The Mind Is Like a Skilled Painter
Awakening Grove Bodhisattva's hymn is the most quoted passage in this chapter, and among the most quoted in the whole sūtra: a painter who cannot know his own mind and yet paints every color by means of it, a mind that paints the entire world, and the closing line every school of East Asian Buddhism has returned to — everything is made by mind alone.
Awakening Grove Bodhisattva's Hymn
爾時，覺林菩薩承佛威力，遍觀十方而說頌言：
At that time, relying upon the Buddha's own awesome power, Awakening Grove Bodhisattva universally surveyed the ten directions and then spoke a verse, saying:
「譬如工畫師，分布諸彩色，
虛妄取異相，大種無差別。
大種中無色，色中無大種，
亦不離大種，而有色可得。
心中無彩畫，彩畫中無心，
然不離於心，有彩畫可得。
彼心恒不住，無量難思議，
示現一切色，各各不相知。
譬如工畫師，不能知自心，
而由心故畫，諸法性如是。
心如工畫師，能畫諸世間，
五蘊悉從生，無法而不造。
如心佛亦爾，如佛眾生然，
應知佛與心，體性皆無盡。
若人知心行，普造諸世間，
是人則見佛，了佛真實性。
心不住於身，身亦不住心，
而能作佛事，自在未曾有。
若人欲了知，三世一切佛，
應觀法界性，一切唯心造。」
"Just as a skilled painter distributes every kind of pigment and color, falsely grasping at distinct appearances, though the great elements themselves have no distinction at all. Within the great elements there is no color, and within color there are no great elements, and yet color is never found apart from the great elements either.
Within the mind there is no painting, and within the painting there is no mind, and yet a painting is never found apart from the mind either. That mind is forever unabiding, immeasurable and inconceivable, manifesting every kind of color, each one unaware of the others.
Just as a skilled painter cannot know his own mind, and yet, because of that very mind, he paints — such is the nature of every dharma. The mind is like a skilled painter, able to paint the whole of the world; the five aggregates are all born from it, and there is no dharma at all it fails to create.
As is the mind, so too is the Buddha; as is the Buddha, so too are living beings — one should know that the Buddha and the mind, in their own substance and nature, are both inexhaustible. If a person knows that the mind's own activity universally creates every world, this person then sees the Buddha, and understands the Buddha's own true nature.
The mind does not abide within the body, and the body, too, does not abide within the mind, and yet it is able to perform the Buddha's own work, sovereign and free as never before. If a person wishes to fully understand every buddha across the three periods of time, they should contemplate the very nature of the Dharma-realm: everything is made by mind alone."
Few verses in Buddhist literature have traveled as far as this one. "The mind is like a skilled painter" and its closing line, "everything is made by mind alone" (一切唯心造), became a touchstone across Huayan, Chan, and Yogācāra thought for a millennium and a half. The painter simile carries a precise point often lost in later quotation: the painter cannot know his own mind even as he paints entirely by means of it — the same mind that constructs every world we take as given is itself never directly seen, only ever inferred from what it has already made. And crucially, the passage places the Buddha inside the same equation as everything else: "as is the mind, so too is the Buddha, as is the Buddha, so too are living beings" — a threefold identity, not a hierarchy, with none of the three privileged over the others.
Part 127 Complete
This closes Part 127. Chapter 20 continues in Part 128 with Knowledge Grove Bodhisattva's hymn, the tenth and last.