The Kaikyōge

You sit before the Buddha, join your palms, and recite a sutra. Whether at a household service, a temple's Dharma assembly, or a stop on the Shikoku Eighty-Eight pilgrimage, in many schools the recitation begins with this same verse. Because it is recited like the opening of a door before entering the body of the sutra itself, it is called the kaikyōge, the sutra-opening verse.

Only twenty-eight Chinese characters. Yet within these four lines lies the fundamental sense of Buddhism: what it means to encounter the teaching. Let us first look at the verse itself.

The structure of the four lines is simple. The first two praise the preciousness of the teaching and the difficulty of encountering it; the last two express the joy of having encountered it now, and the wish to understand it. A Ming-dynasty commentary, the Annotated Essentials of the Ritual Exposition of the Diamond Sutra (Xiaoshi jingang jing keyi huiyao zhujie, Xuzangjing (X) No. 467), explains it the same way: the first two lines praise how hard the wondrous Dharma is to meet, and the last two are the joyful arising of the vow. To praise, to marvel, to awaken, to aspire. Within twenty-eight characters, the whole movement of monbō, the hearing of the Dharma, is gathered complete.

The kalpa of the second line is the unit the sutras use when they speak of vast stretches of time. The sutras offer a famous illustration. Imagine a great rock, one league (yojana, an ancient Indian unit of distance) on a side. Once every hundred years a heavenly being descends and brushes it once, gently, with the sleeve of a celestial robe. Even when the rock has been worn away to nothing, one kalpa has still not ended. This is the illustration known as the rock kalpa. In the same spirit there is the mustard-seed kalpa: an iron citadel filled with mustard seeds, with a single seed removed once every hundred years.

The kaikyōge heaps these kalpas up "a hundred thousand myriad" times. This is not a number meant for calculation. It is a way of expressing how rare the encounter is: something one could fail to meet however much time were piled upon time.

The sutras also have a parable about the difficulty of the encounter itself. A single log floats on the great ocean, with one small hole in it. At the bottom of the sea lives a blind turtle that surfaces only once every hundred years. And at the very moment the turtle lifts its head, its neck happens to slip into that hole. To be born in human form and encounter the Buddha's teaching is harder still. This is the parable of the blind turtle and the floating log. After telling it, the Buddha continues: "And you have now obtained all of these things so hard to obtain." The parable is not meant to make us lament how rare the encounter is, but to make us notice what is already in our hands. The "I now" of the kaikyōge's third line answers this call directly.

All of these are illustrations meant to help us picture a length of time. The kalpa's own true shape lies in a single cycle of the world itself: the world takes form, living beings come to dwell in it, it eventually breaks apart, and it returns to empty void. This one cycle is called a mahākalpa, and the Abhidharmakośa describes it carefully in four stages: formation, abiding, destruction, and emptiness. It is this mahākalpa that the kaikyōge heaps up, a hundred thousand myriad times.

Here we come to the heart of this article. The kaikyōge is recited so widely; who, then, composed it, and when? If it were a passage from a sutra, naming the sutra would settle the matter. But open any sutra you like, and the kaikyōge appears nowhere in this exact form. One often hears the legend that Empress Wu Zetian composed it. Is that true?

There is only one way to find out: to search the surviving Buddhist literature, all of it. For this survey, we took the full-text databases of the Chinese Buddhist canon (CBETA and SAT) as the backbone, and searched exhaustively across eight corpora of different character, including the Pāli Tipiṭaka, the critical editions of Sanskrit texts, the Tibetan canon, the documents recovered from Dunhuang, and the Complete Works of the Jōdo School, for the four lines and for the phrases that became their parts.

To state the result first: the kaikyōge with all four lines together never once appears in the literature up through the Tang dynasty. The oldest extant text is the Commentary on the Diamond Sutra of the Southern Song, with a preface dated 1179. And no text anywhere records an author's name. Yet the search was far from fruitless. Word by word, each phrase of the four lines turned out to have a clear source in a different sutra.

The kaikyōge is not a quotation from any single sutra. Each of the four lines goes back to the words of Mahāyāna scriptures that have long been widely read. Before reading a sutra, one recites a verse made of the words of the sutras — a fitting way for it to have come into being. Let us look at three representative sources, in order, together with their original texts.

