The Root Was a Broken Statue

Ten vows are named and the total is 十佛剎微塵數願海, oceans of vows as numerous as the motes of dust in ten buddha-lands — the same device the samādhi list used in Part 1112, a sample with the total stated after it. What is worth noticing is the neighbourhood of the eighth. The seventh vow is to draw near to every tathāgata and the ninth is to make offerings to every buddha; between them stands 願得承事一切善友, the vow to attend upon every good friend. The good spiritual friend is not a lesser stage on the way to buddhas. In this list they are filed together.

一心思惟普賢大願 — with a single mind she contemplated Samantabhadra's great vows. Her own vows are not invented. They are made by looking at somebody else's and taking them, which is precisely what a reader of this sūtra is being invited to do with the vows now being read.

彼如來復為其女開示演說發心已來所集善根 — that tathāgata further revealed and expounded for that girl the roots of goodness she had gathered since first giving rise to the mind of awakening. Consider the arrangement. A night-spirit is telling Good-Wealth the story of her past; inside that story, a buddha tells a girl the story of her past; and what the girl is awakened by is hearing it. The form of the teaching and the form of the fascicle are the same thing. Good-Wealth is at this moment receiving the treatment the girl received, from the girl.

普賢菩薩勸其修補蓮華座上故壞佛像 — the bodhisattva Samantabhadra urged her to repair a broken buddha-image upon a lotus seat. This is where the whole thing starts. Not a vow in a buddha's presence, not a vision, not a samādhi — a repair job on a damaged statue. The phrase 於彼如來遺法之中 places it precisely: within that tathāgata's bequeathed teaching, meaning after his parinirvāṇa, in an age with no living buddha in it. There was nothing else available to serve. She served the thing that was left.

既修補已而復彩畫，既彩畫已復寶莊嚴 — having repaired it she then painted it in colours; having painted it she then adorned it with jewels. Three acts, chained by two hinges of the form 既…已, having done this. The sequence is the ordinary order of restoring an image, and the sūtra records each step. Nobody is transfigured; nobody flies. Then, at the end of the third clause, she gives rise to the mind of unsurpassed awakening — and the reader is left to notice that it came after the work rather than before it.

The story is now three layers deep in the past: Good-Wealth is being told of a wheel-turning king's age, inside which a buddha told a girl of an age ten great eons earlier still. And at the bottom of the three layers is a broken statue nobody was tending.

我念過去 — I recall that in the past. One sentence earlier the same person was 此妙眼女, this girl Wondrous Eye, described from outside. Here she is 我, I. The night-spirit gives away the ending of her own story in a pronoun, before the formal question 於意云何, what do you think, which comes in the next part. The disclosure is grammatical before it is explicit, which is how a person actually lets something slip.

端正可喜，眾相圓滿，令人樂見 — well-formed and pleasing, complete in every mark, a delight for people to look upon. The word 端正 occurs six times in fascicle seventy, and following it through the fascicle is a small education. It described the king's thousand sons and his court women and his queen; then in Part 1105 it was in the mouth of the man who said 我身端正，汝形鄙陋, my body is well-formed and your shape is base and ugly; then in Part 1109 it described the body Samantabhadra manifested to cure that city of exactly this vanity. Here, at the sixth and last occurrence, it is the karmic result of mending a statue. The sūtra has not condemned beauty at any point. It has only been rearranging where beauty comes from.

常於…常見…常得 — three clauses opening 常, always: always born among kings, always seeing buddhas, always able to draw near Samantabhadra. In Part 1109 the girl's vow was 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 parted from this good spiritual friend. The third 常 here is that vow reported as fulfilled, in the same two characters, 常得.