Overall Teaching

Surendrābhā remembers all the deeds of buddhas.

Summary

1. Sudhana went to the heaven of the thirty-three, and went to the goddess Surendrābhā^[1] and asked her to explain bodhisattva practice, she said:

a. She attained the liberation called ‘pure manifestation of unimpeded recollection.’ She recalled as many miracles of buddhas as happened, done by countless buddhas, in aeons as many as sand grains in the Ganges River, during which she was always serving the buddhas, witnessing their deeds and remembering them.^[2]

2. She said she knows only this liberation but cannot tell of the practice or virtues of bodhisattvas who are free from all obscurity and darkness. Thus, Sudhana should go to Viśvāmitra who can teach him bodhisattva practice.

3. Paying his respects to her, Sudhana left.^[3]

[1] She represents the second of the practices of Samantabhadra: Consistently Remembering All Truths through Mastery of Knowledge and Compassion.

Her father is Smṛtimati (“Mindful/Remembering”). He “appeared in an early book of The Flower Ornament Scripture, and here is called a king, who also has a daughter. This represents spontaneous wisdom and compassion without thought, spiritual teaching without fixed convention; this freedom is represented as divinity and kingship, which thus do not refer literally to a specific realm or status.”

[2] As regards serving buddhas for countless aeons, “This is a description of temporal relativity within the absolute where there is no temporal relativity. Because the timeless realm of knowledge is instantly all-pervasive, this is not a result of fabrication.”

[3] “After this the teachers are lay people, not presented as supernatural, to show that the Way of transcendence is fulfilled but there may be lack of breadth of freedom in helping living beings. There is no more will to seek liberation apart from defilement and purity: there is only riding on the ship of the essence of reality and hoisting the sail of great compassion with great knowledge as the captain, following the wind of the fundamental vow, casting the net of pāramitās, traveling the ocean of birth and death, hauling out ‘fish,’ those with attachments, and placing them on the shore of independent knowledge, to dwell in the precious hall of the real universe, like the tower of Maitreya described hereafter.” (1617–1618)