Ten Great Treasuries of Dharma

猶如自影，從自善業所化出故 — like one's own shadow, because it comes forth by transformation out of one's own good deeds. Of all the images in this run of twenty-five, this is the one that cannot be admired from outside. A shadow is not something a person has; it is something a person casts, and it goes where they go. The reason attached to it — that it comes out of one's own good deeds — makes the simile a statement about karma in its plainest form: what you have done is walking around with you, in your shape.

猶如呼響，隨其所應為說法故 — like an echo, because it teaches the dharma according to what each requires. An echo has no message of its own; it gives back the shape of what was called into it. Put beside Part 1121's thirty-seven diagnoses, where every teaching was determined by what she found the person holding, the image is exact. She is not a source of doctrine. She is what a question sounds like when it comes back.

Three of these eleven are insubstantial things — 自影 a shadow, 呼響 an echo, 影像 a reflection — and they are consecutive, sitting between suchness and a great tree. The sequence runs from 真如, suchness itself, the most solid thing this literature knows, straight into three things that are nothing but the shape of something else, and then back out to a tree, vajra, and jewels. The sūtra does not rank these. Being like suchness and being like an echo are both true of the same gate.

我今為汝說此譬諭，汝應思惟，隨順悟入 — I have now spoken these similes for you; you should ponder them, and in accord with them awaken and enter. The word 譬諭, simile or analogy, occurs once in fascicle seventy-one and thirty-three times across the eighty fascicles; 隨順悟入 occurs twice in the whole sūtra. What is unusual is not the vocabulary but the gesture. Having given twenty-five images, she names them as images and issues instructions for their use. Most of this chapter shows; this sentence tells, and what it tells is that the pondering is the reader's job.

云何修行，得此解脫 — how does one practise so as to gain this liberation? These eight characters occur exactly once in the whole of T279, and this is it. Good-Wealth's four questions in Part 1120 asked what the gate does; this one asks what he has to do. Having been given the work, the domain, the means, the object of contemplation, and twenty-five similes, the pilgrim finally asks for the practice — and the answer is going to be shorter and more ordinary than anything that preceded it.

布施, 淨戒, 堪忍, 精進, 禪定, 般若, 方便, 諸願, 諸力, 淨智 — giving, discipline, forbearance, vigour, meditation, wisdom, skilful means, vows, powers, knowledge. This is the complete list of ten perfections, in its standard order, with nothing added and nothing left out. Part 1121 is worth putting beside it: there she handed out perfections as remedies for particular faults, and only six of the ten appeared — 忍, 精進, 禪, 般若, 力, 智. The four that were missing there, 施, 戒, 方便 and 願, are the first two and the seventh and eighth here. What she dispenses to others is whichever one answers their defect. What she cultivates herself is all ten.

The answer is startlingly ordinary, and that is the point of where it is placed. Good-Wealth has just heard that this liberation is bottomless, is the universal gate, is like suchness and like an echo and like the maṇi jewel-king Stainless Treasury. He asks how one gets it, and is told: giving, discipline, patience, effort, concentration, wisdom, and the four that follow. The sūtra's vast machinery is not an alternative to the basic curriculum. It is what the basic curriculum turns out to have been.

清淨增長，積集堅固，安住圓滿 — purified and increasing, gathered and made firm, abiding and complete. Six characters in three pairs, closing the answer. Each pair puts a process beside a state: purified and growing, accumulated and solid, settled and whole. Nothing in the phrasing suggests a moment of arrival; the liberation is described as something that keeps being got.