further in, and the sūtra speaks the sentence that later ages have quoted without end — “Whatever belongs to the three realms is only one mind.”

And so emptiness, signlessness, and wishlessness become manifest, gate after gate. At the wishless the two vehicles halt; the bodhisattva has kept one thing back and not set it down: only great compassion is excepted.

And just because that one thing is not set down, prajñā is ‘present before one.’ The name of the ground falls here. Now enter it.

The hardest stretch to walk is not the filthiest end of the road; it is that border where things are nearly clean.

The first six grounds carried the contemplation of emptiness to its furthest point; on this ground the illness is the opposite one — dwelling upon emptiness. And so ten sentences of the shape “though … yet …” must be learned: though he cultivates emptiness, signlessness, and wishlessness, yet in kindness and compassion he does not forsake sentient beings; though he is far removed from the three realms, yet he adorns the three realms. ‘Within emptiness he does not abide in emptiness; within existence he does not abide in existence’ — when each of the two sides gains the other, that is what is called the wisdom of skillful means.

He is already able to enter the concentration of cessation in thought after thought, and yet in thought after thought he rises from it and does not make realization of it, like a man who boards a ship and enters the sea and, being skilled, meets with no disaster in the water. He has surpassed in full the host of afflictions, much greed and the rest, and yet the sūtra says of him that he ‘is not called one who has afflictions, nor called one who is without afflictions’ — not called having them, because the afflictions do not actively operate; not called without them, because “his mind that seeks the wisdom of the Tathāgata is not yet fulfilled.” Even that “seeking”, on this ground, counts as a stirring.

Exertion has been carried to its very end, and only then does one know that the next step can no longer be taken by exertion. Enter this ground.

Once the ship is out on the open sea, there is no more need to row.

The seven grounds before this were one long exertion of strength, and at the utmost reach of that strength the strength itself can at last be let go. This ground tells of a person who for the first time no longer has to exert himself and whose practice does not for that break off — the deliberations of body, speech, and mind all come to rest, and even the mind of awakening and the mind of nirvāṇa ‘are not given rise to’; and the sūtra at this point comes out with a startling sentence: were the buddhas not to appear before him and urge him on, “at that time he would enter final nirvāṇa”.

What calls him back out of that stillness is no strength from outside; it is the vow he himself made at the beginning. And so among the ten perfections of this ground, the perfection of vows is preeminent.

Thus “upon a single buddha-field his body does not move”, and yet within the assemblies of unspeakably many buddha-fields his body appears — as the sun and moon abide in empty space and there is a reflection of them in every water.

Only the one who no longer exerts himself travels the farthest. Enter this ground.

The gold, refined as far as this ground, has now been made into a jeweled crown.

The eight grounds before this were the walking of one’s own road through to the end; this ground is the speaking out of the road once walked. He first sees people clearly — the minds of sentient beings, their afflictions, their deeds, their faculties, their faith and understanding, their dispositions, their delights and desires, their latent tendencies, their taking of birth, their habit-energies, and their being fixed in rightness, fixed in wrongness, or unfixed: eleven dense thickets, known aspect by aspect out to eighty-four thousand. Only one who sees this finely dares to sit down upon the seat of the Dharma.

Then the sentient beings of the three-thousandfold great-thousand world-system come before him and question him all at once, and no two of them ask the same thing; he ‘receives them all in a single thought’ and answers with a single sound, and each one hears the very sentence he was after.

The latent tendencies are not what the strength of concentration can hold down — “the realms of concentration can only push them off and one still falls back — it is the cessation by the adamantine path that is final.” This ground says the thing outright, and says plainly what a master of the Dharma is worth: the one who can expound the Dharma is first of all the one who can see. Enter this ground.

For a rain to fall, there must first be a vessel able to catch it.

The ten grounds have walked to their end. The name of this ground is Dharma Cloud; yet when the sūtra explains that name, the first thing it speaks of is not the raining but the bearing: when the great rain of the dragon king comes down, only the great sea can hold it; when the great Dharma-rain of the Tathāgata comes down, only the bodhisattva of this ground can hold it. ‘Being able to receive’ comes before ‘being able to rain’ — this is the eye of the whole ground.

He takes his seat upon the great jeweled lotus, and first sends out light from the soles of his feet to illumine the hells, and only at the last sends it out from the crown of his head in offering to the buddhas; then the light of the buddhas of the ten directions enters him through the crown of his head, as a wheel-turning king takes the water of the four great seas and consecrates the crown of his prince. To this moment the sūtra gives four words: “he falls within the number of the buddhas” — already listed in the number of the buddhas, and yet it does not say he has become a buddha. And so the great assembly presses the question, “then what of the Buddha?”, and he answers: take one clod of earth from the four continents and set it against the earth of the boundless worlds — the very act of comparing does not hold.

Ten mountains stand within one and the same great sea, and each of them has its own name. So it is with the ten grounds — they stand within one and the same omniscience, and gain their names by their differences.

Enter, then, this ground.

The Buddha said: he is here, dwelling close beside me, and he has never once moved.

The assembly raised their heads to look for him, and could not find him. They looked a second time, and still could not find him. One of them entered ten thousand asaṃkhyeyas of samādhis to look for him, and could not see even the seat where he sat.

The Buddha did not call the man out. He asked one question only: the conjured forms within a conjuring of letters — can you say where they dwell?

Afterwards they saw him. Not because they searched with greater force, but because they were willing to raise the vow ‘one and the same practice and vow with Samantabhadra’ — and so exchanged their eyes from a single direction to all places.

The main text of the ten samādhis begins only with the sentence after this one. This whole passage is for nothing else than to bring forth the one who is to expound.

The asura king stretched his body until it stood as high as Mount Sumeru, and his own body had not shifted by a hair.

We suppose that concentration means shutting the world outside the door — the eyes close, and the objects are gone. This concentration says exactly the opposite: the first thing about it is “the inexhaustibility of wisdom,” and the last thing about it is “he sees all the worlds entering everywhere into his body.” Not only has the world not been shut out, it has all come in. The point turns on the last four words: “attached to nothing at all.” The one who sees most clearly is exactly the one who sticks least.

And so this concentration is named ‘universal light’: not that the light shines upon one place only, but that there is no place that can rob it of its light.

To change into a different person when the setting changes — that is what confusion means. Now look at this concentration.

The sun shines upon the seven jeweled mountains, the shadow of the mountains falls into the sea, and the shadow of the sea falls back upon the mountains. Within the shadows there are shadows, shadow holding shadow, and there is no counting to the end of it.

What this samādhi has to say is not how great the spiritual penetrations are, but something harder: measureless worlds enter into the single body of the bodhisattva, and that single body enters everywhere into measureless worlds — why is there no crowding, no muddling, no collapse? The sūtra answers with the utmost economy: “he does not, because those worlds are many, thereby ruin this one world; nor does he, because this world is one, thereby ruin those many worlds.” The many are still many, the one is still one, and neither has been compressed.

There is only one sentence of reason: “because the bodhisattva knows that all dharmas are without self.” Only where there is a self are there boundaries, and only where there are boundaries is there obstruction. Since the self cannot be got hold of, neither can the boundaries — and the shadows can shine into one another precisely because they were never nailed fast upon any one mountain.

And the last line of defense in the whole passage is this: not even the thought ‘I am able to enter’ may be set up. Set it up, and the boundaries come back.

Now enter this samādhi.

When the sun comes out it is called day, and when the sun goes down it is called night — day has no arising, and night has no ceasing either.

The name of this samādhi is ‘travelling in due order to all buddha-lands,’ which sounds like a journey with no end to it. Yet all the way through the sūtra text, not one clause puts its weight on the travelling: he passes beyond numberless worlds, then beyond as many worlds again as those numberless worlds ground into dust motes, and then, in all those worlds, he enters one and the same samādhi.

For how long does he enter? The sūtra honestly lists more than thirty kinds — a kṣaṇa, an instant, a day, a year, a kalpa, on to “unspeakably unspeakable kalpas.” It lists until language itself can go no further. Then it gathers the whole with a single clause: “whether long or short, whether by dharma or by time, in every kind of way they differ.” Granting difference, granting it to the full.

Only the next sentence is the turning: toward these the bodhisattva “gives rise to no discrimination, his mind is without defiling attachment,” making neither two nor not-two, neither the universal nor the particular. And having left discrimination behind, not a particle of function is the less — he still rises out of the samādhi by skillful means of spiritual penetration, and “toward all dharmas he neither forgets nor loses, on to the very last.”

The deeper the samādhi the greater the clarity, not the greater the dark. He has travelled numberless lands, and in his mind he has not moved a single step.

The heat-haze in the midday sun looks from far off like a sheet of water; draw near, and the water is gone, and even the thought ‘water’ goes out of itself.

The sūtra first lays the offering out to its utmost — the buddhas he sees outnumber the dust motes of asaṃkhyeya worlds ground fine, and before each and every buddha he presents incense, presents flowers, presents canopies, presents jewels, and at the last simply gathers in, by his spiritual power, every article of offering in every buddha-land; and then he bows his head in homage and casts his whole body upon the ground and asks after the Buddha-dharma. Of the actual doing, not one thing is left undone.

The turn comes upon a single word, ‘and yet’: “And yet as to the buddhas appearing in the world and entering parinirvāṇa, of marks such as these there is nothing whatever obtained.” And what cuts deepest is the sentence after it — “The buddhas’ having marks and likewise their being without marks are alike what the mind that forms conceptions discriminates.” Having broken ‘existent,’ a person always wants to fall back and rest upon ‘nonexistent’; the sūtra will not allow even that step.

Yet obtaining nothing is not the same as having nothing at all. Of this samādhi it says, “having entered it he rises from it, and having risen from it he does not lose what he has gained” — as a person waking from sleep recalls what he dreamed: of the realms within the dream not a trace remains, and yet he remembers plainly. And so he sees the buddhas and hears the Dharma and holds it in memory without forgetting, and comes out to open it up and make it clear to the assemblies gathered in every place of awakening.

He has made offerings to buddhas beyond counting, and has not seen one single buddha appear in the world; he has not seen one buddha appear in the world, and of the Dharma he heard not one sentence has been forgotten.

He has come to know the whole of the past, and he has not turned back a single step.

This samādhi is called ‘the treasury of knowing the adornments of the past.’ What the bodhisattva knows is not a heap of bygone events; it is a net whose meshes take one another in, layer within layer — within the kalpas there are the lands, and within the lands there are the kalpas; within the kalpas there is the appearing of the buddhas, within that appearing there is the preaching of the Dharma, within the preaching there is what the minds of beings delight in, within that delight there are the faculties, within the faculties there is the taming, within the taming there are the life-spans and the count of the years. Know one thing, and the whole is drawn along with it.

This concentration has a second name too: ‘the Pure Treasury of the Past.’ The sūtra says that “within a single thought-moment” it can enter a hundred kalpas, a thousand kalpas, on to “unspeakably unspeakable kalpas” — the measures of kalpas are piled upward until language concedes defeat, and that one thought-moment is still only one thought-moment.

The weightiest words are eight: “he does not extinguish the present, he does not take the past as object.” Chengguan glosses them with great exactness: not extinguishing the present is not abandoning; not taking the past as object is not grasping. To know the past and yet not let the mind sink down into former days, to be clear and yet not let the thought stick fast — the measuring-line for every dharma of looking back lies just here.

At the moment of rising from the concentration, “with no interval between” he gains the ten dharmas of consecration. It is like the kalala first entering the womb: in a single thought-moment consciousness takes up its birth. Realization was never a slow getting better; it is a being fully prepared, and then all at once.

The sun comes up, and villages, cities and towns, mountains and marshes, birds and beasts, trees and groves, flowers and fruits all appear at once. Did the light of the sun ever single out any one of them for discrimination.

We always suppose that we see clearly because we have a measuring rod in the mind beforehand. This samādhi says the opposite: “its substance-nature is even, without discrimination,” and it is for that reason that it “can cause the bodhisattva to know unspeakably unspeakable hundreds of thousands of koṭis of nayutas of differentiated appearances.” A man who has a standpoint first sees only his own standpoint.

And so this samādhi is named ‘the treasury of the light of wisdom’ — a treasury holds within it: within a single thought-moment there is room for all the kalpas of the three times.

How can what has not yet happened be known? The sūtra teaches no reckoning; it teaches only the bringing of the mind into such order that it is without discrimination. Look, then, at this samādhi.

How great the buddha you see is, is the measure of you.

This round of samādhi begins from the smallest — the halo of the Buddha’s body only one fathom, the measure of his body only seven cubits. Then it pushes upward one degree at a time, on to the size of unspeakably unspeakable great-thousand world-systems. Neither end is the Buddha’s body, and neither is any single degree in between. Space does not decrease within the hole of a mustard seed eaten by a worm, and does not increase within numberless worlds.

And so, after laying out so much of what is seen, the sūtra text uses a single sentence to wash it all over at once: “when he sees in this way, he does not discriminate lands, he does not discriminate sentient beings, he does not discriminate buddhas, he does not discriminate dharmas.” Non-discrimination is not a failing to see; it is seeing and yet not setting up a self upon what is seen — just as dharmas do not say of themselves that they express or are expressed, and yet that which expresses and that which is expressed have never been lost.

Chengguan asks it more directly still: if the bodhisattva’s mind is pure then the buddhas he sees are pure; as for the Tathāgata, what purity is there and what defilement?

When you do not see clearly, there is no need to doubt the Buddha.

The door opens where you took there to be a wall.

The bodies of sentient beings differ by a thousand and a thousand degrees — a human being and a yakṣa, one body and a thousand bodies, a śrāvaka and a pratyekabuddha, one’s own body and the body of a buddha, a single thought-moment and koṭis of kalpas, suchness and speech — and an ordinary person sees in these one uncrossable boundary after another. This round of samādhi performs, upon each of those boundaries, one crossing: entering at this end, rising at that. Seventy-eight clauses in thirty-nine pairs; one pair, one wall.

The walls can be gone through because the hands were emptied first. The first mark of dwelling in this samādhi is not what is obtained but the ten kinds of having nothing to which one is attached: not even one’s own samādhi, one’s own station, the buddha one has oneself seen.

At the last, even ‘going in’ and ‘coming out’ are cancelled — entering within rising, rising within entering. Chengguan puts it with the utmost brevity: entering within rising is the stillness that is the very functioning; rising within entering is the functioning that is the very stillness.

A samādhi is not a room to be gone into and come out of.

The place of entering is the eye, the ear, the nose, and the tongue.

When people picture meditation they suppose one must first get away from the six faculties; this samādhi is entered precisely “at his own eye-place and so on to his own mind-place,” and further “within each single pore.” And so it is named ‘mastery’ — not a gathering of the mind into one place where it does not move, but a going anywhere at all and not being caught.

The sun comes forth, and every grain of sand in the lake shows the image of the sun, and sand shows sand the image of the other, “shining clear through one another without hindrance.” Within a single pore the bodhisattva sees buddhas as many as the dust motes of unspeakable buddha-lands, and through measureless kalpas hears the Dharma, and yet “he never once thinks of the length or shortness of the season, nor are those assemblies crowded and pressed for room” — the not being crowded is not space enlarged, it is a mind that does not discriminate upon quantity.

At the end there runs a string of ‘though … yet …’: though he enters the world he is apart from the notion of world; though he delivers beings he is apart from the notion of a being. It is not each side giving way a step; it is two faces each going to its own bottom without obstructing the other.

Enter, then, this samādhi.

A maṇi jewel put into a colored garment is mirrored as of one color with it, and the nature of the jewel is not altered by so much as a part.

The ten samādhis come to their last round, and this bodhisattva is in ten places ‘the same as the buddhas’ — marks and signs, light, spiritual penetrations, body of form, perfect voice, each and every one the same. Whereupon Universal Eye asks the one and only question in the direct exposition of the ten samādhis: since everything is now the same as a buddha’s, why is he still called a bodhisattva? Samantabhadra’s answer has but one bone to it: having entered the realm of wisdom, ‘then he is named a buddha’; the bodhisattva practice he cultivates in the Tathāgata’s presence having no rest, ‘he is said to be named a bodhisattva.’ One person and two names — not that something is still lacking, but that each has its own gate.

