Monks Who Would Rather Talk of Kings

過世界轉微塵數劫 — more eons ago than there are fine motes of dust in the turnings of worlds. This exact measure occurs only once in the whole of T279's eighty fascicles. Every other origin story in this fascicle has counted back in fine motes of dust of buddha-lands or of a single world; this one alone counts by 世界轉, the turnings or revolutions of worlds — the cycles of forming and dissolving this sūtra elsewhere calls 成壞. A hapax like this is easy to read past, but it marks the one place in the whole chapter where the unit of counting is not a piece of matter but a completed cycle of cosmic time.

百千億那由他不可說不可說城 — a hundred thousand koṭis of nayutas of ineffably ineffable cities, in each single one of an already Sumeru-dust-many sets of four continents. This is nesting on top of nesting, and it is worth pausing on the fact that a single city, in a fascicle so far concerned with buddhas, kings and night-spirits, is about to be found and named among all of this. The vastness is not decorative; it is the scale the story has to be told at before the single particular case — one continent, one capital, one buddha — can be picked out of it.

普顯現法王宮殿 — Palace of the Dharma-King Universally Manifest. Good-Wealth's fourth question to this teacher, back in Part 1133, was 云何近法王位, how does one draw near to the throne of a dharma-king. The awakening-site where her whole story is about to unfold is named for exactly that palace, before any king or teacher in the story has done anything to earn it. The setting answers the question before the narrative does.

樂說王論、賊論、女論、國論、海論，及以一切世間之論 — preferring instead to talk of kings, of thieves, of women, of the state, of the sea, and every other kind of worldly talk. This is a fixed and ancient list, the same category of idle discourse condemned across the earliest Buddhist literature as unworthy of a renunciant's time. Its appearance here, inside a Mahāyāna sūtra otherwise occupied with oceans of dust and buddhas beyond counting, is a small shock of the plain and the recognisable. The dharma does not fail here because Māra attacks it. It fails because monks would rather talk about the news.

有千部異眾千種說法 — there arose a thousand divergent communities teaching a thousand different doctrines. The schism is quantified before the moral decline is even described — a thousand groups, a thousand teachings — and the fragmentation of doctrine is named as the first symptom, with worldliness following as the second. A dharma that has split into a thousand mutually disagreeing schools is already dying before anyone in it starts gossiping about kings.

奇哉！苦哉 — how strange, how sorrowful! Two exclamations, and the second is the more unusual choice. A sūtra could easily have given the king-monk anger at the destruction of the teaching; instead the first honest word out of him is grief. 苦, the word for suffering itself, is what he calls watching a true dharma get talked away by its own custodians.

以是因緣，彼如來教，復於六萬五千歲中而得興盛 — by this cause and condition, that tathāgata's teaching flourished once more, for sixty-five thousand years. The rescue is not doctrinal. Nobody refutes the thousand competing schools or out-argues the monks who would rather discuss the sea. One person rises into the air and burns with light, and that alone is what buys the teaching sixty-five thousand more years. Across this whole fascicle, a display has repeatedly done the work an argument could not — Samantabhadra outshone a proud city in fascicle seventy without a word of doctrine, and here a single body of light does what none of the debate could.