Where People Live, and How They Are Made

若見眾生行於道路，我為說法，令其趣向一切智道 — if I see beings travelling along a road, I teach them the dharma so that they set out upon the road of all-knowing wisdom. The character 道 stands on both sides. So does 城 in the clause about walled cities, answered by 法王城, the city of the dharma-king. The method here is the one Part 1121 used with 境界 on both sides of the clause about the senses: she does not take the shape of somebody's life away from them. She keeps the shape and changes what fills it, and a person on a road is simply told that they are already doing the right verb.

Seven consecutive clauses in which the presenting condition is a location — a grove, a road, a village, humankind, a city, the four corners, the quarters. Nothing is wrong with any of them. This is the part of the list that makes clear it is not a catalogue of faults: two-fifths of what a night-spirit notices about a person is simply where they are standing, and she has something to say to each place.

貪行 … 瞋行 … 癡行 … 等分行 — greedy conduct, angry conduct, deluded conduct, balanced conduct. This is the fourfold temperament scheme that runs through Buddhist meditation manuals from the early commentaries onward, and the first two remedies here are the textbook ones: 不淨觀 for greed, 大慈觀 for anger. A night-spirit in a Mahāyāna sūtra of vast cosmic scope stops, for two clauses, and prescribes exactly what a meditation teacher would prescribe.

The verb changes for precisely those two. Across all thirty-seven clauses of this list she says 我為說法, I teach them the dharma, twelve times in this part and twenty in the last; but for greed and for anger she says 我為彼說…觀門, I expound for them a contemplation-gate. The difference is between giving someone a teaching and giving them a practice to do, and the sūtra marks it with a change of verb rather than a remark.

等分行者 — beings of balanced conduct, in whom no one poison predominates. They are not left out of the list and they are not congratulated either. What they get is 諸乘願海, the ocean of vows of all the vehicles — the only remedy in the four that is plural. A person with no particular disease is handed the whole range.

若見眾生樂生死樂，我為說法，令其厭離；若見眾生厭生死苦 … 令能方便示現受生 — if I see beings delighting in the delights of birth-and-death, I teach them so that they grow weary and turn away; if I see beings weary of the suffering of birth-and-death, I teach them so that they are able, by skilful means, to manifest and take on birth. Two clauses in a row pointing in opposite directions, and they are the clearest statement in this fascicle of what skilful means actually is. She does not have a message. She has a direction of travel for each person, and the direction is determined entirely by where they already stand. Weariness is medicine for one and disease for the other.

若見眾生心生憍慢，我為其說平等法忍 — if I see beings whose minds give rise to arrogance, I expound for them the patient acceptance of the dharma of equality. The word 憍慢 occurs once in fascicle seventy and once in fascicle seventy-one, and the two occurrences are worth holding together. In Part 1109 it was the diagnosis of a whole city, and Samantabhadra cured it by arriving more beautiful than anyone in it. Here the same fault gets a quieter answer: 平等法忍, the capacity to bear the fact that things are equal. Arrogance is treated as something one has to be able to withstand rather than be argued out of.

For the last three clauses the phrasing shifts again, to 我為顯示 and 我為其說 — I reveal, I expound for them — and the objects are no longer results but things shown: a road, an acceptance, a straight mind. The list has been moving all along from what she does to people toward what she simply puts in front of them, and it ends on 菩薩直心, a bodhisattva's straight mind, offered to the crooked as a picture rather than a cure.

我時便得廣大歡喜法光明海 — and I then gained the ocean of the light of the dharma of vast joy. This is the answer to the four questions Good-Wealth asked in Part 1120 — what work does this gate do, what domain does it range in, what means does it set in motion, what does it contemplate. The gate is 念念出生廣大喜莊嚴, Bringing Forth Vast Joy and Adornment in Thought After Thought, and the thirty-seven clauses have just shown where the joy comes from. It is not a state she entered and then taught out of. It arrived because she taught, and the word 便, thereupon, does the causal work in a single character.

我以此等無量法施攝諸眾生 — by such measureless gifts of dharma as these I gather beings in. She calls the whole list 法施, a gift of dharma, which is the first of the three kinds of giving and the one a being with nothing material can always make. Part 1121 had her meet poverty with a teaching rather than with wealth; here she names the category that makes that honest. What she has to give is what she knows, and she gives it thirty-seven different ways.

其心怡暢，安隱適悅 — my mind glad and unobstructed, at ease and content. Four characters and then four more, and none of them is a technical term. After an ocean of the light of the dharma, the sūtra adds, in ordinary language, that she felt well. It is a rarer note in this literature than the cosmic vocabulary, and it is the one the whole gate is named for.