The Tenth Vow, and the Fruits of This Teaching
普皆迴向；校量功德；臨終往生極樂世界
Samantabhadra completes the ten vows by dedicating all their merit to every sentient being — including a vow to bear their heaviest karmic suffering in their place — then declares the merit of this teaching itself, and closes with this chapter's most famous passage: a dying person, stripped of everything else, led moment by moment into the presence of Amitābha Buddha in Sukhāvatī.
- This part covers
- The tenth vow, dedicating all merit universally, including the vow to bear sentient beings' heaviest karmic suffering in their place; the sūtra's own comparison of this teaching's merit against a lifetime of the most lavish material giving imaginable; and the closing scene of a dying person led, in a single instant, into rebirth before Amitābha Buddha in Sukhāvatī.
- Why it matters
- The final scene of this part is the textual foundation for this chapter's place among the "five Pure Land sūtras" — and, as the reading note on it explains, Chengguan's own 8th-century commentary already singles it out as a distinct category of fruit, centuries before this chapter was formally bound to the other three core Pure Land sūtras.
1. Tenth Vow — Dedicating All Merit Universally
「復次，善男子！言普皆迴向者：從初禮拜乃至隨順，所有功德皆悉迴向盡法界、虛空界一切眾生，願令眾生常得安樂，無諸病苦；欲行惡法皆悉不成，所修善業皆速成就；關閉一切諸惡趣門，開示人天涅槃正路；若諸眾生因其積集諸惡業故，所感一切極重苦果我皆代受；令彼眾生悉得解脫究竟成就無上菩提。菩薩如是所修迴向，虛空界盡、眾生界盡、眾生業盡、眾生煩惱盡，我此迴向無有窮盡，念念相續，無有間斷，身、語、意業無有疲厭。善男子！是為菩薩摩訶薩十種大願具足圓滿。若諸菩薩於此大願隨順趣入，則能成熟一切眾生，則能隨順阿耨多羅三藐三菩提，則能成滿普賢菩薩諸行願海。」
"Furthermore, good son, as for dedicating all merit universally: all the merit from the very first vow, paying homage, down through according with sentient beings, I dedicate entirely to every sentient being filling the whole Dharma realm and the realm of space, wishing that all sentient beings may forever find peace and happiness, free from every sickness and suffering; that whatever evil they wish to do may never succeed, and whatever good they cultivate may swiftly come to completion; that every gate to the lower realms be shut, and the true path to the nirvana of humans and heavenly beings be opened and shown. And if sentient beings, through evil karma they have accumulated, must undergo the heaviest and most bitter results, I take them all upon myself in their place, so that these beings may attain liberation and ultimately accomplish unsurpassed awakening. And so the bodhisattva's dedication continues until the realm of space is exhausted, the realm of sentient beings is exhausted, their karma is exhausted, and their afflictions are exhausted — this dedication of mine can never be exhausted, thought after thought continuing without a break, my deeds of body, speech, and mind never growing weary. "Good son, these are the ten great vows of the bodhisattva-mahāsattva, complete and perfect in every respect. If bodhisattvas accord with these great vows and enter into them, they will thereby ripen all sentient beings, thereby accord with unsurpassed, perfect, complete awakening, and thereby bring the entire ocean of Samantabhadra Bodhisattva's practices and vows to fulfillment."
Chengguan reads the two syllables of this vow's name literally: hui (迴), "to turn something back around," and xiang (向), "to point it toward a destination" — so that dedication is the act of taking accumulated goodness and redirecting it outward, toward three destinations at once: ultimate reality, awakening, and sentient beings. He addresses the vow's most demanding clause directly — the vow to bear, in sentient beings' place, the heaviest results of their own accumulated evil karma — meeting the obvious objection (karma is produced by the one who acts; how could anyone truly bear it for someone else?) with seven distinct explanations, ranging from the psychological — simply forming the sincere wish to bear another's suffering, even where literal substitution is impossible — to the doctrinally exact: a bodhisattva who deliberately retains a trace of affliction in order to keep being reborn among suffering beings, so as to go on teaching them, is in a real and specific sense bearing their suffering by choosing to remain in a world they could otherwise have already left behind.
The starkest of the seven, he illustrates with a story drawn from the Sūtra of Requiting Kindness. A young brahmin, traveling with five hundred merchants, learns in secret that one of his own traveling companions plans to murder the rest of the caravan that very night. Unable to warn the group without dooming that one man to death at their hands, and unwilling to let five hundred people be killed, he takes up a knife himself and kills the would-be murderer — accepting the karmic weight of killing onto himself alone, precisely so that neither the murderer commits mass killing nor the group commits killing him in return. Chengguan reads this as the vow's own logic made concrete: "bearing suffering in another's place" is not a metaphysical transfer of merit from one ledger to another, but a bodhisattva's willingness to accept a worse personal outcome so that a far greater harm to others never comes to pass at all.
