Light and Shadow, Echo and Dream

"What is meant by the birth-treasury of equal and universal light? Good son, this bodhisattva is fully endowed with every practice, and universally transforms beings; whatever he possesses, he is able to give up entirely; he abides in a buddha's own ultimate realm of pure precepts; he is fully endowed with the dharma of forbearance, and accomplishes the light of every buddha's dharma-forbearance; through great vigour he advances toward all-knowing wisdom, and reaches its very far shore; he cultivates every dhyāna, and attains the concentration of the universal gate; his pure wisdom is perfect and full, and with the sun of wisdom he brightly illuminates every dharma; he attains the eye free of obstruction, beholds the ocean of every buddha, and awakens into the real nature of every dharma; and throughout every world, all who see him rejoice, for he is skilled in cultivating the dharma-gate that accords with reality. This is the bodhisattva's fifth birth-treasury. "What is meant by the birth-treasury of being born into the tathāgata's own family? Good son, this bodhisattva, born into the tathāgata's own family, abides wherever every buddha abides, and accomplishes every profound dharma-gate; he is endowed with the pure great vows of the buddhas of the three times, attains the very same wholesome root shared by every buddha, and shares one single nature together with every tathāgata; he is endowed with the pure and wholesome dharmas of practice beyond the world, and abides firmly in the vast and expansive dharma-gate of merit; he enters every samādhi, and beholds a buddha's own spiritual power; according to whoever he should transform, he purifies that being; and, answering exactly as he is asked, his eloquence is inexhaustible. This is the bodhisattva's sixth birth-treasury. "What is meant by the birth-treasury of a buddha's own power and light? Good son, this bodhisattva enters deeply into a buddha's own power; he travels through every buddha-land with a mind that never retreats; he makes offerings to and serves the bodhisattva assembly without ever tiring of it; he fully understands that every dharma arises just like an illusion; he knows that every world is seen just as in a dream; every form and mark is just like light and shadow; whatever his spiritual powers produce is just like a magical transformation; every taking of birth is entirely just like a reflection; and every buddha's expounding of the dharma is just like an echo in a valley — and, opening and revealing the dharma-realm, he brings every one of these to their very completion. This is the bodhisattva's seventh birth-treasury. "What is meant by the birth-treasury of contemplating the gate of universal wisdom? Good son, this bodhisattva abides in the ground of genuine youth, contemplates all-knowing wisdom through each and every gate of wisdom, and, throughout measureless kalpas, opens up and expounds every practice of the bodhisattvas; he attains sovereign mastery of mind within the bodhisattvas' own profound samādhis, and, in thought after thought, is born at the place of every tathāgata throughout the worlds of the ten directions; within a realm of differentiation he enters concentration free of all differentiation, and within a dharma free of differentiation he manifests wisdom that differentiates; within measureless realms he knows there is no realm at all, and within the smallest realm he enters measureless realms; he penetrates the nature of dharmas, vast and without boundary, and knows that every world is entirely a provisional construction, all of it arising only from the discriminating mind. This is the bodhisattva's eighth birth-treasury.