The elephant-king dwells in his cave on the Golden-Flank Mountain; when Śakra goes abroad he shows himself in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, and turning into a god’s body sports with the gods, and no one can tell which is the elephant and which the god — and his own body, all the while, has never once stirred from the cave.

Not abandoning the cause and yet manifesting the fruit, only because sentient beings are still to be delivered. Now enter this samādhi.

He hears a name, and he is already there — yet his body has never moved.

In this chapter Samantabhadra counts out ten spiritual penetrations, and not one sentence of it boasts of a power. All ten names hang upon a single graph, ‘wisdom’: knowing the differences among the minds of others, seeing the causes behind dying here and being born there, recollecting the whole of the past, knowing beforehand the whole of the future, hearing and being able to hold fast, reaching everywhere without moving, penetrating all speech, displaying measureless form-bodies, knowing all dharmas, entering extinction and yet letting no single affair fall. The ancient masters say it plainly: these ten penetrations have but one substance — the unobstructed great wisdom. Wherever the wisdom reaches, there the penetration is.

The sixth and the tenth matter most. The sixth says that without moving from his own place his body is in the presence of that buddha — not that he travels fast, but that there was never any solid thing there to be carried. The tenth says that within the samādhi of extinction “his spiritual penetrations and transformations never rest” — not that he divides himself into two, but that principle is of itself quiescent and does not obstruct affairs.

“Just as a light-shadow is displayed everywhere in every place, while within the samādhi he is quiescent and unmoving.”

Where the water is full it shows full, where the water is wanting it shows wanting; the light has never moved.

Forbearance is not the swallowing down of what is bitter.

Nowhere in this chapter does Samantabhadra teach anyone to endure. What he teaches is ten pairs of spectacles: the pair through which the mind does not shrink on hearing the profound Dharma; the pair through which one and many are understood through each other; and those several pairs through which the world is seen as a heat-haze, as a dream, as the echo in a valley, as a reflection in water, as a transformation, as space. Chengguan puts it exactly — forbearance is “wisdom illumining and contemplation penetrating”: having seen a thing through and granted it, the mind is unmoved of itself.

That is why the third forbearance says, “he sees not the least particle of a dharma arising, nor does he see the least particle of a dharma ceasing”; and why the fiercest sentence in the chapter is the one that counts even the Tathāgata’s great compassion, even the turning of the wheel of the Dharma, as transformation.

Only what one can look at can one bear. Now look through the ten.

There is a number such that, once you have counted as far as it, it no longer has a name.

Mind-King Bodhisattva asked the Buddha: what is an asaṃkhyeya, and what is an unspeakably unspeakable? The Buddha did not reason the matter out; the Buddha began to count — a hundred lakṣas make one koṭi — and thereafter at every step the number just reached is multiplied once by itself, one hundred and twenty-three rungs of it, until the last name can only be called “an unspeakably unspeakable-turned.”

Then the Buddha spoke in verse, taking this number that has already run to its end and using it to fill up another end: buddha-lands ground into dust motes, and within one dust mote lands again; boundless lands gathered together upon a single hair-tip, and yet it “does not make the hair-tip any larger.”

‘Counting is not for the sake of arriving at some figure; it is so that you may come to a halt at the place where the counting can go no further.’ The last verse says: the differences of their very substance cannot be spoken — and yet the bodhisattva “sees them all with clarity.” That a thing cannot be spoken does not mean it cannot be seen. Now enter this chapter.

The kalpa you find so long is, next door, only daybreak to dusk.

This chapter runs to less than three hundred graphs; Mind-King Bodhisattva speaks it through from beginning to end alone, with no question and answer and no verses, and it does one thing only: it converts. One kalpa of the Sahā world is one day and night of Ultimate Bliss; one kalpa of Ultimate Bliss is one day and night of the world beyond it — ten layers set thus in mutual regard, each layer swallowing the whole of the one before it. Having gone through all ten, one has still only been given ‘the brief’; the real measure is that last land beyond a million asaṃkhyeya worlds.

And at this point the scripture stays its hand. It does not go on to say ‘longer’; it changes over to saying who lives there: “Samantabhadra Bodhisattva together with the great bodhisattvas who practise along with him fill the whole of it.” After this, say the ancient masters, the ocean of lands is the same, with neither better nor worse — there is no longer anything longer left to compare, because the scale itself is gone.

So what this chapter measures was never the Buddha's years. It is the place where you stand. Length and shortness are the bound allotted to what sentient beings see; they are not a bound upon the Buddha.

Time you will never overtake. Practice you can begin today.

A sūtra that speaks of the Dharma realm without end suddenly recites a list of place-names.

Which mountain in the east, which mountain in the south, which cave in the sea, which spot inside a city — twenty-two places, and every clause the same: “from of old, hosts of bodhisattvas have dwelt therein.” Some places give a name and a number besides; some only say that someone is there. The one reciting this list is the bodhisattva Mind King: that a place can be dwelt in and can be pervaded is tied to the mind.

The ancient masters say it straight out: if it be spoken as it really is, at every hair-tip there are measureless Samantabhadras — why point to a quarter at all? Only because the human mind needs somewhere to come to rest; and so quarters are pointed out, that a man may raise up his mind and have a place to turn home to. Once you truly believe that there is not one quarter that is not a dwelling place of bodhisattvas, this list may be set down.

The first ten places are in mountains and seas, displaying the height and depth of wisdom, which can settle and can illumine; the latter twelve are in cities and towns among the press of people, displaying the compassion that abandons not one person.

The sūtra recites as far as the last place, and stops with no closing word. What ought to be asked is not whether there is a twenty-third.

A single dust mote holds the three times, and it is not that the mote has grown larger.

Someone in the great assembly stirred a thought in his mind — what, after all, is a buddha like — and before it was uttered aloud the Buddha already knew it. This chapter does not explain the Buddha to you; it opens thirty-two gates, and gate by gate there is no exhausting what is said. That it cannot be exhausted is itself the answer. And so the text again and again holds the reader back: within a single dust mote there appear measureless buddha-lands, and in them the wheel of the Dharma is turned, and yet “the dust mote does not grow large and the worlds do not grow small” — whoever would understand the Avataṃsaka by enlarging and shrinking is still outside the gate.

The first sentence of the thirty-two gates is “abiding always in great compassion.” Everything that comes afterward — the pores that hold worlds, the single thought that pervades the ten directions — grows out of that one sentence. The stretch about entering the city gate is plainer still: the Buddha sets one foot inside the city, and “the blind gain eyes, the deaf gain ears, the deranged gain their minds, the naked gain clothing” — the solid ground of a buddha’s deeds is that a person’s suffering is here and now one measure less.

‘The inconceivable’ is never somewhere far off. Now enter this gate.

One crown of a head, and it holds the whole number of a buddha’s marks.

Samantabhadra counts from the crown of the Buddha’s head down to the tips of his toes, one mark after another, ninety-seven lights in all. Every one of them is shining, showing forth buddhas, expounding the Dharma — even the sheathed organ, the most hidden place of all, sends out a cloud of the Buddha’s voice. And when he has counted to the end he says instead: this was only the brief telling; in truth there are ‘great-man marks as many as the motes of dust of ten Flower-Treasury world-oceans.’

So do not go counting. The ancient masters shut that door long ago: this number ninety-seven does not lie in matching dharmas to it out of one’s own fancy.

What is to be looked at is another sentence: this mark ‘is one mark together with empty space and the Dharma realm, and yet can give birth to all marks.’ The substance is only one, the function without end — and it is here that an ocean of marks earns the name of ocean.

The marks are the fruit, and practice is the cause. That is why the one who speaks the marks is Samantabhadra. Now look at these ninety-seven lights.

The one who expounds the Dharma here is not the Buddha. It is a drum.

A single light shines the beings of the hells up into heaven. They give rise to a doubt: a sound so lovely as this — where does it come from? The drum answers: it does not come from the east, nor from the south, the west, the north, the four intermediate quarters, the zenith, or the nadir. And it says further: that hell-body you wore yesterday has no place it comes from either.

And what of the sins? Deeds do not come from the ten quarters, and yet they truly gather upon the mind; they are born only of inversion, and have nowhere they abide. The drum holds up a mirror: mountains and rivers and beings, and even the images of the hells, all appear within it — did those images ever come? The sons of the gods answer: “They cannot be said to.”

‘If one is able to know in this way, this is true repentance.’

So repentance turns out not to be a transaction. It is a seeing clearly. Listen, then, to this drum.

One thought of anger can block a whole road along its entire length.

Samantabhadra says one thing of the utmost weight: “I see no single thing so greatly at fault as bodhisattvas rousing a mind of anger against another bodhisattva.” He is not saying that anger is the worst of the afflictions; he is saying that anger of a fellow traveler against a fellow traveler is the worst. Great compassion is the very substance of this road, and the moment anger rises, the substance is the first thing broken. And so one thought of anger accomplishes ‘a million gateways of hindrance’: from not seeing awakening and not hearing the true Dharma, all the way down to the last two — according with the two vehicles, departing far from the lineage of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas of the three times. Once there, it is not that one cultivates badly; it is that one is no longer on this road at all.

The first medicine for turning about is just as simple: “toward the bodhisattvas, give rise to the thought of them as Tathāgatas.”

Only when the hindrances have been told to the end does the practice get spoken. Ten dharmas, ten purities, ten wisdoms, ten universal enterings, ten surpassingly wondrous minds, ten kinds of skillful wisdom — each stage gives birth to the next. And the whole look of the practice of Samantabhadra is there in that one verse: “Within a single mote of dust the worlds are wholly seen; should beings hear this word, they would be confounded and their minds go mad.”

And take that person beside you who is hardest to get on with, and look upon him as a Tathāgata.

When a sūtra comes to say what a buddha finally is, the Buddha himself, of all people, does not open his mouth.

The World-Honored One only sends out two beams of light. The first comes from between his brows and enters the crown of one bodhisattva — and that one then asks; the second comes from his mouth and enters the mouth of another bodhisattva — and that one then expounds. The first beam sets up the one who asks, the second the one who expounds. The ancient worthies put it finely: out of the mouth and into the ear is ‘so that he may hear’; out of the mouth and into the mouth is ‘so that he may speak’.

The one who receives the empowerment finds his body and his seat surpassing all the rest a hundredfold on the instant — and yet falling short of the Buddha’s seat alone. That one stroke is left there on purpose, for fear that anyone should mistake receiving empowerment for being the same as a buddha.

The one who asks asked ten things: the marks of the Buddha’s appearing, his body, his speech, his mind, his object, what he practises, his accomplishing of right awakening, his turning of the wheel of the Dharma, his parinirvāṇa, and what roots of goodness may be planted by seeing him once or by hearing his name once. Those ten questions are the table of contents of the whole chapter.

And the one who is to expound has not yet opened his mouth when this portion comes to an end. Let us see how he will speak.

A rain comes down, and no one can count how many drops there are.

People always want to find the one cause — why did a Buddha appear in the world? Samantabhadra, in his first breath, blocks that road: not by one condition, not by one thing. It was not brought about at some single moment; it was measureless eons of rousing the mind, of compassion, of practice and vow, of merit and wisdom — ten measureless things brought to fullness, and only then is a Tathāgata accomplished.

Ten similes, and every one of them likens how a world comes to stand out of one great rain: cloud, rain, four wheels of wind, the great earth, mountains and seas, palaces. And the sentence that closes them is the hardest — there is none that gives birth, none that makes, none that knows, none that accomplishes; and yet the world did indeed come to stand.

So when beings say, this is made by the Buddha’s divine power, the sūtra answers at once: this is not made by the divine power of the Tathāgata. Not that the Buddha lends no strength, but that there is simply no one behind it making the decision. To credit it all to the Buddha is to lose causes and conditions.

Then what is there for me to do? The verses have only one line: make your mind pure as empty space. Not to polish the mind, but to stop adding to it.

The ten similes finished, the sūtra admits it of itself: this matter is, from the first, a simile spoken where no simile can be.

Let the water clear, and the moon comes of itself.

Samantabhadra asks his own question: where is the body of the Buddha to be seen? The answer is not some one place, but ten similes — space pervading everywhere, space displaying forms, the sun rising, the sun shining on high and low, the sun benefiting those born blind, the bright moon, the Brahmā king, the king of physicians, the maṇi jewel, the jewel-king. The ten similes say one thing only: “because the body of the Tathāgata has no body, he displays a body for the sake of sentient beings.” It is not because he is great that he pervades; it is because he has no resistance of substance.

The sun shines earlier and later because the mountains and the ground are high and low — “the sun does not raise a thought”. If the reflection of the moon does not appear in this well of yours, it is because the water is not clear, not because the moon is unwilling to come. One born blind does not see the sun, and the sun still divides day and night for him and tempers cold and warmth — ‘not being able to see’ and ‘not receiving’ have always been two different things.

The last line is the most generous of all: “Sentient beings without faith do not see the Buddha, but it is not that the mind of the Well-Gone One has cast them away.”

Let the water go still first.

A valley does not talk; yet whatever you call into it, that is what it answers back.

What Samantabhadra asks is not whether the Buddha’s voice is pleasant to hear, but ‘how are you to know it?’ The answer walks along both sides at once: on one side it reaches everywhere and makes everyone rejoice; on the other it “does not come forth from the body, nor come forth from the mind,” has no master over it, and is beyond all telling. Ten clauses are spoken, and then they are all taken back again — “not measured, nor measureless; not with a master, nor without a master; not showing, nor without showing.”

Then ten similes: the four sounds that rise of themselves when the world is breaking up, the echo in a valley, a drum that no one beats, the hundred thousand sounds inside one sound, the Brahmā voice each hearer takes for a word spoken to him alone, the water of one taste that differs with the vessel — and the four rains of four dragon kings.

The difference was never in the water. It is in the vessel. The Buddha’s mind is even, and toward the Dharma he is not grudging.

Inside one mote of dust is stored a book as large as the whole world.

Samantabhadra says that the Buddha’s mind is “unobtainable,” and then takes ten great similes to let you watch the Buddha’s wisdom instead: space is what all things rest upon while it rests upon nothing; the water of the ocean flows hidden beneath the ground, and whoever is willing to dig gets water, while the ocean never says ‘the water comes forth from me’; that king of medicine trees on the Snow Mountains, whose root grows the trunk and whose trunk grows the root, never finishes growing, because “the practice of the bodhisattva is the nature of the Tathāgata.”

Only in the last simile does he say the thing outright: “there is not one sentient being who is not fully furnished with the wisdom of the Tathāgata; it is only on account of deluded thought, inversion, and attachment that they fail to realize it.” The scroll has been inside the dust all along; all that is wanting is someone willing to break the dust open.

So the Buddha appears for the sake of saying one line: “How marvelous! How marvelous!”

Look, then, within your own body, at that sūtra you have never yet opened.

The dragon does not leave his own place, and the rain has already covered the whole earth.

Samantabhadra puts the question himself: how is the realm of the Buddha to be known? He first sets out ten things — the world, the three times, the lands, the dharmas, sentient beings — running on to gather in suchness and the true limit, and then the last clause of all turns out to be ‘that realm which is no realm’. Only when it has been gathered in to what cannot be pointed at is it the realm of a buddha.

Then he hands the measuring rod back into your own hands: “The bodhisattva-mahāsattva should know that the realm of the mind is the realm of the Tathāgata.” Your mind appears just as you think it, and no one has ever measured its far edge — and the realm of a buddha, manifesting body and wisdom according to what meets it, is the same.

He tells besides a very long simile: twenty-five thousand rivers of the four continents flowing into the sea, eighty koṭis of dragon kings raining by turns and each doubling the last, until the great assembly answers that it is very much indeed and cannot be told by any simile; and then a single sentence pushes it all over: “the Buddha’s realm is not what a simile can reach.”

First he gives you a measure, and then he tells you that this measure is not enough.

And the ocean of wisdom arises from the great vows of long ago — as deep as the vow, so deep the ocean.

Chengguan says: practicing all day long, and yet never having practiced.

