Her Whole Story, in Seven-Character Lines

Nearly every gāthā across these two fascicles has fallen into five-character lines — Good-Wealth's own verses, the night-spirits' catalogues of buddha-names, the closing hymns of praise. This is the first seven-character verse this translation has met. The extra two characters per line give the metre a slightly slower, more deliberate cadence, and it is used here for the one teacher whose gate is named for voice and sound, 甚深自在妙音解脫 — a fitting metre for someone whose whole liberation is about how something is said.

Set this stanza beside Part 1137. There, in prose, the eon was named 離垢光明, Free of the Stain of Light; the world was 法界功德雲, Cloud of the Merit of the Dharma-Realm; the capital was 普寶華光, Universal Jewelled Flower Light. Here, in verse, the eon is 淨光, Pure Light; the world is 法焰雲, Cloud of the Flame of Dharma; the capital is 寶華光, Light of Jewelled Flowers. The capital name is a close match, missing only the first character to fit the seven-character line. The eon and the world are not close matches at all — related in feel, built from overlapping vocabulary, but not the same words. This is the same kind of discrepancy this translation has already recorded between prose and verse accounts in Part 1117 of fascicle seventy, where a world's transliterated name in prose became its translated equivalent in verse. Here the gap is wider, and no resolution is offered by the text itself.

有佛名為法海音，於此劫中先出現 — there was a buddha named Sound of the Ocean of Dharma, who first appeared within this eon. This is not the name given to the first buddha in the prose account, which was 法海雷音光明王, King of the Light of the Thunder-Sound of the Dharma-Ocean. The verse's name shares two characters, 法海, dharma-ocean, with the prose name, but drops the rest. Across a fascicle that has repeatedly let its verses compress and vary its prose, this is one more case recorded rather than smoothed over.

我見法海雷音佛 — I saw the Buddha Thunder-Sound of the Dharma-Ocean. Here, at last, the verse's naming lines up with the prose: this is the same 法海雷音光明王 whose sūtra the wheel-turning king once upheld in Part 1137, given here in a shortened four-character form that keeps its most distinctive part, 雷音, thunder-sound. The verse has now named this buddha two different ways in three stanzas — once compressed almost past recognition, once close to exact — and neither form troubles the other.

我暫見彼如來身，即發菩提廣大心 — the moment I saw that tathāgata's body, I straightaway gave rise to the vast mind of awakening. The prose account in Part 1137 and Part 1138 gave the mind of awakening to the bhikṣuṇī upon hearing her father's lament and seeing his display of light, not upon seeing this first buddha directly. The verse compresses two separate scenes — the buddha's appearance, and the king-monk's later grief — into a single moment of seeing.

令此解脫得清淨 — and so this liberation came to be purified. Her closing line answers, at last, the third of Good-Wealth's original four questions to her back in Part 1133, which this translation has not seen answered directly until now: 行何境界, what domain does it range in, and by implication what refines it. The verse's answer is not a definition but a history — the gate was purified by an eon of drawing near to buddhas, and the eleven stanzas that preceded this line were the account of how.

過於剎轉微塵劫 … 於諸剎轉微塵劫 — the same measure, 剎轉微塵劫, opens the verse and closes it, framing the whole eleven stanzas between two nearly identical lines. It echoes, in slightly different words, the prose account's own hapax measure from Part 1137, 世界轉微塵數劫. Prose and verse each reach, independently, for a way of counting eons by the turning of lands rather than by dust — related phrasing, not identical, one more instance of this fascicle's habit of retelling the same fact in two hands that do not quite shake.