I. What This Concept Is Saying
The "Ten Bodies" (*daśa-kāya*) is a precise technical term from the *Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra* (《大方廣佛華嚴經》, the forty-chapter recension, T0293). It names ten kinds of *dharma-body* (法身, *dharma-kāya*) that a bodhisattva brings to fulfillment as the ten grounds (十地, *daśa-bhūmi*) of the bodhisattva path mature. Each "body" here is not a physical body, a personality, or a role — it is a dimension of *being* that becomes visible when a particular stage of practice has ripened. Together they are called "the bodhisattva's ten dharma-bodies," and possessing all ten is itself the gateway into the complete, luminous *dharma-body* of a thus-come-one (如來清淨法身).
The classical passage comes from a section where the Brāhmaṇa "Most Quiet" (最寂靜婆羅門) is teaching the liberation of "True-Speech" (誠願語). He first explains that True-Speech rests on *suchness* (如如), unchangingness (不變異), non-duality (無二體), ultimate meaning (勝義), truth (諦), and what is called "the dharma-body of the tathāgatas of the three times" (三世如來法身體). Then he says: when a bodhisattva cultivates and perfects ten dharmas, those dharmas mature into ten bodies. Possessing all ten, one obtains the tathāgata's pure dharma-body. The ten, in order, are:
1. 平等身 — the *Equal Body* 2. 清淨身 — the *Pure Body* 3. 無盡身 — the *Inexhaustible Body* 4. 修集身 — the *Cultivated Body* 5. 法性身 — the *Dharma-Nature Body* 6. 離尋伺身 / 無尋伺身 — the *Body Beyond (or Free from) Inquiry and Contemplation* 7. 不思議身 — the *Inconceivable Body* 8. 寂靜身 — the *Quiet Body* 9. 虛空身 — the *Space-like Body* 10. 妙智身 — the *Body of Subtle Wisdom*
Each of these names is not a metaphor floating freely — it is the *fruit* (果德, *guṇa-phala*) that ripens on a specific ground. The sūtra is careful to bind body to ground and to state what the cultivation on that ground actually is:
- First ground. The bodhisattva "penetrates dharma-nature (法性), is free from crookedness, and sees the equality of dharmas" (通達法性、離邪曲、見法平等). The ripening of this insight is the *Equal Body*. - Second ground. Free from the stain of precept-violation; the nature of the precepts is pure (離犯戒垢、戒性清淨). The ripening is the *Pure Body*. - Third ground. Free from desire, hatred, and envy; dwelling in supreme samādhi (離欲、瞋恚、慳嫉等惡法而住勝定). The ripening is the *Inexhaustible Body*. - Fourth ground. Diligently cultivating all the bodhi-factors (勤修諸佛菩提分法, the thirty-seven aids to awakening). The ripening is the *Cultivated Body*. - Fifth ground. Observing and awakening to the truths, realizing the essential nature of dharmas (觀察覺悟諸諦、證法體性). The ripening is the *Dharma-Nature Body*. - Sixth ground. Contemplating dependent origination; its object is hard to fathom, beyond the reach of *vitarka* and *vicāra* (尋伺), the coarse and subtle mental probing. The ripening is the *Body Beyond Inquiry and Contemplation*. - Seventh ground. Gathering buddha-dharmas, with skillful means, wisdom-action fulfilled (集諸佛法，方便善巧、智行滿足). The ripening is the *Inconceivable Body*. - Eighth ground. Afflictions no longer arise; far from worldly disputation (煩惱不再現行，遠離世間戲論). The ripening is the *Quiet Body*. - Ninth ground. The body's sign is boundless, pervading everything (身相無邊、遍滿一切). The ripening is the *Space-like Body*. - Tenth ground. Universally gathered and perfected, the subtle realm of the *all-knowing wisdom* (一切種智). The ripening is the *Body of Subtle Wisdom*.
A textual point that should not be smoothed over: the sūtra itself uses two writings for the sixth body. When listing the ten, it reads *離尋伺身* ("Body *apart from* inquiry and contemplation"); when explaining the sixth ground, it reads *無尋伺身* ("Body *without* inquiry and contemplation"). Both are original to the text. The remaining nine names are identical in both passages. There is also a separate, parallel passage in the same sūtra that speaks of the "Vajra Indestructible Body" (金剛不可壞身) arising from ten meanings — this is *not* an eleventh or replacement body in the ten-body list. It is a different enumeration and should not be merged in.