The sense before this one told how vast the Buddha’s realm is; this sense asks: then what is the Buddha doing? Samantabhadra sets up two names — the unobstructed practice, the practice of suchness. Chengguan takes them apart in a single line: one is phenomena seen within principle, the other is principle seen within phenomena; only their ‘fusing without obstruction’ is called the practice of the Tathāgata.

Then, step by step, he dismantles “measure.” It is not measured — and just as you are about to add, offhandedly, ‘so it is measureless,’ he blocks the way first: “For if one calls it measureless, that is precisely a measure.”

Five similes, two postures. The king of the golden-winged birds gives one beat of his two wings, the sea of craving parts, and he seizes out the people whose roots of goodness have ripened — that is the valiant side. The sun and moon travel space alone and shine a whole day long without once raising the thought “where have I come from” — that is the thoughtless side. Chengguan says: the former figures the compassion that is identical with wisdom, the latter the compassion that does not lose wisdom.

To act and yet be without thought about it is the exercise this sense leaves for the reader. When you benefit someone, if the mind still keeps in it that you are benefiting him, that stretch of keeping-in-mind is what the sūtra calls frivolous talk.

Someone asks: the buddhas conjured out of conjured minds — how many are there, in the end?

The one who answers says: the conjured and the unconjured were never different; what are you still asking a number for? Samantabhadra calls out his approval on the spot, and pushes the saying to its limit — “Suppose all sentient beings were in a single thought to accomplish right awakening entirely: this is equal to and no different from their not accomplishing right awakening.” Why? Awakening has no characteristic; and where there is no characteristic there is no such thing as one part more or one part less.

So from beginning to end this sense teaches no procedure for becoming a buddha; it teaches only a manner of knowing. The great ocean universally seals all images and yet nothing is manifested; space is neither increased nor decreased by the forming and ruin of worlds; within a single pore there are buddha-bodies equal in number to sentient beings — and the nearest line of all is this: your mind, at this moment, has in thought after thought a buddha accomplishing right awakening, because the buddhas do not accomplish right awakening apart from this mind.

‘Should know in this way’ — those four words are the gate of practice of this sense.

The wheel has been turning all along, and no one is pushing it.

Samantabhadra puts the question to himself first: how this matter of the Buddha’s turning the wheel of the Dharma is to be known. He then says nine clauses in a row, each of them saying first how it is turned and then because of knowing what — and the very first clause takes the act away: “by the power of the mind’s mastery, with nothing arisen and nothing turned, he turns the wheel of the Dharma.” Chengguan supplies a footnote to that clause: at the very time of speaking the Dharma, not one thought stirs in the mind that says ‘I am handing the Dharma to the person across from me’.

Then he sets up two similes. One is of letters: though one spoke to the exhaustion of the kalpas of the future it could not be told to the end, and the wheel of the Dharma likewise has no rest. One is of the written graph: it can get into every affair, every utterance, every reckoning, and yet stays in none of them.

What is most unexpected is his saying that the place where the wheel of the Dharma is born is not on the Buddha’s side — sounds are issued “following the measureless differences in the workings of the minds of all sentient beings and in what they desire and delight in.” However many differences there are among sentient beings, the wheel of the Dharma has that many faces.

And so comes the widest sentence of all: “because the true character of speech-sound is itself the wheel of the Dharma.” Every sentence you hear today is not outside the wheel.

The vessel is ruined and the reflection does not appear — and this is no fault of the sun.

What Samantabhadra asks is not in which year the Buddha departed; it is ‘with what sort of knowing a bodhisattva should know this matter’. He first gives a place to begin: “He must come to know the root nature.” And then ten clauses in a row, each with the word “just as” — as suchness has its nirvāṇa, so is the Tathāgata’s nirvāṇa. Fazang says that this word “just as” cannot be exchanged for “is identical with”: say “is identical with” and only the nature is left, with no arising; say “just as”, and only then is it ‘the arising that is the same as no arising’.

Then he sets up three similes, all of them breaking one and the same misunderstanding. The sun comes forth and shines universally, and in every vessel of clean water there is its reflection; one vessel breaks, and there the reflection does not appear. Fire does the work of fire everywhere in the world, and where one fire dies out it is not that there is no fire under heaven. The conjuror manifests his conjured body everywhere; in this place the business is finished and he withdraws from sight, while in the other places he is there as before.

The most unexpected thing is the fourth passage: at the very moment when the Tathāgata manifests nirvāṇa he is entering the immovable samādhi, and from each and every body light is sent forth, and from the light come lotus flowers, and in the flowers are buddhas — “the number of those buddha-bodies is exactly equal to the number of all sentient beings.” You take it for the emptying of the hall; the scripture says it is the hall at its fullest.

And nirvāṇa is not the point at which one may at last stop caring. The closing sentence of the scripture is this: “Because the original vow sustains him, there is no time when he rests, and he forsakes not one sentient being, not one land, not one dharma.”

So is the Buddha here or not? The question to ask is whether one’s own vessel is clean.

The little diamond that has been swallowed — the body cannot keep it.

At the last of the ten senses Samantabhadra turns round at length and asks you: the once you saw the Buddha, the once you heard him, the once you made your bow — does that little root of goodness count for anything? He answers without hesitation — “all of them not in vain” — and then sets down three similes one after another to stand surety for those words.

The simile of the diamond says: the substance is of a different kind, and so the afflictions cannot digest it away. The simile of the fire says: the side that is able to burn is able to burn however little of it there is, and the side that can be burned is only so much combustible stuff however much of it there is. The simile of the king of medicine trees says: seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, touching it — and even taking the earth from beneath it — all bring benefit.

And then the sentence in the whole passage that stops one short — “suppose there were sentient beings who saw the Buddha and heard the Buddha, and yet, bound and covered over by karmic obstruction, could not bring forth a mind of faith and delight — they too have planted roots of goodness, with nothing passing away in vain.” Even one in whom faith has not yet arisen has planted it already. Chengguan presses on from there: ‘if even slander brings benefit far off, how much more deep faith.’

The three similes done, the scripture topples the similes itself: “there is no simile that can speak this Dharma.” First it gives you a measure, and then it tells you the measure will not do — this is the manner of the whole chapter.

At the end it gives ten names, and says that this gate of Dharma does not fall into the hands of the remaining beings, as the wheel-turning king’s treasures can be borne only by the crown prince. And there is only one condition for being able to bear them: to be born into the family of the Tathāgata. And Chengguan says that a single thought of understanding in an ordinary person is also called being born into the family.

That is why the last verse dares to speak as it does — “this is the first wealth that surpasses the world … you should hold to it and not be heedless.”

Two hundred lines asked through to the end, and not one of them answered.

Samantabhadra enters samādhi, the ten directions quake, and he rises from it. Universal Wisdom alone steps forward, and beginning from “What is the support of a bodhisattva-mahāsattva?” he asks all the way to “Why does the Tathāgata, the Worthy One, the Perfectly Awakened One, display his entry into parinirvāṇa?” It is the longest single breath in the whole scripture.

In the assemblies before this one the questioning came first and the samādhi after; in this assembly it is turned about — the samādhi first and the questioning after. In the assemblies before this one there was the Buddha’s empowering; in this assembly there is none. Chengguan says this very lightly, and it weighs a great deal: what went before displayed that understanding may be had from another, and so there was empowering from another; here it displays that ‘practice is established by oneself’, and so the prompting comes by one’s own strength.

Another can teach you to understand. No one can walk for you.

As for how these two hundred lines are to be divided — the ancient worthies of old took the six rounds of question and answer in the separately circulating Dushi jing and outlined this text by them, and Chengguan carried that outline on. The scripture itself gives not one name of a stage.

The chapter is called Detachment from the World. Chengguan says that detachment is not going away: “the nature of the world being empty is itself what transcends the world” is detachment in nature, and “practice accomplished and undefiled” is detachment in fact.

The questions are set up first; the answering runs six segments long.

The first sentence of what Chengguan calls the two thousand practices is: he takes the mind of awakening as what he relies upon.

Universal Wisdom asked two hundred sentences, and to each question Samantabhadra answered with ten, which Chengguan reckons as two thousand practices. This is the first of the answers, twenty gates. If you read it by rank and stage, you will read it as a stairway you can never finish climbing — yet the sūtra text does not say the name of a single stage. The names of the stages were fitted on by Chengguan from an outline he received from the ancient worthies; the sūtra itself is only opening one dharma of practice after another.

The twenty gates fall in three stretches. The first nine finish laying the foundation — reliance, perception, practice, good friends, exertion, the mind at rest, bringing beings to accomplishment, precepts, receiving the prediction. The middle eight walk outward — entering the bodhisattvas, entering the Tathāgatas, entering beings, entering worlds, entering kalpas, speaking of the three times, knowing the three times, the mind that does not weary; only here does the walking begin to go into the realms of others and of the Buddha. The last three gather it up — the wisdom that is held, the holding that does the holding, and the Buddha who is understood.

What matters most are two turns in the road. The first is at gate nine: the prediction is not something you wait for a Buddha to hand you, it is that by these a bodhisattva knows of himself that he has received the prediction — let any one of the ten be there, and you know it yourself. The second is at gate fourteen: he enters into all kalpas that are the very single thought. Earlier it said he abides throughout all kalpas carrying out the bodhisattva practice, which sounds like a life sentence; only here is it explained that that length and this present single thought are not held apart.

The last gate speaks of ten kinds of Buddha. The first gate said that he takes all Tathāgatas as what he relies upon, and the last gate speaks of knowing the ten senses of a Buddha — from relying on the Buddha at the start to knowing the Buddha at the end, everything cultivated in the eighteen gates between is the process of coming to see clearly what that relied-upon thing is.

So these twenty gates need not be climbed in order, storey by storey. Whichever gate you can lift today, go in by that one.

Twenty gates, and all of them are entrances, not steps of a stair.

Universal Wisdom asks twenty clauses, Samantabhadra answers with twenty gates, and every gate has ten clauses. If you read them off against a rank of positions, you will read them as a chart of stairs you can never finish climbing — the scripture in fact sets up no positional name ‘abode’ at all. The names of the positions were fitted on by Chengguan, who took them over from the outline of the ancient worthies; the scripture itself only opens practice-dharmas one gate after another.

From ‘giving rise to the mind of great kindness’ down to ‘the transformation of all sustaining’, walking once through the twenty gates, what matters most is two turns. The first is at gate twelve: ‘all dharmas have only a name.’ The mind, the vows, the compassion, the perfections, the powers and the equalities cultivated in the eleven gates before it are all disposed of here in a single clause — do not hoard them up into property. The second is at gate seventeen: ‘clinging to nothing in any buddha.’ Only when even a buddha is not grasped at do the roots of goodness, the taking of birth, the vows and the practices truly come loose.

The last gate speaks of transformation. Chengguan gives only four characters: ‘this is, just as it is real, like a transformation.’ It is not that one has learned how to transform something; it is that the practice of the twenty gates has all been done, and not one item of it has ever been taken as one's own.

So there is no need to go up these twenty gates floor by floor in order. Whichever gate you can lift today, go in by that one.

Only what holds up may be called practice.

Thirty gates are spoken straight through in one breath, with not one question inserted in the middle. The first gate asks the most practical thing of all — what is it that holds practice up? The answer is ten kinds of sustaining power: the buddhas, the Dharma, sentient beings, deeds, practice, vows, the objective realm, time, good, and wisdom. When a person’s resolve fails, it is usually not that he no longer wishes to practice; it is that one of these ten has been cut.

The twenty-eight gates in the middle fill practice out one gate at a time: when you are afraid, look at the fifth gate; when you doubt, the sixth; when someone heaps evil words and abuse upon you, the second seal of the twenty-fifth. The place you least want to go, the sixteenth gate calls a garden — “birth-and-death is the garden of a bodhisattva, for the reason that there is nothing he wearies of and forsakes”; the circumstance you can least put down, the seventeenth gate calls a palace.

It closes at last upon the ocean. When the thirty gates have been walked through, the ocean-like wisdom of the final gate comes to rest on four words, “never having enough” — not that the walking is finished, but that it cannot be finished and one does not wish to stop.

There is one more thing to keep in mind: nowhere in this stretch does the text itself name a single stage. ‘The ten practices’ and ‘the practice of gladness’ are what the ancient worthies of old assigned as an outline on the basis of the Dushi jing, and Chengguan carried it on.

First see for yourself which of the ten sustainings has been cut.

A jewel set in muddy water: its light and color do not change.

Twenty-nine gates, of which twenty-eight read “there are ten kinds” and one reads “bring forth ten kinds.” It looks like a list, and in fact it says only one thing: to dedicate is not to send merit away, it is to set up no accomplishment belonging to oneself — in the ten phrases of the dedicating of roots of good, every phrase reads ‘taking my roots of good to be the same as such-and-such of the good friend, accomplishing in this way, setting up no separate accomplishment of my own.’

The eleven gates in the middle are called “the unimpeded workings.” The mastery before them is being effortless; the unimpededness here is being unrestricted. The ten phrases of the unimpeded working with regard to objective realms show the bone most plainly: “being within the objective realm of the buddhas and yet not forsaking the objective realm of the demons,” “being within the objective realm of nirvāṇa and yet not forsaking the objective realm of birth-and-death” — this is not keeping a foot in two boats; what are contrary are only the objective realms, and the mind is not contrary.

Nor are the ten fearlessnesses a matter of screwing up one’s courage. All ten phrases read “because he does not see it, his mind obtains fearlessness” — it is not a forcing of oneself not to fear, but that the I that was threatened simply cannot be found.

The last sentence is the broadest of all: for one who has obtained the ten unimpeded workings, whether he becomes a buddha or not “goes as his mind intends and is not gone against,” and “though he has accomplished perfect awakening, he does not break off the cultivation of the bodhisattva practice.”

‘Station’ is the outline of the ancient worthies; ‘practice’ is what the scripture says. First be clear about this, and then read the twenty-nine gates.

Feet are not for walking with.

Samantabhadra spoke fifty gates. The first thirty speak of the mind, of understanding, of the path; and from the thirty-first gate onward the text all at once speaks the whole way through by way of the body — feet, hands, belly, storehouse, the armor donned, weapons, head, then eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, then walking, standing, sitting, and lying down.

Do not take this for the description of a bodily form. “The foot of keeping the precepts” is a foot; “the hand of giving” is a hand; “the belly that leaves flattery and crookedness behind” is a belly. Once the names of the organs are turned, they have every one of them become the names of practices. That is why the closing sentence dares to say, “if he but lifts a step, he will be able to reach everywhere throughout all the worlds” — what reaches everywhere throughout all the worlds is not the feet; it is the walking made of all ten feet — precepts and vigor, penetration and power, faith and vow, guarding and hearing the Dharma, and the last two of virtue.

The eye of it lies in one gate in the middle: “going forth from the world, not held in common with the world, and yet also not admixed with the practice of the two vehicles.” All ten clauses are two ends held apart by a single ‘and yet’ — “to leave the afflictions behind forever, and yet to dwell together with all sentient beings.” To leave is not to walk away; it is not to be stained.

The ancient worthies judged these fifty gates to be the characteristics of the practice within the stations of the ten grounds, and Chengguan carried it on — the text itself does not name a single station.

Begin by looking at this pair of hands of your own.

Fifty-one gates stand open, and the last of them opens through to nirvāṇa.

This is the last of the rounds of Samantabhadra’s answering, running from “there are ten kinds of contemplation” to “manifesting parinirvāṇa.” The earlier part teaches you how to look, how to practice, and how to keep clear of obstruction; the later part plays through the whole course of accomplishing the Way. Not one stage-name occurs — the ten faiths, the ten abodes, the ten grounds, and names of that sort are an outline the ancient worthies set up on the basis of the Dushi jing, which Chengguan carried on and used; the scripture itself does not say them. The coordinates can be taken away, and the gates are still there.

The most piercing thing among the fifty-one gates is the ten māras: the māra of the roots of good, the māra of samādhi, the māra of the good friend, the māra of the wisdom of the dharma of awakening. How can roots of good be a māra? Chengguan answers without the least hesitation — “the name māra of the aggregates comes solely from grasping and attachment” — the name māra does not fall upon the thing, it falls upon the grasping. And he pushes it one sentence further: “when the mind discriminates, the ten thousand dharmas are all māra; how should it be only these ten?”

