The Land Accomplished: Halls, Pools, and the Lotus-Born Buddhas
願行成就（下）
Bathing pools that rise exactly to the depth a bather wishes; food tasted but never craved; a beggar set beside a king, and a king set beside something greater still — and the passage that finally explains why this land is also called Utmost Bliss.
- This part covers
- Lecture halls and bathing pools responsive to a bather's wish; the source of the land's other name, Utmost Bliss; beings' apparitional bodies and food, eaten without craving; the parable of the beggar beside the king, extended up through six ranks of splendor; the land's final adornments; the closing image of lotus flowers whose light gives birth to buddhas, which ends the first fascicle.
23. Bathing Pools That Answer to a Wish
又講堂精舍宮殿樓觀皆七寶莊嚴自然化成。復以真珠明月摩尼眾寶。以為交露覆蓋其上。內外左右有諸浴池。或十由旬。或二十三十。乃至百千由旬。縱廣深淺各皆一等。八功德水湛然盈滿。清淨香潔味如甘露。黃金池者底白銀沙。白銀池者底黃金沙。水精池者底瑠璃沙。瑠璃池者底水精沙。珊瑚池者底琥珀沙。琥珀池者底珊瑚沙。車磲池者底瑪瑙沙。瑪瑙池者底車磲沙。白玉池者底紫金沙。紫金池者底白玉沙。或有二寶三寶。乃至七寶轉共合成。其池岸上有栴檀樹。華葉垂布香氣普熏。天優鉢羅華。鉢曇摩華。拘物頭華。分陀利華。雜色光茂彌覆水上。彼諸菩薩及聲聞眾。若入寶池。意欲令水没足。水即没足。欲令至膝。即至于膝。欲令至腰。水即至腰。欲令至頸。水即至頸。欲令灌身。自然灌身。欲令還復。水輒還復。調和冷煖自然隨意。開神悅體蕩除心垢。清明澄潔淨若無形。寶沙映徹無深不照。微瀾迴流轉相灌注。安詳徐逝不遲不疾。波揚無量自然妙聲。隨其所應莫不聞者。或聞佛聲。或聞法聲。或聞僧聲。或寂靜聲。空無我聲。大慈悲聲。波羅蜜聲。或十力無畏。不共法聲。諸通慧聲。無所作聲。不起滅聲。無生忍聲。乃至甘露灌頂眾妙法聲。如是等聲。稱其所聞歡喜無量。隨順清淨離欲寂滅真實之義。隨順三寶力無所畏不共之法。隨順通慧菩薩聲聞所行之道。無有三塗苦難之名。但有自然快樂之音。是故其國名曰極樂。
And its lecture halls, monastic dwellings, palaces, and towers are all adorned with the seven treasures, formed spontaneously of themselves, and further covered over with canopies of pearl, bright moon-jewels, and every kind of gem. Within and without, to left and right, there are bathing pools — some ten yojanas across, some twenty or thirty, up to a hundred thousand yojanas, their length, breadth, and depth all matched evenly. Water of the eight virtues fills them, still and brimming, pure, fragrant, and clean, its taste like sweet dew. In pools of yellow gold, the bed is of white silver sand; in pools of white silver, the bed is of yellow gold sand; in pools of crystal, the bed is of lapis lazuli sand; in pools of lapis lazuli, the bed is of crystal sand; in pools of coral, the bed is of amber sand; in pools of amber, the bed is of coral sand; in pools of mother-of-pearl, the bed is of carnelian sand; in pools of carnelian, the bed is of mother-of-pearl sand; in pools of white jade, the bed is of red-gold sand; in pools of red-gold, the bed is of white jade sand. Some are formed together of two or three treasures, and on up to all seven at once. On the banks of these pools grow sandalwood trees, their flowers and leaves hanging down, their fragrance spreading everywhere; heavenly blue lotuses, red lotuses, yellow lotuses, and white lotuses, of every color, grow in lush profusion, covering the water's surface. When the bodhisattvas and śrāvakas there enter these jeweled pools, if they wish the water to rise only to their feet, it rises to their feet; if they wish it to reach their knees, it reaches their knees; if to their waist, it reaches their waist; if to their neck, it reaches their neck; if they wish to be bathed all over, it bathes them all over of itself; and if they wish it to recede again, it recedes at once. Its warmth and coolness are harmonized entirely as one wishes, opening the spirit, delighting the body, and washing away every stain from the mind. Clear, bright, still, and pure, it is as though without any substance at all; the jeweled sand beneath shines through it, so that there is no depth it fails to illuminate. Its faint ripples circle and flow, pouring one into another, moving in calm and leisurely course, neither too slow nor too fast, and its rising waves send out immeasurable, spontaneous, wondrous sounds — and whoever hears them hears exactly what is fitting for them to hear. Some hear the sound of the Buddha, some the sound of the Dharma, some the sound of the Saṅgha; some hear the sound of stillness, the sound of emptiness and no-self, the sound of