Every Buddha Distinct, No Two Alike
In another place, within the tower, Sudhana saw every tathāgata surrounded and encircled by a great assembly; and he came to know as well that the families of every buddha differ, that their lineages differ, and that their bodies, their lifespans, their kalpas, and their lands differ; that the boundless Dharma-gates they teach differ; and that how long their true Dharma abides in the world differs — discerning and fully understanding that in every single case, none of it is the same as any other.
No Two Buddhas the Same
或於樓觀，見諸如來，大眾圍遶、又知諸佛家族不同，種姓不同，其身壽量劫剎，教授無量法門，正法住世，分別了知，皆悉不同。
In another place, within the tower, he saw every tathāgata surrounded and encircled by a great assembly; and he came to know as well that the families of every buddha differ, that their lineages differ, that their bodies, their lifespans, their kalpas, and their lands differ, that the boundless Dharma-gates they teach differ, and that how long their true Dharma abides in the world differs — discerning and fully understanding that in every single case, none of it is the same as any other.
This brief but pivotal passage introduces a theme that will govern the entire remainder of the tower vision: individuation without limit. Every buddha differs from every other in every describable respect — Fazang reads this insistence on total particularity as the necessary counterpart to the vision's equally insistent claims of boundless number and interpenetration; the tower does not show countless identical copies of a single archetype, but countless genuinely distinct buddhas, worlds, and beings, each entire and irreducible, which is precisely what makes the vision's scale so difficult to convey in ordinary language.
Part 391 Complete
This brief but consequential passage on the distinctness of every buddha is now given in full. Part 392 turns to the single most extraordinary tower Sudhana beholds within all the others — one that contains within itself the entire trichiliocosm, and shows the complete life of a buddha unfolding from conception to relics distributed.
Continue to Part 392 →