Fascicle Seventy-One Complete

得入此菩薩甚深自在妙音解脫故 — having thereby entered the bodhisattva liberation of the Profound and Sovereign Wondrous Voice. No further teaching intervenes between her closing verse in Part 1143 and this sentence. He does not ask a further question, and she does not explain anything further. He simply enters the gate, and three more attainments arrive in the same breath — an ocean of samādhi, an ocean of dhāraṇī, great spiritual penetration, great eloquence. This is the clearest instance yet in this translation of a teaching working exactly the way this teacher's own gate is named to work: 念念 in Part 1120's terms, in thought after thought, not across a course of practice but in the moment of hearing.

Good-Wealth's verse keeps her own seven-character line rather than reverting to the five-character metre every other verse of his has used in this pilgrimage. It is a small formal courtesy easy to miss in translation and impossible to miss in the original: he answers her in the shape she gave him, not the shape he usually speaks in.

了達眾生無有性，而於眾生起大悲 — you have fully realised that beings have no fixed nature of their own, and yet toward beings you give rise to great compassion. The word 而, and yet, marks the turn this whole pilgrimage keeps returning to: knowing that beings have no essential self does not reduce compassion for them, and the verse states the two facts back to back as though daring a reader to find the contradiction it declines to resolve.

天神一念悉了知，晝夜日月年劫海 — heavenly spirit, in a single thought you fully know day and night, sun and moon, the ocean of years and eons. A night-spirit's ordinary competence is knowing when it is night; the verse takes that plain fact and extends it, in one line, to the whole of time. The vocative 天神, heavenly spirit, appears three times across these last two stanzas, addressed directly and by name in a way the earlier stanzas of praise were not — as if, having finished describing what she does, Good-Wealth simply starts talking to her.

隨眾生樂現眾色 — you manifest every kind of form according to what beings delight in. The verse's very last line closes on the same principle Part 1121's thirty-seven diagnoses were built on, two hundred and some characters after the whole prose account of that teacher was set down — a form fitted to what a being already wants, not imposed on them from outside. It is the last thing Good-Wealth says about her, and it is also the first thing she ever said about her own method.

Fascicle seventy-one has held one teacher's entire encounter, from the four questions of Part 1133 to this departure — twelve Parts for a single night-spirit, more than half of them spent on ninety-eight buddha-names and two verses in an unusual metre. The plain departure formula that closes it is the same twelve characters that closed the previous teacher's thirteen-part account at the end of fascicle seventy, and the one before that, and very nearly every teacher Good-Wealth has left in this whole pilgrimage. Whatever a fascicle contains, this is how it lets its pilgrim go.