Ten Dharmas for Meeting a Good and Wise Friend
Gopā traces the bodhisattva's valiant, unretreating diligence back to its actual source: meeting good and wise friends in the first place. She names ten dharmas that make such meetings possible — not sparing one's own body or life, not seeking worldly pleasure, and purely cultivating the bodhisattva's own perfect wisdom among them.
Ten Dharmas, the Root of Every Meeting
「佛子！若諸菩薩勇猛精進，心無退轉，出生修習佛無盡法，值善知識故。佛子！菩薩有十法值善知識。何等為十？所謂：不惜身命、不求世樂、知諸法相而不捨離、一切智願、觀察法界、離三有海、無所依住、深入一切菩薩諸願、普照一切諸佛世界、淨修菩薩圓滿智慧，是為十法值善知識。」
"Child of the Buddha, if the bodhisattvas are valiant and diligent, their minds never retrogressing, giving rise to and cultivating the buddha's own inexhaustible dharmas, it is because they have met good and wise friends. Child of the Buddha, a bodhisattva has ten dharmas for meeting a good and wise friend. What are these ten? Namely: not sparing one's own body or life; not seeking worldly pleasure; knowing the mark of every dharma, yet not relinquishing or departing from it; the vow of omniscience; contemplating the Dharma-realm; departing from the ocean of the three modes of existence; abiding with no reliance on anything; deeply entering every bodhisattva's own vows; universally illumining every buddha's own world; and purely cultivating the bodhisattva's own perfect wisdom. These are the ten dharmas for meeting a good and wise friend."
This second list of ten reaches back one causal step further than the first: not what fulfills a bodhisattva's own conduct, but what actually brings a bodhisattva into contact with a good and wise friend to begin with. Read against the whole shape of this collection, the list names, in miniature, exactly what Sudhana himself has been doing since the very first page — not sparing his own body or life in travel, not seeking worldly pleasure along the way, deeply entering every bodhisattva's own vows at every one of his now-forty teachers. Gopā is not describing an abstract principle here; she is describing, without naming him, the pilgrim standing in front of her.
Part 146 In Progress
Two sets of ten dharmas are now complete. Part 147 turns to verse, as Gopā retells this whole teaching a second time in a hymn of thirteen stanzas.
Continue to Part 147 →