Two Motes of Dust of Eons

過二佛剎微塵數劫 — more than two fine motes of dust of buddha-lands' worth of eons. The phrase occurs twice in one sentence, once for how long ago she set out and once for how long she then practised before arriving here. It is worth noticing what kind of number this is. It is enormous, but it is a number — not 不可說不可說, ineffably ineffable, the measure reserved for the oceans of dharma-realms in Parts 1129 and 1130. Asked how long since she began, she gives the largest figure this fascicle has used that can still, in principle, be counted.

賢劫 — the Fortunate Eon, the name of the present cosmic age in which this world now stands, home to a fixed roster of a thousand buddhas of whom only a few have yet appeared. Her arrival here is dated not to a year but to an eon-name any reader of this literature would recognise, the same one the next paragraph will use to place Śākyamuni among his predecessors.

彼清淨光金莊嚴世界，今猶現在，諸佛出現相續不斷 — that world Adorned with Pure Light and Gold still exists at this very moment, and buddhas continue to appear there without a break. This is not a claim the sūtra needed to make; the whole autobiography could have ended one sentence earlier. She adds it anyway, and what it does is take the place where her story began — the world with the broken statue's more famous cousin, ten world-oceans east of here — out of the past tense. It is not a setting she once occupied. It is a place still happening, elsewhere, now, while she stands here telling Good-Wealth about it.

汝當一心修此菩薩大勇猛門 — you should single-mindedly cultivate this bodhisattva gate of great valour. Her entire prose account closes on an imperative aimed at Good-Wealth, not a further fact about herself. Everything from Part 1120 onward — the nineteen minds, the thirty-seven diagnoses, the thirty-two-fold sentence, the similes, the ten treasuries, two motes of dust of eons of buddhas — collapses into six characters of instruction: do this yourself.

常尊重父母，恭敬而供養 — I constantly honoured father and mother, reverently making offerings to them. Set among stanzas about oceans of eons and the buddhas of the three times, this line is startlingly domestic, and it is worth reading beside Part 1121, where this same night-spirit taught beings 戀著父母, clinging in love to their parents, to widen that love until it reached every buddha's assembly. What she prescribes to others as a fault to be worked past, she reports of herself as a practice she never stopped — honouring her own parents was, for her, not the attachment to be outgrown but part of how she entered the gate.

我昔曾見佛，為眾生供養 — in the past I once saw a buddha make offerings for the sake of beings. The line is easy to misread as her making an offering to a buddha, which is the shape every other clause in this fascicle takes. Read plainly it says the opposite: a buddha making offerings, on behalf of beings. It is one of the few moments in the whole account where the direction of giving runs from a buddha outward rather than from her upward.

水火及王賊 — water and fire, kings and thieves. The same four plain catastrophes appeared in fascicle seventy, Part 1103, in the verse Samantabhadra's own devotee sang about him: 滅除水火賊，王等一切怖, doing away with every fear — of water, of fire, of thieves, of kings. There the fears belonged to a list of what a bodhisattva's body dissolves on sight. Here they belong to a night-spirit's own account of what she has actually spent her practice doing. The grand vision and the flood-and-tax-collector version of danger keep turning out to be the same list.

老病貧窮人，諸根不具足 — the old, the sick, the poor, those whose faculties are not complete. This is the exact population Part 1121 catalogued by what they clung to and what teaching would cure it. The verse strips away the diagnostic frame entirely. There is no 若見眾生 here, no analysis of attachment. There is only 愍濟, pity and rescue, and a wish that they be safe. Ten stanzas after a fascicle of the most elaborate cosmology in the sūtra, her own summary of the whole matter turns out to be the plainest sentence in it: old, sick, poor, incomplete people; I felt pity; I helped.