The Space Between Two Night-Spirits

The phrase 善知識, good spiritual friend, occurs five times in these two rows, and each occurrence carries a different preposition: 念善知識所有教誨 — keep their instruction in mind; 願得見善知識 — vow to see them; 與善知識同一善根 — share one root of goodness with them; 得善知識巧方便行 — attain their skillful practice; 依善知識入精進海 — enter the ocean of vigor in reliance on them. The vow works through the whole grammar of a relationship: remembering, meeting, sharing, receiving, depending.

於無量劫常不遠離 — through measureless eons never to be far from them. Good-Wealth is at this moment perhaps a few paces from his next teacher, who is in the same assembly as the one he has just left. He is making a vow about measureless eons at a distance of a few steps, which is the sort of disproportion this chapter has stopped apologising for.

其光普照一切世間。照世間已，入善財頂 — that light shone universally over every world; having shone over the worlds, it entered the crown of Good-Wealth's head. The sequence matters. The light goes out to the whole world first and only afterwards comes back into one person. It is not a private beam aimed at a pilgrim; it is a universal illumination that happens to end in him, and what he then sees will be everything it touched.

智燈普照清淨幢 — the Pure Banner of the Lamp of Wisdom Universally Illuminating. A lamp, a shining, and a banner in a single name. The lamp is what the light is, the shining is what it does, and the banner is how it is seen from far off — which is the standard Huayan habit of building one name out of substance, function, and sign.

悉見二神兩處中間 — he saw in full the space between the two places where the two spirits stood. This is the sentence the whole passage turns on. In Part 1100 the sūtra pointedly stopped sending Good-Wealth anywhere, naming the next teacher as sitting 此眾會中, in this very assembly. Having removed the journey, it now opens up the only thing left — the gap — and finds inside it every mote of dust there is, each one holding worlds that form and fall apart. The pilgrimage has not shrunk. It has changed direction, from across to within.

地塵、水塵及以火塵 — motes of earth, motes of water, motes of fire. Only three of the four great elements get motes here; wind is missing, and appears one sentence later in 一切地、水、火、風諸大積聚, where the topic is massed accumulations rather than particles. The omission is exact rather than careless — wind is the element that has no grain to it.

The word 塵 appears seven times in the first row, and it is doing two different jobs: it names the actual specks of earth, water, fire, jewel, flower, and ornament lying in the space between the two spirits, and it also supplies the measure — 佛剎微塵數, as numerous as the fine motes of dust in a buddha-land — for the worlds found inside each speck. The unit of counting is also the thing counted.

The list holds ten clauses, each opening with 或有. The first eight name their subject — 或有世界, some worlds — and the last two drop it, 或有覆住、或有側住, some rest face-down, some rest on their side. The ellipsis is where the list changes topic: the first seven items are about defilement and purity, and the last three are about geometry. A world can be graded morally or positionally, and the sūtra runs the two scales together without marking the seam.

或有世界雜穢清淨，或有世界清淨雜穢 — some worlds are defiled more than pure; some worlds are pure more than defiled. Two clauses made of the same two words in opposite order, and the prose gives no verb to say what the pairing means. The verse at Part 1103 settles it. There the same contrast returns as 或有染淨剎 … 或有淨染剎, and each member is given a description that runs opposite to the other — the 染淨 land has 少樂多憂苦, little joy and much sorrow, while the 淨染 land is 眾生所樂見, one that beings delight to look upon. So the compounds name proportions rather than sequences, and the leading character is the dominant one.

或有覆住 — some rest face-down. The phrase is standing Huayan cosmology; in Part 536, Samantabhadra's samādhi includes the gate of knowing buddha-lands 覆住、仰住, resting face-down and face-up. What Good-Wealth is being shown in the gap between two night-spirits is not a private revelation but the ordinary furniture of this sūtra's universe, seen at last from inside a speck of dust.