One Voice, Understood According to Every Need
The hymn continues: the tathāgata, for the sake of sentient beings, explains through skillful means, distinguishing each part. When he turns this Dharma-wheel, it shakes every land, the great ocean, and the vajra mountains — yet none at all feel any fear. The tathāgata speaks with a single voice, yet each being understands according to what they themselves need, dissolving the defilement of every affliction, causing them to abide in all-wisdom. The tathāgata speaks with a single voice: some hear of giving, precepts, and forbearance; diligence, meditation, and wisdom; loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity; the four foundations of mindfulness, the four right efforts, the bases of supernormal power and every faculty and power; the factors of awakening, calm-abiding and insight, mindfulness, and every gate of spiritual penetration. The tathāgata speaks with a single voice, and the eight classes of beings, humans and non-humans, Brahmā, Śakra, and the four heavenly kings, each understand according to their own kind of voice.
Every Class of Being, Hearing in Its Own Kind of Voice
「如來為眾生， 方便分別說，
轉此法輪時， 震動一切剎，
大海金剛山， 無有恐怖者。
如來一音說， 各隨所應解，
滅諸煩惱垢， 令住薩婆若。
如來一音說， 或聞施戒忍，
精進禪智慧， 慈悲及喜捨，
四念四正勤， 如意諸根力，
覺道止觀念， 神通諸法門。
如來一音說， 八部人非人，
梵釋四天王， 隨類音聲解。」
"The tathāgata, for the sake of sentient beings, explains through skillful means, distinguishing each part;
When he turns this Dharma-wheel, it shakes every land,
The great ocean and the vajra mountains — yet none at all feel any fear.
The tathāgata speaks with a single voice, yet each being understands according to what they themselves need,
Dissolving the defilement of every affliction, causing them to abide in all-wisdom.
The tathāgata speaks with a single voice: some hear of giving, precepts, and forbearance,
Diligence, meditation, and wisdom, loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity,
The four foundations of mindfulness, the four right efforts, the bases of supernormal power and every faculty and power,
The factors of awakening, calm-abiding and insight, mindfulness, and every gate of spiritual penetration.
The tathāgata speaks with a single voice, and the eight classes of beings, humans and non-humans,
Brahmā, Śakra, and the four heavenly kings, each understand according to their own kind of voice."
"The tathāgata speaks with a single voice" (如來一音說) states, in its most compact and often-quoted form, a teaching found across much of Mahāyāna literature: a buddha's own speech is not multiplied into different sermons for different audiences, but issues as a single, undifferentiated sound that each hearer nonetheless receives as precisely the teaching suited to their own capacity and need. Fazang reads the earthquake that "shakes every land... yet none at all feel any fear" as this stanza's own paired image for the same principle applied to the physical world: a single event with a single, universal cause produces no uniform response, since what each being experiences depends entirely on their own condition — fear absent here not because the shaking is gentle, but because the beings capable of witnessing this teaching have already progressed beyond ordinary fear.
Part 445 Complete
The famous "one voice, many understandings" teaching is now given in full. Part 446 turns to how this single voice addresses the eighty-four thousand specific defilements of greed, hatred, delusion, pride, stinginess, and jealousy — each being given precisely the antidote-teaching it requires.
Continue to Part 446 →