great compassion, the sound of the perfections; some hear the sound of the ten powers and the fearlessnesses, the sound of the qualities unique to a buddha, the sound of the higher knowledges, the sound of what neither acts nor arises nor ceases, the sound of the acceptance of the birthless — and on up to the sound of every wondrous teaching, even the sweet-dew anointing of the crown. Sounds such as these bring, to whoever hears them, joy beyond measure, according with the true meaning of what is pure, free of desire, and utterly still; according with the power of the Three Jewels and the fearless qualities unique to a buddha; according with the path practiced by bodhisattvas and śrāvakas of penetrating wisdom. There is not even the name of the suffering of the three lower paths — only the sound of joy, arising of itself. This is why that land is also named Utmost Bliss.
This is the first point in this translation where the sūtra itself supplies the name "Utmost Bliss" (極樂) — the same name used throughout the Amitābha Sūtra — as a second name for the land it has, until now, called only Peace and Bliss (安樂). Both names come from this sūtra's own text, at different points; there is no discrepancy between the two sūtras to explain away, only two names this text gives its own subject at different moments, for different reasons each time.
Huiyuan reads the water rising exactly to the depth a bather wishes — no more, no less — as the clearest possible physical illustration of what earlier vows only stated abstractly: an environment that answers to intention rather than resisting it, the same logic behind the Thirty-Eighth Vow's robes that appear the instant they are thought of. The long list of sounds the water can be heard to make — a sound suited to whatever each listener needs to hear — carries the same idea one step further: even sensory experience here is calibrated to the individual, not uniform, and never less than instructive.
24. Bodies Without Hunger, in a Land Without Want
阿難。彼佛國土諸往生者。具足如是清淨色身。諸妙音聲神通功德。所處宮殿衣服飲食。眾妙華香莊嚴之具。猶第六天自然之物。若欲食時。七寶應器自然在前。金銀、瑠璃、車磲、瑪瑙、珊瑚、虎珀、明月、真珠。如是眾鉢隨意而至。百味飲食自然盈滿。雖有此食實無食者。但見色聞香。意以為食。自然飽足。身心柔軟無所味著。事已化去時至復現。彼佛國土清淨安隱微妙快樂。次於無為泥洹之道。其諸聲聞菩薩人天。智慧髙明神通洞達。咸同一類形無異狀。但因順餘方故有人天之名。顏貌端正超世希有。容色微妙非天非人。皆受自然虛無之身無極之體。
Ānanda, all those who are born in that buddha's land are fully endowed with such a pure and radiant body, such wondrous sounds, and such spiritual powers and merit; the palaces they dwell in, their clothing, their food and drink, and every wondrous flower, fragrance, and ornament they have are like the spontaneous things of the sixth heaven. When they wish to eat, vessels of the seven treasures appear spontaneously before them — gold, silver, lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl, coral, amber, moon-pearl, and true pearl — bowls such as these arrive exactly as wished, filled spontaneously with food of a hundred flavors. And though this food is present, in truth there is no one who actually eats it — merely seeing its form and smelling its fragrance, the mind takes it as food, and one is naturally satisfied, body and mind made gentle and soft, with no attachment to taste at all. When the meal is done, it vanishes of itself, and reappears again when the time comes. That buddha's land is pure, at ease, subtle, and joyful, second only to the unconditioned path of nirvāṇa itself. The śrāvakas, bodhisattvas, humans, and gods there all have a wisdom that is bright and lofty, and spiritual powers that penetrate thoroughly; they are all alike, of a single kind, with no difference in form — it is only in accordance with the customs of other places that they are given the names "human" and "god" at all. Their countenances are upright and fine, rare beyond anything in the ordinary world, their features subtle and wondrous, neither divine nor human in the ordinary sense; all of them are endowed with a body naturally free of substance, a form without limit.
