The Entertainer Named Lovely Face

我為妓女，名曰：美顏，見佛入城，歌舞供養 — I was a female entertainer, named Lovely Face; seeing the Buddha enter the city, I made an offering of song and dance. The word 妓 in Tang usage means a woman who performs — a singer and dancer — and the act described is exactly that. Set at the end of a list in which she was twice a wheel-turning king, an asura king, and a sage with sixty thousand followers, the entertainer is the last and least-ranked of the bodies, and she is given a name about her looks. She makes the only offering she has, which is her craft, performed in the road as a procession goes past.

佛為於我，放眉間光 — the Buddha, for my sake, sent out a light from between his brows. The phrase 眉間 occurs three times in fascicle seventy and the three make a circuit. In Part 1101 this night-spirit sent a light 於兩眉間 into Good-Wealth's crown; in Part 1103 he praised her for it, 見尊眉間相，放大清淨光; and here, a very long time ago, a buddha did it to her because she sang in the street. What she does to her pilgrim is what was once done to her, and the sūtra puts the original at the bottom of the social scale.

以千偈頌讚歎於佛 — I praised the Buddha in a thousand verses. Good-Wealth's praise of her in Part 1103 ran to twenty-one stanzas. A professional singer produces a thousand. The detail is not a boast; it is simply what a person with that training does when moved, and it is the reason the light came.

乃至不忘一文一句 — not forgetting so much as a single letter or a single phrase. After a catalogue of bodies and buddhas running over motes-of-dust-many eons, the achievement she names is retention. Not insight, not power, not merit — that she has not lost a word. For a tradition whose scriptures were carried in memory for centuries before they were written down, this is not a modest claim dressed up as a large one. It is the large claim stated plainly.

The clause 於彼一一諸如來所, at the place of each single one of those tathāgatas, is used twice in a single sentence, and the two halves it governs are not the same kind of thing. The first is what she did for others — extolling the dharma, benefiting beings. The second is what she got — the light of all-knowing wisdom, the ocean of the three times, Samantabhadra's practices. The sūtra puts giving before receiving in the syntax and declines to say that one caused the other.

我依一切智光明故 … 何以故？以得一切智光明故 — because I rely upon the light of all-knowing wisdom … Why is that? Because I have attained the light of all-knowing wisdom. The phrase occurs three times in four lines and the explanation is identical to the thing it explains. Read as argument this is a circle. Read as it is meant, it is a refusal: there is nothing underneath this to appeal to, and the question 何以故 has run out of places to go. The sūtra uses the same rhetorical move whenever it reaches a floor.

先所未得、先所未見普賢諸行，悉得成滿 — the practices of Samantabhadra that I had not previously attained and had not previously seen were all of them brought to fulfilment. Samantabhadra has been in this account from the beginning: he told her to mend a statue, he outshone her city, his vows were what she contemplated, his body held every bodhisattva she saw. Her attainment is stated, at the very end, as his practices completing themselves in her. She never claims a practice of her own.