The Great Hymn Closes, Fascicle Sixteen Complete
With all ten abodes now restated in verse, Dharma Wisdom's great hymn closes on a final benediction: the merit of even the very first thought that seeks buddhahood, it declares, exceeds what ordinary beings, śrāvakas, and pratyekabuddhas together could ever fathom — a closing measured, characteristically, against feats of holding oceans in a single hair and grinding every world into countable dust.
Unknowable Even to the Two Vehicles
The hymn's closing lines return, one final time, to the very first abode: the merit of that first thought that seeks buddhahood is declared unfathomable even to the two vehicles, śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas — knowable only to one who could hold every world in a single hair, or grind them all into dust and still count every grain.
「如是十住諸菩薩，皆從如來法化生，
隨其所有功德行，一切天人莫能測。
過去未來現在世，發心求佛無有邊，
十方國土皆充滿，莫不當成一切智。
一切國土無邊際，世界眾生法亦然，
惑業心樂各差別，依彼而發菩提意。
始求佛道一念心，世間眾生及二乘，
斯等尚亦不能知，何況所餘功德行！
十方所有諸世界，能以一毛悉稱舉，
彼人能知此佛子，趣向如來智慧行。
十方所有諸大海，悉以毛端滴令盡，
彼人能知此佛子，一念所修功德行。
一切世界抹為塵，悉能分別知其數，
如是之人乃能見，此諸菩薩所行道。
去來現在十方佛，一切獨覺及聲聞，
悉以種種妙辯才，開示初發菩提心。
發心功德不可量，充滿一切眾生界，
眾智共說無能盡，何況所餘諸妙行！」
"Thus do all the bodhisattvas of the Ten Abodes come to be born from the Tathāgata's own Dharma-transformation; according to whatever merit and conduct they have, neither gods nor humans are able to fathom them at all. Throughout the past, the future, and the present, those who give rise to the resolve and seek buddhahood are without any boundary at all, entirely filling the lands of the ten directions — there is none of them who shall not accomplish omniscience.
Every land is without any boundary or limit at all, and worlds, living beings, and dharmas are likewise so; delusion, karma, and the mind's own delight each differ, and it is in reliance upon these that the intent toward bodhi is given rise to. The very first thought of mind that seeks the buddha-path — even the living beings of the world and the two vehicles are still unable to know it at all; how much more so, then, every other kind of meritorious conduct!
Every world there is throughout the ten directions — one who is able to lift them all up entirely with a single hair, that person alone would be able to know this son of the Buddha, heading toward the Tathāgata's own conduct of wisdom. Every great ocean there is throughout the ten directions — one who is able, with the tip of a single hair, to exhaust them all entirely drop by drop, that person alone would be able to know this son of the Buddha's own meritorious conduct, cultivated within a single thought.
Grinding every world entirely into dust, and being entirely able to distinguish and know their every number — only such a person as this would then be able to see the very path that these bodhisattvas practice. The buddhas of the past, the future, and the present throughout the ten directions, and every pratyekabuddha and śrāvaka — all of them, with every kind of wondrous eloquence, open up and reveal the very first giving rise of the mind of bodhi.
The merit of giving rise to this resolve cannot be measured at all, filling the whole realm of living beings entirely; even every wisdom together, proclaiming it, could never exhaust it — how much more so, then, every other wondrous conduct there is!"
The great hymn closes exactly where it spent its longest breath — on the first abode, the Initial Resolve — rather than on the tenth abode's own culminating consecration. This is a deliberate structural choice, not an oversight: everything the hymn has said about the nine abodes that follow was, in effect, already contained within that first resolve, unfolding rather than being added to it. The closing measurement — that even the combined eloquence of every buddha, pratyekabuddha, and śrāvaka throughout the three periods of time could never exhaust the telling of this merit — brings the entire fifteenth chapter's own argument to its natural rest: an act that seems, on the surface, to be merely the beginning of the path turns out, examined closely enough, to already hold everything the path will ever become.
Part 85 Complete — Fascicle Sixteen Complete
This closes Part 85, fascicle sixteen, and the sūtra's fifteenth chapter, "The Ten Abodes" (十住品第十五): the ascent to Mount Sumeru, ten hymns from the wisdom-named bodhisattvas at the summit, and Dharma Wisdom's own two-hundred-line hymn restating the entire teaching of the Ten Abodes in verse, closing on this very benediction with no further narrative frame. Part 86 opens fascicle seventeen with the sūtra's sixteenth chapter.