2. The Merit of This Teaching
「是故，善男子！汝於此義應如是知：若有善男子、善女人以滿十方無量無邊、不可說不可說佛剎極微塵數一切世界上妙七寶，及諸人天最勝安樂，布施爾所一切世界所有眾生，供養爾所一切世界諸佛菩薩，經爾所佛剎極微塵數劫相續不斷所得功德，若復有人聞此願王一經於耳，所有功德比前功德百分不及一，千分不及一，乃至優波尼沙陀分亦不及一。或復有人以深信心，於此大願受持讀誦，乃至書寫一四句偈，速能除滅五無間業，所有世間身心等病，種種苦惱，乃至佛剎極微塵數一切惡業，皆得銷除；一切魔軍、夜叉、羅剎、若鳩槃荼、若毘舍闍、若部多等飲血噉肉諸惡鬼神，皆悉遠離，或時發心親近守護。是故若人誦此願者，行於世間無有障礙，如空中月出於雲翳，諸佛菩薩之所稱讚，一切人天皆應禮敬，一切眾生悉應供養。此善男子善得人身，圓滿普賢所有功德，不久當如普賢菩薩，速得成就微妙色身，具三十二大丈夫相，若生人天，所在之處常居勝族，悉能破壞一切惡趣，悉能遠離一切惡友，悉能制伏一切外道，悉能解脫一切煩惱，如師子王摧伏群獸，堪受一切眾生供養。」
"For this reason, good son, you should understand this matter thus: suppose a good son or good daughter were to fill worlds as numerous as the fine motes of dust in immeasurable, boundless buddha-lands beyond number, and beyond number again, throughout the ten directions, with the finest of the seven treasures and with the most excellent bliss of every human and heavenly being, and give it all as a gift to every sentient being in every one of those worlds, and make offerings with it to every buddha and bodhisattva in every one of those worlds, continuing without a break for as many eons as there are fine motes of dust in those buddha-lands — the merit of all this would not equal even a hundredth part, not a thousandth part, not one part in an upaniṣad-fraction, of the merit gained by a single person who merely hears this King of Vows pass once through their ear. "And if someone, with deep faith, upholds and recites this great vow, or even copies out a single four-line verse of it, this can swiftly dissolve the five heinous transgressions, and every sickness of body and mind, every kind of suffering in the world, down to every evil deed as numerous as the fine motes of dust in a buddha-land — all of it wiped away; and every demon army, every yakṣa and rākṣasa, every kumbhāṇḍa, piśāca, and bhūta, every evil spirit that drinks blood and devours flesh, will withdraw far away from that person, or else will awaken the aspiration to draw near and protect them instead. And so anyone who recites this vow moves through the world unhindered, like the moon emerging from behind the clouds into an open sky; every buddha and bodhisattva praises them, every human and heavenly being should bow before them in homage, and every sentient being should make offerings to them. "This good son has truly gained a human birth to good purpose, has brought Samantabhadra's own merit to fulfillment, and before long will become just like Samantabhadra Bodhisattva himself, swiftly accomplishing a subtle and wondrous body adorned with the thirty-two marks of a great being. Wherever they are reborn among humans or heavenly beings, they will always dwell among the most excellent lineages; they will be able to destroy every lower realm, to escape every evil companion, to subdue every non-Buddhist teaching, and to free themselves from every affliction — like the lion king overpowering every beast of the forest — fit to receive the offerings of every sentient being."
Chengguan situates this passage's extravagant comparisons — a lifetime of the most lavish material giving imaginable, outweighed by a single hearing of this text — inside a broader teaching he calls the ten kinds of Dharma practice (十法行): copying scripture, making offerings to it, sharing it with others, listening to it, reading it, upholding it in memory, expounding it, chanting it, reflecting on its meaning, and actually practicing what it teaches. He is careful that none of the ten substitutes for the others — a scholar who can recite a text from memory but never acts on it, and a sincere practitioner who has never read the text at all, are both, on his account, incomplete in the same way.
He preserves, as inherited tradition rather than as claims he is personally vouching for, a set of stories collected by earlier generations illustrating several of the ten: monks said to have coughed up relics after years of chanting this text, a monk paralyzed by illness who recovered after Samantabhadra appeared to him in a dream and personally explained a passage he had never understood, another said to have died peacefully in the middle of reciting a single verse, immediately after finishing it. Whatever a modern reader makes of accounts like these, Chengguan's own point in preserving them is plain enough: this text's own tradition took the claim that "a single verse of it can dissolve even the five heinous transgressions" as something to be tested against lived experience, not merely recited as pious hyperbole.
