Day 11 continues Chapter 7, The Parable of the Magic City

Having last month concluded this portion of Chapter 7, The Parable of the Magic City, we begin again from the top.

The Buddha said to the bhikṣus:

“When Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha attained Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi, five hundred billion Buddha-worlds in each of the ten quarters quaked in the six ways, and all those worlds, including those intercepted from the brilliant rays of light of the sun and the moon by the neighboring worlds, were illumined [by great rays of light], and the living beings of those worlds were able to see each other for the first time. They said to each other, ‘How did you appear so suddenly?’ The palaces of the gods of those worlds, including the palace of Brahmans, also quaked in the six ways. The great rays of light which illumined all those worlds were brighter than the rays of light emitted by those gods.

In reading this today I realized that this is a telling of the story of a Buddha’s light from the perspective of the observer as compared to the first chapter, where we are first told of the rays of light emitted by the Buddha and then learn of the reaction to the light. Imagine what was hidden before is suddenly revealed. That is the light of a Buddha. Without it, more people fall into the lower regions and fewer people enter the heavens.