Now the heart of the teaching — the relation between the bodhisattva's ten bodies and the tathāgata's *dharma-body*. The sūtra is uncompromising on one point: they are not two different things in essence. All dharmas are equal in nature, of one suchness, so the bodhisattva's dharma-body and the tathāgata's dharma-body share one body. The *only* difference is the fullness of merit and power (功德威力). To make this tangible the sūtra offers two metaphors that must be kept distinct and paired, not collapsed:
- **The *mani* jewel, before and after polishing. The jewel-substance is the same. Before polishing it is dim, clouded, its colors hidden; after polishing its colors blaze out. So too, the bodhisattva's dharma-body and the tathāgata's dharma-body are not different substances — only the polish differs. - The moon from the first to the fourteenth day versus the fifteenth-day full moon.** The lunar disk is one moon. Yet from new to full, the brightness grows. The bodhisattva's dharma-body is like the moon before the fifteenth — the same moon, but the light is not yet full, traces of cloud remain. The tathāgata's dharma-body is the full moon, luminous, unobstructed, illuminating everywhere.
Two things follow from this that contemporary readers often miss. First, "body" here is not the opposite of "mind"; it is the *form* that wisdom takes when a ground has matured — embodied realization, not information. Second, the bodhisattva does not *construct* a dharma-body different from the Buddha's; the bodhisattva *uncovers and polishes* the one body that is already there. The teaching is therefore *not* a ladder of self-improvement but a sequence of *revealings*.
That is what the Ten Bodies are saying. Now let us walk them through ordinary life.
II. Walking the Ten Bodies in Contemporary Life
A note on method before we begin: each of these "bodies" can be glimpsed at any stage of life in micro-form, but the *sūtra* speaks of them as ripening at specific grounds. So when I say "this is the Equal Body at work," I mean a moment in which the *kind of seeing* the first ground describes is genuinely present — not a memory of a teaching, but a perceptual shift. The walkthrough is meant as a *recognition exercise*, not a self-improvement plan.
1. The Equal Body (平等身) — the first ground
The classical definition is precise: *penetrating dharma-nature, free from crookedness, seeing the equality of dharmas.* "Equality" here is not "everyone is the same," nor is it democratic sentiment. It is the seeing-through of the *rankings* we instinctively place on persons, projects, and ourselves — the senior partner is not ontologically higher than the new hire; the influencer is not ontologically brighter than the quiet neighbor; my own story is not centrally more real than yours.
In life. Picture a morning commute. The platform fills with strangers. The mind automatically sorts them: the well-dressed executive heading to a glass tower, the housekeeper with two shopping bags, the teenager with headphones drowning out the world, the elderly man with a cane. None of these people are yet ranked by *worth*; they are sorted by *function*. The Equal Body becomes visible when the sorting softens and what remains is *being*. Not "we are all equal in some abstract sense," but an unmediated recognition that the executive's anxiety and the housekeeper's fatigue have the same texture, that none of these bodies is more real than the next. This is not the same as ignoring differences — you can still see the cane, still know to offer a seat. The *crookedness* (邪曲) the sūtra names is the subtle distortion by which some people are weighed more heavily in your field of awareness than others. Equal Body is the seeing-through of that distortion.
Where modern mapping usually goes wrong. People tend to translate "equality" into social or political programs. The sūtra is talking about *perceptual* equality — what is true in the seeing, before any policy. That doesn't make it apolitical; it makes it the ground on which non-arbitrary ethics can stand.
2. The Pure Body (清淨身) — the second ground
*Free from the stain of precept-violation; the nature of the precepts is pure.* This is not "I am a moral person." It is the second-ground ripeness of the *precept nature itself* being recognized as already pure — and the disappearance of the *stain* (垢) that comes from breaking one's own vows.
