A Mind as Soft as a New Shoot
After a vision containing every world there is, what the girl actually receives is described in the smallest terms the sūtra owns — an embryo, a newborn, a sal tree putting out its first shoot.
A Sūtra, and a Softening
The Buddha does not comment on what she has seen. He teaches, and what the teaching does to her is stated in three images from ordinary life.
普智寶焰妙德幢王如來，為說修多羅，名：一切如來轉法輪，十佛剎微塵數修多羅而為眷屬。
The tathāgata King Banner of Wondrous Virtue and the Jewel-Flame of Universal Wisdom spoke a sūtra for her, named The Turning of the Dharma-Wheel of Every Tathāgata, with sūtras as numerous as the fine motes of dust of ten buddha-lands as its own retinue.
「時，彼女人聞此經已，則得成就十千三昧門，其心柔軟，無有麁彊，如初受胎，如始誕生，如娑羅樹初始生芽。彼三昧心亦復如是，
"At that time, when that woman had heard this sūtra, she accomplished ten thousand gates of samādhi. Her mind became soft and pliant, with nothing coarse or stiff in it — like a child newly conceived, like one just born, like a sal tree first putting out a shoot. The mind of those samādhis was just so.
其心柔軟，無有麁彊，如初受胎，如始誕生，如娑羅樹初始生芽 — her mind became soft and pliant, with nothing coarse or stiff in it, like a child newly conceived, like one just born, like a sal tree first putting out a shoot. Three similes, all of them biological, all of them about the earliest possible stage of a life. This is the fascicle that has spent five hundred parts' worth of vocabulary on oceans of buddha-lands and motes of dust containing worlds. To say what a person is like after all that, it reaches for an embryo.
The pair 柔軟 and 麁彊, soft and pliant against coarse and stiff, is doing more than describing a mood. The city this girl comes from was diagnosed in Part 1109 as full of 憍慢, arrogance — and arrogance is exactly a stiffness, a refusal to be moved by what is in front of you. The remedy is not humility as a virtue one adopts. It is a change in the texture of the mind, and what it is compared to is new tissue.
Twelve Samādhis Out of Ten Thousand
Ten thousand gates opened; twelve are named. Three of them in the middle are not capacities at all but standing intentions.
所謂：現見一切佛三昧、普照一切剎三昧、入一切三世門三昧、說一切佛法輪三昧、知一切佛願海三昧、開悟一切眾生令出生死苦三昧、常願破一切眾生闇三昧、常願滅一切眾生苦三昧、常願生一切眾生樂三昧、教化一切眾生不生疲厭三昧、一切菩薩無障礙幢三昧、普詣一切清淨佛剎三昧……。
Namely: the samādhi of seeing every buddha present before her; the samādhi of illuminating every land universally; the samādhi of entering every gate of the three times; the samādhi of proclaiming the dharma-wheel of every buddha; the samādhi of knowing the ocean of every buddha's vows; the samādhi of awakening all beings and bringing them out of the suffering of birth and death; the samādhi of constantly vowing to break the darkness of all beings; the samādhi of constantly vowing to extinguish the suffering of all beings; the samādhi of constantly vowing to bring forth the happiness of all beings; the samādhi of teaching all beings without ever growing weary; the samādhi of the unobstructed banner of every bodhisattva; and the samādhi of going universally to every pure buddha-land — and so on.
Twelve samādhis are named and the next sentence says 得如是等十千三昧, having attained ten thousand samādhis such as these. Twelve out of ten thousand, and the ellipsis in the punctuated text marks where the rest were left off — a device CBETA's editors use a hundred and twenty-three times across T279, always at a list the Chinese closes with 如是等, such as these. The sūtra does not pretend to have given a complete inventory anywhere. It gives a sample and names the total.
