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68. Ji (), i.e., the topknot on the crown of the head.
69. The visualization of the individual marks is treated somewhat
haphazardly and incompletely in chapter 3, which comprises almost 40
percent of the whole text; see Taishō, vol. 15, no. 643, pp. 648c–668b.
70. Early on, of course, Buddhists created the model of the trīṇi śikṣāṇi (Ch.
san xue, ): śīla/sīla, “morality or precepts”; samādhi, “concentration or
trance”; and prajñā/paññā, “wisdom.” In this model each is the basis for the
next: morality, or the observance of the precepts, reduces mental anguish
and attachment and promotes the stability that nourishes the cultivation
of concentration or trance; trance gives rise to clarity, which makes the
penetrating vision of wisdom possible; see, e.g., Robert Buswell, Jr. and
Robert Gimello, introduction to Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and Its
Transformations in Buddhist Thought (see note 2), pp. 6–7. To the best of my
knowledge, however, no Buddhist in India connected the purification of
the precepts through repentance to the development of mental or trancic
clarity with such specificity.
71. Taishō, vol. 15, no.643, p. 691a.3–7.
72. Taishō, vol. 15, no. 643, p. 691a.7–16.
73. Tiao shen, “regulate the body,” carries the sense of physically relaxing
the body. This sentence may also be rendered, “Relax the body through
massage.”
74. Jingjie here probably represents the Sanskrit word viṣaya, “range,
sphere, object of perception”; see Friedrich Weller, “Bemerkungen zum
sogdischen Dhyāna-Texte,” Monumenta Serica 2 (1936–1937): pp. 392–394.
Here it cannot indicate a buddha-field, since we have not yet covered that
in the visualization. Rather it must indicate the buddhas as “objects of
[mental] perception,” i.e., as objects of meditation. That the text does not
expect the practitioner to actually see the buddhas at this point is made
clear by its choice of terms: the practitioner is to visualize (guan) the
buddhas, not see (jian, ) them.
75. Taishō, vol. 15, no. 643, p. 691b.10.
76. On the Ugraparipṛcchā see Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva
Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā), Studies in the
Buddhist Traditions (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); on the
“Triskandha(ka),” the earliest known repentance ritual, see Nattier, A Few
Good Men, pp. 117–121, 259–260, and note 336; and Nancy Barnes, “Rituals,
Religious Communities, and Buddhist Sūtras in India and China,” in
Buddhism Across Boundaries: Chinese Buddhism and the Western Regions
(Collection of Essays 1993), ed. Erik Zürcher and others (Taipei: Foguang
Cultural Enterprise Co., Ltd., 1999), pp. 485–515.