In Verse, the Wet-Nurse Beholds the Newborn Buddha

Fazang names this second movement of the twenty-three-and-a-half-stanza hymn: 二有八偈半明初佛所發心得法 — "second, eight and a half stanzas revealing the first buddha's own raising of the mind and attainment of the Dharma." The half-stanza in his count is this very passage: the opening six-line block above runs to six lines rather than the usual four, the same irregular stanza length this collection has now met more than once in this teacher's own hymns. One detail worth pausing on: "觀察不見頂" — gazing upon the newborn, she cannot see even the crown of his head. This is the uṣṇīṣa mark, one of the thirty-two marks of a great being, described here at its very first appearance not as a visible feature but as something that exceeds sight altogether — a form too vast, even in infancy, to be taken in whole.

The movement Fazang names turns, across these four stanzas, from beholding to acting: the wet-nurse's own wonder at the newborn becomes, within the space of a single stanza, her own raising of the mind of awakening, and from there directly into vows of her own — adorning worlds, making offerings to every buddha, seeking to extinguish the suffering of sentient beings. The closing line, "hearing that first buddha's own Dharma, I accomplished this very Dharma-gate," restates in verse exactly what the prose account already told: her attainment did not require a lifetime of separate cultivation, but arrived directly from that first encounter itself.