When, then, does the kaikyōge appear with all four lines in place? A full-text search of the Chinese Buddhist canon allows us to follow its footsteps quite clearly. Here it helps to separate two senses of "oldest": the oldest surviving text, and the oldest example whose date is firmly established.

The oldest surviving text is the opening of the Commentary on the Diamond Sutra by the Southern Song Chan monk Yefu Daochuan (read Yabu Dōsen in Japanese), whose preface is dated 1179. The verse appears there as part of the preliminaries for those reciting the Diamond Sutra: the mantra for purifying the karma of speech, the invocation of the Eight Vajra Beings, and the sutra-opening verse. This opening portion, however, may possibly have been added at a later date. For the oldest example with a firmly established date, we may point instead to two Yuan-dynasty monastic codes, the Chanlin beiyong qinggui (author's preface dated 1311) and the Lüyuan shigui (1324). By either reckoning, the kaikyōge's birthplace was the same: neither the imperial court nor the recorded sayings of Chan masters, but the popular practice of reciting the Diamond Sutra. It then settled, in the Yuan dynasty, into the monastic codes of the Chan and Vinaya schools, and in the Ming into the books of daily recitation, taking its present form.

One story often told about the origin of the kaikyōge holds that Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang composed it out of her joy when the new translation of the Flower Garland Sutra was completed. In China the story is widely cherished as a beautiful anecdote. Let us set out in chronological order what the present survey was able to confirm.

The preface the empress herself wrote for the Flower Garland Sutra (699) survives in full, and the kaikyōge is not in it. A full-text search of the Chinese Buddhist canon turns up no Tang or Song record attributing the verse to her. The four lines first appear in the literature in 1179, which is to say roughly 480 years after the translation of the Flower Garland Sutra. And the legend itself enters the written record later still, in the modern era. The oldest confirmed record is a remark in the Shuǐchàn shēnyì shū (Commentary on the Meaning of the Water Repentance Liturgy) by the late Qing and Republican-era Tiantai master Dixian (1858–1932): "by tradition this verse is said to be a composition of Empress Wu." Even he frames it in the tentative form "by tradition it is said" (相傳). In other words, no text has yet been found that confirms the verse itself as Empress Wu's own composition.

And yet the legend has a root. As we saw above, the verse that may be called the model of the second line, "hard to hear even in a hundred thousand myriad kalpas," stands precisely in the eighty-fascicle Flower Garland Sutra translated by imperial decree of Empress Wu. Moreover, the preface the empress wrote with her own hand contains the words, "after five hundred years I have unexpectedly encountered the voice of the Buddha" and "one glimpse of the precious verses filled my heart with joy." A preface that speaks of the joy of a rare encounter, and records its author's delight in the verses of a scripture, resonated with the second line of the kaikyōge; that resonance, we may suppose, was the soil in which the legend grew. The memory of where the verse's words came from, and of the empress's preface, changed shape into the story of a person. Understood this way, the legend makes natural sense.

The full-text search teaches us one more fascinating thing. The characters of the kaikyōge have shifted, little by little, with time and place.

The Yuan-dynasty Chanlin beiyong qinggui gives the second line as "hard to meet even in a hundred thousand myriad of myriads" (百千万億難遭遇). The Ming-dynasty precept-recitation manuals have the form "hard to meet even in a hundred thousand myriad of myriads of kalpas" (百千万億劫難遇), and some recitation books in modern China close the line with "hard to come upon" (難得値). The Qing-dynasty Repentance Liturgy of the Compassionate Medicine Buddha goes further still, recasting the fourth line as "may I understand the meaning of the Tathāgata's repentance rite" (願解如来懺法義), refashioning the verse for the repentance liturgy alone.

And then Japan. The form used in Nichiren Buddhism, "may I understand the foremost meaning of the Tathāgata," cannot be found even once in a full-text search of the Chinese Buddhist canon. It derives from an Edo-period printed text (1681) attributed to Nichiren, a form that grew up in Japan.