The warmest sentence is in the gate on the smile. After each of the ten thoughts comes the same sentence, “with glad delight he smiles and inwardly vows.” Within the thoughts there is the shouldering of ‘apart from me alone, none is able to save them,’ and there is also the sadness of seeing those who once walked with him left standing where they were. Compassion, with not a trace of gladness, cannot be sustained; gladness, with not a trace of sorrow, goes astray.

The last gate speaks of entering extinction, and among the ten senses not one says that the Buddha really went away; every one of them is “manifesting.”

A gate is for walking through, not for looking at.

The six segments answered through to the end — Chengguan reckons them the two thousand practices — and one thing only is left: the giving of a name.

Samantabhadra gives it ten. The last of them is called “the Chapter of the Dharma Gate of Detachment from the World.” Detachment, in the ancient worthies’ reading, is not ‘going away’: Fazang says it is “constantly within the world and yet not gathered in by the world,” and Li Tongxuan says it is “dwelling in the world undefiled.” And so what this scripture has been speaking of from beginning to end is the kind of practice that stands within the world without being taken into the world’s keeping — ‘detachment from the world’, and not a leaving of the world behind.

Then only three clauses are given: “having heard, they believe and understand; having understood, they practise” — and between them there is no shortcut. And it is said once more the other way about: “if bodhisattvas do not practise as it is spoken, one should know that such a person is forever parted from the awakening of the Buddha.”

Then the earth quakes and the buddhas appear — and it is no reward. The reason the scripture itself gives is “because this Dharma gate is a dharma that is just so.” The Dharma is of itself thus, and therefore it appears thus.

Last come the two hundred and fifteen and a half verses, which tell of measureless buddha-lands set down upon the tip of a hair — and the two passages on holding the lands and setting them back and on taking in the oceans are each followed by a restraint: beings do not know of it, the great ocean neither increases nor decreases, beings are not disturbed or harmed. So much done, and yet “ultimately nothing is grasped.”

The last clause of the whole chapter teaches one action only —

“He should give rise to the vajra mind, and learn this practice of merit.”

Vajra: what is taken from it is that it will not scatter along the way.

An assembly opens with more than eight thousand graphs, and the Buddha does not say one word.

The assembly put no question aloud. In their hearts they raised, all at once, a single thought: “the state of the Tathāgata, the wisdom-practice of the Tathāgata, the empowering of the Tathāgata, the power of the Tathāgata, the fearlessness of the Tathāgata, the samādhi of the Tathāgata, the abiding of the Tathāgata, the self-mastery of the Tathāgata, the body of the Tathāgata, the wisdom of the Tathāgata” — these ten the gods and men of the world cannot reach.

The World-Honored One knew that thought. He did not open his mouth; he simply “entered the samādhi of the Lion’s Stretching.”

Then the pavilion of a sudden grew vast, the Jeta Grove of a sudden grew vast, ten kinds of cloud appeared in the empty sky, and all the worlds of the ten directions were seen in this same way.

The answer is not words; it is appearance. Chengguan glosses this thus: that the Buddha himself enters is to display that only a buddha can exhaust the realization of the Dharma realm; that he does not speak is to display that what is realized is apart from words, and further to make men witness it with their own eyes and realize it for themselves.

The passage that follows is the one that stings most. Śāriputra, Maudgalyāyana, and the rest of the great disciples were in that very same grove, and “none of them saw it.”

It is not that they were far off. The scripture strikes ten comparisons one after another, and the last of them says: like a monk who has entered the samādhi of cessation, whose six faculties are all there, and who neither knows nor perceives.

And the ninth comparison is nearer still — from the moment a man is born two gods accompany him, and “the gods constantly see the man, while the man does not see the gods.”

Not seeing has never been a question of distance.

And so this portion is called ‘the showing of loss and gain’. The loss is theirs; the gain is the reader’s: the eighteen clauses of “because they formerly did not …”, turned over one by one, are a course of practice to be undertaken.

The Buddha finished displaying the realm, and then said not one word.

The ones who spoke were others. Ten bodhisattvas of the ten directions each spoke ten verses (eleven in the upper direction), one hundred and one verses in all, and the first of them opened his mouth with a command — “You should all contemplate: the way of the Buddha is beyond thinking; right here within this Jeta Grove he has displayed the power of the spiritual penetrations.” It is not a buddha far off that is being spoken of, but this grove before one's eyes.

After the ten segments Samantabhadra comes out, and with ten Dharma clauses opens that samādhi once through. One should ask: they have seen it all already, so why speak of it again? Chengguan answers plainly — seen it they have, and yet they cannot of themselves search out the principle in it, and so there must be a ‘borrowing of words to open it out, so that by searching the words they may tally with the real’.

The speaking done, the Buddha at last stirs: from between his brows he sends forth a ray. The ray does not speak the Dharma; it only causes them to see. Words can give a road, but the realizing one must walk oneself, and so in this passage there are no words.

After the ray comes Mañjuśrī. Chengguan says that Samantabhadra makes the principle manifest by practice and Mañjuśrī makes the principle manifest by understanding, and that ‘understanding and practice being not two, one is then able to enter’ — the two of them, one at the head and one at the tail, are the two feet by which one enters the Dharma realm.

Last comes the function. The bodhisattvas who gained the benefit appear bodily to deliver people, and among the ten particular bodies they display most are stations within the market and the street: a śramaṇa, a king of physicians, a caravan leader, a musician, a craftsman. The scripture's two closing clauses are almost the same text, differing only in the first graph, 「然」 tr. “however” and 「而」 tr. “and yet” — the latter place reads 「而亦不離此逝多林如來之所」 tr. “and yet neither have they left this Jeta Grove and the place of the Tathāgata”.

To pervade the ten directions is not to leave here and go there; it is that here is of itself already pervading.

Contemplate thus far.

Of the forty-one good friends, forty of them are ten persons to one stage. Only the first is a single person.

Why? Chengguan answers in the shortest possible way: the first, Mañjuśrī, one person assigned to the ten faiths — faith has not yet become a stage, and so there is only one person.

Faith has not yet become a stage. The ten abodes can be abided in, the ten practices can be practiced, the ten grounds can be entered; every stage has a body and a span to it, and so ten persons are assigned to each so as to display the ten gates within that stage. Faith has no body or span; it is only that one step at the doorway, and one person is enough — more would look like a ladder of ranks to be climbed.

And that one step is precisely where the whole road begins. Mañjuśrī stands for the mind that is able to have faith, Samantabhadra for the Dharma realm that is relied upon; Sudhana at the first sees Mañjuśrī and gives rise to the mind, and at the last sees Samantabhadra and his stage is full — head and tail, with the fifty-three visits held between them.

One more thing is to be remembered: the judgment called assignment to a stage is not something the sūtra text says of itself. Before Chengguan set up the five marks, he first recorded the house that does not assign the stages, said that both have their reason, and only then said for the present I follow the ancient worthies and assign them as five marks. That one word, for the present, states the measure of the thing plainly — the ruler was laid on by later men; the road is the one the sūtra text walks.

At the very end Mañjuśrī gives Sudhana only one thing to do: he should with settled determination seek out a true good friend.

Faith has not yet become a stage, and so there is only one person; and for that same reason, the road that this one person points out takes fifty-three persons to walk to the end.

Let faith rest here for now.

The first of the fifty-three visits is to a monk walking on a mountain.

Sudhana climbed Wondrous Peak Mountain and searched for seven days, and the man was on a different mountain. Chengguan says under this sentence: “Only when one forgets the stage one abides in does one get the point, and so he is seen upon a different mountain.” The very mountain you have climbed is the reason you cannot see the man.

The first dharma conferred by the first good friend is mindfulness of the Buddha. Why this one? Chengguan answers in three layers, and the last is the plainest: the person in the abode of first resolve gave rise to the mind with the Buddha as its object to begin with.

The full name of the dharma gate is long—“the dharma gate of universal seeing by the light of the wisdom of the realm of all the Buddhas held in mindfulness.” Chengguan takes this name apart into three: the realm of all the Buddhas concludes what is observed, the light of wisdom concludes that which observes, and the dharma gate of universal seeing gathers up the first two and concludes the name.

The twenty-one gates below it are, gate by gate, mindfulness of the Buddha. And the sūtra text does not say ‘how well I have cultivated’; it says only “constantly sees.” Seeing much is not the fruit of searching hard—Chengguan puts his finger on the substance: going without moving, holding without being mindful, seeing without going.

Then Cloud of Virtue said the sentence that has to be said at every station: “I have obtained only this … and how could I know, or be able to tell of, their practice of merit?”

A real good friend will send you away.

Sudhana had given rise to the mind before he came to ask the road; the door opened, and the first words were a question back: “Son of good family! Have you already given rise to the mind of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi?”

He had no choice but to answer once more.

Why ask? Because giving rise to the mind is not a formality of entry; it is the capacity to catch what comes after. Ocean Cloud then puts the matter beyond argument—“If beings do not plant roots of good, they cannot give rise to the mind of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi”—and the ten things below that are, every one of them, things being done, not a single thought in the mind.

Then he speaks of himself: “I have dwelt in this land of the Sea Gate twelve years, constantly taking the great ocean as my objective realm.” Twelve years, doing one thing only—looking at the ocean, and looking until ten virtues came out of it.

The most important thing is the turn that comes after the ten have been looked through. He did not stop at the ocean; instead he asked, “Is there anything more broad and wide than this ocean?” Chengguan says that this one question is ‘forgetting the wording and seeking the point,’ and is the intimate cause of seeing the Buddha. No sooner had this thought arisen than a lotus flower opened suddenly at the bottom of the ocean, and upon the flower there was a Buddha, and the Buddha stretched out his hand and stroked the crown of his head, and expounded for him the ‘universal eye’—which Chengguan glosses saying, “within one dharma, all is seen.”

Twelve years of work, exchanged for one sentence: “I know only this dharma gate of the universal eye.”

And so look upon this ocean.

When Sudhana saw this good friend, the man was walking in empty space.

A whole stretch of spiritual powers is opened out from that one sentence: now walking, now standing; now hidden, now displayed; passing through walls as through space, treading on water as on the ground; in a single thought passing worlds as many as the dust motes of unspeakably unspeakable Buddha-fields, manifesting a body before each single Buddha, raining down ten kinds of clouds of offering. The sūtra text writes what it is to be able all the way to the end.

Then he says of himself: “Son of good family! I know only this gate of liberation without obstruction, of universally swift making of offerings to the Buddhas and bringing beings to accomplishment.”

Only this one gate. And then he defers upward to what belongs to others—not to greater spiritual powers, but to twenty sentences of moral discipline. The discipline of great compassion, the discipline of the perfections, and so on down to the discipline that leaves dust behind and the discipline that leaves defilement behind; and at the end one sentence turned back as a question: “Merits such as these—how could I know them, or be able to tell of them?”

Chengguan puts his finger here upon the point: “That all of them make moral discipline clear is meant to display that the obtaining of liberation without obstruction above is in every case by holding to the discipline of individual liberation as the ground it relies upon, because without discipline one cannot cultivate and govern the mind.”

So the root of the twelve sentences of being without obstruction lies only within one question and one answer—“Why is this? Because he has obtained the power of spiritual penetration that does not abide and does not act.” Not abiding, and so there is nowhere that can obstruct; not acting, and so there is nowhere that can be exhausted.

A man who can reach unspeakable worlds says of himself that he knows one gate only.

And abide here.

The one who tells the Dharma comes down from the lion seat and casts his five limbs to the ground before a youth who seeks the Dharma.

The reason does not lie in that youth. Megha first asked one sentence: “Son of good family! Have you already given rise to the mind of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi?” Only after he had received the answer “Yes” did he come down from the seat. What was bowed to was that mind.

Chengguan says it plainly: “The reason the master bows to the disciple is that the mind of awakening is the cause of Buddhahood.” And he cites the words of a treatise—what is bowed to is the slender crescent of the first moon of the bright half at the beginning of the month, not the moon already full; because the first moon is rare, and the full moon comes precisely from it.

But when the bowing was done he returned to his own seat and told the Dharma. Bowing to the mind is bowing to the mind, and honoring the Dharma is honoring the Dharma; the two things do not take each other away.

What he conferred was ‘the exhausting of letters and sounds’—forty-two letters and fourteen sounds, the sounds entering everywhere into the letters, and therefore letters come forth without end; and so among all the speech of the three-thousandfold great-thousand world-system there is none he cannot know. And the place where this gate of the Dharma is told is the marketplace. Li Tongxuan says that this precisely signifies “the market of birth-and-death is clamorous and yet constantly still.”

At the end he still says: “I know only this bodhisattva's dharma gate of the light of the wondrous-sound dhāraṇī.”

Sudhana bowed to his feet and went, weeping and sobbing.

One sūtra writes the two utmost extremes between master and disciple into one and the same stretch.

Sudhana asked a very practical question—how a bodhisattva is to study and how he is to cultivate.

The Elder Liberation did not answer. He went into concentration.

Within the concentration, there appeared in his body Buddhas as many as the dust motes of ten Buddha-fields in each of the ten directions, and even the lands, the places of awakening, and the names of the foremost bodhisattvas were each one distinct, “abode as it originally was, without confusion among them.” Sudhana was not standing to one side and watching—of the words those Buddhas spoke, he “was wholly able to hear and receive them.”

Coming out of the concentration, only then did he open his mouth. The first sentence is the name of the dharma gate; the second is the ten Buddhas of the ten directions counted off direction by direction; and only the third is the pivot of the whole stretch—“those Tathāgatas did not come here, and I did not go there.”

He saw it with perfect clarity, and yet no one came and no one went.

Then he gave four similes: dream, reflected image, illusion, echo. All four liken the Buddha and at the same time liken the mind—when both sides are empty together, coming and going truly cannot stand. At the end he gathers it into one sentence: “the Buddhas that are seen are all by one's own mind.”

Here is where the words are most easily read wrong, and so he immediately added ten sentences: one should aid one's own mind with good dharmas, one should moisten one's own mind with the water of the Dharma … Chengguan says it plainly: these ten sentences are to drive off one false understanding—that some reckon that all dharmas are mind, and that letting them go as they are is the Buddha, so why cultivate at all.

The mind, though it is the Buddha, has long been filmed over by the dust of toil.

And let it be seen this far.

When Sudhana arrived, this teacher did not open his mouth.

He was within concentration, “apart from the breathing out and in, without any separate thought or awareness, his body settled and unmoving.” Sudhana could not ask, and could only stand and look—and he looked for six months and six days more.

What he saw was this: from the soles of the feet up to the crown, fourteen places, and at every place an assembly coming forth, at every place work being done, filling the whole Dharma realm. One unmoving person, doing the work of an entire world.

Only after the coming out of concentration was Sudhana able to ask the name. Three were answered: “Universal Eye Relinquishing and Obtaining,” “Prajñā-pāramitā Objective Realm Pure Light,” “Universal Adornment Pure Gate.” Chengguan says the first is set up upon knowledge, the second takes objective realm and knowledge together, and the third fuses objective realm and knowledge.

Then Sudhana asked the finest sentence of this section—“Holy one! Is the objective realm of this samādhi in the end only thus?”

He had already looked for six months, and still he asks ‘is it only this?’

Beyond what is seen there is always something not yet seen. This one question is the proof that he had truly seen.

And let it be seen this far.

Sudhana asked three times, and only the third time did he ask after the name of the dharma gate.

The first two questions both asked ‘how long’—how long ago she gave rise to the mind, and how long yet until she becomes a Buddha. Not once did she answer with time.

The first time, she counted Buddhas: Lamp Lighter, Free from Defilement, Wondrous Banner … on to the sands of thirty-six Gaṅgā rivers, and then one sentence closed it off—“What lies before that is what the knowledge of a Buddha knows, and is not what I am able to fathom.”

