A World of Pure and Foul Together

爾時，善財童子說此頌已，白 — at that time, when Good-Wealth had finished speaking these verses, he said. These first eleven characters are word for word the ones that opened the same moment with Joyful Eye in Part 1094, and the middle question here, 得此解脫其已久如, how long is it since you attained this liberation, is those same eight characters again. But there he asked two questions and here he asks three, and the new one is the last: 修何等行而得清淨, by cultivating what practice did it come to be pure. The pilgrim is learning to ask about the work rather than only the date.

A thing worth noticing about all three questions is what is missing from them. In Part 1100, Joyful Eye told him to come here and ask 菩薩云何入菩薩行、淨菩薩道 — how a bodhisattva enters the bodhisattva practices and purifies the bodhisattva path. Neither 入菩薩行 nor 淨菩薩道 occurs anywhere in this fascicle. He does not ask the assigned question. What he asks instead grows out of what he has just witnessed, and the word 淨, purify, survives from the assignment into his third question as if by memory rather than obedience.

Nine clauses, each closing 者境界故 — because it is the domain of one who. The first three describe a person by where they stand: abiding in Samantabhadra's practices, abiding in the treasury of great compassion, rescuing and guarding beings. The remaining six all open with 能, able to, and describe a person by what they can do. The turn from position to capacity is the whole answer to Good-Wealth's third question. What makes the liberation pure is not a state one occupies but a set of things one can actually perform.

諸天及人、一切二乘所不能測 — gods and humans and all those of the two vehicles alike cannot fathom it. She has just been addressed as 天神, a heavenly spirit, and her first act is to say that gods cannot understand this. The exclusion includes her own apparent rank. Whatever she is, it is not the thing Good-Wealth has just called her.

我承佛力，今為汝說 — sustained by the Buddha's power, I shall now speak of it for you. The formula concedes the difficulty rather than dissolving it. She does not say the nine clauses were an exaggeration; she says she will speak anyway, and borrows the power to do it. Everything that follows in this fascicle is delivered under that borrowing.

其形正圓，淨穢合成 — its shape was perfectly round, and it was formed of the pure and the foul combined. Four characters of geometry and four of morality, in the same breath and the same grammar, as though how a world is shaped and what it is made of were the same kind of fact. This translation met exactly that pairing three parts ago. In Part 1101 the vision in the gap between two night-spirits sorted worlds first by defilement and purity and then, without marking the seam, by whether they lay level, face-down, or on their side. Here the two scales have merged into one sentence. The character pair 淨穢 occurs only this once in the whole fascicle.

The name of the eon is 圓滿清淨, Perfect and Complete Purity, and the world inside it is 淨穢合成, made of the pure and the foul together. That is not a contradiction the text is embarrassed by. A perfectly pure age is one in which foulness is included rather than excluded, because there is nowhere else to put it and no one left to put it there.

The four continents are then sorted by their inhabitants into four grades — 惡業, evil deeds; 雜業, mixed deeds; 善根, roots of goodness; and 一向清淨諸大菩薩, great bodhisattvas wholly and only pure. The phrase 一向清淨 appears twice in this fascicle and nowhere else: once in Part 1101 as the seventh kind of world, and once here as the fourth kind of continent. The taxonomy Good-Wealth was shown in a speck of dust turns out to be the floor plan of the world he is about to be told a story about.

Six kinds of tree are named — 如意樹 wish-fulfilling, 香樹 incense, 鬘樹 garland, 華樹 flower, 寶樹 jewel, and 音樂樹 music — and each is given a verb of production: sending out clouds, raining flowers, putting forth jewels, playing sounds. The land is described almost entirely by what grows on it and gives itself away. Even the music is agricultural; it is what the trees do when the wind arrives.

不藉耕耘而生稻粱 — rice and grain grew there without depending on any ploughing. The detail is older than this sūtra and belongs to the standard description of the northern continent, where nobody farms and food appears of itself. Placed here, at the opening of a story about a night-spirit's ancient past, it does a plainer job: it clears the labour out of the way. Nothing that happens in this land will be explicable by anyone having had to work for a living.

晝夜受樂無時間斷 — delight was received by day and by night without a moment's interruption. The teller is a night-spirit. She has spent four parts of this fascicle being praised for lights that end darkness, and the first world she chooses to describe from her own past is one where day and night make no difference at all to how much joy there is in it.