One might suspect these are mere copying errors. But consider it this way. Characters move precisely because the text is alive and in use. In each setting of recitation, the verse has gradually changed its shape, toward forms easier to voice aloud, toward forms suited to the purpose of each Dharma assembly. Having slipped free of any one person's hand, it has gone on being polished by the hands of the people who use it. The family tree of its variants is the record of a thousand years of that handling.

The survey does not end with the Chinese translations. We also searched the Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan literature, and in none of these languages does any original text correspond word for word to the kaikyōge. The kaikyōge is not a translation of an Indian sutra; it is a verse born of the Chinese-language Buddhist world.

And yet the heart of the verse can be traced back to the oldest layers of the Buddhist scriptures. The Pāli Dhammapada sings, "hard is the arising of buddhas"; the sutra of the blind turtle and the floating log calls out, "you have now obtained these things so hard to obtain." The Sanskrit Gaṇḍavyūha has a verse with exactly the syntax of the second line: "even through a hundred koṭis of kalpas."

What is fascinating is what happens next. Each language sphere raised this same Indian heart into an entirely different form. The Chinese-language world made it a four-line verse recited before the sutras. Tibet made it not a verse but a subject of practice: the repeated contemplation of "the freedoms and endowments so hard to obtain," that is, how hard it is to gain this human body with all its freedoms and favorable conditions. The Pāli world kept it as the teaching told in parables. The kaikyōge is one among humanity's several attempts to give form to the astonishment of having encountered the teaching.

From here we read as Shingon Buddhism does. The kaikyōge itself had not yet taken shape in the days of Kōbō Daishi Kūkai. Yet the very heart of this verse is written, unmistakably, in his works.

Take, for instance, the "kalpa" of the second line. The Darijing shu (Commentary on the Mahāvairocana Sutra), the foundational commentary of Shingon Buddhism, fascicle one (Taishō No. 1796), reads two meanings into the word kalpa: time itself, and deluded attachment. Three layers of delusion, coarse, fine, and extremely fine, are understood together as "three kalpas," and to transcend them within a single lifetime is to become a buddha at once. This is the teaching of sokushin jōbutsu, attaining buddhahood in this very body. A story of unimaginable spans of time turns, here, into a guide back to this single present thought.

In the order of service of the Shikoku Eighty-Eight Sacred Sites, the kaikyōge is recited after the verse of repentance, the Three Refuges and their confirmation, the Ten Good Precepts, the mantra of arousing the aspiration for awakening, and the mantra of the samaya precepts; after it comes the Heart Sutra. This sequence has its meaning. One repents of one's sins, takes refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, keeps the precepts, and arouses the aspiration for awakening. Only when the heart has been made ready does one at last open the sutra. At that doorway stands the kaikyōge.

When you recite it, do so slowly, with the meaning in mind. Simply resting the heart on the single point, "a teaching so hard to meet, and I am meeting it now," changes the resonance of the Heart Sutra that follows. Whether you come by car, by bus, or on foot, the visit begins from the same verse.

Byōdōji is the twenty-second temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage. When you recite these four lines before the main hall, we would be glad if, somewhere in a corner of your mind, you remembered that these words have traveled a thousand years to reach you, from the Lotus Sutra and the Flower Garland Sutra.

The kaikyōge is recited in many schools, but its form and setting differ. It is sometimes said to be "common to nearly all schools," but a closer look shows the distinct character of each tradition coming through.

The conclusion of the survey can be summed up like this. The kaikyōge has no author whose name has been handed down. Words from the Lotus Sutra and the Flower Garland Sutra, with the sutra-lecture assemblies of the Tang as their matrix, crystallized into four lines in the Diamond Sutra recitation practice of the Southern Song, and the tradition of recitation itself has polished the verse ever since.

That the name is not handed down is itself this verse's pedigree. It was made as the words of everyone who sets out to open a sutra. That is exactly why the subject of the third line is always the person reciting it. The lay believer in China a thousand years ago and you, sitting before the Buddha today, live the same "I now," and recite the same four lines. The next time you recite a sutra, try holding just this one point in mind: "a teaching so hard to meet, and I am meeting it now."