常願破一切眾生闇三昧、常願滅一切眾生苦三昧、常願生一切眾生樂三昧 — the samādhi of constantly vowing to break the darkness of all beings, to extinguish their suffering, to bring forth their happiness. Three consecutive entries open 常願, constantly vowing, and this is a strange thing for a samādhi to be. A concentration is normally a state one enters; these are wishes one keeps. The list is saying that for this person a standing intention has become a place she can sit down in.
常願破一切眾生闇 — constantly vowing to break the darkness of all beings. The woman who eventually tells this story is a night-spirit. Of the twelve samādhis her younger self is given, the seventh is the one that describes what a spirit of the dark spends her existence doing, and it arrives here as a vow rather than a job.
Thirty Kinds of Mind
After the samādhis, minds — thirty of them, and the middle stretch is made entirely of things the mind no longer is.
得如是等十千三昧已，復得妙定心、不動心、歡喜心、安慰心、廣大心、順善知識心、緣甚深一切智心、住廣大方便海心、捨離一切執著心、不住一切世間境界心、入如來境界心、普照一切色海心、
Having attained ten thousand samādhis such as these, she attained further a mind of wondrous concentration, an unmoving mind, a joyful mind, a mind of consolation, a vast mind, a mind that accords with good spiritual friends, a mind whose object is the profound wisdom of all-knowing, a mind abiding in the vast ocean of skilful means, a mind that casts off every attachment, a mind that does not abide in any worldly domain, a mind that enters the tathāgata's domain, a mind that universally illuminates every ocean of form,
無惱害心，無高倨心、無疲倦心、無退轉心、無懈怠心、思惟諸法自性心、安住一切法門海心、觀察一切法門海心、了知一切眾生海心、救護一切眾生海心、普照一切世界海心、普生一切佛願海心、悉破一切障山心、積集福德助道心、現見諸佛十力心、普照菩薩境界心、增長菩薩助道心、遍緣一切方海心。
a mind without harm or injury, a mind without haughtiness, a mind without fatigue, a mind without backsliding, a mind without indolence, a mind that contemplates the intrinsic nature of all dharmas, a mind abiding securely in the ocean of every dharma-gate, a mind that observes the ocean of every dharma-gate, a mind that fully knows the ocean of all beings, a mind that rescues and guards the ocean of all beings, a mind that universally illuminates the ocean of all worlds, a mind that universally brings forth the ocean of every buddha's vows, a mind that shatters every mountain of hindrance, a mind that accumulates merit as an aid to the path, a mind that sees the ten powers of the buddhas present before it, a mind that universally illuminates the bodhisattva's domain, a mind that increases the bodhisattva's aids to the path, and a mind whose object is every ocean of the directions.
Thirty minds, twelve in the first row and eighteen in the second, and five consecutive entries at the join open with 無, without — 無惱害心, 無高倨心, 無疲倦心, 無退轉心, 無懈怠心: without harm, without haughtiness, without fatigue, without backsliding, without indolence. Everything before that block is something the mind has become, and everything after it is something the mind does. The negations are the hinge between the two, and they occupy the place in the list where you would expect the peak.
無高倨心 — a mind without haughtiness. The second of the five, and it is the only item in this whole inventory of thirty that names the specific fault of the city she grew up in. Samantabhadra crossed a world to cure that fault with a light; the sūtra records the cure here as one line in a list, without underlining it.
The word 海, ocean, appears in nine of the thirty — the ocean of skilful means, of form, of dharma-gates twice over, of beings twice over, of worlds, of buddhas' vows, and of the directions. It is this sūtra's unit for a quantity that has no edge, and by the end of the list the mind is described almost entirely in terms of what it can hold rather than what it is.
Part 1112 Complete
This continues chapter thirty-nine, 入法界品, in fascicle seventy. Part 1113 has her contemplate Samantabhadra's great vows and bring forth an ocean of vows of her own — ten of them named out of ten buddha-lands' worth — and then the Buddha tells her the whole story of her own roots of goodness.