Ten Worlds, One Vow
Gopā's total knowledge of this Sahā world, its buddhas, and its sentient beings closes with a single further claim: the same knowledge holds across nine further categories of world throughout the ten directions. All of it, she says, rests on one source — the buddha Vairocana's own root vow.
Nine Further Worlds, and a Single Root Vow
「知彼菩薩諸佛剎海，究竟法海；知眾生海，修習一切菩薩法門，滿足大願，顯現種種自在神力，如是等事，我悉了知。如此娑婆世界知十方世界世界性、世界海、世界輪、世界圓滿、世界分別、世界旋、世界轉、世界蓮華、世界須彌、世界相中事，亦復如是。盧舍那佛本願力故，我悉深入分別念知，何以故？」
"I know the ocean of every buddha-land of those bodhisattvas, and the very end of the ocean of the Dharma; I know the ocean of sentient beings, the cultivation of every bodhisattva's own Dharma-gate, the fulfillment of the great vow, and the manifestation of every kind of sovereign spiritual power — matters such as these, I know them all in full. Just as I know these matters within this Sahā world, so too, within the worlds of the ten directions — every world-nature, every ocean of worlds, every world-wheel, every world-fullness, every world-discernment, every world-whirl, every world-turning, every world-lotus, every world-Sumeru, and every matter within every world-mark — I know them in just the same way. It is by the power of the buddha Vairocana's own root vow that I am able to deeply enter, discern, and recollect all of this. Why is this so?"
The ten "world" categories named here — world-nature and ocean of worlds already familiar from earlier teachers in this collection, joined now by world-wheel, world-fullness, world-discernment, world-whirl, world-turning, world-lotus, world-Sumeru, and world-mark — function as this cosmology's own comprehensive taxonomy of every kind of cosmic structure a world can take. Naming all ten in sequence is itself a claim to totality: not one Sahā world known deeply, but every possible register of "world" known equally, throughout every direction. The single cause given for this — Vairocana's own root vow — answers in advance the question Gopā poses to herself at the passage's close, before turning, in what follows, to answer it directly.
Part 151 In Progress
Gopā has claimed total knowledge across every register of world. Part 152 closes her answer — explaining why this Dharma-gate makes such knowledge possible, and naming its final scope: the minds, roots of goodness, and purity of every sentient being, and the sovereign samādhi of every śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva, and buddha alike.
Continue to Part 152 →