The Buddha's Eight Adornments

On the throne, Tanluan directs the reader to the Contemplation Sūtra's own lavish description rather than paraphrasing it: eighty-four thousand petals, each with eighty-four thousand veins "like heavenly paintings," each vein giving off eighty-four thousand rays of light, a hundred koṭis of maṇi jewels set between every pair of petals — a throne, in short, whose description exhausts the sūtra's own vocabulary for magnitude before it exhausts the throne itself. On the body, he catches what he takes to be a translator's own compression: local Chinese usage measures "one fathom" (尋) as the span of two outstretched arms, a plain human measurement — yet the Contemplation Sūtra states elsewhere that Amitābha's own body rises sixty myriad koṭis of nayutas of Ganges-sand-counted yojanas in height, with a halo to match. If the translator did indeed mean "a fathom" in the ordinary human sense, applied to a body of that same sūtra's own scale, "then the halo, too, must extend sixty myriad koṭis of nayutas of Ganges-sand-counted yojanas" — the fathom is not a literal cubit measurement at all, but a fixed proportion, scaled up to fit whatever body it describes.

The adornment of the mind draws Tanluan's most sustained philosophical excursion in the entire commentary. He anchors it to the Contemplation Sūtra's own most quoted line: "all Tathāgatas are the body of the Dharma-realm itself, entering into the mind of every sentient being's own contemplation. Therefore, when your own mind contemplates the Buddha, this very mind is itself the thirty-two marks and the eighty subsidiary marks — this mind makes the Buddha, this mind is the Buddha." Tanluan's own gloss builds the argument in careful steps. "Body," he says, means what is gathered together; "realm" means what is distinct in its own function — as the eye-element is what arises from the specific coming-together of a sense-faculty, an object, space, light, and attention, and does not thereby take on the function of the ear or nose. To call the Buddha's body "the body of the Dharma-realm" is to say that this same Dharma-realm — which is simply the sentient being's own mind, since mind alone generates every worldly and transcendent dharma there is — generates the Buddha's own marks and features exactly as color generates the eye's own seeing. The Buddha's body, on this account, "does not carry out the function of any other condition" — which is precisely why it can enter directly into every sentient being's own mind, without mediation.

Having established this, Tanluan turns to the two hardest clauses. "This mind is itself the thirty-two marks": when a sentient being contemplates the Buddha, the Buddha's own excellent marks appear, manifest, within that very mind — "like water, when clear, showing a reflected image; the water and the image are neither one thing nor two different things, and so it is said that the Buddha's own excellent, marked body is itself this very contemplation." "This mind makes the Buddha": the mind is capable of making a buddha. "This mind is the Buddha": there is no buddha to be found apart from the mind. He reaches for fire and wood to make the point vivid: "it is like fire arising from wood — fire cannot be separated from the wood that produces it. Because it cannot be separated from the wood, it is able to burn the wood; and the wood, being burned by the fire, is itself, in that very burning, the fire." Mind does not merely represent the Buddha from a distance, on this account, any more than fire merely resembles the wood it consumes — the making and the being are the same single event, seen from two different angles.

On the adornment of unfailing, sustaining power, Tanluan first illustrates its opposite with plain, unsentimental observation: "there are people who go without food themselves to support their own retainers, or who stack up wealth aboard ships, or fill their own storehouses with gold — and still do not escape dying of hunger. Sights like this meet the eye everywhere." Ordinary effort, however sustained, carries no guarantee that what is aimed at will actually be obtained — "attainment is not simply produced by effort, and remaining is not simply secured by guarding it; all of this comes from deluded karma, which cannot truly sustain anything at all." Amitābha's vow-power works by an entirely different logic: "the vow is accomplished by the power, and the power is fulfilled by the vow; the vow is never made in vain, and the power is never exercised for nothing — vow and power correspond to each other exactly, without the slightest discrepancy, and this is what is called accomplishment." And when the treatise adds that beholding this buddha brings even an unrealized bodhisattva to instant parity with those of the highest grounds, Tanluan anticipates the reader's own doubt — the Ten Stages Sūtra, after all, describes an immense, gradual climb through countless stages — with an image he has used before, of an elephant, a horse, and a rabbit crossing one and the same river at three different depths, and a still bolder one besides: a tree called Firm-and-Good, which lies dormant in the earth for a hundred years and then, in a single day, shoots up a hundred spans tall. "Someone who hears that Śākyamuni attained arhatship after a single hearing, or ended the round of rebirth in the course of a single morning's teaching, takes this for mere rhetorical flattery, not a literal claim — and such a person will doubt this present teaching in exactly the same way. Extraordinary words simply do not reach ordinary ears; it is only natural that they find them unbelievable."