She Sees Herself Inside Samantabhadra
The girl takes off the jewellery her city was proud of and throws it at the Buddha. It becomes a canopy in the sky with another buddha inside it — and looking up into what used to be her ornaments, she finds every bodhisattva there is inside one body, and her own body inside that.
Her Jewellery Becomes the Sky
Of everyone in that city, she is the one who gives away the thing the city valued. The gift is not accepted so much as unfolded.
「時，轉輪王女——普智焰妙德眼，即解身上諸莊嚴具，持以散佛。時，莊嚴具於虛空中變成寶蓋，寶網垂下，龍王執持，一切宮殿於中間列；十種寶蓋周匝圍遶，形如樓閣，內外清淨，諸瓔珞雲及諸寶樹、香海摩尼以為莊嚴。
"At that time the wheel-turning king's daughter, Eye of Wondrous Virtue and the Flame of Universal Wisdom, undid the ornaments upon her body and scattered them over the Buddha. At that moment those ornaments turned in mid-air into a jewelled canopy, with jewelled nets hanging down from it that nāga kings held up, and palaces of every kind ranged in the spaces between. Ten kinds of jewelled canopy encircled it all around, shaped like towered pavilions, pure within and without, adorned with clouds of necklaces and with jewel-trees and the maṇi of fragrance-oceans.
即解身上諸莊嚴具，持以散佛 — she undid the ornaments upon her body and scattered them over the Buddha. Part 1105 diagnosed this city as one where people despised each other over their looks; Part 1109 showed the girl watching Samantabhadra and wishing for 如是莊嚴, adornment like his. What she does the moment she reaches the Buddha is take her own adornment off. It is the shortest possible account of what the whole episode has been for, and the sūtra spends no words at all explaining it.
The name here is 普智焰妙德眼, the one Part 1105 gave the king's daughter — not 蓮華妙眼, the name used for her in Part 1109. The reading note there set out the difficulty; this occurrence is the second of the two places T279 uses the longer name in this fascicle, and it is recorded here rather than resolved.
A Tree Inside the Canopy
And inside the canopy made of her own jewellery there is a tree, and beneath the tree a buddha — but not the buddha she is standing in front of.
於此蓋中，有菩提樹，枝葉榮茂，普覆法界，念念示現無量莊嚴。毘盧遮那如來坐此樹下，有不可說佛剎微塵數菩薩前後圍遶，皆從普賢行願出生，住諸菩薩無差別住，
Within this canopy there was a bodhi tree, its branches and leaves luxuriant, covering the dharma-realm everywhere, manifesting measureless adornments in thought after thought. The Tathāgata Vairocana sat beneath this tree, with bodhisattvas as numerous as the fine motes of dust of ineffably many buddha-lands surrounding him before and behind, all of them born out of Samantabhadra's practices and vows, abiding in the undifferentiated abiding of all bodhisattvas.
毘盧遮那如來坐此樹下 — the Tathāgata Vairocana sat beneath this tree. The buddha of that age, the one whose feet the king has just touched, is 普智寶焰妙德幢王如來. Vairocana is somebody else, and he is inside the canopy. The girl has thrown her necklaces at one buddha and they have opened into a space containing another, seated under his own tree, which 普覆法界, covers the whole dharma-realm. This is not confusion on the sūtra's part. It is the standard Huayan arrangement, in which the buddha one is looking at and the buddha who is everything one is looking at are both present and neither displaces the other.
皆從普賢行願出生 — all of them born out of Samantabhadra's practices and vows. Samantabhadra has been the active agent in this girl's story since Part 1109, where he outshone her city and she vowed never to be parted from him. Here he is not an agent at all but a source. The bodhisattvas around Vairocana are not his disciples; they are what his vows produced.
Eight Things She Sees
Then the vision opens out, and it keeps widening for six clauses before turning, in the last two, back on the person looking.
亦見有一切諸世間主，亦見如來自在神力，又見一切諸劫次第世界成壞，又亦見彼一切世界一切諸佛出興次第，又亦見彼一切世界一一皆有普賢菩薩供養於佛、調伏眾生，又亦見彼一切菩薩莫不皆在普賢身中，亦見自身在其身內，亦見其身在一切如來前、一切普賢前、一切菩薩前、一切眾生前，
She saw too that every lord of every world was there; she saw the sovereign spiritual power of the tathāgata; she saw worlds coming into being and falling apart in the succession of all the eons; she saw further that in every one of those worlds the buddhas arose in succession; she saw further that in each single one of those worlds there was a bodhisattva Samantabhadra making offerings to the Buddha and taming beings; she saw further that there was not one of all those bodhisattvas who was not inside Samantabhadra's body; she saw her own body inside his body; and she saw his body standing before every tathāgata, before every Samantabhadra, before every bodhisattva, and before every being.
