Everything in the World Speaks

Ten things are named, and the first eight are matter of decreasing size and increasing human involvement — encircling mountains, Sumerus, mountain ranges, oceans, ground, cities, walls, palaces. The ninth, 音樂, music, is already sound and so can only become sound differently. The tenth is 語言, language. The sentence has walked from the outermost ring of a world-system to the thing people do with their mouths, and it asks the same of both: that they give out sound in praise. Part 1105 recorded the last time language was heard doing anything in this story. It was one person telling another that he was ugly.

Fifteen clouds, and they sort themselves into three groups of increasing strangeness. The first nine are things one could in principle put in a cloud — fragrance, burning and powdered incense, fragrant jewels, flames, garments, necklaces, flowers. The next two are a buddha's light and a buddha's halo, which are at least visible. The last four are a cloud of music, a cloud of the voice of vows, a cloud of the ocean of speech, and a cloud of excellent marks. By the end the sūtra is raining audible things and bodily features, and it does not pause to explain how.

一切如來相好雲 — clouds of the excellent marks of every tathāgata. The final cloud is made of the thirty-two marks and eighty minor marks, that is, of a buddha's body. Rain of a buddha's own appearance is the last item because it is the closest thing to the buddha himself that can still be described as falling from the sky, and the sentence ends 顯示如來出現世間不思議相, displaying the inconceivable sign that a tathāgata had appeared in the world.

於此成阿耨多羅三藐三菩提時，即於十方一切世界中成阿耨多羅三藐三菩提 — at the very time he attained anuttara-samyak-sambodhi here, he attained it in every world of the ten directions. The same ten-character phrase is used twice in one sentence, once with 於此, here, and once with 於十方一切世界中, in every world. Nothing is repeated for emphasis; the repetition is the content. An awakening is not an event with a location that then propagates. The same event simply has every location.

一一座上皆有菩薩結跏趺坐 — upon each single seat there sat a bodhisattva with legs crossed. Part 1106 described the pool ringed by a million koṭis of nayutas of trees, every one of them shaped like the bodhi tree at the centre. The same figure returns here one level in: the great lotus is ringed by ten buddha-lands' worth of lotuses, and each of those already has somebody sitting in it. Whatever happens at the centre of a Huayan scene, the circumference turns out to have been doing it all along.

Twenty clauses opening 令無量眾生, caused measureless beings to. Ten of them, items four through thirteen, end 菩提之行, awakening-practice, and they form a block in the exact middle of the list. Before that block come three destinations that are not the bodhisattva path at all — out of the evil destinies, up into the heavens, onto the ground of the śrāvaka and the pratyekabuddha. After it come seven that are: the mind of awakening, the bodhisattva path, the pāramitās, the first ground, the second through tenth, surpassing vows, and Samantabhadra's vows.

What is startling about the arrangement is the placement of 發菩提心, giving rise to the mind of awakening. It comes fourteenth, after ten awakening-practices have already been accomplished. Read as a sequence it makes no sense; read as an inventory of everything one buddha does across every world at once, it is exactly right. Somewhere a being is being lifted out of hell while somewhere else a being is completing Samantabhadra's vows, and a single turning of the wheel is doing both.

令無量眾生得生天中 — caused measureless beings to be born among the gods. The second item, and a reminder that this sūtra has not discarded the older goods. Rebirth in heaven sits in the same list as the tenth ground, unranked and unapologised for, because the list is not measuring attainments against each other. It is counting what a buddha's appearance is worth to whoever is standing where.