Nineteen Fears, and Nineteen Reasons

Five clauses beginning 令 stand in this row — hell-beings, animals, hungry ghosts, nāgas, and the beings of the desire realm — and the sixth, human beings, has to wait for a row of its own, because the list of what humans are afraid of runs to nineteen items. The proportion is the argument. What a hell-being needs is stated in four characters, 免諸苦毒, escape from bitter torment. What an animal needs is stated in five, 不相食噉, that they not devour one another. Human fear needs nineteen entries and most of them have no physical cause at all.

隨諸眾生形貌、言辭、行解差別，以方便力普現其前 — in accord with the differences among beings in shape and appearance, in speech, and in practice and understanding, she appears universally before them. Three axes of difference, and they ascend: what a being looks like, what language it speaks, and how it practises and understands. A rescuer who matched only the first two would be a shapeshifter. Matching the third is what makes her a teacher.

The list holds nineteen fears, and its third through seventh items — 惡名怖、大眾怖、不活怖、死怖、惡道怖 — are exactly the classic set of five fears this sūtra has given before, in Part 697, as the fears a bodhisattva leaves behind on the day they give rise to the mind of awakening: the fear of not surviving, of a bad reputation, of death, of an evil destiny, and of a great assembly's own majestic authority. Here they sit unannounced in the middle of a longer list, with the dark of night and gossip before them and the whole of a practitioner's anxiety after.

The turn comes at the eighth item, 斷善根怖, the fear of cutting off one's roots of goodness. From there the catalogue leaves the world entirely: turning back from the mind of awakening, meeting a bad friend, being parted from a good spiritual friend, falling to the stage of the two vehicles. These are fears one has to have earned. A being who never set out cannot be afraid of turning back, and the sūtra is quietly telling its reader that some of the worst fears arrive only after the good news.

離善知識怖 — the fear of being parted from a good spiritual friend. Good-Wealth has just spent the opening of this fascicle vowing 於無量劫常不遠離, never through measureless eons to be far from his good spiritual friends. The vision he is now being shown names that very separation as one of the nineteen terrors a night-spirit removes. He made a vow against it; she takes it away.

卵生、胎生、濕生、化生，有色、無色，有想、無想，非有想、非無想 — the standing formula, which this translation has met before at Part 406 among the bodhisattva's great vows. Four modes of birth, then two grades of form, then the three positions of perception. The final term is a single category, neither perceiving nor non-perceiving, even though the Taishō punctuation sets a mark inside it; it names the summit of the formless attainments, and it is included here so that the list reaches beings so refined that ordinary rescue has no handle on them.

Nineteen clauses, each ending in 故 — ten in the first row and nine in the second. The opening four all end 力故, by the power of: great vows, samādhi, spiritual penetrations, and Samantabhadra's practices and vows. Four more then open with 得, so as to attain. The shape of the first half is acquisitive; the shape of the second half is not. The last four clauses all turn on 一切眾生 — entering their minds, knowing their faculties, purifying their understanding, shattering their ignorance — and the nineteenth gives the whole series away by not being about her at all, 令得一切智清淨光明故, so as to cause them to obtain the pure light of all-knowing wisdom.

The passage answers a question nobody asked out loud. Good-Wealth has just watched her save beings from nineteen fears, and the natural response is gratitude. What the sūtra supplies instead is motive — and the motive is not pity. She rescues beings in order to perfect vows, deepen samādhi, and make her powers firm, exactly as much as she rescues them in order to shatter their ignorance. Compassion here is not the opposite of self-cultivation; it is the method of it.

即捨菩薩莊嚴之相，還復本形，而不捨其自在神力 — she put off the adorned form of a bodhisattva and returned to her original shape, yet without putting off her sovereign spiritual power. The character 捨 appears twice in one sentence, once affirmed and once denied, and the whole theology of these night-spirit chapters sits in the gap between them. The splendour was a costume; the power was not. What she goes back to being is a night-spirit — an ordinary local deity of the dark, in the ordinary shape Good-Wealth first saw — who happens to have lost nothing at all.

却住一面 — he withdrew and stood to one side. The gesture is as old as the Pali canon, where a visitor sits down to one side before speaking. After a vision containing every world in every mote of dust, Good-Wealth does the plainest thing available to him: he steps back, joins his palms, and starts to sing.