The second time, she simply took the question ‘how long’ apart. A bodhisattva does not give rise to the mind for the sake of teaching and transforming one being, nor for a hundred, nor for beings as many as unspeakably unspeakable turnings; not for the sake of making offerings to one Buddha, not for the sake of adorning and purifying one world, not for the sake of abiding in and upholding the Dharma left behind by one Tathāgata. The numbers are pushed to the far end of what a person can imagine, and they are still a number. Only after turning it over does she say: “It is because he wishes to teach, transform, and tame all beings, wholly without remainder, that he gives rise to the mind of awakening”—all, wholly without remainder.

And then that sentence: “Only when all worlds have been adorned and purified to exhaustion will my vow be exhausted; only when the habit-energies of the afflictions of all beings have been pulled out to exhaustion will my vow be fulfilled.”

A vow that will never be fulfilled. And so no answer of far or near can be got out of it.

The dharma gate is named the Banner of Freedom from Sorrow and Security. Chengguan says that the banner is great compassion standing high and showing far, and says further that compassion that is itself knowledge is able to wade through suffering and yet be secure, and that knowledge that is itself compassion is able to pass through many kalpas and yet be free from sorrow.

Let the visit rest here.

The eighth good friend, of whom Li Tongxuan judges that what he manifests is the mark of an outsider, leads ten thousand followers and sits upon the grass beneath a sandalwood tree.

Sudhana asked him what the realm of the dharma gate he had obtained was. He answered not one word.

“At that time, the seer Pimu at once stretched out his right hand, stroked the head of Sudhana, and took the hand of Sudhana.”

At one clasp of the hand, Sudhana saw himself going into worlds as many as the dust motes of ten Buddha-fields in the ten directions, seeing the Buddhas, hearing the Dharma, passing kalpas—from one day and night all the way to kalpas as many as the dust motes of unspeakably unspeakable Buddha-fields.

Then the hand was released. “The youth Sudhana at once saw his own body back in the place where it had been.”

Here Chengguan set down one sentence: “Without moving from the place where he was he pervades the places of the ten directions, and since he is back at the time where he was, so too the many kalpas have not gone beyond a single day.” And he said that this is the power of the dharma gate of the good friend of the round teaching, and at the last admonished in one sentence—one ought not to settle this deep purport by time or by place.

The dharma gate is named ‘the unvanquished banner.’ Chengguan glosses it thus: as for the banner, it stands high out beyond the surface of effortful functioning; as for the unvanquished, it is unmoved toward marks and toward delusion.

The seer asked Sudhana one question: “Son of good family! Do you keep it in mind?”

Sudhana answered: “Yes! This is the power of the holy one, the good friend.”

The realm was seen by himself, and yet the merit does not go to himself.

Between one clasp and one release, this visit is finished.

Sudhana has come to the ninth of his visits, and for the first time he suspected, within his own mind, that a good friend might be a Māra.

What he saw was this: “on all four sides masses of fire, like a great mountain, and within them a mountain of knives, so high that it had no end.” What he heard was one sentence with no explanation to it—climb this mountain of knives, cast yourself into this mass of fire, and the practice of a bodhisattva is made pure.

He hesitated. What he hesitated over was not dying. Within his mind he counted twelve things hard to come by: a human body is hard to obtain, meeting a Buddha is hard, coming upon a true good friend is hard … What he feared was that this one leap would destroy the conditions of the path.

And so thirteen hosts came out one after another in the midst of empty space to bear witness. The most worth turning over is the second host—it is Māra. What he feared was Māra, and the one who comes out to say ‘he has delivered me’ is precisely Māra.

The doubt removed, he leapt. The two samādhis the sūtra text gives are placed with the utmost fineness: “before he had reached the middle, he obtained the bodhisattva samādhi of Dwelling Well; and as soon as he touched the flames, he further obtained the bodhisattva samādhi of the Spiritual Penetration of the Bliss of Quiescence.” The one is in empty space, resting on neither the mountain above nor the fire below; the other is within the flames, where to touch is at once to realize it in person.

Then he said it himself: “How very wonderful, holy one! A mountain of knives and a great mass of fire such as these—when my body touches them, they are secure and pleasant.”

The testimony of the thirteen hosts, added all together, does not come up to this one sentence.

And Victorious Heat says only: “Son of good family! I have obtained only this bodhisattva liberation of the inexhaustible wheel.”—and having said it, he hands him over to a maiden in the south named Kindly Conduct.

The knife comes first, kindness comes after.

Walk on this far, for now.

What Sudhana asks is this: how is a bodhisattva to study, how is a bodhisattva to cultivate.

The first answer of this good friend does not set out a single principle. She says: “Son of good family! You should observe the adornment of my palace.”

Observe what? Observe a house. Sudhana looked on—and within each single wall, each single pillar, each single mirror, each single necklace, there appeared all the Tathāgatas of the Dharma realm, from the first arousing of the mind all the way to the display of nirvāṇa, the whole road of it inside. Chengguan says this is called ‘causing him to observe and to realize it in person,’ and points out the reason for it: at the last of the ten abodes the Dharma is no longer shown by words alone, but shown by recompense.

The looking done, only then is the name given out: the gate of the universal adornment of prajñā-pāramitā. Asked again about its objective realm, it opens out a million asaṃkhyeya gates of total retention, which the sūtra text sets out name by name, one hundred and eighteen gates.

The gates are opened so wide, and yet the place where they gather is only one. The last gate is called “the dhāraṇī gate of the purity of one's own mind”—Chengguan says that all the gates are gathered in general, and none goes beyond this.

So the sequence is: first it is seen, and then there is a name; the name once there, the function can be asked after; the function opened to its widest, it still comes home to one's own mind.

And having said it out, she leaves only one sentence: “I know only this gate of the universal adornment of prajñā-pāramitā.”

Look this far, for now.

The first lesson of the ten practices is a man walking back and forth in a wood.

Sudhana looked for him, and looked through walled towns and markets and shops, river plains and mountain valleys. When he found him, he was just then “neither slow nor swift, walking back and forth with careful discernment.”

Upon this man's body are the marks of a Buddha, and yet within his mind everything has come to rest—“whether sinking or lifting, whether knowledge or not knowledge, the stirring and the frivolous talk, all of it has come to rest.” The very man in whom all of it has come to rest does not stop his feet.

Asked how a bodhisattva learns the bodhisattva practice and how he cultivates the bodhisattva path, he opens his answer with “I am young in years, and I went forth from the household not long ago.” Chengguan says this is no modest formula: ‘Young in years is that he has only now entered the position of practice; going forth from the household is that he has only now left the household of the ten abodes.’

Then he says twelve times over, “within a single thought”—the ten directions present themselves, the buddha-lands are adorned and made pure, the oceans of samādhi present themselves, the oceans of the three times present themselves. Chengguan says that the reason all twelve of these sentences are within a single thought is that “because he has obtained the knowledge that rests on nothing and does not think, there is no dharma that does not appear.”

He does not raise a thought in order to illumine, and therefore there is nothing he does not illumine.

The dharma gate is named “the bodhisattva liberation of the Lamp That Accords.” It accords with the Dharma, and so its illumining leaves nothing out; it accords with the faculties, and so what it illumines is always apt.

Coming to rest and walking on were never two stretches of time.

Walk on this far, for now.

What Sudhana asks is still that one sentence: how is a bodhisattva to study, how is a bodhisattva to cultivate.

The one who answers him this time is a child. When Sudhana found him, he was upon an islet in the river “heaping up sand at play,” with ten thousand other children around him.

The dharma he sets out has not one sentence of the profound in it: writing letters, counting numbers, reckoning, seal-impressions; healing the sick, putting up houses, refining elixirs, working the fields, buying and selling; looking at a person's marks and knowing where he is bound and which vehicle he should take. Chengguan matches these, word by word, to the precepts—writing is saying plainly what is to be stopped and what is to be done; number is the four grave and the ten grave offenses, on down to the eighty thousand fine points of conduct; calculation is how great a fruit each single cause brings on; the seal is that keeping and breaking, good and evil, bring their fruit with certainty. And the heaping of sand is ‘the merit that is as the sands of the Gaṅgā, gathered together by the precepts.’

Then comes the longest stretch of the whole section: the position names of calculation. From “a hundred Lakṣas make one Koṭi,” each position multiplied by itself makes the next, rung upon rung, up to “Unspeakably Unspeakable-turned.” However high it climbs, every step of it is still a step that can be counted.

The names counted out, he counts sand—“able to know in full how many grains are within it.” At the opening he is playing with sand; at the close he counts the sand to the end. Merit can be piled up at all only because every single grain counts.

And he ends with a single sentence: “I know only this dharma gate of the light of the knowledge of all craft and great supernormal power.”

One who has come to know this much, and is still willing to say that he knows only one gate—that is how the road stays walkable.

Study this far, for now.

Sudhana entered that house, and the first thing he saw was the laywoman seated on a jewelled throne; only then the ten koṭis of seats spread within the house, surpassing all there is among men and among gods.

Then he looked further down, and the whole house had nothing in it at all—

“In the house there were no garments, no food and drink, nor any of the other things whatever that sustain life; there was only, set down before her seat, one small vessel.”

In the house there were no garments, no food or drink, nothing of the requisites of life—only one small vessel set before her.

And the food that comes out of this vessel fills a hundred beings, a koṭi of beings, beings as many as the dust motes of unspeakably unspeakably many Buddha-lands, “and yet that food and drink comes to no end, nor does it grow less.”

Those of the two vehicles eat it and realize their fruit; the bodhisattva bound to one more birth eats it and attains the way beneath the tree.

Chengguan says that this is because ‘one small vessel is fused into sameness with the Dharma realm, and the arising by conditions is inexhaustible’—the vessel is not of great capacity; it is that the vessel and the Dharma realm have become one single thing.

He says something shorter still: “Further, it signifies that forbearance must abase itself, and so it is the small forbearance in dharmas.”

The vessel is small because the character of forbearance is to put itself low.

The Yanyi chao goes on to explain that ‘emptiness’: clay is kneaded to make a vessel, and “where there is nothing, there is the use of the vessel.”

The vessel has its use, and its use lies in there being nothing at all in the middle of it.

The dharma gate she has obtained is called ‘the inexhaustible treasury of merit’—a treasury is not in the hoarding, it is in being able to bring forth.

One empty house, one small vessel, and the ten directions cannot eat it to an end.

This good friend sits in the noisiest place in the city — the crossroads of the market, where four roads meet and run out in every direction.

Beings come from every quarter, differing in form and kind, and what they want differs from one to the next. He opens no storehouse. He does one thing only, and it takes eight graphs: for a moment he gathers his mindfulness, and he looks up into space.

And then: whatever they need comes down out of the sky.

The giving done, he goes on to teach: to those who wanted food he speaks of eight practices, to those who wanted drink of the taste of the Dharma, to those who wanted carriages of the Great Vehicle, to those who wanted clothing of shame and conscience. He begins from the one thing the person is holding in his hands.

The gate is named the liberation gate of the treasury of merit brought forth at will. What is hard about ‘at will’ is not the quantity but the fact that no two are alike; and the place ‘brought forth’ comes from is not a storehouse but the open sky.

The giving finished, each person goes home. The last thing he says to Sudhana is to go south.

When Sudhana leaves, of the five things he holds in mind not one so much as mentions this gate. Every one of them is about the good friend.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana asked about the path, and this elder answered not one word of doctrine.

He took Sudhana by the hand, brought him home, and said: “Son of good family! Just look at my house.”

That house had ten storeys and eight gates. Sudhana looked up through it one storey at a time: food given, garments given, ornaments given, attendant women and jewels given; and higher up, bodhisattvas expounding the Dharma, fifteen gates of wisdom, the forbearance of the echo, one voice pervading the lands, one more birth to come; and on the topmost storey, all the tathāgatas filling it.

When he had seen it all, Sudhana asked only one thing: “By what conditions was so pure an assembly brought about?”

The answer: beyond as many kalpas as there are dust-motes in a buddha-land, a buddha entered the city, and I made music sound, and I burned one pellet of incense.

One pellet of incense; ten storeys. Between them stand four graphs only — “the dedicating to three places.”

At the end the elder says: “I know only this bodhisattva liberation gate of the treasury of measureless merit.”

The ten-storeyed house was piled up storey by storey, with discrimination; those bodhisattvas he points to are ‘furnished with all dharmas without discrimination.’

It is harder for a man to say which storey he is standing on than to say he has reached the top.

Let it stand here for now.

This good friend is a man who cures the sick.

Sudhana asks the same two questions as before. The elder first praises him for having already aroused the mind, then at once gives the teaching; its opening sentence is: “Son of good family! I know all the illnesses of all beings:” — and what follows is a list of illnesses: wind, bile, phlegm, fever; ghosts and sprites, venomous magic, and even harm by water and fire. What he takes up first is the pain in a person’s body.

Once they are cured, there is still the giving. Bathing in fragrant water, fine garments and choice robes, food and drink and goods and treasures, until “all of them are supplied in full and lack nothing at all.” Only after that does he expound the Dharma.

A person whose body still hurts cannot take in the Dharma. The order of the scripture text skips not one step.

The expounding, too, has two layers. To the greedy he teaches the contemplation of impurity, to the angry the contemplation of kindness and compassion, to the deluded the distinguishing of the marks of things, and to those in equal parts he reveals the surpassing Dharma — of this layer Chengguan says that “in sense it runs through both the great and the small.” Of the sixteen clauses of the layer above it — raising the mind, giving rise to compassion, the ten perfections, the ten bodies — he says, “this is the Great Vehicle alone.”

The second matter is incense. Nine kinds of incense; but the weight of it falls not on the names of the incenses, but on “knowing in full the method of preparing and blending them.” Upon those two graphs Chengguan turns a single sentence: “blending is the perfect and unobstructed fusion of discipline, concentration, and wisdom.”

Incense lies not in the single note, but in the blending.

He calls this gate of his the Dharma gate of causing all beings everywhere to see the buddhas and rejoice — the rejoicing comes from curing illness, the seeing the buddhas everywhere from burning incense. His two occupations are written into the name itself.

The assignment to the practice of Good Manifestation is what Chengguan matched, carrying forward the ancient worthies. But in the scripture text itself, 「善現」 tr. “Good Manifestation” does not appear even once.

Let it stand here for now.

On this whole road of Sudhana’s, this is the first time he does not dare to go in.

What he sees is a king inflicting punishment upon his main hall: “some had hands and feet cut off, some had ears and nose severed, some had their eyes gouged out, some had their heads struck off,” and of the sound of the cries the scripture says it is “as it is in the great hell of Crushing Together.” On the spot a thought rises in him: “How could I seek the Dharma here, and raise up the mind of great compassion to rescue and protect beings?”

The deity in the sky offers no defense of this king. It only tells him to turn back and recall the teaching of his previous teacher, and then says one thing: a bodhisattva’s “knowledge that gathers beings in is beyond conceiving.”

Sudhana hears what the god tells him, his doubt is removed, and he walks in and bows—the god has not said that this king is blameless, only that the knowledge of a bodhisattva is inconceivable; what the king has been doing, the king himself will answer once they are inside the palace.

The king takes him by the hand into the palace, first tells him to look at the palace, and then puts the question back to him: “If I truly did evil deeds such as those, how would I obtain a fruit such as this, a body such as this, a retinue such as this, wealth such as this, sovereignty such as this?” — deeds and their fruits do not deceive each other, and so those evil deeds were not truly done. The ones punished are conjured, the suffering undergone is conjured. 「我得菩薩如幻解脫。」 tr. “What I have attained is the bodhisattva’s liberation like an illusion.”

And the heaviest sentence of the whole unit comes afterward: “would rather undergo the suffering of the Unremitting Hell in time to come than give rise to so much as one thought of an intention to do anything that would make one mosquito or one ant suffer—how much less a human being!”

Blade and saw and cauldron in front, one mosquito and one ant behind. Only when this passage has shown you both ends is it finished speaking.

Let it stand here for now.

The teacher Sudhana meets this time is a king.

He does not sit in his hall; he sits at the heart of a street open in all four directions. The pavilion where he constantly dwells is named Treasury of the True Dharma.

