The King Was Mañjuśrī
The verse ends on why she did any of it. Then she drops out of verse into prose and asks Good-Wealth a question with an answer he could not have guessed — the king in that ancient capital, and the spirit who shouted her name out of the sky, were both people he already knows.
Why She Did Any of It
Three stanzas on what beings are actually doing, one stanza on the vow that followed, and four on where it took her. The reason comes first and the attainment last.
見眾生顛倒，執常樂我淨，
愚癡暗所覆，妄想起煩惱。
行止見稠林，往來貪欲海，
集於諸惡趣，無量種種業。
一切諸趣中，隨業而受身，
生老死眾患，無量苦逼迫。
為彼眾生故，我發無上心，
願得如十方，一切十力尊。
緣佛及眾生，起於大願雲，
從是修功德，趣入方便道。
願雲悉彌覆，普入一切道，
具足波羅蜜，充滿於法界。
速入於諸地，三世方便海，
一念修諸佛，一切無礙行。
佛子我爾時，得入普賢道，
了知十法界，一切差別門。
Seeing beings upside down, grasping at permanence, pleasure, self and purity, covered over by the darkness of delusion, giving rise to afflictions out of false imagining;
moving and halting within the thicket of views, coming and going in the ocean of craving and desire, amassing in the evil destinies measureless karma of every kind;
and how in every destiny of existence they take a body according to their karma, and are pressed hard by measureless suffering — the manifold ills of birth, old age and death:
for the sake of those beings I gave rise to the unsurpassed mind, vowing to become as all the honored ones of the ten powers throughout the ten directions are.
Taking the buddhas and beings as my object, I raised up clouds of great vows; from this I cultivated merit and set out upon the path of skillful means.
The clouds of vows covered everything over, entering universally into every path; complete in the pāramitās, they filled the dharma-realm.
Swiftly I entered the grounds, and the ocean of the skillful means of the three times, cultivating in a single thought all the unobstructed practices of every buddha.
Son of the Buddha, at that time I gained entry to Samantabhadra's path, and fully knew the ten dharma-realms and all their gates of difference.
執常樂我淨 — grasping at permanence, pleasure, self and purity. The four inversions again, compressed here into four characters where Part 1084 spelled each out in full. The verse spends three stanzas on the diagnosis before it reaches the vow, and the diagnosis is entirely about other people: 為彼眾生故，我發無上心, for the sake of those beings I gave rise to the unsurpassed mind. Not one line concerns her own suffering.
緣佛及眾生，起於大願雲 — taking the buddhas and beings as my object, I raised up clouds of great vows. 緣, to take as object, is the technical term for what a mind rests on. Her vow is described as having two objects at once and no third; and the figure she reaches for is 願雲, a cloud of vows — the same weather that has been issuing from her pores for the last dozen parts.
Was He Some Other Person?
She leaves the verse for prose, and uses the sūtra's standard formula for a past-life reveal — twice in three lines, for two different people.
「善男子！於汝意云何，彼時轉輪聖王，名：十方主，能紹隆佛種者，豈異人乎？文殊師利童子是也！爾時夜神覺悟我者，普賢菩薩之所化耳！我於爾時為王寶女，蒙彼夜神覺悟於我，令我見佛，發阿耨多羅三藐三菩提心。
"Good son, what do you think? That wheel-turning sage king of that time, named Lord of the Ten Directions, who was able to continue and exalt the buddha-lineage — was he some other person? He is Mañjuśrī, the youth! And the night-spirit who woke me at that time was a transformation of Samantabhadra Bodhisattva! At that time I was that king's jewel-woman, and it was through being woken by that night-spirit that I came to see the Buddha and gave rise to the mind of anuttara-samyak-sambodhi.
豈異人乎？文殊師利童子是也 — was he some other person? He is Mañjuśrī, the youth. The cakravartin king born from a lotus, whose vast household Part 1094 spent three stanzas enumerating, turns out to be the bodhisattva who sent Good-Wealth out on this pilgrimage in the first place. Vāsantī used the same formula of herself in Part 1080; this teacher uses it of someone else.
爾時夜神覺悟我者，普賢菩薩之所化耳 — and the night-spirit who woke me at that time was a transformation of Samantabhadra Bodhisattva. The second reveal, and the particle 耳 gives it a shrug — that, and nothing more. So the two figures who frame this entire chapter, Mañjuśrī at its opening and Samantabhadra at its end, were both present at the moment this teacher first woke up: one as the king she served, one as the voice that called her name.
我於爾時為王寶女 — at that time I was that king's jewel-woman. Her own identification is given last and in five characters, after both of theirs. The grammar of the passage keeps her subordinate in exactly the way the story does: she was a woman in someone's household, and what happened to her happened because two bodhisattvas arranged to be in the room.
And Ever Since
What one waking bought: dust-mote eons without a single bad birth, and at the end of them the liberation Good-Wealth has now received himself.
自從是來，經佛剎微塵數劫，不墮惡趣，常生人、天，於一切處常見諸佛，乃至於妙燈功德幢佛所，得此大勢力普喜幢菩薩解脫，以此解脫如是利益一切眾生。
From that time onward, through eons as numerous as the fine motes of dust in a buddha-land, I have not fallen into the evil destinies but have constantly been born among humans and gods, and in every place have constantly beheld the buddhas — until at last, at the place of the Buddha Wondrous Lamp Banner of Merit, I attained this bodhisattva liberation of the Banner of Universal Joy of Great Power; and by this liberation I benefit every being in the way you have seen.
不墮惡趣，常生人、天 — I have not fallen into the evil destinies but have constantly been born among humans and gods. The same guarantee Vāsantī reported of her own first aspiration in Part 1080, and there it was followed by 而未滿足菩薩諸根, and yet the bodhisattva faculties were still not complete. Here there is no such qualification: the sentence runs all the way through to the liberation, 乃至於妙燈功德幢佛所, at last at the place of the Buddha Wondrous Lamp Banner of Merit.
Part 1099 Complete
This continues chapter thirty-nine, 入法界品, in fascicle sixty-nine. Part 1100 closes the fascicle with her confession before bodhisattvas who see every tathāgata in every mote of dust, and names a thirty-fifth teacher — another night-spirit, sitting in this same assembly.