Huiyuan reads the description of eating here — food that appears, is smelled and seen, satisfies, and vanishes, with no one who actually needs it — against the Thirty-Ninth Vow's promise, back in Part 3, that the beings of this land would know a joy equal to a monk who has exhausted every outflow of affliction. The point is not asceticism transplanted into paradise; sensory pleasure is fully present — fragrance, flavor, satisfaction — but detached from craving, since nothing here is required for survival in the first place. What ordinarily binds pleasure to appetite has, on this reading, simply been removed, leaving the pleasure without the grasping that usually rides along with it.
The closing claim — that "human" and "god" are only borrowed labels, since everyone born there actually shares one formless kind of body — is Huiyuan's occasion to note that this sūtra treats rebirth in Sukhāvatī as ending the ordinary six-fold classification of beings altogether, not merely improving one's position within it. There is, strictly, no caste of "human" or "deva" left to occupy once a being is reborn there; the words survive only because they are still useful for speaking about it in language borrowed from elsewhere.
25. The Beggar Beside the King
佛告阿難：譬如世間貧窮乞人在帝王邊。形貌容狀寧可類乎。阿難白佛。假令此人在帝王邊。羸陋醜惡無以為喻。百千萬億不可計倍。所以然者。貧窮乞人底極斯下。衣不蔽形食趣支命。飢寒困苦人理殆盡。皆坐前世不植德本。積財不施富有益慳。但欲唐得貪求無厭。不信修善犯惡山積。如是壽終財寶消散。苦身積聚為之憂惱。於己無益徒為他有。無善可怙無德可恃。是故死墮惡趣受此長苦。罪畢得出生為下賤。愚鄙斯極示同人類。所以世間帝王人中獨尊。皆由宿世積德所致。慈惠博施仁愛兼濟。履信修善無所違諍。是以壽終福應得昇善道。上生天上享茲福樂。積善餘慶今得為人。遇生王家自然尊貴。儀容端正眾所敬事。妙衣珍膳隨心服御。宿福所追故能致此。佛告阿難：汝言是也。計如帝王。雖人中尊貴形色端正。比之轉輪聖王。甚為鄙陋。猶彼乞人在帝王邊也。轉輪聖王威相殊妙天下第一。比忉利天王。又復醜惡不得相喻。萬億倍也。假令天帝比第六天王。百千億倍不相類也。設第六天王。比無量壽佛國菩薩聲聞。光顏容色不相及逮。百千萬億不可計倍。
The Buddha said to Ānanda: "It is like a poor beggar standing beside a king in this world — could their form and bearing possibly be compared?" Ānanda said to the Buddha: "Were such a person to stand beside a king, they would be so wretched and unsightly that no comparison could express it — a hundred thousand koṭis of times beyond any measure. And why is this? A poor beggar has sunk to the very bottom: clothing not enough to cover the body, food barely enough to sustain life, hunger, cold, and hardship pressing them almost past what a human being can bear. All of this comes from not having planted roots of virtue in a former life — hoarding wealth without giving, growing rich yet clinging all the more tightly, wanting only to gain without effort, greedy and never satisfied, not trusting in the cultivation of good, and piling up wrongdoing like a mountain. And so, when such a person's life ends, their wealth and treasure scatter away, and the very body that toiled to gather it becomes a source of anxiety and grief — of no benefit to themselves, amassed only for others to have. With no good to rely on and no virtue to lean upon, they fall after death into an evil destiny and undergo this long suffering; and when that penalty is finished and they are born again, it is into a low and humble state — their foolishness and baseness at its very worst, though still shown in human form. As for why the king of the world stands alone, honored above all others — this too comes entirely from virtue accumulated in past lives: compassion and generosity practiced broadly, kindness and love extended to help others, trust upheld, goodness cultivated, contention with no one. And so, when such a person's life ends, in accordance with their merit they rise to a good destiny, ascending to be born among the gods and enjoying that blessedness there; and when the remaining good fortune from accumulated virtue brings them to be born human again, encountering birth into a royal house, they are naturally honored, their bearing upright and fine, respected and served by everyone, clothed