Nine Lights, and Seven Days

Every one of these three lights is named 音, a sound, and so is the one that opens the next section. Four consecutive lights of the eleven carry that ending — 一切眾生業果音, 生一切善根音, 佛不思議境界音, 嚴淨一切佛剎音 — yet the first thing each of them does is not to be heard but to be met: 若有眾生遇斯光者, if any being encountered that light. The sūtra is not being careless. A buddha's approach is announced in a medium that is simultaneously seen and heard, because there is no sense in which what is arriving belongs to one channel rather than another.

悉得自知諸業果報 — they came to know for themselves the recompense of all their own deeds. This is the third rung of the ladder and the first one that is unpleasant. Part 1105 ended with a whole population shortening its own life by contempt, and the first substantive gift the countdown gives that population is the ability to see exactly what their deeds have bought them. The light does not console. It shows the bill, and only then does the buddha come.

The names change here. After four lights ending 音, sound, come three ending 燈, lamp — 無差別燈, 三世明燈, 離翳智慧燈. The turn is exactly where the gifts stop altering the recipient and start showing them things: pure lands, buddhas to visit, an ocean of past deeds. Sound does the work on a person; lamps do the work on a view. The sūtra shifts its own metaphor at the hinge of its own list.

悉能現見一切如來諸本事海 — they were able to see before them the ocean of the past deeds of every tathāgata. It is worth noticing what this gift is, at the three-thousand-year mark, inside a story that is itself a night-spirit's account of her own distant past. The light that arrives three thousand years before a buddha gives beings the power to do the exact thing Good-Wealth has been doing for forty parts of this pilgrimage — look at what buddhas did long ago. The capacity being handed out is the capacity to hear this kind of story.

如來離翳智慧燈 — Lamp of the Tathāgata's Wisdom Free of Cataract. The image has been standing in this fascicle since Part 1103, where Good-Wealth praised this same night-spirit for a light from her eyes that 悉滅世癡翳, dissolved the world's cataract of delusion. There the cataract was removed by a spirit in the present; here it is removed by a flower two thousand years before a buddha. The same operation is being performed at two scales of the same story, and the reader is expected to notice that the night-spirit's power is not hers alone but a thing this world has always done.

則得成就見佛三昧 — they accomplished the samādhi of seeing the buddhas. The last of the ten millennial lights gives a capacity whose entire content is the thing that is about to happen anyway. A thousand years before a buddha arrives, beings are given the ability to see buddhas. It is the sūtra's characteristic way of describing preparation: one is not made ready for an event so much as given, in advance, the faculty the event will consist of.

The eleventh light breaks the pattern the other ten kept. Each of those gave a capacity — an opened mind, a clean eye, knowledge of one's deeds, complete faculties, a vast mind, sight of pure lands, access to buddhas, sight of their past, a universal eye, a samādhi. The last one gives 大歡喜, great joy, which is not a capacity for anything. Seven days out, there is nothing left to become able to do.

一切世界悉皆震動，純淨無染 — every world shook throughout, becoming wholly pure and without stain. The world this happens to was introduced in Part 1104 as 淨穢合成, formed of the pure and the foul combined, and the city at its heart was, in Part 1105, busy shortening its own lifespan by contempt. 純淨無染 is the exact reversal of both. For the duration of a buddha's appearance, a mixed world is unmixed.

若有眾生根性淳熟，應見佛者，咸詣道場 — any being whose faculties and nature were fully ripened, who was fit to see the Buddha, came to the awakening-site. After ten thousand years of notice, the attendance is still conditional. The sentence does not say everyone came; it says the ripe came. That is not a restriction the sūtra apologises for — it has just spent eleven lights describing precisely how a being gets ripe, and the whole countdown exists so that the condition can be met.