Lights as Many as the Thoughts of Beings

我善財得見 — I, Good-Wealth, have been able to see. The pronoun 我 runs through this verse seven times, which is a great deal for a hymn of praise. The other night-spirits' verses have mostly been about what they did; this one is about what happened to the person watching, and the grammar says so in the first three characters.

譬如空中星，一切悉嚴淨 — like the stars in the sky, every one of them pure and bright. The image is chosen for the teacher he is addressing. She is a night-spirit, a deity of the dark, and the only thing in her own element that could stand for the marks adorning her body is the night sky itself. He praises her with her own darkness.

眾生心數光 — lights as many as the thoughts of beings. Five characters, and they replace the sūtra's usual measure. Everywhere else the unit is 佛剎微塵數, the fine motes of dust in a buddha-land, which is a quantity of matter. Here the quantity is mental. If one light exists for every thought any being has ever had, then the light is not answering the world; it is answering the inside of heads, one by one, and the number of lights is exactly the number of times someone has needed one.

一一光明端，皆出寶蓮華；華中出化身 — at the tip of each single light a jewelled lotus flower comes out, and from within the flower a transformation body. The chain is three deep and each link is smaller and more concrete than the last: pore, light, flower, body. The vision does not expand outward into vastness. It telescopes down a single ray until it arrives at somebody able to end suffering — which is where, in this sūtra, the vast always ends up going.

毘盧舍那境 — the domain of Vairocana. This is the single most striking philological detail in the fascicle. Across the whole eighty-fascicle T279, the buddha's name is written 毘盧遮那 one hundred and twenty-two times and 毘盧舍那 exactly once, and the once is here, in this line. Both spell the same Sanskrit name; 舍 is the older transliteration, familiar from Buddhabhadra's sixty-fascicle version. In a verse, where the line must come out at five characters and the ear governs, the older syllable slipped through the standardisation that had regularised every other occurrence in the sūtra.

The verb 放, to send forth, occurs six times in these twenty-one stanzas, and the sources it names are four: 毛孔, the pores; 兩眉, the brows; 口, the mouth; 眼, the eyes. The comparisons climb as the openings rise — a mountain for the brows, suns for the mouth, moons for the eyes — and the two great luminaries of the night-and-day cycle are handed to a spirit of the night.

滅除水火賊，王等一切怖 — doing away with every fear, of water, of fire, of thieves, of kings, and the rest. Four plain catastrophes, and they are the oldest list in the tradition of what can ruin a household: flood, fire, robbery, and the state. Part 1102 gave the same teacher a list of nineteen fears in which almost nothing was physical. The verse restores the other half. She is not only the remedy for spiritual dread; she is also what you call on when the river rises or the tax officer arrives.

我承喜目教，今得詣尊所 — following the instruction of Joyful Eye, I have now been able to come into your presence. He credits his previous teacher in his praise of the present one. The pilgrimage's whole architecture rests on this small courtesy: every teacher names the next, and the pilgrim keeps saying who sent him. It is also, quietly, the answer to the fear listed in Part 1102 as 離善知識怖 — being parted from a good spiritual friend. He has not been parted from her. Her instruction is what is standing here.

放大清淨光 … 而來入我身 — sending out a great pure light … and then coming to enter my own body. The brows have already been named once in this verse, two stanzas earlier, as one of the four places her light comes out of. The verse returns to them here for a different reason. The first time they were a feature to be admired from outside; the second time they are where the thing that is now inside him came from.

或有染淨剎，少樂多憂苦 … 或有淨染剎，眾生所樂見 — some are lands defiled more than pure, with little joy and much sorrow; some are lands pure more than defiled, which beings delight to look upon. This pair settles a question left open in Part 1101, where the prose listed 或有世界雜穢清淨，或有世界清淨雜穢 with nothing to indicate what the doubled compounds meant. Here the verse gives each of them a description, and the descriptions run in opposite directions. So the compounds are proportions, not sequences, and the leading character is the dominant one — a 染淨 land is mostly foul, a 淨染 land is mostly clean. The reading note on Part 1101 has been corrected accordingly.

示現三乘像，往彼而救度 — you manifest the forms of the three vehicles and go there to rescue and deliver them. It is the mixed and mostly-miserable land, not the pure one, that gets the three vehicles. Where conditions are bad, the full apparatus of graded teaching is deployed; where bodhisattvas already throng, no vehicles are mentioned at all. Skilful means is a function of how bad things are.

毘盧遮那佛，往劫所嚴淨 — which the Buddha Vairocana adorned and purified in eons gone by. Two stanzas after the outlying spelling 毘盧舍那, the name returns in its standard form, and the difference between the two occurrences is not only orthographic. The first was a domain that light shone on; this one is an agent who did work. The pure lands in the dust are not a metaphysical given. They were made, and somebody made them, and the making is in the past tense.

我見普救天 — I see you, the god Who Universally Rescues. Her name is 普救眾生妙德 and her rank is 夜神, night-spirit; the five-character line has room for neither, so the verse abbreviates the name to 普救 and promotes the rank to 天, a god. It is not an error of status. In the prose that immediately follows, Good-Wealth opens his question to her with the vocative 天神, and it is worth noticing that a being the sūtra has been calling a spirit of the dark is addressed, the moment anyone speaks to her directly, as a deity.