Merit No Kalpa Could Exhaust
Merit Grove Bodhisattva's closing hymn reaches its final lines — manifesting the Buddha's own pure body wherever it is needed, and then declaring that even countless emanated bodies extolling the bodhisattva's merit for hundreds of thousands of millions of kalpas, or countless buddhas speaking of it for immeasurable kalpas, could never bring their praise to its ultimate conclusion.
No Praise Could Ever Reach Its End
The hymn's final ten lines turn from the refrain of practices to a direct declaration: this practice is "vast and expansive, without any limit at all" — and no one, not even countless emanated bodies, not even countless buddhas across countless kalpas, could ever finish praising the merit it produces. The two-hundred-line hymn, and with it the entire chapter, closes on this note of frank immeasurability.
隨其應見應供養，為現如來清淨身，
教化眾生百千億，莊嚴佛剎亦如是。
為令眾生出世間，一切妙行皆修習，
此行廣大無邊際，云何而有能知者？
假使分身不可說，而與法界虛空等，
悉共稱揚彼功德，百千萬劫無能盡。
菩薩功德無有邊，一切修行皆具足，
假使無量無邊佛，於無量劫說不盡。
何況世間天及人，一切聲聞及緣覺，
能於無量無邊劫，讚歎稱揚得究竟。」
According to whether they should be seen or should be given offerings, manifesting for them the Tathāgata's own pure body, teaching and transforming hundreds of thousands of millions of living beings, and adorning buddha-lands in just the same way. For the sake of causing living beings to go beyond the world, cultivating and practicing every wondrous conduct there is — this practice is vast and expansive, without any limit at all — how could there be anyone at all able to fully know it?
Even if one's emanated bodies were beyond all telling, equal to the Dharma-realm and empty space itself, and all of them together extolled that very merit, through hundreds of thousands of millions of kalpas it could never be exhausted. The bodhisattva's own merit has no limit at all, every cultivation and practice entirely complete — even if immeasurable and boundless buddhas, throughout immeasurable kalpas, spoke of it, they could never finish telling of it.
How much more so, then, the gods and humans of the world, and every śrāvaka and pratyekabuddha there is — could they, throughout immeasurable and boundless kalpas, ever bring their praise and extolling of it to its ultimate conclusion?"
The hymn closes by ranking its own witnesses in ascending order of inadequacy: countless emanated bodies could not exhaust the praise; countless buddhas across countless kalpas could not finish it; and gods, humans, śrāvakas, and pratyekabuddhas fall shorter still. This is not false modesty but the same teaching the hymn has restated from its opening homage onward — that the ten practices, and the merit born from them, exceed every measure that could be brought to bear on them, including the measure of a two-hundred-line hymn built to praise them.
Chapter 21 and Fascicle 20 Complete
This closes chapter twenty-one, "The Ten Practices" (十行品第二十一), and with it fascicle twenty of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. The fascicle ends here in the Taishō text, with no further chapter beginning before its close; fascicle twenty-one opens directly with the sūtra's twenty-second chapter, "The Ten Inexhaustible Treasuries" (十無盡藏品第二十二) — Merit Grove Bodhisattva speaking once again, this time to teach the bodhisattva's ten treasuries of faith, moral discipline, shame, remorse, learning, giving, wisdom, mindfulness, upholding, and eloquence — in Part 163.