The Crown Whose Washing Frees the Four Armies

"The fourfold army" (四種兵眾, the classical Indian military formation of elephant corps, cavalry, chariotry, and infantry, standard in descriptions of a cakravartin's own royal power) usually travels only over land — its release into "open sky" upon the crown's washing is the marvel this simile turns on, a mundane force of conquest transformed into an unbounded, aerial one. Fazang reads the mapping onto "the unconditioned domain... in the very midst of open space" as this catalogue's clearest spatial image yet for liberation itself: not merely freedom from bondage but freedom to move through what was previously inaccessible terrain entirely, exactly as the crown's washing does not merely clean the ornament but transforms the very mode of the army's own movement.