The Profound Meaning of the Diamond Sutra from the Consciousness-Only Perspective (122)

The merit of receiving, upholding, reading, and reciting the Diamond Sutra is truly difficult to narrate and describe. By citing just a small portion of examples to illustrate its general outline, everyone can understand the boundlessness and inconceivability of this merit. For example, after a bodhisattva realizes the prajñā ultimate reality, cultivating the four dhyānas and eight samādhis in accordance with the tathāgatagarbha, he will have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of millions of mind-made bodies (manomaya-kāya), thereby benefiting and bringing joy to countless sentient beings, enabling them to transcend the suffering of saṃsāra and birth-and-death. This merit is truly priceless and beyond comparison; it cannot be calculated. This merit can never be exhausted, forever and ever, and it will increase without limit.

As for the merit of giving away Mount Sumerus as numerous as a great trichiliocosm, although it is also extremely great and beyond reckoning, it is still finite and can be completely consumed. This merit also cannot offset evil karma; perhaps, due to ignorance, while enjoying blessings one may use that merit to commit great evil deeds, and then one will undergo evil retribution in accordance with that evil karma. When evil deeds are committed, the merit will also be diminished and consumed, until finally the merit is entirely used up in various ways. But the merit of a bodhisattva who reads, recites, receives, and upholds the Diamond Sutra not only cannot be diminished, it will increase; the accumulated merit will grow ever more abundant and ever greater.

As the bodhisattva's wisdom continually grows, his merit will increase countless times over. When the bodhisattva cultivates to the stage of an eighth-bhūmi bodhisattva, with just a single mental intention (manaskāra), he can manifest a trichiliocosm filled with the seven treasures, countless times more than Mount Sumeru, and the bodhisattva will give it all to sentient beings—that merit is even more impossible to calculate. The bodhisattva will also manifest even more of the various material necessities of life that sentient beings need, giving them to benefit and bring joy to sentient beings; this merit is likewise impossible to calculate. Furthermore, the bodhisattva manifests countless emanated bodies, going to worlds in the ten directions to extensively deliver immeasurable and boundless sentient beings—that merit need not even be calculated, because it simply cannot be calculated, nor imagined, nor conceived.

This is the merit attained by an eighth-bhūmi bodhisattva, or the merit attained by bodhisattvas before the eighth bhūmi—all of this merit is beyond calculation. Then, when the bodhisattva cultivates further to the stage of a bodhisattva of equal enlightenment (samatā-sambodhi), over one hundred kalpas the bodhisattva manifests countless great-bodied sentient beings for immeasurable sentient beings to eat and thereby survive famine; the merit thus obtained is even more unimaginable. Cultivating further to the stage of buddhahood, extensively delivering immeasurable sentient beings throughout the worlds of the ten directions, the merit thus obtained—even if all sentient beings were to calculate it together, they could not compute it, and no words could express it. Therefore, the World-Honored One said that for those who receive, uphold, read, and recite the Diamond Sutra and the four-line gāthās within it, their merit is greater than the merit of those who give the seven treasures by immeasurable hundreds of thousands of millions of times—and even that is not the limit; the two truly cannot be compared.