Sudhana asks him how a bodhisattva studies and how he cultivates, and he answers with one sentence: “I have purely cultivated the bodhisattva practice of the Banner of Great Kindness; I have brought the bodhisattva practice of the Banner of Great Kindness to fullness.” Then he takes that sentence apart into twelve — by this Dharma I am king, by this Dharma I give command, by this Dharma I gather in, by this Dharma I follow after the world … In his hands kindness is not a mood; it is a way of governing a country.

Halfway through the telling he stops and says: “Son of good family! Wait but a little while, and you will presently see it before you of yourself.”

On the spot, he enters concentration.

The ground, walls, halls, palaces, steps, and shutters of the whole city give forth sound and bend toward him. The people in the city cast themselves to the ground; the birds and beasts look at one another and give rise to a mind of kindness and compassion. The hills, plains, grasses, and trees turn about; the ponds, pools, springs, wells, rivers, and seas surge and overflow and pour out before him. Even those kings who drink blood, eat flesh, and do cruel harm to beings “all gave rise to a mind of kindness.”

Chengguan glosses this passage in eight graphs only: 「同體大慈，物我無二」 tr. “great kindness of one same substance, in which thing and self are not two”. That grass and trees are willing to bow is not because grass and trees have minds; it is because in that mind of kindness there is no division of thing from self.

After he rises from concentration he says: “I know only this bodhisattva gate of the samādhi of according with the world with great kindness foremost.”

The man who has just displayed the homage of an entire world says that he knows only this one.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana asks her: what are the states of these Dharma gates like?

She answers only one clause: 「善男子！此處難知。」 tr. “Son of good family! This place is hard to know.”

Sudhana asks again. Only then does she open her mouth — and what she speaks of is not the marks of things, but a certain night in a past age when she was a king’s daughter: at night, when the household had gone to sleep, she was alone upon an upper storey looking up at the stars, and saw in the empty sky a buddha “like unto a king of jeweled mountains.”

From that night onward, what she asks is “what sort of deeds did this buddha, this world-honored one, perform” — she asks after the cause, not the fruit. And so the buddha teaches her to set her mind in ten ways.

Then come kalpas as numerous as the dust motes of Jambudvīpa. Twelve times over, “throughout those kalpas,” and every one of them is saying the same thing: upholding, and never having forgotten one letter or one clause; seeing beings, and not one whom she did not urge toward the mind of awakening.

Immovable does not mean doing nothing. It means, in the midst of what is done, never having been shaken.

At the very end she says, “I have attained only this radiance of the samādhi of never being satiated in seeking all things” — and then uses nine comparisons to speak of what others do.

Someone who gives herself one clause and gives others nine.

Let it stand here for now.

The teacher Sudhana is to look for this time is a non-Buddhist ascetic.

He is walking back and forth upon a mountain, ten thousand Brahmā gods around him, his majestic light such that not even a Great Brahmā king can match it. Sudhana asks him how to study the practice of a bodhisattva, and the first clause of his answer is 「我已安住至一切處菩薩行」 tr. “I already dwell in the bodhisattva practice that reaches everywhere”.

Reaching everywhere means that the hells and the animals are counted in too.

And the most important clause in the whole unit lies not in what he manifests but in what he does not leave behind — 「諸眾生等，悉不能知我是何人、從何而至，唯令聞者如實修行。」 tr. “Those beings are none of them able to know what person I am or where I have come from; it is only that those who hear are made to cultivate in accordance with the real.”

No one knows who he is. For those who listen, only the Dharma is left.

Chengguan says of this one that he is displayed as a non-Buddhist because he is able to walk what is not the path, and that because he is not stained by what is not the path he is therefore said to have left the household life.

Able to go in, and not to take on the color of it. And so wherever he goes he is still himself.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana has asked twenty teachers along this road; this one sells perfumes.

What does he say he is able to do? 「我善別知一切諸香，亦知調合一切香法……」 tr. “I am skilled at distinguishing and knowing all perfumes, and I also know the method for blending all perfumes …” Just that.

Then he names ten perfumes one by one: the one that, burned, makes a whole city joyful and free of illness for seven days and seven nights; the one that, smeared on the body, lets a man enter fire unburned; the one that, smeared on a drum, makes the enemy armies scatter of themselves; the one whose single pellet, the size of a sesame seed, perfumes a whole realm; the one that, smelled, makes the mind leave defilement behind; the one reserved for a wheel-turning king’s use alone; the one that makes the gods mindful of the Buddha; the one that makes the gods of a whole heaven come of themselves to hear the Dharma; the one that makes a perfume cloud cover the Dharma realm; and one more, whose name is Snatching Away the Mind.

When he has finished, he leaves behind only a single clause: 「善男子！我唯知此調和香法。」 tr. “Son of good family! I know only this method of blending perfumes.”

Below that it is all “nothing to which one is attached” — precepts with nothing to which they are attached, knowledge with nothing to which it is attached, an objective realm with nothing to which it is attached, in every place whatsoever nothing to which one clings.

A man who sells perfumes speaks of perfume with such solidity for one reason only: to make clear that however fine the perfume, it too is to be set down.

This one is assigned to ‘rescuing and guarding all sentient beings while free of the mark of sentient beings.’ The sequence of the scripture text is this: the first ten passages tell of what perfume benefits in beings, and the last passage lets fall six words for attachment in a row to speak of having nothing to which one is attached.

Let it stand here for now.

At this station of Sudhana’s, the teacher is a ship’s captain.

The place where he stands is exact — 「在城門外海岸上住」 tr. “dwelling upon the sea-shore outside the city gate”. Not inside the city, and not out on the ship, but just on that strip of shore where the city and the ocean meet.

The Dharma he speaks is his own trade: where the islands of jewels lie, which dragon palaces must be given a wide berth, how deep the eddies run, whether the water’s color is clear or muddy, how the sun and moon travel, whether the planking is iron or wood, whether the wind is against or with. The whole trade told out, he gathers it up in a single sentence — 「我以成就如是智慧，常能利益一切眾生。」 tr. “Because I have accomplished wisdom such as this, I am constantly able to benefit all sentient beings.”

The trade itself is the wisdom; there is no wisdom apart from the trade.

And the heaviest sentence in the whole unit comes later — 「我將大船如是往來，未始令其一有損壞。」 tr. “I take the great ship back and forth in this way, and have never yet let it suffer so much as one damage.”

Voyage after voyage in and out of the ocean of birth and death, and the ship has never been damaged. It is at the first sentence of this very passage that Chengguan marks ‘assigned to the indestructible dedication,’ and glosses the friend’s name as ‘Sovereign’ — upon the ocean of birth and death he is able to ferry well, and in all dharmas his deep faith is indestructible.

‘Indestructible’ does not mean not going in; it means having gone in a great many times, and still being there.

Let it stand here for now.

The teacher Sudhana finds at this station is in the middle of judging a case.

Measureless merchants and a hundred thousand householders stand about him, and he is 「理斷人間種種事務」 tr. “governing and deciding for people all the various affairs of the human world.” The scripture text goes straight on with one clause — 「因為說法」 tr. “following upon that occasion he expounded the Dharma for them.” The occasion that is the deciding of matters is the very occasion of his expounding the Dharma.

The Dharma gate he has accomplished carries a long name: “the spiritual penetrating strength, without anything depended upon and without anything done, of the gate of bodhisattva practice that reaches every place.”

Of what he himself knows he claims this one gate and no more; and having told out the virtues of the great bodhisattvas — going everywhere to every buddha-land, sending forth with the broad and long tongue the even and equal sound, their knowledge-bodies vast and great and entering universally into the three times — he closes with a single question: “how then could I be able to know, or be able to tell of, their practices of merit and virtue?”

And “reaching every place,” brought down onto the text, is everywhere “and for them I expound the Dharma.” From the gods of the desire realm to the Brahmā gods of the form realm, from the hamlets and encampments and walled towns to the worlds as many as the dust-motes of the ten directions, wherever he reaches, clause upon clause is expounding.

A man who judges cases says that what he rests upon is ‘nothing depended upon.’

Judging matters most requires something to go upon. The weightiest sentence of this section is hidden just there, in what looks like a contradiction.

Let it stand here for now.

When Sudhana came to the Sunlight Grove, this teacher was sitting upon every seat in the whole grove.

Not by turns, but all at one time — 「在一一座，眾會不同，所說法門亦各差別」 tr. “upon each and every seat the assembly gathered was not the same, and the Dharma gate expounded also differed in each case”. Thirty seats, thirty crowds, thirty Dharma gates with thirty different names. What the gods of the Pure Abodes heard was Inexhaustible Liberation; what the rākṣasas heard was Giving Rise to a Mind of Pity and Compassion; what the vajra-holding spirits heard was the Nārāyaṇa Adornment of Vajra Knowledge.

Asked what this Dharma gate of hers was, she gave one name only: 「善男子！我得解脫，名：成就一切智。」 tr. “Son of good family! I have gained a liberation named: the accomplishing of omniscient knowledge.”

Asked again why it bore that name, the answer was shorter still: 「善男子！此智光明，於一念中普照三世一切諸法。」 tr. “Son of good family! This radiance of knowledge, within a single thought, illumines everywhere all the dharmas of the three times.”

Thirty ways of expounding upon thirty seats, and gathered back in there is only this one sentence.

And of herself she says: 「善男子！我唯知此成就一切智解脫。」 tr. “Son of good family! I know only this liberation of the accomplishing of omniscient knowledge.”

Someone able to expound thirty Dharmas to thirty crowds at one and the same time says that she knows only one. That sentence is not mere courtesy — thirty is not thirty, it is one; and because she knows that one, she is able to speak the thirty.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana walks as far as his twenty-fifth teacher, and a city shows two kinds of people.

One kind do not know her. They look at this youth, 「諸根寂靜，智慧明了」 tr. “his faculties still, his wisdom clear and bright,” and they grow anxious for him, asking in their minds: “with what sort of intention has he come seeking this woman?”

The other kind have long known who she is. They open their mouths with “excellent, excellent,” and then four resolutions come one after another: resolutely to seek the fruit-station of a buddha, resolutely to wish to pull out from all sentient beings the poisoned arrow of craving and love.

The same person, the same matter, and two ways of seeing it.

The Dharma gate she names for herself is called “the Limit Apart from Craving and Desire.” Upon those words Chengguan sets out three tiers: ordinary beings are stained by desire, those of the two vehicles part from it, and “a bodhisattva gains liberation without cutting off craving and desire” — and the half-sentence that comes after must not be dropped: 「智了性空，欲即道故。」 tr. “because his knowledge comprehends that the nature of it is empty, desire is itself the path.”

Ten samādhis, one name to each occasion, and at the end they are gathered into a single clause: “whatever sentient beings draw near to me, all of them are able to abide in the limit apart from craving.”

As for where this whole sovereignty of hers came from — 「以一寶錢而為供養。」 tr. “she made an offering of one jeweled coin.”

One coin.

Let it stand here for now.

This good friend does one small thing only — Chengguan says that he constantly makes offerings at a single stūpa of the Buddha.

Sudhana asks for the Dharma, and he announces the name of what he has gained: 「我得菩薩解脫，名：不般涅槃際。」 tr. “I have gained a liberation of a bodhisattva, named the Limit of Not Entering Parinirvāṇa.”

Then he says a thing that runs almost contrary to what the world knows: 「我知十方一切世界諸佛如來，畢竟無有般涅槃者，唯除為欲調伏眾生而示現耳。」 tr. “I know that of the buddhas, the tathāgatas of all the worlds in the ten directions, there is finally none that enters parinirvāṇa, except only that, wishing to tame sentient beings, they manifest it.”

On what ground does he say so? He answers with one matter only: 「我開栴檀座如來塔門時，得三昧，名：佛種無盡。」 tr. “when I opened the door of the stūpa of the tathāgata of the sandalwood seat, I gained a samādhi, named the Lineage of the Buddhas Is Inexhaustible.” Once the door of the stūpa is open, all the buddhas of this world are seen in their sequence, and within the space of a single thought, on to buddhas as many as dust motes.

Chengguan glosses the name of this samādhi with nine graphs — ‘the lineage of the buddhas arises from conditions; the buddhas are born conditioned upon the principle.’ Buddhas come to be from conditions, and buddhas are born conditioned upon the principle; the principle has never ceased, and therefore the buddhas have never ceased.

And at the end he still says: 「我唯得此菩薩所得不般涅槃際解脫。」 tr. “I have gained this one liberation alone that a bodhisattva gains, the Limit of Not Entering Parinirvāṇa.”

One stūpa, one door, and one sentence: ‘the Buddha has not gone away.’

Let it stand here for now.

This teacher hangs out no signboard. Sudhana had to 「處處求覓」 tr. “seek everywhere” before he found him, among the cliffs and valleys on the west side of the mountain.

The gate he has gained carries a very short name — “the bodhisattva’s liberation gate of the practice of great compassion.”

Within the gate there are two passages. The first is eleven clauses each beginning “at times”: giving, kindly speech, beneficial conduct, working alongside, manifesting a form-body, manifesting nets of light, voice and sound, deportment, expounding the Dharma, spiritual transformations — and the last clause is 「或為化現同類之形，與其共居而成熟之」 tr. “at times I manifest by transformation a shape of the same kind as theirs, and dwell together with them and bring them to ripeness” — to manifest a body of the same kind as yours, and settle down there.

The second passage is eighteen fears. They are counted from perilous roads and burning distress all the way to “parting from the fear of what presses upon the mind, parting from the fear of sorrow and grief” — the further the counting goes, the nearer it draws, and the last item is already inside the mind.

Then he says: 「復作是願：『願諸眾生，若念於我，若稱我名，若見我身，皆得免離一切怖畏。』」 tr. “I make this vow as well: ‘May all sentient beings, if they recollect me, if they call my name, if they see my body, be freed and part from every fear.’”

But rescue from fear is not the end. He goes on to say that, when sentient beings have been made to part from fear, 「復教令發阿耨多羅三藐三菩提心永不退轉」 tr. “I further teach them to raise the mind of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi and never again turn back from it.”

‘First let a person stop being afraid; then let him raise the mind.’

If he is not first made unafraid, he cannot raise the mind; and if he is only made unafraid and is not taught to raise the mind, even that freedom from fear will not hold.

Let it stand here for now.

This one Sudhana did not go to find.

He had not yet stirred from the assembly of the teacher before him when, from the eastern quarter, a bodhisattva came through the air — he pressed the ground, and the world quaked in six ways; he sent forth light, and the light of sun and moon and stars and lightning was 「皆如聚墨」 tr. “all like a mass of gathered ink”; the light reached the hells and the hungry ghosts and the animals, and 「眾苦皆滅，煩惱不起」 tr. “every kind of suffering was quenched, and the afflictions rose no more”; further, he rained down offerings upon all the buddha-lands; further, he manifested a body according to what sentient beings delighted in. Only when all this was done did he walk into this assembly.

Then, and only then, did the teacher ask Sudhana: 「汝見正趣菩薩來此會不？」 tr. “Have you seen the bodhisattva Right Course come to this assembly or not?” Sudhana answered: 「已見。」 tr. “I have already seen him.”

He went and asked, and the answer he got was a single sentence: 「我得菩薩解脫，名：普門速疾行。」 tr. “I have gained a liberation of a bodhisattva, named the Universal Gate of Swift Practice.”

‘He performed it through once, and only then said the name.’

Sudhana pressed him with three further questions: in whose presence he had gained it, how far off the place he came from was, how long he had been walking. Within the answer there is one sentence stranger than the rest — he has been walking for unspeakably unspeakable kalpas, and yet within a single thought-moment he raises unspeakably unspeakable steps. Walking that long is precisely how the walking is shown to be that swift.

And into every buddha-land he passed he entered, in each he made offerings, and in each he left the Dharma expounded.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana finished asking for the Dharma, and this teacher did not answer at once.

First he 「長舒四手，取四大海水自洗其面」 tr. “stretched out his four hands far, took the water of the four great oceans, and washed his own face with it”; only then did he take golden flowers and scatter them over Sudhana; only then did he open his mouth.