In life. Most contemporary people are not monastics holding formal precepts, but nearly everyone carries vows — some explicit ("I will not lie to my parents about money," "I will not drink on weeknights," "I will not sleep with someone who is not consenting"), most tacit ("I am a person who keeps my word," "I am a parent who does not humiliate my children"). The Pure Body is not the *keeping* of these vows; it is what becomes possible *because of* keeping them — a kind of basic cleanliness of intent. When you have just broken such a vow — lied to your partner about where you were, lost your temper with a child in a way you swore you wouldn't — there is a *stain*. Not guilt in the moralistic sense, but the phenomenological experience of opacity, of not-quite-recognizing-yourself. The Pure Body, in its small everyday ripening, is the capacity to notice that stain without performing penitential theater, to wash it clean by returning to the vow (not by vowing harder), and to recover the basic trust in one's own word.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. People often hear "pure" and think "innocent." Innocence is a property of someone who has not yet encountered the stain; purity is a property of someone who has encountered it and *can* return. The sūtra's "離犯戒垢" presupposes the possibility of violation; the second ground is the ground of *post-violation* returnability.
3. The Inexhaustible Body (無盡身) — the third ground
*Free from desire, hatred, and envy; dwelling in supreme samādhi.* The "inexhaustible" is not a feeling of high energy. It is the *un-depletable resource* that appears when the three classical poisons have been so thoroughly worked with that they no longer drain the system.
In life. Consider a stretch of sustained caregiving — a child who is sick for weeks, a parent in slow decline, a team that is in crisis at work. The naive image is that this is sustainable only by willpower, and willpower is finite; you will burn out. The Inexhaustible Body, in its ripening form, is the discovery that something *else* kicks in when the three poisons quiet down. Envy ("why is it easier for her") drains. Hatred ("this is unfair, I hate this") drains. Desire ("let me just check out for an hour") drains and then crashes you back. When those three are held, the samādhi of the third ground is not a meditation cushion experience but an *available patience*, a register of presence that does not run out the way willpower does. You can sit for the third night in a row with the feverish child and not be counting the hours. That availability is what *inexhaustible* means.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. Modern self-help often treats "energy" as a metabolic or motivational quantity (sleep, exercise, "energy management"). The sūtra treats *inexhaustibility* as a function of the three poisons having lost their grip. The two are not in opposition, but they are not the same — the third ground's inexhaustibility is downstream of inner freedom, not upstream of it.
4. The Cultivated Body (修集身) — the fourth ground
*Diligently cultivating all the bodhi-factors.* This is the body that *accumulates*. "Accumulated" here is the rendering of *修集* — cultivated-and-gathered. The fourth ground is where one stops having insights and starts *banking* them, the way a musician who can now play the scales begins a serious practice regime.
In life. Think of someone a decade into a meditation practice, or five years into sobriety, or two years into daily writing, or twenty years into a marriage in which they have stayed *deliberately* attentive. There is a difference between the early energy of insight ("I see clearly now!") and the long, patient, unglamorous middle period in which one returns to the cushion, the meeting, the difficult conversation, the same mistake corrected again, the same vow renewed again. The Cultivated Body is the *body of returns*. It is not a feeling; it is a structure. It is what makes it possible to keep showing up on the third Tuesday of an ordinary month when nothing in particular is on fire. The "菩提分法" — the factors that branch into awakening — are not exotic states. They are the small, repeated, ordinary actions that compose a life: mindful speech, generous giving, patient listening, returning to the breath, returning to the vow.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. In a culture that valorizes the breakthrough, the fourth ground is the most mocked. People mistake the long middle for stagnation. It is the opposite: it is the body that is being woven.
5. The Dharma-Nature Body (法性身) — the fifth ground
*Observing and awakening to the truths, realizing the essential nature of dharmas.* Where the first ground *saw* the equality of dharmas, the fifth ground *realizes their nature*. This is the move from insight as a viewpoint to insight as *what is now obviously the case*.
In life. There is a moment many meditators know: the difference between believing in impermanence intellectually, and *looking at the steam rising from the tea* and finding that impermanence is simply the way the cup is, without anything to defend or argue. The Dharma-Nature Body is that shift, generalized. It is not "I have a metaphysical view." It is *the world has lost its cover of solidity*. The cup on the table is no longer *primarily* an object you have feelings about; it is the place where dharma-nature is happening. The same goes for the colleague who has annoyed you for years: there is a moment — not always, but possible — when you see the irritation itself as dharma-nature happening, not as a problem to be solved.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. "Realizing dharma-nature" gets spiritualized into a peak experience. The sūtra treats it as the ordinary *transparency* of things once the obscurations have been worn thin by the previous grounds. It can be quiet. It usually is.
