Samantabhadra Outshines a Proud City

自恃色貌及諸境界，而生憍慢陵蔑他人 — relying on their own looks and their own circumstances, and so giving rise to arrogance and treating others with contempt. This is the diagnosis of the disease Part 1105 showed us catching. There, one person told another 我身端正，汝形鄙陋, my body is well-formed and your shape is base and ugly, and lifespan and beauty began to shrink for everyone. Here the sūtra names the illness in its clinical form and adds the second cause the anecdote did not mention — 諸境界, one's circumstances. It is not only faces. It is everything one happens to have.

化現妙身，端正殊特 — he manifested a wondrous body, upright and extraordinary. The remedy is startling, and it is worth refusing the temptation to make it gentler than it is. Samantabhadra does not arrive and explain that beauty is impermanent. He arrives better-looking. The word 端正, well-formed, is the very word the proud man used of himself in Part 1105. The cure for taking oneself to be the most beautiful thing present is to be shown something more beautiful, and the sūtra evidently thinks this works where a lecture would not.

譬如日出眾景奪曜，亦如聚墨對閻浮金 — as when the sun rises and robs every other glow of its brightness; as a lump of ink set beside Jambū-river gold. Two similes for one event, and they differ in temper. The first is impersonal — the sun does not humiliate the stars, it simply comes up. The second is unkind: beside river gold, what you were proud of is a lump of ink. The sūtra offers both, and lets the reader decide how the citizens are meant to feel.

此為是誰？為天？為梵 — who is this? Is it a god? Is it a Brahmā? Their two guesses are the two highest things their cosmology offers, and both are wrong. Part 1104 has already supplied the correction in advance, where this same night-spirit told Good-Wealth that 諸天及人、一切二乘所不能測, gods and humans and both vehicles alike cannot fathom this. A city that can only ask whether something is a god or a Brahmā is a city that has no word for a bodhisattva yet.

The message Samantabhadra finally delivers has nothing to do with the light. He has flattened the vanity of an entire city, and what he says is a single piece of news — 今汝國中，有佛興世, in your country now a buddha has arisen in the world — with an address attached. The whole display was to make one sentence audible. Nothing is said about pride at all; the beings who were preening a moment ago are simply given somewhere else to look.

得如是身、如是莊嚴、如是相好、如是威儀、如是自在 — such a body, such adornment, such excellent marks, such bearing, such sovereign freedom. Five clauses, each opening 如是, like this. The first thing the girl wants is exactly what her city wanted: to look like that. The vow begins as the same vanity that Samantabhadra came to cure, aimed at a better object — and then it turns. 願令於我亦得如是，為諸眾生作智光明, may it be granted to me to do likewise, to be a light of wisdom for all beings. She started by wanting the body and ends by wanting the work.

能於眾生生死長夜黑闇之中放大光明 — able, in the long night and darkness of beings' births and deaths, to send out a great light. The girl is describing Samantabhadra, and she is also describing, without knowing it, the job of a night-spirit. The teacher telling this whole story is 普救眾生妙德, a spirit of the dark whose entire office is to give light in the long night. Whoever this girl grew up to become, the vow she makes is for the work that the voice narrating it now performs.

願我所在受生之處，常得不離此善知識 — may I, in whatever place I am reborn, never be apart from this good spiritual friend. Fascicle seventy opened, in Part 1101, with Good-Wealth making the same vow in almost the same words: 於無量劫常不遠離, through measureless eons never to be far from them. The pilgrim listening and the girl in the story have now made one vow between them, separated by more eons than there are motes of dust in a buddha-land.

One textual difficulty should be stated plainly rather than smoothed over. Part 1105 named the wheel-turning king's daughter 普智焰妙德眼, and the sūtra will use that name again later in this fascicle; here the daughter is 蓮華妙眼, Lotus Wondrous Eye. The Taishō text carries no variant reading at this point. Whether these are two daughters or two names for one, T279 does not say, and this translation does not decide for it.