Eight clauses of seeing, each marked 亦見 or 又見, and the sequence has a shape. The first six go outward and get larger — the lords of the world, a buddha's power, the forming and falling of worlds through all eons, the succession of buddhas in each, a Samantabhadra in every one of them, and then every bodhisattva inside one Samantabhadra. The seventh reverses direction in six characters: 亦見自身在其身內, she saw her own body inside his body. Having watched the cosmos fold into one person, she finds herself already folded in.
又亦見彼一切菩薩莫不皆在普賢身中，亦見自身在其身內 — she saw that there was not one of all those bodhisattvas who was not inside Samantabhadra's body, and she saw her own body inside his body. Readers who know where the Gaṇḍavyūha is going will recognise this. At the very end of the pilgrimage Good-Wealth will be admitted into Samantabhadra's body and will see the same thing there. The sūtra is showing it here, in a story about somebody else, thousands of parts before the pilgrim gets there — and the woman telling the story is the girl it happened to.
亦見其身在一切如來前、一切普賢前、一切菩薩前、一切眾生前 — she saw his body standing before every tathāgata, before every Samantabhadra, before every bodhisattva, and before every being. The third item in that list is the strange one. Samantabhadra stands before every Samantabhadra. He is not one being who is everywhere; he is a being of whom every instance is in front of every other, which is a different and harder claim, and the sentence makes it without comment.
Twenty-Five Kinds of Difference
The last thing she sees is the largest catalogue in the fascicle — worlds inside worlds, and everything about them that can vary.
又亦見彼一切世界一一各有佛剎微塵數世界種種際畔、種種任持、種種形狀、種種體性、種種安布、種種莊嚴、種種清淨、種種莊嚴雲而覆其上、種種劫名、種種佛興、種種三世、種種方處、種種住法界、種種入法界、種種住虛空、
She saw further that each single one of all those worlds had within it worlds as numerous as the fine motes of dust of a buddha-land, with every kind of boundary, every kind of upholding, every kind of shape, every kind of substance, every kind of arrangement, every kind of adornment, every kind of purity, every kind of adornment-cloud covering them above, every kind of eon-name, every kind of buddha's arising, every kind of three times, every kind of quarter and place, every kind of abiding in the dharma-realm, every kind of entering the dharma-realm, every kind of abiding in empty space,
種種如來菩提場、種種如來神通力、種種如來師子座、種種如來大眾海、種種如來眾差別、種種如來巧方便、種種如來轉法輪、種種如來妙音聲、種種如來言說海、種種如來契經雲；
every kind of tathāgata's site of awakening, every kind of tathāgata's spiritual power, every kind of tathāgata's lion seat, every kind of tathāgata's ocean of assembly, every kind of difference among a tathāgata's assemblies, every kind of tathāgata's skilful means, every kind of tathāgata's turning of the dharma-wheel, every kind of tathāgata's wondrous voice, every kind of tathāgata's ocean of speech, and every kind of cloud of a tathāgata's sūtras;
Twenty-five items open with 種種, every kind of, and the list divides cleanly in two. The first fifteen are properties of worlds — boundary, upholding, shape, substance, arrangement, adornment, purity, the clouds above them, the names of their eons, the arising of their buddhas, their three times, their quarters, their abiding in and entering the dharma-realm, their abiding in space. Not one of the fifteen contains the word 如來. Every one of the last ten begins with it. The catalogue walks from the furniture of a world to the buddha in it, and the seam falls exactly at the halfway point.
種種如來契經雲 — every kind of cloud of a tathāgata's sūtras. The final item, and it is the sūtra naming itself as a feature of the landscape. Scripture appears at the end of a list of things a world can have, alongside its boundaries and its shape, as though a text were a geological property. It is the last thing seen before the vision closes, and the next sentence has a buddha begin to speak one.
And Then Her Mind Was Clear
The whole vision is dismissed in ten characters, and what it left behind is stated as simply as possible.
既見是已，其心清淨，生大歡喜。
having seen all this, her mind became pure and she gave rise to great joy.
既見是已，其心清淨，生大歡喜 — having seen all this, her mind became pure and she gave rise to great joy. Ten characters to close a vision that took five hundred to describe. Nothing is said about understanding, and nothing about attainment; the two results are that the mind is clean and that there is joy. The girl came from a city whose disease was 憍慢, arrogance, and what the cure turns out to consist of is having seen something large enough that there is nothing left to be proud of.
Part 1111 Complete
This continues chapter thirty-nine, 入法界品, in fascicle seventy. Part 1112 has the Buddha speak a sūtra for her, and her mind become soft — as newly conceived, as newly born, as a sal tree first putting out a shoot — together with the ten thousand gates of samādhi she gains from hearing it.