6. The Body Beyond (or Free from) Inquiry and Contemplation (離尋伺身 / 無尋伺身) — the sixth ground
*Contemplating dependent origination; its object is hard to fathom, beyond the reach of inquiry and contemplation.* The terms *vitarka* and *vicāra* (尋, 伺) are the coarse and subtle *probing* of the conceptual mind — the way we take an object, push on it with questions, examine it from angles. Dependent origination (緣起) is the sūtra's classic "object" that resists exactly this kind of handling, because every time you think you've pinned it down, it has already become something else. The sixth body is the *release of that instrument*. It is not the absence of thought; it is the absence of the *need to keep probing*.
In life. Anyone who has sat with a difficult koan, or held a friend in grief for hours without speaking, or watched a child learn to walk without narrating, knows something like this register. The mind is fully present, awake, even precise — but it has stopped trying to *figure out*. There is a curious lightness, because the mental effort that normally consumes so much bandwidth is, for that stretch, simply not running. The sūtra uses two names for the same body — *apart from* (離) and *without* (無) — and the gentle redundancy is itself a teaching: this body is defined by *both* the gentle stepping-back and the simple not-having. If you have to *try* to be free of inquiry, you have not yet left inquiry.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. People often confuse this with "no thoughts" or "the witness state." Neither is what the sūtra means. The body is defined by the *object* (dependent origination) being too fluid for conceptual probing, not by the *subject* becoming blank. It is more like being inside a river than outside the river.
7. The Inconceivable Body (不思議身) — the seventh ground
*Gathering buddha-dharmas, with skillful means, wisdom-action fulfilled.* When conceptual probing is no longer required, what comes back online is not blankness but a different kind of intelligence — one that responds to situations without premeditation, often in ways that surprise the bodhisattva herself.
In life. Most adults have had the experience of saying *exactly* the right thing in a hard conversation and not knowing where it came from. Or of making a small decision in a crisis that turned out to be load-bearing, made before the deliberative mind caught up. The Inconceivable Body, at its seventh-ground ripening, is the *availability of skillful means as a body-level capacity* — not as a clever technique. It is what the sūtra calls *方便善巧* (skillful means, *upāya-kauśalya*), but lodged in the person rather than in the repertoire. After the long stretch of inquiry-and-contemplation-release, the bodhisattva can act in unaccountable ways. "Inconceivable" here is not an intensification of thought; it is the recognition that thought is no longer the bottleneck.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. "Inconceivable" gets read as "mysterious" or "supernatural." The sūtra's word is more sober: it is what cannot be *fully pre-conceived* by thought, because it is generated in the moment of need. It is the body that has learned to trust that.
8. The Quiet Body (寂靜身) — the eighth ground
*Afflictions no longer arise; far from worldly disputation.* "Afflictions no longer arise" (煩惱不再現行) is one of the strongest claims in the bodhisattva path. It does not mean "I never feel angry." It means that the *chain reaction* by which an irritation becomes a resentment becomes a story becomes a position becomes a war has been interrupted at its first link. The trigger may still be felt; what no longer arises is the *taking-over* by the kleśa.
In life. Picture the same political argument you have had with a relative for a decade. The first seven grounds did the inner work of clearing away the projections that fueled it. At the eighth ground, you can hear the same argument and not be recruited into it. You can answer, or not. You can engage on the points that matter and let the rest pass. *Worldly disputation* (世間戲論) is the verbal version of the kleśa chain — the kind of conversation that exists for the ego-gratification of being right rather than for the meeting of minds. The Quiet Body does not withdraw from the world; it withdraws from the *automatic participation* in the chain. The world can still be entered; it just doesn't drag the bodhisattva in.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. Quietness gets confused with passivity, or with the famous "spiritual bypassing" — disengaging from justice work because one has achieved inner peace. The sūtra is precise: it is freedom from *戲論* (dramatic disputation), not from engagement. The eighth-ground bodhisattva, on the classical accounts, is the most engaged of all.