Four hands, the ancient worthies say, are the four unobstructed understandings — of dharma, of meaning, of speech, and of eloquence, the capital with which one expounds the Dharma. The water of the four great oceans is the Dharma he has realized. And that water he uses first upon his own face.

There is an old way of reading that takes this washing to be the washing of Sudhana’s face. Fazang collated the Sanskrit witness and judged it to be a washing of his own face; Chengguan says nothing of a Sanskrit witness, and what he judges is the same — ‘first purify oneself, and afterward benefit others.’ The scripture text of the eighty-fascicle witness has of itself the one graph 「自」 tr. “oneself.”

The gate of liberation he has accomplished is named 「雲網」 tr. “Cloud-Net.” A cloud can cover and can moisten; a net can dredge and can gather in; and the substance of it is the six perfections.

A deva-spirit who can manifest a vast and great body, and can conjure up twenty mountains of jewels, does as the first thing before expounding the Dharma this: he washes his own face clean.

Let it stand here for now.

This time Sudhana did not journey south.

He walked to the site of awakening in the country of Magadha — the very ground where the Buddha accomplished the way. A million earth goddesses recognized him first, and said 「此來童子即是佛藏」 tr. “this youth who comes here is the very treasury of the Buddha.”

The first thing the earth goddess said when she opened her mouth was not an exposition of the Dharma but a question: 「善來童子！汝於此地曾種善根，我為汝現，汝欲見不？」 tr. “Welcome, youth! In this ground you once planted roots of goodness. I shall display them for you — would you like to see them?”

Sudhana answered in six graphs: 「聖者！唯然！欲見。」 tr. “Holy one! Yes indeed! I wish to see them.”

Thereupon the goddess pressed the ground with her foot, and 「百千億阿僧祇寶藏自然踊出」 tr. “hundreds of thousands of koṭis of asaṃkhyeyas of treasuries of themselves welled up,” and then she said: this is 「汝往昔善根果報」 tr. “the fruit and recompense of your roots of goodness of old.”

One press, and it opened. So those treasuries were in the ground all along, and had followed him the whole way — 「今此寶藏隨逐於汝」 tr. “these treasuries now follow you and go after you.”

The Dharma gate she conferred is named 「不可壞智慧藏」 tr. “the Indestructible Treasury of Wisdom.” A treasury in the ground can be dug out to the last; this one cannot be destroyed.

‘Thirty good friends walked down, and he walked to the very ground he had set out from; one press, and the whole ground was full of what he had planted himself.’

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana came to the city, entered by the east gate, stood a little while, and the sun went down.

To see the one who keeps watch through the night, you must wait for the dark.

She was in empty space, 「一切星宿炳然在體」 tr. “all the constellations appearing plainly upon her body.” He asked for the Dharma, and she answered: 「我得菩薩破一切眾生癡暗法光明解脫。」 tr. “I have gained the bodhisattva liberation of the light of the Dharma that breaks the deluded darkness of all sentient beings.”

Then she told what she does. When the night is deep and the voices still, when the clouds are dense and the fog heavy — for the people at sea she becomes the shipmaster, for the people on land she becomes the sun and the moon, for the people in the mountains she becomes a single herb that gives off light. Every time she rescues, a vow follows after.

Sudhana asked her: how long has this been going on.

She told two lives. Both lives are the same picture — she is asleep, and a night goddess comes and wakes her. The first time by shaking necklaces, the second time by shaking the house. Awake, she goes to see the Buddha; seeing the Buddha, she gains the samādhi; the samādhi lets her hear the Dharma; and only from hearing the Dharma does she gain this liberation.

At the end she points the road, saying that the next one is within the site of awakening, named Universal Virtue Pure Light — whom Chengguan judges to be the very one who woke her in those days.

‘A good friend, so called, is the one who makes a sound while you are asleep.’

Let it stand here for now.

A name of eight graphs: 「寂靜禪定樂普遊步」 tr. “Quiescence, Meditative Concentration, Joy, and the Universally Roaming Stride.”

Chengguan takes it apart into four things — to accord with principle and not to grasp is quiescence, the joint working of stilling and contemplation is meditative concentration, abiding in the joy of the right Dharma is joy, and a great working without bound is the universally roaming stride. Then Chengguan outlines four passages: seeing the buddhas without grasping, the four dhyānas, the drawing forth of merit and virtue, and the benefiting of sentient beings. The name is taken apart into four parts and the working is opened into four passages — and Chengguan matches them as three: one passage for quiescence, one for concentration, and two for the universally roaming stride, with the sense of 「樂」 tr. “joy” gathered into the working of concentration.

That passage of the four dhyānas is the one most worth looking at. In the first dhyāna, 「大悲救護一切眾生，一心不動」 tr. “rescuing and guarding all sentient beings with great compassion, single-minded and unmoving”; in the second, 「攝一切眾生」 tr. “gathering in all sentient beings”; in the third, 「思惟一切眾生自性」 tr. “pondering the own-nature of all sentient beings”; in the fourth, 「悉能息滅一切眾生眾苦熱惱」 tr. “being wholly able to extinguish all the sufferings and burning distress of all sentient beings.” Four dhyānas, and all four clauses stand upon sentient beings. Chengguan, fearing that people will misread it, adds a line: the dhyāna of the world only leaves behind desire and what is evil and unwholesome, while what this one leaves behind is every deluded thought.

She is a night goddess. And so it is that 「靜夜時為說深法」 tr. “in the still of night she expounds the deep Dharma” for them, making a light for them, removing their obstruction of darkness, extinguishing their fear. By the passage of humbling herself the night has changed into another one — what she says she cannot know and cannot tell of belongs to those who are 「能於生死大夜之中出生一切智慧光明」 tr. “able, in the great night of birth and death, to bring forth the light of all wisdom.”

One and the same night: one of them outside the door, one of them within birth and death.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana asked a question that sounds like a courtesy: 「汝發阿耨多羅三藐三菩提心，為幾時耶？」 tr. “You raised the mind of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi: how long has it been until now?”

The night goddess answered with ninety-one verses.

There are almost no years or months in the answer; the one number is “for twenty thousand years I made offerings to that tathāgata.” Only ten kalpas, string after string of buddhas’ names, and at the end of each kalpa that one clause — 「然未得慧眼」 tr. “and yet I had not gained the eye of wisdom,” 「無而計為有」 tr. “reckoned as existing what does not exist,” 「未能明了法」 tr. “was not able to understand the dharmas clearly,” 「猶未能深悟」 tr. “was still not able to awaken deeply,” 「未能成就忍」 tr. “was not able to accomplish forbearance.” Over and over again. Only at the eighth kalpa and the tenth does she stop telling of what she had not gained.

On that first night she was a jewel maiden in the palace, and she was asleep. When the buddha appeared in the world she had already, in a dream, seen the buddha’s wonders and heard the profound Dharma; ten thousand goddesses who preside over the night roused her from the sky: 「賢慧汝應起，佛已現汝國。」 tr. “Worthy and wise one, you should rise! The Buddha has appeared within your land.”

Waking, she saw the Buddha, and made a vow. What the vow said was — 「我願作是身，覺諸放逸者。」 tr. “I vowed to take on such a body, and to awaken those who are heedless.”

And so she became a night goddess. It was not handed to her by recompense; she chose it herself: whoever woke me in those days, that is the one I will become.

The ninety-one verses done, she first joins past to present (the wheel-turning king and the jewel maiden of that time are these very persons today), and then she says 「我唯得此大勢力普喜幢解脫門」 tr. “I have gained only this liberation gate of the Banner of Great Mighty Power and Universal Joy.”

‘The one who can tell clearly how far he has walked is the one who can tell how far he has not.’

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana asked three things: what it is called, how long since she gained it, and by cultivating what she came to it.

She answered in seven thousand graphs and more, and nearly all of it is where she came from.

Measureless kalpas ago, she was the daughter of a king. The people of that city compared with one another who was the fairer, and compared until their lifespan and their strength of color were diminished. Samantabhadra came by transformation, and at one sending forth of light every light in the city was gone. She looked up and saw, and raised a vow — 「願我所在受生之處，常得不離此善知識」 tr. “May it be that in whatever place I receive birth, I ever gain not to be parted from this good friend.”

Push back ten great kalpas further, and there is something smaller still: Samantabhadra urged her to repair a buddha-image upon a lotus seat that had fallen into ruin, to paint it, to adorn it. The raising of the mind was there.

Afterward she was a wheel-turning king, the daughter of a dragon king, a sea spirit, a seer of the five spiritual powers. This Dharma gate she gained in the life when she was a jewel maiden and saw the Buddha Wondrous-Virtue Banner; later, as the courtesan Beautiful Face, she made her offering with song and dance, was touched by the light from the Buddha’s brow, and gained yet another gate, named 「法界方便不退藏」 tr. “the Treasury of Non-Regression in the Skilful Means of the Dharma-realm.”

At the end she names three identities: the father king is Maitreya, the queen is the next good friend, the daughter is I.

Upon that one layer of mother and daughter Chengguan sets down a single line — “true vigor comes forth after all from concentration.”

The Dharma gate this night goddess gained is what is called 「普現一切世間調伏眾生解脫門」 tr. “the liberation gate of Appearing Everywhere in All Worlds and Subduing Sentient Beings.”

Let us look this far for now.

This time Sudhana asked very finely, four clauses in one breath: 「此解脫門為何事業？行何境界？起何方便？作何觀察？」 tr. “Great sage! What undertaking is this liberation gate? What realm does it walk in? What skillful means does it set in motion? What beholding does it carry out?”

The night goddess answered in four passages and left not one of them out — but the order was changed. He asked: undertaking · realm · skillful means · beholding. She answered: skillful means · undertaking · beholding · realm.

Chengguan set up a section of his own for this, and said that ‘in the asking, what is able and what is accomplished are to be kept apart; in the answering, what is able and what is accomplished are to accomplish each other’ — first there is the mind that sets a thing in motion, and only then the deed that is done; first there is the eye that beholds, and only then the realm that is walked in.

The name of the Dharma gate is 「念念出生廣大喜莊嚴解脫門」 tr. “the liberation gate of the vast joy adorned that comes forth in thought after thought.” The eye of it is one graph: 「喜」 tr. “joy.”

Where does the joy come from? She told of two places. Sentient beings were converted, and the converting came out right: 「我時便得廣大歡喜法光明海」 tr. “at that time I gained the sea of the light of the Dharma of vast joy.” The Buddha was beheld, and the beholding saw him: eight passages of what she saw, and passage after passage is closed with 「既見是已，生大歡喜」 tr. “having seen this, great joy arose.”

The one is a joy that is made; the other is a joy that is seen. And this is why it is called ‘coming forth in thought after thought’ — because what she converted and what she beheld never once broke off.

Let it stand here for now.

The Dharma gate this good friend has gained is named 「甚深自在妙音解脫」 tr. “the liberation of Profound and Sovereign Wondrous Sound.”

Six graphs, three senses. The three passages of the working in the prose Chengguan outlines as glossing these three in turn — the ten contemplations of the Dharma realm expound the profound, the ten dhāraṇī wheels expound the sovereign, the twenty-three clauses of expounding the Dharma expound the wondrous sound. The name is the net-rope, and the three passages are the meshes.

Sudhana asked her: how long is it since you gained this Dharma gate?

What she answered was not a number but a stretch of the past. Very long ago there was a kalpa, and when the Dharma was about to perish a king who had gone forth said to the monks who talked all day of the affairs of kings and of thieves: 「奇哉！苦哉！佛於無量諸大劫海集此法炬，云何汝等而共毀滅？」 tr. “How strange! How bitter! Through measureless great seas of kalpas the Buddha gathered together this torch of Dharma; how is it that you would destroy it together?” Having spoken, he rose into the sky and sent out a great light. His daughter heard that sentence and saw that light, and raised the mind — and that nun is the night goddess who is speaking today.

And so when she tells of herself she says: 「於生死夜無明昏寐諸眾生中而獨覺悟。」 tr. “amid the sentient beings who lie in the night of birth and death and in the slumber of ignorance, I alone am awake.”

Birth and death are the night, ignorance is the sleep. She causes beings to do one thing with each of three cities — to guard the city of the mind, to forsake the city of the three realms, and to abide in the unsurpassed Dharma city of all-knowledge.

How deep the root of the Dharma is cannot be told. It can only be told as a stretch of the past.

Let us look this far for now.

Sudhana asked this one: how is a bodhisattva to learn the bodhisattva practices?

She answered first with something very small — the sky has darkened, the lotuses have closed, the wanderers have dispersed, and there are still people upon the road who must get home; and she 「皆密護，令得正道，達其處所，宿夜安樂」 tr. “protects them all in secret, causing them to walk upon the right road, to reach the place they are going, and to be at ease through the night.”

Then she spoke the name of her Dharma gate: 「菩薩出生廣大喜光明解脫門」 tr. “the bodhisattva liberation gate of giving birth to the light of vast joy.”

Sudhana pressed with a single question: how long has it been now since you raised the mind?

She gave no number of years. She told of a king: at the end of the kalpa the five turbidities arose, the people came to the foot of the city and wept aloud; the king uttered ten clauses of 「哀哉眾生」 tr. “alas for beings,” opened his storehouses, gave universally, and gave his way down to his head, his eyes, his hands, and his feet. At the assembly of giving there was a daughter of an elder, who took off her necklace and offered it up, and made one vow — 「願我未來亦復如是」 tr. “may I in the future be just like this.”

At the very last clause she said: 「寶光童女者，即我身是。」 tr. “Jewel Light the maiden is my own self.”

That king is today’s Vairocana. That maiden who made the vow is this night goddess speaking at this moment. And what she is doing at this moment is exactly the ‘just like this’ she vowed on that day.

‘Asked how long ago, she answered with that one thought; and every night after that one thought is that one thought.’

Let it stand here for now.

The gate this night goddess has gained — the scripture text sets up its name itself: 「此解脫門，名：教化眾生令生善根。」 tr. “This liberation gate is named: teaching and converting beings so as to cause good roots to be born.”

Sudhana asked three clauses. The second was: 「發心已來為幾時耶？」 tr. “How long has it been since you raised the mind?”

The night goddess did not answer at first. She said 「菩薩智輪遠離一切分別境界」 tr. “the bodhisattva’s wheel of knowledge is far removed from every realm of discrimination,” and that it cannot be displayed by long and short, defiled and pure, broad and narrow, many and few; and then she raised five similes one after another — the sun-wheel that of itself has neither day nor night, the sun in the sky whose reflection falls into all waters, the ferryman who cleaves to neither shore, empty space that hinders neither forming nor decaying, and the conjured man who has limbs complete and yet not the ten matters.

When the similes were done, only then did she answer; and what she answered with was a story.

In an age long past a king built a prison. The prince Good Subduing walked into it and saw 「筋斷骨現，號叫苦劇」 tr. “their sinews severed and their bones laid bare, crying aloud, their pain violent.” He asked the king for a pardon, and the ministers said that whoever pleaded for their rescue should die as well. He said: ‘According to what you say, only release these men; let the punishment be visited upon me.’

His reason was a single clause — 「我若不救此眾生者，云何能救三界牢獄諸苦眾生？」 tr. “If I do not rescue these beings, how shall I be able to rescue all the suffering beings in the prison of the three realms?”

Afterward the night goddess said: that prince was my own self. The five hundred great ministers who would have killed me are now to become buddhas in order, the first of them named Great Compassion. Those condemned men whom I rescued are the thousand buddhas of the Worthy Kalpa.

Those who were rescued have become buddhas; the one who rescued them still keeps the night upon the ground of the cause.

Asked how long ago she raised the mind, what she gave at the last was not a number, but a prison.

Let it stand here for now.

What Sudhana asked was 「菩薩云何修菩薩行、生如來家、為世大明」 tr. “how a bodhisattva is to cultivate the bodhisattva practices, to be born into the house of the Tathāgata, and to be a great light for the world.”

The one who answered him dwells in that garden where the Buddha was born.

