往生淨土懺願儀 1.4

1.4

One should select a quiet hall or room. First remove the old soil, and then take fresh soil from a secluded place. The ground must be free of tiles and stones, and not previously defiled. Use it to fill in the ground, and smear it with fragrance blended in, making it exceedingly pure. Next, suspend a new jeweled canopy above it. Inside the canopy, hang banners of five mixed colors, and throughout the room hang banners and flowers of silk and multicolored fabric, aiming for fine adornment. Set up an image of the Buddha seated in the west facing east, with Avalokiteśvara attending on the left and Mahāsthāmaprāpta attending on the right. In front of the images, arrange many fine flowers, lotus blossoms, and the like. It is best if images of the nine grades of rebirth are set up, but there is no harm if they are absent. As for the rest of the adornments, arrange them according to one's capacity. Next, spread mats all around, taking precautions against the dampness of the low ground. Practitioners must wear newly cleaned clothes; if there are absolutely no new and clean ones, then wash and dye the best among one's clothing, bathe, and only then put them on to enter the bodhimaṇḍa. One should enter and exit via the left or right of the doorposts, with shoes aligned properly, not in disarray. When going out, one must change into old clothes, bathe, and then put the clean clothes back on, doing so day after day. Next, in the bodhimaṇḍa, one should exhaust one's resources to offer various kinds of offerings to the Three Jewels. If one does not offer all that one possesses, one's practice of the method will lack singlemindedness and will surely fail to induce a response. Only if one has absolutely no possessions of one's own may one seek them externally. There should be ten practitioners or fewer; more is not permissible. It is appropriate to commence on one of the six poṣadha days.