3. The Fruit at Life's End: Rebirth in Amitābha's Sukhāvatī
「又復，是人臨命終時，最後剎那一切諸根悉皆散壞，一切親屬悉皆捨離，一切威勢悉皆退失，輔相、大臣、宮城內外，象馬車乘，珍寶伏藏，如是一切無復相隨，唯此願王不相捨離，於一切時引導其前。一剎那中即得往生極樂世界，到已即見阿彌陀佛、文殊師利菩薩、普賢菩薩、觀自在菩薩、彌勒菩薩等，此諸菩薩色相端嚴，功德具足，所共圍遶。其人自見生蓮華中，蒙佛授記；得授記已，經於無數百千萬億那由他劫，普於十方不可說不可說世界，以智慧力隨眾生心而為利益。不久當坐菩提道場，降伏魔軍，成等正覺，轉妙法輪。能令佛剎極微塵數世界眾生發菩提心，隨其根性，教化成熟，乃至盡於未來劫海，廣能利益一切眾生。善男子！彼諸眾生若聞、若信此大願王，受持讀誦，廣為人說，所有功德，除佛世尊餘無知者。是故汝等聞此願王，莫生疑念，應當諦受，受已能讀，讀已能誦，誦已能持，乃至書寫，廣為人說。是諸人等於一念中，所有行願皆得成就，所獲福聚無量無邊。能於煩惱大苦海中拔濟眾生，令其出離，皆得往生阿彌陀佛極樂世界。」
"And furthermore, when this person's life comes to its end, in the very last moment all of their faculties will scatter and fail, every relative will forsake them, every mark of power and authority will slip away — ministers and great officers, the palace within and the city without, elephants and horses and carriages, treasures and hidden stores — none of it will follow them any longer. Only this King of Vows will never forsake them, but will guide them onward at every moment. In a single instant they will attain rebirth in Sukhāvatī, and upon arriving there will behold Amitābha Buddha, and the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī, Samantabhadra, Avalokiteśvara, Maitreya, and the rest — bodhisattvas whose forms are dignified and whose merit is complete, gathered all around. That person will find themselves born within a lotus flower, and will receive a prophecy of buddhahood directly from the Buddha. Having received this prophecy, across countless hundreds of thousands of millions of koṭis of nayutas of eons, they will move throughout the ten directions, through worlds beyond number, and beyond number again, benefiting sentient beings through the power of wisdom, according to what is in each being's mind. Before long they will sit at the seat of awakening, subdue the armies of Māra, accomplish perfect awakening, and turn the wondrous wheel of the Dharma — able to bring sentient beings, in worlds as numerous as the fine motes of dust in a buddha-land, to arouse the mind of awakening, ripening them according to their capacities, and to the very end of the ocean of future eons, benefiting all sentient beings without limit. "Good son, the merit gained by those beings who hear this King of Vows, believe in it, uphold and recite it, and proclaim it widely to others — this merit is known to none but the Buddha, the World-Honored One himself. Therefore, when you hear this King of Vows, give rise to no doubt: you should receive it with sincerity — having received it, be able to read it; having read it, be able to recite it; having recited it, be able to uphold it; and go on to copy it out and proclaim it widely to others. All such people will, in a single thought, bring every one of these practices and vows to fulfillment, and the store of blessings they gain will be immeasurable and boundless. They will be able to rescue sentient beings from the great ocean of suffering born of affliction, and bring them out of it, so that all attain rebirth in Amitābha Buddha's land of Sukhāvatī."
Chengguan gives this passage its own formal heading in his commentary, distinct from everything that comes before it. Up to this point, he has organized the rewards of this teaching under the five kinds of karmic fruit familiar from Abhidharma analysis — the fruit of dominant condition, the fruit resembling its cause, the fruit of ripening, the fruit of effort, and the fruit of freedom from bondage — treating each line of the merit-comparison passage as an instance of one or another. Reaching the deathbed scene and the vision of Sukhāvatī, he sets that entire fivefold scheme aside and opens a new section, titled in his own words "distinctly explaining the fruit of the Pure Land" (別明淨土果) — a sixth and final category, standing apart from ordinary karmic reward altogether. This is worth sitting with on its own terms: more than five centuries before the Ming-dynasty grouping of the "four Pure Land sūtras," and well over a millennium before Yinguang bound this chapter onto the back of them in the early twentieth century to make the now-standard "five Pure Land sūtras," the fourth patriarch of the Huayan school — commenting on this very chapter as part of the Avataṃsaka itself, with no thought of any Pure Land canon at all — had already isolated this exact passage as belonging to a category of its own: not one more karmic reward among several, but rebirth in a buddha-land.
Chengguan glosses Amitābha's own name here by quoting the Amitābha Sūtra directly: the name carries two meanings at once — immeasurable light, because that buddha's radiance illuminates the lands of the ten directions without obstruction, and immeasurable life, because that buddha's own lifespan, and the lifespan of everyone reborn into that land, extends across incalculable eons without end. He also pauses over a puzzle in the assembly the text describes: Mañjuśrī and Maitreya are, by this very sūtra's own account elsewhere, actively teaching in this world, this Sahā universe — so how can the same two bodhisattvas also stand in the assembly around Amitābha, in an entirely different universe? He offers two readings without insisting on only one: either the being seen in Sukhāvatī shares a name with the one teaching here without being strictly the same individual — much as several buddhas across different world-systems share the epithet Amitāyus — or, his own evident preference, it is genuinely the same Mañjuśrī and the same Maitreya, whose realization is such that a single bodhisattva of their attainment manifests without limit across every world at once, fully present wherever beings turn to receive their teaching, with no contradiction at all in being "here" and "there" simultaneously.