She Was a Tree-Spirit First

此華藏莊嚴世界海東，過十世界海，有世界海 … 有世界種 … 中有世界 — to the east of this Flower-Treasury Adorned World-Ocean, beyond ten world-oceans, there is a world-ocean … a world-seed … a world. Asked a question about time, she answers with a route. The three nested units are the ones this sūtra set out at length in its own eighth to tenth fascicles, in the chapter on the Flower-Treasury world-system: world-oceans hold world-seeds, and world-seeds hold worlds. She is not inventing a cosmology for the occasion; she is giving a street address in one the reader is assumed to have already learned.

淨穢相雜 — with purity and foulness mingled together in it. The pair 淨穢 occurs exactly once in fascicle seventy and exactly once in fascicle seventy-one. The first was at Part 1104, where the previous night-spirit's ancient world was 淨穢合成, formed of the pure and the foul combined. Two night-spirits in succession have now begun an account of their own beginnings by saying that the world they started in was a mixed one. Neither treats it as a problem, and neither explains why she mentions it.

其已久如 — how long is it since. Good-Wealth asked Joyful Eye almost this question in Part 1094, where the words were 汝發阿耨多羅三藐三菩提心，為幾時耶？得此解脫，其已久如？ — two questions, one about the resolve and one about the liberation. Here he asks only the first, and applies to it the phrase that was attached to the second. He has compressed his own formula, and what he wants to know now is when she began.

我於爾時，作菩提樹神 … 守護道場 — at that time I was a bodhi-tree spirit, and I guarded that awakening-site. Her first life in this account is not a princess or a king or even a human being. She was the spirit of a tree, and her job was standing there. Part 1106 of this translation spent a whole section on such a tree — rooted in a maṇi king, trunk of maṇi, leaves of jewels, expounding the domain of every tathāgata. Somebody had to be its spirit, and the sūtra now tells us that this teacher was.

我見彼佛成等正覺 … 發阿耨多羅三藐三菩提心 — seeing that buddha accomplish perfect awakening, I gave rise to the mind of anuttara-samyak-sambodhi. The answer to Good-Wealth's question is finally given, and it is a moment rather than a number. She began when she watched somebody else begin. The tree she was guarding was the tree he was sitting under, which means she was closer to that awakening than anyone in the story and had no part in it whatever — and it started her.

我時命終，還生此中 — my life then came to an end and I was born again in that very place. Five characters for a death and four for a return, and the return is to the same spot. She does not go anywhere. What changes is her post: she was the spirit of the tree and is now 道場主夜神, the night-spirit presiding over the awakening-site. The sūtra treats the death as a change of office rather than a change of location, and this is the first appearance in her account of the word she is still described by.

名：法樹威德山 — Mountain of the Majestic Virtue of the Dharma-Tree. The second buddha's name has a tree in it, and she has just stopped being one. Nothing is made of the coincidence. It is the kind of quiet rhyme this sūtra produces by having a fixed stock of auspicious words, and a reader may take it or leave it.

身為夜神，因得見佛承事供養，即獲三昧 — my body was that of a night-spirit, and because I was able to see that buddha and attend upon and make offerings to him, I obtained a samādhi. From here the account settles into a fixed formula that will run for many more buddhas: a name, the same body, the same three acts — seeing, attending, offering — and a new samādhi each time. Nothing about her changes again. What accumulates is the samādhis.