Extraordinary Power to Travel at Will
From Amitabha Buddha’s Great Vows 10 & 11
Extraordinary Power to Travel at Will
Amitabha Buddha’s Great Vows 10 & 11
Sakyamuni Buddha speaks of the monk Dharmakara, his practice, and his forty-eight vows before he became Amitabha Buddha. Excerpted from the Infinite Life Sutra:
When I become a Buddha, all the beings born in my land will attain extraordinary powers at will to perfection. If, in an instant of thought, they cannot traverse beyond hundreds of millions of nayutas of hundreds of thousands of buddha-lands, traveling everywhere to make offerings to all Buddhas, I will not attain perfect enlightenment.
- Vow 10. Extraordinary power that pertains to physical form.
- Vow 11. Make offerings to all Buddhas.
Beings born in the Western Pure Land are replete with extraordinary powers. One such power, which pertains to physical form, allows them to traverse space anytime they wish. They can be anywhere by willing it while in meditative concentration. Disappearing from where they are and instantly reappearing elsewhere, distance is not a problem.
This extraordinary power also allows the bodhisattvas in the Pure Land to make multiples of themselves or transform into any form to help beings.
Additionally, a being born in the Pure Land will not only attain extraordinary powers, they will do so to perfection. Perfection here refers to the state of “paramita.” This paramita helps bodhisattvas to better benefit themselves through their cultivation and also to better help others attain liberation. Here, the level of perfection achieved is close to that of a Buddha.
The extraordinary power to be anywhere and to have many manifestations will enable them to make extensive offerings to all Buddhas. Making offerings to a Buddha will result in accumulating an incredible amount of merits and virtues, and good fortune. At the same time, they will learn from these Buddhas.
In the Saha world, the opportunities to make such offerings are rare. Sakyamuni Buddha only taught for forty-nine years, and Maitreya Bodhisattva will not become the next Buddha for another 5,670 million years. But in the Pure Land, we can make offerings to all Buddhas in the ten directions whenever we want to. Moreover, there is no need to plan and prepare each of the offerings. They will appear spontaneously the instant we have the thought of them.
>> Learn more: The Initiation, Amitabha Buddha’s Forty-eight Vows
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Dedication of Merit
May the merits and virtues accrued from this work
adorn the Buddha’s pure land,
repay the four kinds of kindness above,
and relieve the sufferings of those in the three paths below.
May all those who see and hear of this
bring forth the bodhi mind
and at the end of this life,
be born together in the Land of Ultimate Bliss.
Note: The above is excerpted from the book “Awakening the Bodhi Mind: Amitabha Buddha’s Forty-Eight Vows”, which is available for download at eLibrary collection, Amitabha Gallery.
The Amitabha Buddha’s forty-eight vows is derived from the Chinese verses of the Infinite Life Sutra, that we are immensely grateful to the compilation efforts by Mr Xia Lianju. Translation credits go to The Pure Land Translation Team, Pure Land College Press.
