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In the majestic Flower Ornament Scripture [Avatamsaka Sutra] the protagonist is an enlightening being by the name of Sudhana. This is an oceanic sutra that stultifies the disingenuous. You do acquire merit, though, even if you touch it long enough to use it as a doorstop. The last nearly a third of the book is the revered "Entry into the Realm of Reality", where Sudhana is sent by Manjushri to visit fifty-three spiritual friends and benefactors, each of whom shuttles him forth to his next encounter that he might progress and not slip back into past teachings.
The seventeenth of these great enlightening beings is a king called Tireless [Anala] in a city called Bright and Clean [Taladhvaja]. Sudhana sees King Tireless giving orders to his ten thousand ministers, manifesting the appearance of HORRIFYING SCENES to govern the people, "so there were ten thousand soldiers cutting off the heads of criminals, or gouging out their eyes, or any number of similar horrors." Sort of the Ziegfeld Follies of the perfection of nonattachment.
The king had Sudhana enter his palace and look at the superlative adornments; then he said he knew magical liberation, explaining that these punishments, the criminals, and the soldiers, were all magical projections of great compassion to frighten the actual people into giving up evil. In reality, not even a single gnat or a single ant was harmed, much less any humans. This is why he had been rewarded with such splendor, to make it clear that he would, on the contrary, have been doomed if he had been torturing people intentionally because of his own subjective feelings.Given that I know this, given some of the bits of adamantine wisdom in the Watts lecture, given the carnage governing us the wrong kind of too well, I'm wondering if I should sally forth and check....
— from the commentary by Li Tongxuan [635-730 c.e.]
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