A hand across a hundred and ten yojanas
Who you'll meetThe first teacher again, and then the last
Sudhana leaves Maitreya's tower and walks. The text counts the distance: a hundred and ten cities. He arrives outside a city called Sumukha, stands still, looks in every direction, and thinks one thing — when will I see him again?
He means Mañjuśrī, who sent him south in Session 1 and has not appeared since.
And that is the entire reunion. A hand arrives from far away, rests on his head, and says "Excellent, excellent, good man." Mañjuśrī gives one teaching — about faith — establishes Sudhana at the entrance to Samantabhadra's practice, and withdraws without ever becoming visible.
- Sumukha is Universal Gate. 普門城 — the same name this translation rendered descriptively in Session 5, where the incense-seller lived. The road closes its circle on a place the pilgrimage has already been.
- 普賢所行 — "Samantabhadra's own practice," named back in Session 1 as the horizon of the very first question Sudhana was told to ask. Thirteen sessions later it is where he is standing.
- Where this ends for you. If you took Read a Whole Sūtra, its eighth and last session was the Vows of Samantabhadra. This road arrives at the same doorway from the other side.
The episodeForty-three parts, and a colophon
A Hundred and Ten Cities, and a Hand Outstretched
The walk, the waiting, and the reach across the exact distance he travelled.
Read it →Whoever Hears This With Joy, Swiftly Attains the Path
Samantabhadra's final hymn — and the last four lines of the whole chapter, which stop addressing Sudhana.
Read it →Part 454 is worth opening even though it contains no teaching at all: it is Buddhabhadra's own colophon, naming the monastery, the patrons, the scribe who took the translation down by brush, and the dates — 418 to 420 CE. The book ends by telling you who made it.
Three moments, read closely
1. The hand.
"Sudhana the youth then journeyed on in this way, passing through a hundred and ten cities, until he arrived near the city of Sumukha, where he stood in contemplation, gazing in every direction, single-mindedly seeking only Mañjuśrī: 'When shall I meet with him again, and behold his own compassionate countenance?' As he was reflecting in this way, Mañjuśrī, from far away, extended his own right hand, reaching across a hundred and ten yojanas to the city of Sumukha, and touched Sudhana's crown, saying: 'Excellent, excellent, good man!'"
Everything about this is restrained. Sudhana wants to see a face — 面奉慈顏 — and does not get one. He gets a hand, from a hundred and ten yojanas away, and the same two words the first teacher gave him on a mountain four hundred parts ago: 善哉！善哉！
Fazang does the arithmetic. A hundred and ten cities walked, a hundred and ten yojanas reached. The teacher covers exactly the distance the student covered. Neither of them crosses it alone, and the meeting happens in the middle of the same measure.
2. Faith, described entirely by its absence.
Mañjuśrī's one teaching is a warning, and its form is peculiar: he praises Sudhana by listing, at length, everything Sudhana did not do.
"Should one depart from the root of faith, his mind sinks into regret, his merit and practice are incomplete, and he retreats from diligence; satisfied with but a small measure of merit, his mind gives rise to attachment over but a single root of goodness; he is unable to properly raise the bodhisattva's own vow and practice, is not embraced and protected by a good friend, and is not held in a tathāgata's own mindfulness."
Read this passage in full →Read the list as a description of the road just travelled, in negative. Satisfied with a small measure. Attached to a single root of goodness. That is precisely the failure fifty-three teachers were arranged to prevent — every one of them saying "I know only this one gate" and sending him on. And not embraced and protected by a good friend: the one condition Sudhana has never once lacked since Session 1.
Fazang notes that the eight ways of understanding listed at the end of the passage — comprehensive knowledge, knowledge by kind, fathoming, gradual entry, explanation, discernment, realization, attainment — are all eight equally foreclosed to someone without faith. Faith is not one virtue among the others here. It is the floor they all stand on.
Then he goes. 文殊師利還攝不現 — Mañjuśrī gathered himself back and was no longer visible. Fazang reads the brevity as the point: his role at the end is purely transitional, "a bridge rather than a destination, his own spiritual power spent entirely in propelling Sudhana across the final threshold" — the mirror image of his first appearance, where he was the one who set the boy walking.
3. The last four lines, which are not addressed to Sudhana.
Samantabhadra takes thirty-nine parts. His closing hymn refuses every available category — neither form nor formless, neither existent nor non-existent, "without going anywhere, reaches everywhere" — and then, in its final quatrain, the text turns and faces somewhere else.
"The motes of dust within the minds of sentient beings, the drops of water in the sea, could all be counted; the vastness of space itself could be measured — yet the buddha's own merit, it is said, can never be exhausted. Whoever hears this teaching with joy, with a mind of faith free of any doubt, swiftly accomplishes the unsurpassed path, becoming equal to every tathāgata."
聞此法歡喜 — whoever hears this teaching. Not Sudhana; he has already arrived. The final sentence of a chapter about one boy's pilgrimage is addressed to whoever is reading the chapter, and it offers them the same trajectory: 與諸如來等, becoming equal to every tathāgata.
And notice what the condition is. Not completing the journey. Not visiting fifty-three teachers. Hearing it with joy, with a mind of faith free of doubt — which is exactly the floor Mañjuśrī had just finished describing forty parts earlier. The chapter closes by handing the reader the one thing it says everything else rests on.
One practice, for this course
Sit down once with a blank page and list the people you actually learned from. Not the ones you admire, and not the ones with the titles — the ones after whom you could do something you could not do before.
Then apply the pilgrimage's own criteria. How many were older than you? How many were professionals at teaching? How many did you choose, and how many simply arrived? How many would have been embarrassed to be on the list — and how many never knew they were teaching you at all?
Five questions
The last five. Answer from what you read.
"Whoever hears this teaching with joy, with a mind of faith free of any doubt, swiftly accomplishes the unsurpassed path, becoming equal to every tathāgata."
One question, left open
Fifty-three teachers, and every one of them sent him away. Who are you not sending on?
The referral was the fixed gesture of this whole road — praise for the next teacher, a direction south, and no summary of what would be found there. It is also the hardest thing in the book to imitate, because everything that makes someone a good teacher makes them want to be enough. If you teach anything at all — a class, a child, a colleague, a congregation — the question is exact and uncomfortable: who is finished with you and still here, and whose name have you failed to give them? Sudhana's journey was possible only because not one of fifty-three remarkable people tried to keep him.
And the other forty teachers are waiting
This was a route, not the pilgrimage. All fifty-three are on this site in full — 454 parts, beginning at Part 1, with Fazang's commentary throughout, and a second complete Chinese translation of the same chapter beside it. If thirteen sessions were enough to make you want the whole thing, start walking. Sudhana took a hundred and ten cities; you can do it from a chair.