in fine garments and fed rare delicacies exactly as they wish — all of it brought about by the good fortune pursuing them from before." The Buddha said to Ānanda: "What you say is true. Yet reckon it this way: however honored among people a king may be, however upright his form, set beside a wheel-turning sage-king he would seem quite wretched — just like that beggar standing beside the king. And a wheel-turning sage-king, whose majestic form is the finest under heaven, set beside the king of the Trāyastriṃśa heaven would again seem unsightly, beyond any comparison — a difference of ten thousand koṭis of times. And were the lord of that heaven set beside the king of the sixth heaven, a hundred thousand koṭis of times would not express the difference between them. And were the king of the sixth heaven himself set beside the bodhisattvas and śrāvakas of Amitāyus Buddha's land, his radiant countenance could not begin to compare — a hundred thousand koṭis of times beyond any reckoning."
This parable extends, in narrative form, the same six-rung ladder of comparison used more briefly for music in Part 4 — human king, wheel-turning sage-king, the Trāyastriṃśa heaven, on up through the sixth heaven of the desire realm — and then, in the final line, adds one rung beyond anything that ladder had previously reached: the king of the very highest heaven of the desire realm, compared to an ordinary bodhisattva of Sukhāvatī, is still the one left looking like the beggar. Huiyuan reads the parable's real target as the reader's own instinct to be impressed by worldly and heavenly rank at all — kingship, wealth, even divine status, are shown to form a single continuous scale, with no discontinuity anywhere along it, right up until Sukhāvatī, which stands outside the scale altogether rather than merely occupying its top rung.
Worth noting honestly: Ānanda's own extended reply, on why the beggar and the king ended up where they did, reads karmic cause and consequence in very direct, almost proverbial terms — hoarding without giving leads to poverty, generosity leads to honor. Huiyuan does not treat this as the sūtra's most doctrinally precise statement about karma elsewhere in the canon; it functions here as an accessible illustration for the parable's purpose, not as a technical treatise on how karmic causation actually operates.
26. Every Adornment, As the Mind Wishes
佛告阿難：無量壽國其諸天人。衣服飲食華香瓔珞。諸蓋幢幡微妙音聲。所居舍宅宮殿樓閣。稱其形色髙下大小。或一寶二寶。乃至無量眾寶。隨意所欲應念即至。又以眾寶妙衣遍布其地。一切天人踐之而行。無量寶網彌覆佛上。皆以金縷真珠百千雜寶奇妙珍異。莊嚴絞飾周匝四面。垂以寶鈴。光色晃曜盡極嚴麗。自然德風徐起微動。其風調和不寒不暑。溫涼柔軟不遲不疾。吹諸羅網及眾寶樹。演發無量微妙法音。流布萬種溫雅德香。其有聞者塵勞垢習自然不起。風觸其身皆得快樂。譬如比丘得滅盡三昧。又風吹散華遍滿佛土。隨色次第而不雜亂。柔軟光澤馨香芬烈。足履其上陷下四寸。隨舉足已還復如故。華用已訖地輒開裂。以次化沒清淨無遺。隨其時節風吹散華。如是六反。
The Buddha told Ānanda: "The gods and humans of Amitāyus's land — their clothing, food and drink, flowers and fragrances, jeweled ornaments, canopies, banners, and subtle, wondrous music; the houses, palaces, towers, and pavilions they dwell in, matched to their form in height, size, and scale — some made of one treasure, some of two, up to immeasurable treasures all at once — arrive exactly according to their wish, the moment the thought occurs. And the whole ground is spread over with wondrous robes of every jewel, and every god and human there walks upon them. Immeasurable jeweled nets cover over that buddha-land, all woven through with threads of gold, pearls, and a hundred thousand kinds of rare and marvelous treasures, adorned and bound about on every side, hung with jeweled bells, their light and color shining forth in the utmost splendor. A spontaneous, virtuous wind rises now and then, gently stirring — a wind perfectly tempered, never cold and never hot, warm or cool, soft, neither too slow nor too fast — and as it blows through the jeweled nets and the