A Vow That Never Once Broke
Since making that ancient vow, Māyā has been mother to Vairocana through every bodhisattva-practice life he has ever lived, and, further, to every buddha of past, present, and the ten directions whose great light has ever come to illumine her own body and palace. She closes this whole account by admitting the boundary of what she herself can know or explain.
Mother to Every Light That Has Ever Touched Her
「善男子！我從爾時發願已來，盧舍那佛於一切有行菩薩行，教化眾生，乃至最後受生，我常為母。復次，善男子！現在、過去、十方、無量、無邊諸佛，放大光明來照我身、宮殿、住處者，彼最後生，我悉為母。善男子！我唯知此大願智幻法門；諸大菩薩具大悲藏，教化眾生，心無厭足，得自在法，一一毛孔現一切佛自在神力。我當云何能知、能說彼功德行？」
"Good man, from the time I made that vow onward, throughout every life in which Vairocana Buddha has practiced the bodhisattva's own practice, teaching and transforming sentient beings, up to and including his final rebirth, I have always been his mother. Further, good man, of every buddha of the present, the past, and the ten directions, boundless and without limit, whose great light has ever come to illumine my own body, my palace, and my dwelling-place — in that buddha's final rebirth, I have been mother to every one of them as well. Good man, I know only this Dharma-gate of the Vow's Own Wisdom-Illusion; the great bodhisattvas, who possess the great treasury of compassion, teach and transform sentient beings with a mind that never tires or is satisfied, who have attained the sovereign Dharma, manifesting every buddha's own sovereign spiritual power from each and every one of their own pores — how could I possibly know, or possibly speak of, the practice of their own merit and virtue?"
Māyā's self-limitation here follows the standard formula this collection has used at the close of every one of Sudhana's 53 teachers so far — each declares their own liberation genuine but partial, deferring to the bodhisattvas' own boundless practice as something beyond their capacity to fully know or describe. What distinguishes Māyā's own version is scope: rather than one liberation among many, hers turns out to explain the motherhood of every buddha whose light has ever reached her — a claim so vast that her own admitted limitation reads less as false modesty than as an honest acknowledgment of a genuinely cosmic scale.
Part 219 In Progress
Māyā's own account of her Dharma-gate is now complete. Part 220 turns to her farewell to Sudhana and her referral to the next teacher — a young goddess named Light, Lord of the Devas, in the Trāyastriṃśa Heaven.
Continue to Part 220 →