Light That Grows With Every Drop of Oil
The catalogue continues: it is like a bright lamp that enters a great dark room, able to illuminate and dispel every darkness there entirely; the lamp of the mind of bodhi is likewise, entering the dark room of the mind, able to remove entirely the darkness of delusion accumulated across boundless kalpas, fully endowing the bodhisattva's own bright, pure wisdom. It is like a lamp's own wick, whose light corresponds to the wick's own fineness or coarseness, and which, should oil be added, only grows brighter still; the wick of the mind of bodhi is likewise, sending forth, according to its own root vow, the light of wisdom that universally illuminates the Dharma-realm — and as the oil of great compassion is added, teaching and transforming sentient beings, purifying buddha-lands, and carrying out every buddha's own work, it is without end.
The Oil of Great Compassion Feeds a Light Without End
「譬如明燈入大闇室，悉能照除一切闇冥。菩提心燈亦復如是，入心闇室，於無量劫積集癡闇，悉能除滅，具足菩薩明淨智慧。
「譬如燈炷，隨其精麁，光明亦爾，若益膏油，光明轉增。菩提心炷亦復如是，隨其本願，出智慧光，普照法界，增大悲油，教化眾生，淨佛世界，行諸佛事，無有窮盡。
"It is like a bright lamp that enters a great dark room, able to illuminate and dispel every darkness there entirely. The lamp of the mind of bodhi is likewise: entering the dark room of the mind, it is able to remove entirely the darkness of delusion accumulated across boundless kalpas, fully endowing the bodhisattva with bright, pure wisdom.
"It is like a lamp's own wick, whose light corresponds to whether the wick itself is fine or coarse, and which, should oil be added to it, grows only brighter still. The wick of the mind of bodhi is likewise: sending forth, according to its own root vow, a light of wisdom that universally illuminates the Dharma-realm — and as the oil of great compassion is added to it, teaching and transforming sentient beings, purifying buddha-lands, and carrying out every one of the buddha's own works, it continues without end."
The wick simile's careful attention to "fine or coarse" wick-quality — a real, observable variable in oil-lamp technology, where a wick's own material determines the baseline brightness before any oil is added — is mapped onto "root vow" (本願), the specific, individual aspiration a given bodhisattva first makes, which likewise sets a baseline before compassionate action is added to it. Fazang reads this as one of the catalogue's more technically precise similes: it does not collapse the wick and the oil into a single undifferentiated cause, but preserves two distinct contributing factors — an inherent vow and an added compassionate fuel — exactly paralleling the bodhisattva path's own combination of original aspiration and ongoing compassionate practice.
Part 362 Complete
Two lamp similes are now given in full. Part 363 turns to Māra Vaśavartin's own natural golden crown, unbreakable by any god of the desire-realm, and to the roar of a great lion that emboldens every lesser lion who hears it.
Continue to Part 363 →