jeweled trees, it draws forth immeasurable, subtle sounds of the Dharma, and spreads abroad a thousand kinds of gentle, virtuous fragrance. Whoever encounters it finds that the toil and stain of worldly habit spontaneously fail to arise; and wherever that wind touches the body, one attains joy, as though a monk had entered the samādhi of the cessation of all sensation and perception. And that wind also scatters flowers across the whole buddha-land, each falling in its own color, in due order, never mixed in confusion, soft, lustrous, and richly fragrant. Where a footstep falls upon them, they yield four inches and spring back the instant the foot is lifted, exactly as before; and when the flowers have served their use, the ground opens of itself, and they sink away, transformed and vanished, cleanly, without a trace remaining, so that in due season the wind may scatter fresh flowers again. And this happens six times over, in each day and night."
"Six times over" recalls the Amitābha Sūtra's own "six periods of day and night" — the same old Indian division of time, three watches by day and three by night — used there to describe beings offering flowers to buddhas of other worlds and returning in time for a midday meal. Huiyuan reads the recurrence of this exact time-division across both sūtras as evidence that the two texts, though translated a century and a half apart by different translators, are drawing on the same received cosmological vocabulary for how time is structured in a Pure Land: not absent, but organized entirely around continuous practice and beauty rather than around labor or need.
27. Lotus Flowers, and the Buddhas Within Them
又眾寶蓮華周滿世界。一一寶華百千億葉。其葉光明無量種色。青色青光。白色白光。玄黃朱紫光色亦然。煒燁煥爛明曜日月。一一華中。出三十六百千億光。一一光中。出三十六百千億佛。身色紫金相好殊特。一一諸佛。又放百千光明。普為十方說微妙法。如是諸佛。各各安立無量眾生於佛正道。
And jeweled lotus flowers fill the whole world; each jeweled flower has a hundred thousand koṭis of petals, and the light of each petal shines in immeasurable colors — blue petals with blue light, white petals with white light, and the same for petals of black, yellow, vermilion, and violet, each gleaming and radiant, brighter than sun or moon. From within each flower there come forth thirty-six hundred thousand koṭis of rays of light, and from within each ray of light there come forth thirty-six hundred thousand koṭis of buddhas, their bodies the color of red-gold, their marks rare and excellent. And each of these buddhas, in turn, sends forth a hundred thousand rays of light, and, for the sake of the ten directions, expounds the subtle Dharma — and every one of these buddhas, each in their own place, establishes immeasurable beings in the true path of a buddha.
This image — flower, then light, then buddha, endlessly multiplying outward, each new buddha still teaching — closes the first fascicle of the sūtra, and Huiyuan reads its placement here as deliberate rather than incidental: it is the last image offered before the text turns, at the start of the second fascicle, to the beings who will actually be born within these very flowers. The image is generative rather than merely decorative — flowers that do not simply exist as scenery but continuously produce teaching buddhas from within themselves — and it anticipates, without yet describing outright, the lotus-birth awaiting anyone reborn in this land, which the next parts of this translation take up directly.
This is also where the first fascicle (卷上) of Saṃghavarman's translation ends and the second fascicle (卷下) begins. The sūtra was transmitted and copied in these two physical scrolls from its earliest period, and the division marks a real structural seam in the text, not an editorial choice made for this translation. The next part turns to who is actually reborn in this land, and how.