Eleven Thickets
The ninth ground is the ground of the teacher, and it begins by looking inside the people to be taught. What it finds there it calls 稠林 — dense thicket, undergrowth — eleven of them, and then it starts describing what grows in each.
Entering the Ninth Ground
No simile and no interval — the entry is a list of nine things done, ending with the one that makes them a bodhisattva's rather than anyone else's.
爾時，金剛藏菩薩告解脫月菩薩言：「佛子！菩薩摩訶薩以如是無量智思量觀察，欲更求轉勝寂滅解脫，復修習如來智慧，入如來祕密法，觀察不思議大智性，淨諸陀羅尼三昧門，具廣大神通，入差別世界，修力、無畏、不共法，隨諸佛轉法輪，不捨大悲本願力，得入菩薩第九善慧地。
Then Vajragarbha Bodhisattva said to Vimuktacandra Bodhisattva: "Child of the Buddha! A bodhisattva mahāsattva who, with measureless wisdom such as this, deliberates and contemplates, and who wishes to seek a still more surpassing liberation of quiescence — who cultivates the Tathāgata's wisdom again, enters the Tathāgata's secret Dharma, contemplates the inconceivable nature of great wisdom, purifies the gateways of the dhāraṇīs and the samādhis, is complete in vast and expansive spiritual penetration, enters into differentiated worlds, cultivates the powers, the fearlessnesses and the unshared dharmas, turns the Dharma-wheel in accordance with the buddhas, and does not forsake the power of the original vow of great compassion — attains entry into the bodhisattva's ninth ground, Sādhumatī, the Ground of Excellent Wisdom.
「佛子！菩薩摩訶薩住此善慧地，如實知善不善無記法行、有漏無漏法行、世間出世間法行、思議不思議法行、定不定法行、聲聞獨覺法行、菩薩行法行、如來地法行、有為法行、無為法行。此菩薩以如是智慧，如實知眾生心稠林、煩惱稠林、業稠林、根稠林、解稠林、性稠林、樂欲稠林、隨眠稠林、受生稠林、習氣相續稠林、三聚差別稠林。
"Child of the Buddha! A bodhisattva mahāsattva abiding on this Ground of Excellent Wisdom knows exactly as they are the conduct of dharmas that is wholesome, unwholesome and indeterminate; the conduct of dharmas with outflows and without outflows; the conduct of dharmas worldly and world-transcending; the conduct of dharmas conceivable and inconceivable; the conduct of dharmas fixed and unfixed; the conduct of dharmas of the śrāvakas and the pratyekabuddhas; the conduct of dharmas that is the bodhisattva's practice; the conduct of dharmas of the ground of the Tathāgata; and the conduct of dharmas conditioned and unconditioned. With such wisdom as this, this bodhisattva knows exactly as they are the thicket of beings' minds, the thicket of their afflictions, the thicket of their karma, the thicket of their faculties, the thicket of their understandings, the thicket of their natures, the thicket of what they delight in and desire, the thicket of their latent tendencies, the thicket of their taking birth, the thicket of the continuing succession of their habitual tendencies, and the thicket of the differences among the three groups.
稠林 — thicket. The word is agricultural before it is doctrinal: dense scrub, the kind of growth that cannot be walked through and cannot be seen into. It is applied here eleven times to the interior of ordinary people, and the ninth ground's whole achievement will be that it can see into all eleven.
三聚 — the three groups: those settled in rightness, those settled in wrongness, and those settled in neither. To call even this a thicket is a fine touch, since the three groups are a classification, and the sūtra is saying that people do not sit neatly inside their classification either.
Mind, Affliction, Karma
Each thicket is then opened. Mind gets ten aspects, afflictions ten, karma ten — and each list closes with the same formula, that in brief it runs to eighty-four thousand.
此菩薩如實知眾生心種種相，所謂：雜起相、速轉相、壞不壞相、無形質相、無邊際相、清淨相、垢無垢相、縛不縛相、幻所作相、隨諸趣生相；如是百千萬億乃至無量，皆如實知。又知諸煩惱種種相，所謂：久遠隨行相、無邊引起相、俱生不捨相、眠起一義相、與心相應不相應相、隨趣受生而住相、三界差別相、愛見癡慢如箭深入過患相、三業因緣不絕相；略說乃至八萬四千，皆如實知。
This bodhisattva knows exactly as they are the many aspects of beings' minds — namely, the aspect of arising mixed together, the aspect of turning swiftly, the aspect of perishing and not perishing, the aspect of having no shape or substance, the aspect of having no bound, the aspect of purity, the aspect of being defiled and undefiled, the aspect of being bound and unbound, the aspect of being made by conjuring, and the aspect of being born according to the destinies — and so on through a hundred thousand ten-thousand koṭis of them and on to the measureless, all known exactly as they are. They know too the many aspects of the afflictions — namely, the aspect of following along from the far distant past, the aspect of giving rise to boundless things, the aspect of being born together with one and not forsaken, the aspect of lying dormant and arising being one in meaning, the aspect of being associated and not associated with mind, the aspect of abiding while taking birth according to one's destiny, the aspect of the differences among the three realms, the aspect of craving and views and delusion and pride being calamities that enter deep as an arrow, and the aspect of the causes and conditions of the three kinds of karma never being cut off — spoken of in brief on up to eighty-four thousand of them, all known exactly as they are.
又知諸業種種相，所謂：善不善無記相、有表示無表示相、與心同生不離相、因自性剎那壞而次第集果不失相、有報無報相、受黑黑等眾報相、如田無量相、凡聖差別相、現受生受後受相、乘非乘定不定相；略說乃至八萬四千，皆如實知。
They know too the many aspects of karma — namely, the aspect of being wholesome, unwholesome and indeterminate; the aspect of being manifest and unmanifest; the aspect of being born together with mind and not separate from it; the aspect that, though its own nature perishes in an instant, the fruit is gathered in due order and is not lost; the aspect of having recompense and having none; the aspect of undergoing every kind of recompense, black and black and the rest; the aspect of being measureless, as a field is; the aspect of the difference between the ordinary and the noble; the aspect of being undergone in this life, in the next birth, or in a later one; and the aspect of being of a vehicle or not of a vehicle, fixed or unfixed — spoken of in brief on up to eighty-four thousand of them, all known exactly as they are.
眠起一義相 — the aspect of lying dormant and arising being one in meaning. 隨眠, the latent tendency, is literally what sleeps along with a person. The line insists that the sleeping and the waking form are not two things, which is why a tendency cannot be dealt with by waiting for it to subside.
受黑黑等眾報相 — undergoing every kind of recompense, black and black and the rest. The phrase abbreviates an old fourfold scheme of karma: black with black result, white with white, black-and-white mixed, and neither-black-nor-white, which ends karma altogether. The sūtra gives only the first term and trusts the reader with the series.
Part 465 Complete
This opens Sādhumatī, the Ground of Excellent Wisdom, the ninth of the Ten Grounds, in fascicle thirty-eight. Part 466 continues opening the thickets — the aspects of the faculties, keen and middling and dull; understandings, natures and desires each in their three degrees; the latent tendencies that only the noble path can pull out; and the taking of birth, with karma for a field, craving for the water that soaks it, ignorance for the darkness that covers it, and consciousness for the seed.