Thirty-Two Kinds of Everything

The phrase 種種, every kind of, occurs thirty-two times in this one sentence, and thirty-two verbs govern them — 修, 現, 有, 放, 以, 入, 出, 具, 詣, 見, 得, 照, 遊戲, 觀察, 集, 受, 從, 與, 雨, 坐. Of the thirty-two verb positions, seven are 入, to enter, more than any other. Nothing else in fascicle seventy-one is written at this density. The sentence is not describing an itinerary; it is producing, by sheer repetition, the experience of a mind for which no activity is singular.

遊戲種種諸解脫門 — I play among every kind of gate of liberation. 遊戲, to sport or play, sits eighteen items into a list of otherwise strenuous verbs — entering, gaining, illuminating, gathering. It is the sūtra's regular word for what mastery feels like from inside, and putting it here, unannounced, between gaining an ocean of samādhi and going toward all-knowing wisdom, is the only hint in the sentence that any of this is enjoyable.

坐種種莊嚴座 — and I sit upon every kind of adorned seat. Thirty-one verbs of motion and production, and the last one is sitting down. After going to oceans of lands, covering empty space with clouds, and raining adornments, the sentence ends with a person taking a seat. The list of what she does concludes with the thing she was doing at the start of this part, when Good-Wealth found her 坐摩尼光幢莊嚴蓮華座, seated on a lotus seat adorned with maṇi-light banners.

既見是已，生大歡喜 — and having seen this, great joy arose in me. The phrase 生大歡喜 occurs nine times in this fascicle and 既見是已 eight, and from here to the end of her account almost every sentence will close on one or both. This is the mechanism of the gate she is named for. 念念出生廣大喜莊嚴, Bringing Forth Vast Joy and Adornment in Thought After Thought, has turned out to mean something quite specific: she looks at a buddha, and joy happens; she looks again, and it happens again.

我觀毘盧遮那如來 — I contemplate the Tathāgata Vairocana. The name occurs three times in fascicle seventy-one, and this is the first. In fascicle seventy it was scattered across four different referents — a buddha in verse, a world, a wheel-turning king, another buddha. Here it is used plainly for the buddha she is looking at now, and the looking is in the present tense, 我觀, where everything in the previous fascicle was recollection.

我觀如來頂及兩肩 — I contemplate the tathāgata's crown and his two shoulders. Of all the places to look, this is the specific one. The crown and the two shoulders are where a seated figure's mass is highest and widest, the three points that make a silhouette — which is to say she is describing what a buddha looks like from a distance, at night, by someone whose whole office is watching. And what those three points are producing is 寶焰山雲, clouds of jewel-flame mountains, which is what a lit silhouette against the dark resembles.

一一光明以無量佛剎微塵數光明而為眷屬 — each single light has for its retinue lights as numerous as the fine motes of dust of measureless buddha-lands. The word 眷屬, retinue, has been used in this translation for a king's household, for a sūtra's companion scriptures, and now for the lights that accompany a light. The sūtra applies the vocabulary of rank to photons without comment, and the effect is to say that nothing here travels alone.

The pores appear twice in this passage, and what comes out of them differs: first 光明海, oceans of light, then 香光明雲, clouds of fragrant light. The second adds smell to the first. This is the sūtra building a body by senses rather than by parts — and it is worth noticing that the one gift attributed to the lights, 消滅一切諸眾生苦, extinguishing the suffering of every being, is attached to the first and plainest of them.