The Ten Powers, and a Buddha Who Never Departs

Root Verses 佛地 · 十力 · 佛不入涅槃

Past the Tenth Ground lies buddhahood itself — the text's final chapter, and this collection's closing entry. Chinese source at left is Venerable Fazun's (法尊法師) translation; the English at right is Ru-Yi's own translation of that Chinese.

Where Buddhahood Is Attained

The text places final buddhahood "at the summit of the form realm" — and the lecture is careful to flag that this is not the ordinary heavenly abode of that name, available to any sufficiently accomplished meditator, but a pure state reached only by a Tenth Ground bodhisattva who has completed the cause of the ten powers and gone further still. Once there, every quality the path has been slowly cultivating — across ten grounds, ten perfections, and everything examined in the entries before this one — is said to reach a completion that admits no further increase and no equal.

The Ten Powers

What that completion actually consists of is spelled out as ten specific powers of knowledge: knowing what is and isn't possible, knowing the precise ripening of karma, knowing beings' individual inclinations and underlying dispositions, knowing every path leading to every destination, knowing the full range of meditative attainments, recollecting past lives without limit, knowing future rebirths, and knowing the complete exhaustion of all outflows. Together they describe something closer to total, unobstructed comprehension than to any single skill — and the text pairs this catalogue with an account of the three bodies through which a Buddha's teaching reaches different kinds of beings: the reality-body itself, an enjoyment-body visible only to those who have already realized what it embodies, and the emanation-body (extending, the text notes, even to inanimate manifestations) that can reach beings who could perceive nothing subtler.

Effortless Activity

The second verse above answers a question the text has been building toward since much earlier in the series: once nothing is left to accomplish, does a Buddha's activity simply stop? The text's answer uses the image of a potter's wheel — spun hard, then released, it keeps turning and can still shape a pot long after the potter's hand has withdrawn. A Buddha's continuing teaching activity works the same way: sustained not by any renewed act of deliberate will in the present moment, but by the momentum of vows made across the entire path, meeting the present receptivity of beings still able to benefit from them. Effort and intention were real, once; what continues now is closer to a natural consequence than to an ongoing decision.

Why the Buddha Never Enters Final Nirvana

The text's closing argument is also, in a real sense, where this whole collection began. The very first entry in this series opened with the homage's image of compassion as a seed at the start of the path, water sustaining its growth, and — this was the less obvious part — still present at the end, as what is enjoyed once the fruit has ripened. The Buddha-ground chapter cashes that image out in full: compassion is described here as a mother's milk, and wisdom as the mother who gives birth — and as long as any being remains unliberated, that nursing relationship simply doesn't end. The text's reasoning isn't sentimental attachment; it's closer to structural necessity. Nothing about attaining buddhahood removes the fact that beings continue to suffer, mistaking harmful cravings for genuine goods the way a sick person might crave the very poison making them worse. A Buddha's compassion is described as exceeding even a mother's grief for a poisoned child — and it is precisely this, the text says, that "holds the mind back from cessation." Buddhahood, on this account, is not a departure. It's the point at which compassion, no longer limited by anything the path itself required, becomes simply unceasing.

A Note on the Lecture's Discussion

The final session of the series opens with an image worth closing on here too: a garuḍa, capable of flying the immense distance between one cosmic mountain and another, eventually turns back — not because it runs out of sky, but because its own strength gives out first. The text applies this to itself: not even advanced disciples or bodhisattvas can exhaust praise of a Buddha's qualities, and Candrakīrti, in the treatise's own closing dedication, includes a strikingly humble admission that he can only "recite a small portion" of what Nāgārjuna's tradition has already made known.

Ven. Miao Jing closes his own lecture series in a similarly candid register, recounting — briefly, and without much ceremony — how he came to teach this text at all: a lay disciple in California arranged the course after a different teacher fell through, and he says plainly that he had, at the time, only a partial grasp of the material and "boldly" agreed anyway. He thanks Venerable Fazun by name, noting that without Fazun's Chinese translation he could not have studied this text at all, having no Sanskrit or Tibetan of his own. And he restates, one last time, the one place in the text where he has openly disagreed with Candrakīrti throughout this series — the treatment of Yogācāra discussed in an earlier entry in this collection — while adding that he does not presume too far, given the tradition's own account of Candrakīrti as an unusually accomplished master. It's a fitting note for a lecture series, and for a set of reading notes built on top of it, to end on: real scholarship, offered candidly, without pretending to have the last word.