She gave ten gates, and gate after gate is named 「受生藏」 tr. “a treasury of taking birth.” Yet the place where she herself gained the Dharma is not among those ten gates — it lies in an ancient age long, long ago: she was a wet-nurse, the devas laid the newborn prince into her hands, and she 「敬受，生大歡喜，即得菩薩普眼三昧」 tr. “received him with reverence, great gladness arose in her, and at once she gained the bodhisattva samādhi of the universal eye.”

In the space of one embrace, the whole of it.

From that time on she has seen the Buddha take birth in this garden, and has seen at the same moment, within every dust mote of every world, a Tathāgata displaying the taking of birth — 「如是念念，常無間斷」 tr. “thus in thought after thought, ever without a break.”

And this one who knows the taking of birth through measureless kalpas — where does she point Sudhana at the last? To the city of Jiapiluo, to ask a woman of the Śākya clan: 「菩薩云何於生死中教化眾生？」 tr. “how is a bodhisattva to teach and convert beings within birth and death?”

To be born into the house of the buddhas, it turns out, is not to change the place one goes to be reborn.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana asked four graphs: 「其已久如？」 tr. “How long ago was it?”

What answered him was a whole account of causes and conditions of a past age — a royal city, a prince, a jeweled maiden, a dream, a marriage. Within it there is love and attachment, there are the words ‘if my wish is not fulfilled, I shall put an end to myself,’ there is a necklace dropped into a begging bowl. Not one of these looks like practice.

The scripture does not say that it was. What the scripture says is 「起善不善心，菩薩皆攝取」 tr. “whether they raise a good mind or a bad, the bodhisattva gathers them all in” — those who raise a good mind are gathered, and those who raise a bad one too; that one offering made with a stained mind lies within what is gathered.

Before he left she spoke thirty-one verses more, of which fifteen are not in the prose — filling in that earlier and coarser stretch as well: 「雖以愛染心，供養彼佛子；二百五十劫，不墮三惡趣。」 tr. “Though it was with a mind of love and attachment that I made offering to that son of the Buddha; for two hundred and fifty kalpas I did not fall into the three evil destinies.”

Chengguan calls this ‘taking the coarse as a figure for the wondrous.’

And having walked to the fortieth good friend and been assigned to the end of the tenth ground, what she says at the last is still that she does not know — 「佛子！菩薩普賢解脫門，與如來境界等。」 tr. “Son of the Buddha! The bodhisattva's liberation gate of Samantabhadra is equal to the objective realm of the Tathāgatas.”

Here the commentary concludes: the marks of the practice assigned to the stations above are finished.

When a stretch of road has been walked to its end and one can still say honestly what one does not know, that stretch was not walked in vain.

Let us look this far for now.

Counting from Mañjuśrī, whom he met first, after forty-one good friends, what Sudhana sees is the mother of the Buddha.

The Dharma gate she names is 「菩薩大願智幻解脫門」 tr. “the bodhisattva liberation gate of the illusion of great vow and knowledge”; and the way she expounds it is to say the one thing — that she is his mother — over and over again.

Mother of the present World-Honored One, mother of the measureless buddhas of the past. In an age past she was the spirit of a lotus pool, and took up a bodhisattva who had come suddenly to birth by transformation, and the world called her the mother of the bodhisattva; as the spirit of a site of awakening, once more. Within the Worthy Kalpa: Krakucchanda, Kanakamuni, Kāśyapa, Śākyamuni, and Maitreya who is to come; and thereafter the buddha Lion, the buddha Dharma Banner, the buddha Good Eye, counted off one name at a time, all the way to 「如是乃至樓至如來」 tr. “and so on to the Tathāgata Luzhi.”

She might have said, in a single clause, ‘every buddha is born of me.’ She did not.

And as for holding, what the scripture text gives is this one clause — the assemblies of the ten directions all enter her body, and 「雖我腹中悉能容受如是眾會，而身不廣大亦不迫窄」 tr. “although within my belly I was able utterly to take in and hold assemblies such as these, yet my body was neither made vast nor pressed narrow.”

At the last she says: 「我唯知此菩薩大願智幻解脫門。」 tr. “I know only this bodhisattva liberation gate of the illusion of great vow and knowledge.”

The mother of all buddhas opens her mouth, and it is still this one clause.

Then she points the way onward, pointing to the daughter of a king in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three.

Let it stand here for now.

Eight teachers, and one of them taught nothing at all.

Sudhana asked Universal Friend, and Universal Friend said only: 「善男子！此有童子，名：善知眾藝，學菩薩字智。汝可問之，當為汝說。」 tr. “Son of good family! Here there is a boy named Well Knowing the Many Arts, who studies the bodhisattva’s knowledge of graphs (the knowledge that enters the Dharma by way of letters). You may ask him, and he will expound it for you.” And with that it was over — no name of a Dharma gate, no clause of humbling, not even a word to see the visitor off.

Chengguan did not take it for a lack. He set up four meanings for it, and the last of the four is ‘it is having nothing gained that is the way to gain.’

The other seven all said the name of their Dharma gate, and then every one of them added the same clause: 「我唯知此。」 tr. “I know only this.” The recollection of ten kalpas ends so; the forty-two graphs end so; and one clause, 「淨智光明」 tr. “pure knowledge, light,” ends so as well.

In eight gatherings, seven times 「我唯」 tr. “I only.” The one that is missing is the teacher who had no Dharma gate.

He had nothing to be humble about, and so he was not humble.

Let it stand here for now.

The fiftieth good friend is a boy and a maiden, the two of them speaking together.

The liberation they have realized is named 「幻住」 tr. “the abiding in illusion.” Ten clauses of 「皆幻住」 tr. “are all the abiding in illusion” — worlds are, sentient beings are, dharmas are, the three times are, lands are; and by the last three clauses, śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas are, bodhisattvas are, and even everything bodhisattvas do is.

Not ‘illusion vanished,’ but 「幻住」 tr. “the abiding in illusion.” To abide is to be still within it, doing what is to be done.

Having said this one thing, the two of them say no more about themselves. The whole unit runs to over four thousand graphs, and some nine parts in ten of it speak of the next one — Maitreya is within the storeyed pavilion in the park Great Adornment in the land Sea Shore; go there, and ask in this way; do not cultivate one thing and suppose you have reached the summit; in seeking good friends do not weary; good friends are like a kind mother, like a kind father, like a wet-nurse, like a teacher …

The three graphs 「善知識」 tr. “good friend” occur sixty-five times in this section.

The closing clause is: 「一切菩薩成就佛法，皆由善知識力，以善知識而為根本，依善知識生，依善知識出，依善知識長，依善知識住，善知識為因緣，善知識能發起。」 tr. “All the accomplishing of the Buddha-Dharma by bodhisattvas is by the power of good friends, takes good friends as its root, is born depending on good friends, comes forth depending on good friends, grows depending on good friends, abides depending on good friends; good friends are its cause and condition, and good friends are what set it in motion.”

Only one who knows that everything is an illusion can say these five graphs without falling into a single dependency — ‘born depending on good friends.’

Let it stand here for now.

Close on four thousand graphs in this section, and Maitreya says not a word and does not once show his face.

What is written is the stretch of road Sudhana walked to get there. On the road he calls to mind nine faults of former lives — not cultivating the paying of respect, body and mind not pure, doing evil deeds of every kind … and with each one recalled, 「即時發意」 tr. “on the spot he brought forth the intent,” and one antidote is set up. Nine faults, nine antidotes, not one left out.

Then he reaches the door. 「於毘盧遮那莊嚴藏大樓閣前，五體投地。」 tr. “Before the great storeyed pavilion Vairocana Adornment Treasury he cast the five parts of his body to the ground.” The door is not open and the man is not seen, and he first praises with fifty-three clauses of 「之所住處」 tr. “is the dwelling place of,” and then speaks fifty-five verses.

What is praised is not the pavilion. Every clause says what kind of person dwells within — 「是解空、無相、無願者之所住處」 tr. “is the dwelling place of one who understands emptiness, no-mark, and no-wish”; 「是親近一切佛而不起佛想者之所住處」 tr. “is the dwelling place of one who draws near to all buddhas and yet does not give rise to the notion of a buddha”; 「雖行九次第定而不厭離欲界受生」 tr. “though he practices the nine successive concentrations, he is not weary of taking birth in the realm of desire.”

To be able to realize and not to realize is in order to stay here. The man he praises walks this double path at every step.

Fifty-three verses speak of the other; in the fifty-fourth he joins his palms and pays respect; only in the last does he speak of himself: 「我今恭敬禮，願垂顧念我！」 tr. “I now reverently pay respect: may you look upon me and call me to mind!”

Not yet seen, and already known.

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana has walked as far as the fifty-first friend, and this one, on seeing him, did not question him, nor did he first answer him.

He pointed Sudhana out to the assembly, and said: 「汝等觀善財。」 tr. “All of you, look upon this Sudhana.”

Then he spoke a hundred and thirteen verses, praising this boy the whole way from the bringing forth of the mind to the fruit that is to come. Chengguan says that praising a person before an assembly like this has a purpose to it — 「指示者，令眾同覩，倣而行故」 tr. “as for pointing him out, it is so that the assembly may see him together and, imitating him, may practice.” The praise both lets the assembly look upon Sudhana and learn from him, and addresses him directly to encourage and gladden him.

Within the hundred and thirteen verses, what is counted first is what he already has, and what is counted afterward is what he is to accomplish; and the turn between them is a single graph — 「當」 tr. “is to.”

And in the last verse, this teacher does not keep the student with him: 「汝當往大智，文殊師利所。」 tr. “You should go to the place of Mañjuśrī, the one of great knowledge.”

In the two verses Sudhana answers with, he too calls only one person to mind: 「我以文殊故，見諸難見者。」 tr. “It is because of Mañjuśrī that I have seen those who are hard to see.”

Fifty-one stations walked, praise carried to the very summit — and yet the words go back to that friend who set him out.

‘If this road is truly walked through, it comes back to where it began.’

Let it stand here for now.

Sudhana has walked through a hundred and ten good friends, and when he comes to Maitreya his first words are these: 「我已先發阿耨多羅三藐三菩提心，而我未知菩薩云何學菩薩行？」 tr. “I have already before this brought forth the mind of anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi, and yet I do not know how a bodhisattva is to study the practice of a bodhisattva.”

Already brought forth, and still not knowing how to walk.

Maitreya does not give him the stages first. He speaks instead to the whole company of the place of the Way about this boy; and when he has finished, the scripture records one line: on the spot, measureless hundreds of thousands of sentient beings brought forth the mind of awakening.

Only then does he speak to Sudhana, saying one 「善哉善哉」 tr. “well done, well done,” and ten clauses of 「汝獲善利」 tr. “you have gained a good benefit,” and then asking one 「何以故？」 tr. “and why is this?” — and the two hundred and more clauses that follow are all of them the answer to that one question.

The former set of a hundred and eighteen clauses is cast in one and the same mold, clause after clause: 「菩提心者，猶如種子，能生一切諸佛法故」 tr. “the mind of awakening is like a seed, for it is able to give birth to all the dharmas of the buddhas.” It begins at a seed and ends at a shrine. The latter set of a hundred and three similes changes to 「譬如……亦復如是」 tr. “suppose … so it is also,” running from medicines and jewels and closing at last in seventeen vajras.

In the middle stands one sentence that is the bone of the whole: 「因菩提心出生一切諸菩薩行，三世如來從菩提心而出生故。」 tr. “because the mind of awakening gives birth to every practice of the bodhisattvas, and because the Tathāgatas of the three times are born from the mind of awakening.”

The two hundred and more clauses said out to the end, only then does Maitreya come back to that question: 「善男子！如汝所問……汝可入此毘盧遮那莊嚴藏大樓閣中周遍觀察，」 tr. “good man, as for what you asked … you may enter this great storeyed pavilion Vairocana Adornment Treasury and contemplate it everywhere,”

He asked for the road, and what he was given first was a mirror.

Once it is clear what is in your hands, the door opens.

Let it stand here for now.

What Sudhana asks for is not a Dharma but a door — 「唯願大聖開樓閣門，令我得入！」 tr. “I only pray that the great sage will open the door of the storeyed pavilion and let me enter!”

Maitreya expounds nothing. He walks to the front of the pavilion, snaps his fingers once, and the door opens. Sudhana goes in, and 「入已還閉」 tr. “once he had entered, it closed again.”

Inside are some four thousand graphs of what he sees: adornments beyond counting, Maitreya’s former deeds through the three times, a hundred thousand pavilions within one pavilion, all places within one place. At this point, those teachers say to him one homely sentence — 「善來童子！汝觀此菩薩不思議事，莫生疲厭。」 tr. “Welcome, youth! You are looking upon the inconceivable deeds of this bodhisattva — do not grow weary and turn away.”

Maitreya snaps his fingers a second time, and out he comes. The first snap was to make him lay words down; the second was to forbid him to stay within the stillness.

Only after coming out can he ask the name: 「善男子！此解脫門，名：入三世一切境界不忘念智莊嚴藏。」 tr. “Good man! This gate of liberation is named: the Adornment Treasury of the Knowledge of Unforgetting Mindfulness That Enters All the Realms of the Three Times.”

Then comes the shortest question and answer of this section. 「此莊嚴事，何處去耶？」 tr. “Where have these adornments gone?” — 「於來處去。」 tr. “They have gone to the place they came from.”

At the last Maitreya tells him to go back and see Mañjuśrī. Of all the good friends along the road, the final step is to look back at the first step.

Let it stand here for now.

He walked more than a hundred and ten cities, came to the gate, and did not go in.

The sūtra text writes down nothing but a way of standing — he stood at the gate of that city, holding Mañjuśrī in his thought. And then that hand reached across from a hundred and ten yojanas away: just at this time, Mañjuśrī stretched out his right hand from far off, passed across a hundred and ten yojanas, and laid it on the crown of Sudhana's head.

The person did not appear. Sudhana did not ask a single word either.

What Mañjuśrī says when he opens his mouth is a whole stretch in which not one sentence is spoken in the affirmative — what would follow if one parted from the root of faith, what would follow if the practices worked at were not complete, running all the way to one would be wholly unable to do it. The ancient worthies call this manner of telling raising the losing so as to display the gaining: tell out one by one what a man would come down to if these were lacking, and the man who has walked the road recognizes of himself what he has.

When it was told, the sūtra text writes eight graphs: Mañjuśrī drew himself back in and was not present.

He did not go away. Chengguan glosses it: when faith has come as far as knowledge, the mark of faith is no longer set up.

At the last, Sudhana single-mindedly wished to see Mañjuśrī, and what he saw was good friends as many as the dust motes of a great thousandfold world of three thousand realms.

Meeting them one by one, and having them all present at a single moment — what lies between the two is exactly those hundred and ten cities.

What Sudhana passed through, Chengguan's outline makes ‘a hundred and ten cities’ and ‘fifty-three positions’; and before this last one, he did not ask.

Samantabhadra asks him first: “Good man! Do you see this power of spiritual power of mine?”

He answers: “Yes indeed, I have seen it.” — and then adds a line: “This inconceivable matter of great spiritual power — only a tathāgata is able to know it.”

Having seen, and not daring to say he knows. That one sentence is the last measure of restraint the whole sūtra leaves to a practitioner.

The sūtra goes on to say that he is “equal to Samantabhadra and equal to all the buddhas,” with twelve graphs of “equal” running down the line. Chengguan judges this to be ‘in meaning corresponding to equal awakening,’ and says that since the ocean of the fruit is apart from words, the sūtra does not say that he becomes a buddha.

Further down, it is no longer Sudhana that is spoken of. In ninety-nine stanzas Samantabhadra speaks only of the merit and virtue of the Buddha, down to the final stanza, which concludes his virtue —

“The motes of dust in the lands and the thoughts of the mind may still be counted and known, the water within the great ocean may still be drunk dry, space may still be measured and the wind still be bound — yet none is able to speak to the end of the merit and virtue of the Buddha.”

After it comes one more stanza, which exhorts to faith: “If there are those who hear this ocean of merit and virtue and give rise to a mind of joy, faith, and understanding, they shall obtain all that has been extolled; on no account harbor doubt about this.” The sūtra in eighty fascicles ends here.

Look no further than this place for now.