Ten Thousand Years of Notice

The tree is given in three parts, each on the same frame — 而為其根, 以為其幹, 以為其葉, for its root, for its trunk, for its leaves. The last two are materials, maṇi and mixed jewels. The first is not. What the root is made of is 念念出現一切如來道場莊嚴堅固摩尼王 — the firm maṇi king that in thought after thought brings forth the adornments of every tathāgata's awakening-site. That is not a substance; it is a continuous activity, described in the present, with 念念 in it. The tree is rooted in something that is happening.

時，彼城北有菩提樹 — at that time, north of that city there was a bodhi tree. The city in question is the one Part 1105 left mid-decline, where a boast about a well-formed body had just started shortening everybody's life. The story turns from that to this without a transition. Both things are true of the same moment: contempt is spreading through the streets, and north of the walls a tree is expounding the domain of every tathāgata.

一一樹形如菩提樹 — each single tree shaped like the bodhi tree. A million koṭis of nayutas of jewel-trees stand around the pool, and every one of them is a copy of the tree they surround. The arrangement is the Huayan claim in landscape form. The centre is not distinguished from the circumference by being different; it is distinguished only by being the centre, and everything around it already has the same shape.

其第一佛，名：普智寶焰妙德幢 — the first of those buddhas was named Banner of Wondrous Virtue and the Jewel-Flame of Universal Wisdom. Part 1105 introduced the wheel-turning king's daughter under the name 普智焰妙德眼, Eye of Wondrous Virtue and the Flame of Universal Wisdom. The two names differ by one character inserted in the middle and one at the end — 寶 and 幢 against 眼. The sūtra has said nothing about any connection and there is no need to assume one yet. But a storyteller who has already put 妙德 from her own name into the princess has now given the buddha of that age a name that differs from the princess's by almost nothing.

The countdown that opens here runs to eleven lights in all — ten thousand years, then nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and one thousand, and then a light seven days before. The verb phrase changes exactly once, and it changes here. These first two are 放淨光明, sent out a pure light; the nine that follow are all 放大光明, sent out a great light. Two lights to make the eye clean, and then nine to fill it. Part 1107 gives the rest.

知十千年後佛當出現 — and they knew that ten thousand years later a buddha would appear. Every one of the eleven lights ends in this same clause with a different number in it, so what the lights actually deliver is not illumination but a date. The gift each light carries — an opened mind, a clean eye, knowledge of one's own deeds — is stated first and the announcement second, as though the capacity were only the means of receiving the news.

十千年 — ten thousands of years, rather than the ordinary Chinese 一萬. The form is a calque on the Indic way of counting, and Śikṣānanda keeps it: across the whole of T279 he writes 十千 one hundred and seven times against 一萬 twenty-five. Reading it aloud, one hears a translator's hand rather than a Chinese author's.