A Gandharva King Among the Buddhas

八乾闥婆王 — the eighth, Gandharva King. A gandharva is a celestial musician, and this sūtra's opening fascicle lists gandharva kings among the beings who come to hear the Buddha; Part 1101 counted their palaces among the things Good-Wealth saw in a speck of dust. Here one is the name of a buddha. The sūtra is not claiming that a gandharva became a buddha. It is showing what happens to a naming system when it has to produce a hundred and ten distinct names in five characters each — everything in the cosmos becomes available as a name.

第六那羅延 — the sixth, Nārāyaṇa. The same figure appeared in Part 1115 inside the buddha-name 金剛那羅延幢, Banner of the Vajra Nārāyaṇa. This translation keeps it transliterated rather than rendering it, as this sūtra's earlier fascicles do, because Nārāyaṇa is a named being in Indian myth and not a description that can be translated. A buddha called simply Nārāyaṇa is a buddha named after a strong man.

第五眾生眼 — the fifth, Eye of Beings. Set among mountains, oceans, treasuries and jewels, this is the one name in the decade that is about somebody else. A buddha named for the organ his hearers see with, rather than for anything he has or is.

第一娑羅藏 — the first, Sāla Treasury. The sal tree occurs twice in fascicle seventy and this is the second. The first was in Part 1112, where the girl's newly softened mind was compared to 娑羅樹初始生芽, a sal tree first putting out a shoot. The tree that stood for the beginning of her practice now stands at the head of a decade of buddhas, and nothing in the verse connects the two. The sūtra simply reuses its own furniture.

第八遍照光 — the eighth, Universally Illuminating Light. This is the second and last occurrence of 遍照 in the fascicle. The first was in Part 1117, where the verse named the world 遍照燈 — the translated form of the name the prose had transliterated as 毘盧遮那. Here the same two characters are a buddha's name among fifty others, unremarked, and whatever weight they carried three stanzas ago is not carried here.

第五地威力 — the fifth, Power of the Earth. In the prose, at Part 1115, the night-spirit told Good-Wealth that she had once been 主地神, an earth-spirit, named Bringing Forth the Meaning of Equality. A buddha named for the earth's own power stands here in a list she is reciting from memory, and she does not pause over it.

第三高顯光 — the third, Lofty Manifest Light. The same name stood third in the decade two stanzas earlier. Counting the whole of this closing verse, a hundred and ten buddha-names are given and a hundred and four of them are distinct: six names occur twice, and 高顯光 is the only one of the six to fall at the same ordinal position both times. Four of the other repeats — 廣大智, 須彌德, 功德輪, 無勝幢 — all make their first appearance in the decade that opens this part. The sūtra does not flag any of this, and there is no reason to think it is a mistake. A verse producing a hundred and ten five-character names out of a fixed stock of auspicious words will collide with itself.

第七速疾風 — the seventh, Swift Wind. Among bodies of light, banners of valour and canopies of jewels, one buddha is named after weather. It is worth resisting the urge to find significance in it. The list is a list, and the woman reciting it told Good-Wealth two parts ago that of everything those buddhas taught she had not forgotten 一文一句, a single letter or phrase. This is what that looks like from outside.