Countless Buddhas Attain and Pass Away
The hymn's third movement closes: within a single mote of dust, countless bodhisattvas go forth and attain the most correct awakening, and countless buddhas manifest their own parinirvāṇa, all witnessed within one single thought-moment. A final stanza then declares this entire Dharma-gate beyond exhaustive praise, however many kalpas were spent trying.
Going Forth, Awakening, and Turning the Wheel — All in One Mote of Dust
「一念中悉見， 無量諸剎海，
一切諸菩薩， 出家詣道場。
不可思議剎， 得成最正覺，
顯現諸方便， 除滅眾生苦。
一一微塵中， 轉無盡法輪，
無盡妙音海， 普雨甘露法。」
"Within a single thought-moment, I beheld in full the boundless ocean of every land, and every bodhisattva going forth from the household life to the bodhimaṇḍa.
Throughout inconceivable lands, they attained the most correct awakening, manifesting every skillful means, extinguishing the suffering of sentient beings.
Within each and every mote of dust, they turned the inexhaustible wheel of the Dharma, an inexhaustible ocean of sublime voices, universally raining down the Dharma of ambrosia."
These three stanzas trace the classic arc of a buddha's own final life — going forth, awakening, and turning the Dharma-wheel — but compressed to occupy a single mote of dust, and witnessed entirely within a single thought-moment. The scale established across this teacher's whole episode — Māyā's womb holding the trichiliocosm, her pores holding every past life — reappears here in miniature, applied now to the very structure of enlightenment itself rather than to a single body.
Parinirvāṇa, Offerings, and a Dharma-Gate Beyond Praise
「念念中悉見， 一一微塵中，
億剎塵等佛， 示現般涅槃。
見無量剎海， 如來初受生，
一一諸佛所， 無量身供養。
不思議剎海， 無量諸群生，
我以諸方便， 為說甘露法。
佛子我知此， 不思議法門，
無量諸劫數， 稱讚不可盡。」
"Within every single thought-moment, I beheld in full, within each and every mote of dust, buddhas as numerous as motes of dust in a koṭi of lands, manifesting their own parinirvāṇa.
I beheld, throughout the boundless ocean of lands, every tathāgata's own first taking of rebirth, and, at the presence of each and every buddha, made offerings with boundless bodies.
Throughout the inconceivable ocean of lands, for the boundless multitudes of sentient beings, I, through every skillful means, expounded for them the Dharma of ambrosia.
Child of the Buddha, I know only this inconceivable Dharma-gate; throughout boundless numbers of kalpas, it could not be praised to its very end."
Fazang closes his own count here: 四末後一偈結歎無盡 — "fourth, the final stanza, closing with praise of the inexhaustible." The hymn's arc across its own thirteen-stanza third movement runs from taking rebirth to parinirvāṇa and back to rebirth again — the sequence circling rather than ending — before the closing stanza steps back entirely, admitting that even this single Dharma-gate, however thoroughly described across twenty-three and a half stanzas, "could not be praised to its very end" across boundless further kalpas of trying. This is the same humility this collection's teachers return to again and again at the close of their own testimony: the more that is said, the more plainly what remains unsaid comes into view.
Part 136 In Progress
The entire twenty-three-and-a-half-stanza hymn is now complete. Part 137 turns to the deva's own closing words — naming the boundary of her own attainment against the great bodhisattvas' far larger scope, and sending Sudhana onward to Gopā, a Śākya woman at Kapilavastu — closing out teacher 39's entire episode.
Continue to Part 137 →