Ten Trillion Buddha-Lands Away, and Who May Go
The ninth doubt combines two objections into one: an impossible distance for a weak being to cross, and a line from the Rebirth Treatise that seems to exclude women and those with incomplete faculties from rebirth altogether. The treatise answers both by relocating the question from geography to mind — and from who may go, to what one becomes once there.
Doubt 9: An Impossible Distance, and an Apparent Exclusion
第九疑
問：「西方去此十萬億佛剎，凡夫劣弱，云何可到？又《往生論》云：『女人及根缺，二乘種不生。』既有此教，當知女人及以根缺者，定必不得往生？」
答：「為對凡夫肉眼、生死心量說耳，西方去此，十萬億佛剎。但使眾生淨土業成者，臨終在定之心，即是淨土受生之心；動念即是生淨土時。為此，《觀經》云：『彌陀佛國去此不遠。』又業力不可思議，一念即得生彼，不須愁遠。又如人夢，身雖在床，而心意識，遍至他方一切世界，如平生不異也。生淨土亦爾，動念即至，不須疑也。『女人及根缺，二乘種不生』者，但論生彼國，無女人及無盲、聾、瘖、瘂人，不道此間女人、根缺人不得生。彼若如此，說者愚癡，全不識經意。即如韋提夫人，是請生淨土主，及五百侍女，佛授記悉得往生彼國。但此處女人，及盲、聾、瘖、瘂人，心念彌陀佛，悉生彼國已，更不受女身，亦不受根缺身。二乘人但迴心，願生淨土，至彼更無二乘執心。為此，故云『女人及根缺，二乘種不生』，非謂此處女人及根缺人不得生也。故《無量壽經》四十八願云：『設我得佛，十方世界一切女人，稱我名號，厭惡女身，捨命之後，更受女身者，不取正覺。』況生彼國，更受女身，根缺者亦爾。」
Doubt 9
Question: "The west lies ten trillion buddha-lands from here, and an ordinary being is weak and feeble — how could such a one possibly arrive there? Moreover, the Rebirth Treatise says: 'Women, and those with deficient faculties, and the seed of the two lesser vehicles, are not born there.' Given this teaching, must we not conclude that women and those with deficient faculties are certainly and definitely unable to attain rebirth there?"
Answer: "This distance — ten trillion buddha-lands — is spoken of only in terms answering an ordinary being's fleshly eye and his measure of mind bound up in birth and death. So long as a being's karma for the pure land is accomplished, the mind that is settled in concentration at the moment of death is itself the very mind that receives birth in the pure land — the instant a thought stirs is itself the moment of birth in the pure land. This is why the Contemplation Sūtra says: 'Amitābha's land is not far from here.' Moreover, the power of karma is inconceivable: a single thought is enough to attain birth there, and there is no need to be troubled by the distance. It is also like a person dreaming: though the body remains in bed, the mind, the intellect, and consciousness travel throughout every world in every other direction, exactly as if it were waking life. Birth in the pure land is exactly the same — the instant a thought stirs, one has already arrived, and there is no need to doubt this.
"As for 'women, and those with deficient faculties, and the seed of the two lesser vehicles, are not born there' — this speaks only of what is found once born in that land: there are no women there, and no one blind, deaf, mute, or dumb — it does not say that women or those with deficient faculties in this world cannot be born there at all. If someone reads it that way, such a reading is foolish, and entirely misses the meaning of the sūtra. Consider Queen Vaidehī herself: she was the very one who first requested rebirth in the pure land, and she, together with her five hundred attendant women, all received the Buddha's prediction that they would attain rebirth in that land. It is simply that women, and those blind, deaf, mute, or dumb, in this world, who hold Amitābha in mind, all, once born in that land, no longer take on a woman's body, nor a body with deficient faculties. As for those of the two lesser vehicles, once they have simply turned their minds around and vowed to be reborn in the pure land, upon arriving there they no longer hold to any attachment to the two lesser vehicles at all. This is why it says: 'Women, and those with deficient faculties, and the seed of the two lesser vehicles, are not born there' — it does not mean that women or those with deficient faculties in this world cannot be born there. This is why the forty-eight vows of the Immeasurable Life Sūtra say: 'If, once I have attained buddhahood, any woman in all the worlds of the ten directions, calling upon my name, and coming to despise her woman's body, should, after the end of her life, take on a woman's body once again — then may I not accept complete enlightenment.' How much less, then, would one take on a woman's body again upon being born in that land! And it is exactly the same for those with deficient faculties."
Chengyu meets the dream analogy with a full Yogācāra breakdown of what "mind, intellect, and consciousness" actually names. Mind divides into three: the purely true — the eighth consciousness in its intrinsically pure aspect, abiding constantly from the outset, neither inert like wood or stone nor an ordinary act of discrimination; the true mixed with the false, which is the eighth consciousness (ālayavijñāna) as it actually functions, storing seeds and giving rise to their manifestation; and the purely false, the first seven consciousnesses. Of these the first is the underlying essence, the latter two its function — and within that function, what accumulates and records is properly called "mind" (心, the eighth consciousness), what deliberates and clings to that eighth consciousness as an inner self is called "intellect" (意, the seventh), and what discriminates the six sense-objects is called "consciousness" (識, the first six). The treatise's phrase singles out the sixth consciousness specifically, Chengyu notes, because it alone reaches pervasively across every direction and every time — which is exactly the reach the analogy needs — while depending, as it always does, on the seventh, which depends in turn on the eighth.
On the "no women" clause the questioner reads as a bar to rebirth, Chengyu marshals two texts against a literal reading: the Amitābha Sūtra itself states that Amitābha "has immeasurable, boundless śrāvaka disciples," and the Lotus Sūtra states plainly that a woman who hears and practices its teaching goes, at her death, straight to Sukhāvatī, born in a lotus seat before Amitābha and his assembly of great bodhisattvas — proof enough, he says, that women of this world do attain rebirth there. On the "no two vehicles" clause, he adds a doctrinal precision the base text leaves implicit: strict Hīnayāna teaching holds that once self-attachment is exhausted, a practitioner accepts no further rebirth at all, and names no further destination for such a person — so a śrāvaka who "turns the mind around" and vows rebirth in the pure land is, by that very act, already stepping outside a purely Hīnayāna framework and into a Mahāyāna one. As for the apparent tension between śrāvakas being present in Amitābha's land at all and being absent from it, Chengyu resolves it the same way he resolved the coarse-and-subtle distinction under Doubts 3 and 6: the coarser, variegated aspect of that land, visible to beings still carrying some residue of the two vehicles, does include such figures — and even women, as the Dhāraṇī Sūtra of the Drum-Sound King names Amitābha's own father and mother by name — while its subtler aspect, visible only to advanced bodhisattvas, is purely and exclusively Mahāyāna. The sūtras are not contradicting each other; they are describing the same land from two different heights of vision.
Part 9 Complete
This closes Part 9, and with it the treatise's answers to every objection raised against Pure Land practice in principle. What remains, in the treatise's own final doubt, is the most practical question of all: having settled that rebirth there is possible, desirable, and open to anyone at all who seeks it, what does a person actually do?
Continue to Part 10 — The Two Practices, and Chen Guan's Postscript →