A Tainted Offering, Two Hundred Fifty Kalpas Protected

Gopā names her own motive without any softening — "with a defiled mind," 染心, the same term used elsewhere in this account for the prince's own initial desire toward her. What this stanza insists on is that the field of the offering, a true child of the Buddha, outweighs the impurity of the intention behind it: two hundred and fifty kalpas of protection from the three evil destinies, earned from a single gesture whose motive she does not pretend was pure. This is a striking counterpoint to the usual Buddhist emphasis on intention as the measure of karma — here, the recipient's own sanctity carries weight enough to overcome a compromised giver's own state of mind.

This stanza closes the loop this whole hymn has been building toward: the girl named Stainless, Sublime Virtue, whose lotus birth and courtship by the prince this account already told in full prose, was not a beginning but a culmination — the fruit of two hundred and fifty kalpas of protected rebirths, themselves the fruit of a single tainted offering two hundred and fifty kalpas before that. Five hundred kalpas in total separate the young woman first begging alms of a wandering monk from the girl later found seated in a jeweled lotus, waiting for a prince who turns out to be Śākyamuni himself.