Overall Teaching

Sudarśana walks in the words surrounded by deities. He teaches Sudhana that despite being a youth, he, in one instant of thought, has countless teachings and has learned from buddhas for aeons.

Summary

1.     Contemplating profundity of bodhisattva knowledge and practice, Sudhana looked for the monk[1] Sudarśana2 in Trināyana.[2]

2.     He found him, finally, walking in the woods,[3] young[4] and handsome, with steady gaze and mind free from vacillation, dressed like a deity of the pure abodes. He was surrounded by many different deities who prepared his way, putting lotuses beneath his footsteps, and lighted the forest.[5]

3.     Sudhana, paying respect to him, respected that he teaches him the practice of bodhisattvas.

(1226)

4.     Sudarśana said:

a.     After becoming a monk, he practiced with buddhas for both short and aeon-long periods, after which he remembered their teachings, perceived their transformations, realised their equality, and entered the sphere of realised practice. 

b.     He also realised their past vows for purifying buddha-lands and the pāramitās through setting out on Samantabhadra’s practice.

c.     While he walks here, all realms both flow towards him (because of observant knowledge brought to the fore) and away from him (by accomplishing past vows). In a single thought untold bodhisattva practices, visions of buddha-lands, and the ways to honour those buddhas appear to him. (1227) By the power of his vow to carry out the practice, countless samādhis, faculties, mindfulnesses, times, and so forth appear to him in a single thought.[6]

d.     While he can tell of the liberation called ‘the lamp of knowledge which is never extinguished,’ he cannot tell of the virtues of bodhisattvas with adamantine will and with greater power, thus he must go to the land of Śramāṇamaṇḍala in the city Sumukha, where the boy Indriyeśvāra lives.

5.     Thus, Sudhana, respecting Sudarśana and his teaching, left.

[1] He is a monk because ‘it is possible to enter the world and integrate illumination beneficially for others, inducing them to end contention, only when one’s own mind is unattached to the world.’ (1583) 2 He was a mendicant who realised the First Practice: Joy.

[2] Meaning “three eyes:” ‘the eye of knowledge observes faculties, the objective eye knows principles, and the eye of wisdom distinguishes right from wrong. These three are originally one, which is given three names according to function.

‘If one lacks these three eyes, one is also deluded already and so cannot help others. Therefore, the name of the land is Three Eyes.’ (1582-3)

[3] The woods, with their many trees, represent how there are many practices involved in adapting to the world. ‘Their purpose is to enter birth and death to liberate beings from birth and death—and also to induce beings to make compassionate commitments to go back into birth and death to liberate yet others, going on and on in this way, like one lamp lighting a hundred thousand lamps so that all darkness is illumined and the light never ends. This is the meaning of going and returning. Thus, the story says Sudhana saw the mendicant walking around in a forest, emblematic of this process. (1583)

[4] ‘Because he was at the beginning of the ten practices, he is represented as young.’ (1584)

[5] According to Li, being surrounded by these deities represents adapting the teaching to people’s faculties, without fixed method and dogma (thus they go wherever he goes). They hold up lotuses for his footsteps, representing undefiled conduct (not staining anything). The other deities represent appreciation of deities for his meditation, humility, elegance, and verbal teaching.

[6] In his teaching, wherein he can induce all these things in a single thought, ‘he included the three teachings of the ten abodes, ten practices, and ten dedications all in one practice without leaving the eightfold correct path, and this lifetime was a lifetime without before or after, beginning or end; so Sudarśana said he was young and had only recently left home, but he had in this lifetime cultivated pure conduct in the company of as many buddhas as sand grains in thirtyeight Ganges rivers.

 ‘Because the moment delusion disappears an instant and all time interpenetrate, there being no far or near in knowledge, each atom containing oceans of lands, Sudarśana said he had cultivated pure conduct with some buddhas for a day and a night, with others up to untold aeons.’ (1584)