Samantabhadra's Own Conduct Within One Life
A bodhisattva who learns as Sudhana has learned is able to consummate every practice, purify every land, and, encountering every good friend, become endowed within a single lifetime with every one of Samantabhadra's own conduct. Maitreya then begins a new catalogue of oceans: the ocean of dignified bearing, the ocean of wisdom, the ocean of awakening, the ocean of bodhisattva practice.
Encountering Every Good Friend Within a Single Lifetime
「諸善男子！若有菩薩，如是學者，則能究竟菩薩所行，成滿大願，近佛菩提，淨一切剎；教化眾生，深入法界，具足一切諸波羅蜜；廣菩薩行，畢本意性，出於魔業；值遇一切諸善知識，於一生中，能具普賢菩薩諸行。此童子者，入威儀海，諸智慧海；修菩提海，菩薩行海；……」
"Good men, if there is a bodhisattva who learns in this way, they will be able to consummate every one of the bodhisattva's own practices, accomplish every great vow, draw near to the buddha's own awakening, and purify every land; teaching and transforming sentient beings, entering deeply into the dharma-realm, and being endowed with every one of the pāramitās; broadening the bodhisattva's own practice, fulfilling their own original intent and nature, and emerging free of every māra's own activity; encountering every good friend, they are able, within a single lifetime, to be endowed with every one of Samantabhadra's own practices. This boy has entered the ocean of dignified bearing, every ocean of wisdom; he cultivates the ocean of awakening, the ocean of bodhisattva practice … [the catalogue continues]"
"Within a single lifetime, to be endowed with every one of Samantabhadra's own practices" is a striking claim given how vast this collection has already shown that conduct to be — Fazang reads this as the direct fruit of the causal principle just stated: encountering every good friend in sequence is what compresses into one ordinary human lifetime an accomplishment this teaching elsewhere describes as spanning uncountable kalpas. The "ocean" catalogue that follows will recur throughout this teaching's remaining praise of Sudhana, mirroring the same device used earlier in the hymn to Maitreya himself.
Part 309 In Progress
This new catalogue of oceans is only beginning. Part 310 continues with the ocean of every buddha-land, every buddha, and every offering, closing on a cloud of sovereign power that every sentient being beholds.
Continue to Part 310 →