Eight Buddhas, Eight Bodies

我為轉輪王 — I was a wheel-turning king. The speaker is a night-spirit and she says it without any framing at all. In the story she has just finished telling, a wheel-turning king was the most powerful being in a world, ruled four continents, and turned out to be Maitreya. Here the same office is an item in a list of things she has been, mentioned twice in two sentences, and less remarkable than the sūtra she heard while holding it.

The third entry is the only one of the eight that names no offering at all. The elder's daughter does not give anything; the buddha simply speaks a sūtra for her and she upholds it. In a catalogue whose other seven entries all record what she brought, the blank is worth seeing. Being taught is not always something one pays for.

The verb for offering changes exactly at the fifth entry. The first four bodies — two kings, a daughter, an asura king — either bring 恭敬供養, reverent offerings, or bring nothing. From the nāga king's daughter onward, every entry uses 雨, to rain: clouds of maṇi jewels, clouds of lotus flowers, clouds of fragrant flowers, clouds of jewel-trees. Four entries rain and four do not, and the split falls where the forms stop being kinds of person and start being kinds of power.

五百修多羅而為眷屬 — with five hundred sūtras as its retinue. The retinue sizes in this catalogue do not climb. They run: ten buddha-lands' dust, Sumeru's dust, Jambudvīpa's dust, five hundred, a million koṭis, a buddha-land's dust, sixty thousand, measureless. A plain five hundred sits between two figures beyond counting, and nothing in the text marks it as a demotion. The sūtra is not ranking these buddhas. It is simply saying how many there were each time.

我為阿脩羅王 — I was an asura king. The asuras are the jealous demigods, the beings whose defining fault in Buddhist cosmology is exactly the 憍慢 that ruined the city she came from. She has been one of them, and mentions it in the same tone as everything else.

六萬諸仙前後圍遶 … 六萬修多羅而為眷屬 — sixty thousand sages surrounding me before and behind … sixty thousand sūtras as its retinue. The number occurs twice in the seventh entry and it is the same number both times. She arrives with sixty thousand followers and the buddha's teaching arrives with sixty thousand companions. The word 眷屬, retinue, is used for the sūtras exactly as it is used elsewhere for a king's household. A teaching in this sūtra travels the way a person of rank travels.

為主地神，名：出生平等義 — I was an earth-spirit, named Bringing Forth the Meaning of Equality. This is the only one of the eight entries that gives her name in the form she was wearing, and the name it gives is the one that fits an earth-spirit best. Ground does not choose what it holds up. A being who bears everything without preference is the natural inhabitant of a name about equality, and the buddha she met while wearing it was called Vairocana Treasury of Merit.

毘盧遮那功德藏 — Vairocana Treasury of Merit. The name Vairocana attaches to four different things in fascicle seventy, and this is the last of them: a buddha in Good-Wealth's verse at Part 1103, the world 毘盧遮那大威德 at Part 1104, the wheel-turning king at Part 1105, and now a buddha of a later world. No effort is made to distinguish them. In this sūtra Vairocana is less a person one could confuse with another than a name that keeps turning up wherever illumination is total.