The Awakening of Mahāvairocana 1.1

1.1

大唐天竺三藏善無畏共沙門一行譯

Chapter I

The Stations of the Mind When

Entering the Mantra Gateway

Thus have I heard. At one time the Bhagavān (Lord) was residing in the vast adamantine palace of the Dharma realm empowered by Tathāgatas, in which all the vajradharas had all assembled; the great pavilion [comparable to] the king of jewels, born of the Tathāgata’s faith-and-understanding, play, and supernatural transformations, was lofty, without a center or perimeter, and variously adorned with great and wondrous jewel-kings, and the body of a bodhisattva formed a lion throne.

Those vajra[dhara]s were called the vajradhara Gaganāmala, the vajradhara Gaganavikrama, the vajradhara Gaganasaṃbhava, the vajradhara Vicitrāmbaradhara, the vajradhara Vicitracārin, the vajradhara Sarvadharmasamatāvihārin, the vajradhara Anantasattvadhātuparitrāṇa, the vajradhara Nārāyaṇabalin, the vajradhara Mahānārāyaṇabalin, Suvajradhara, the vajradhara Paramavega, the vajradhara Vimala[vajra], the vajradhara Vajrāgra, the vajradhara Tathāgatavarman, the vajradhara Tathāgatapadodbhava, the vajradhara Aprapañcavihārin, the vajradhara Tathāgatadaśabalasaṃbhava, the vajradhara Vimalanetra, and Vajrapāṇi, Lord of Mysteries.

Accompanied by a multitude of vajradharas equal in number to the dust motes of ten buddha fields with these at their head, and surrounded in front and behind by great bodhisattvas such as the bodhisattva Samantabhadra, the bodhisattva Maitreya, the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and the bodhisattva Sarvanīvaraṇaviṣkambhin, [the Bhagavān] expounded the Dharma, namely, the Dharma gateway of the state of the equality of body, speech, and mind,

through the empowerment of the Tathāgata’s sun which transcends the three

periods [of past, present, and future].

Then, with the bodhisattvas headed by Samantabhadra and the vajra-

dharas headed by the Lord of Mysteries, through the empowerment of the

Tathāgata Vairocana there was swiftly made manifest the inexhaustible treas-

ury of adornments [of the equality] of the body; likewise, there were swiftly

made manifest the inexhaustible treasuries of adornments of the equality of

speech and mind. These were not produced by the body or speech or mind

of the Buddha Vairocana, and the limits of their arising and disappearing in

all places cannot be apprehended. Yet all the actions of Vairocana’s body,