9. The Space-like Body (虛空身) — the ninth ground
*Body-sign boundless, pervading all.* The "body-sign" (身相) is the *phenomenal shape* of the bodhisattva's presence — how they appear, how they take up room. The ninth ground is when that shape loses its hard edges. It does not mean the body becomes invisible; it means that the bodhisattva can be *fully present* anywhere without compressing the space.
In life. Most of us know people whose entry into a room subtly reorganizes it. It is rarely about volume or status. It is the kind of presence in which other people find themselves more themselves, less defended, more able to say the thing they needed to say. The Space-like Body, at its ripening, is that quality *as a stable capacity*, not as a personality trait. It is also the capacity to *hold* — to be a space for others' pain without filling that pain with one's own reaction. The metaphor is exact: like space, this body holds everything and is not stained by what it holds; it is not an object among objects, and so it is not displaced by objects.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. People read "boundless" as grandiose. The sūtra's word *虛空* is the same word for empty space — the un-fixed, un-locatable, accommodating openness. The Space-like Body is not larger than the room; it is the *room itself*.
10. The Body of Subtle Wisdom (妙智身) — the tenth ground
*Universally gathered and perfected, the subtle realm of all-knowing wisdom.* "All-knowing wisdom" (一切種智, *sarvākāra-jñatā*) is the wisdom that knows each thing in its own kind — meeting each person, each situation, in exactly the mode it requires, without needing to bring a pre-formed template.
In life. This is the hardest to glimpse, because the tenth ground is the bodhisattva's last stage before Buddhahood. In its micro-form, it is the moment when a teacher, with no script, meets the exact person in front of them with the exact question that person needed, and knows afterward they could not have predicted what they said. It is what an experienced psychotherapist does when the training has fallen away and only the meeting is left. It is what a parent occasionally achieves with a child. It is *妙* — subtle, fine-grained, not flashy — and it is *智* — knowing, not feeling. This is the bodhisattva's dharma-body just before it becomes indistinguishable in fullness from the tathāgata's dharma-body, differing still only in the *unfinished polish*.
Where modern mapping goes wrong. "Subtle wisdom" is easily misread as esoteric, refined, elite. The sūtra's word *妙* is closer to *precise* — wisdom so attuned to its object that it almost disappears into that object. It is the opposite of distant.
III. Why Contemporary People Need This Map
There are at least three reasons a teaching from a forty-chapter *Avataṃsaka* deserves a hearing on a Tuesday morning.
1. It gives dignity to where you are, without requiring you to stay there. In a culture of relentless self-improvement, almost every spiritual and therapeutic discourse is built on the premise that *who you are now is the problem and the next version is the solution*. The Ten Bodies refuse this. Each body is a real ripening; each deserves recognition. You are not "only" on the second ground; you are *on the second ground*, and the second ground has its own integrity — the returnability after breaking one's word. That is a real attainment. It is not a consolation prize. Equally, the map is *not* a license to stop, because each body's *fullness* is not yet the next body's foundation. You cannot have a real Space-like Body on the basis of an unworked third ground. The map is honest in both directions.
2. It dignifies the body itself. Most of what passes for "spiritual" in late-modern circulation floats free of embodiment — it is about beliefs, attitudes, vibes. The Ten Bodies are explicitly *bodies*. Wisdom is not something the bodhisattva has; it is something the bodhisattva *is*, in the form of her presence, her patience, her capacity to hold. This is a quiet rebuke to the disembodied spirituality of the algorithm age. The Inexhaustible Body is not a belief in patience; it is the body that can sit with the sick child without counting hours. The Pure Body is not the absence of wrongdoing; it is the *capacity to wash the stain of wrongdoing* that the body actually has. The Dharma-Nature Body is not the conviction that things are impermanent; it is the perceptual shift in which the steam from the tea is no longer *interesting* but transparent. We need a spirituality that knows what *body* it is talking about.
3. It is the one map that does not split the seeker from the sought. The jewel-metaphor and the moon-metaphor in the sūtra are doing important work. They say: you are not building a new thing. You are polishing something that is already there; you are letting the moon already in the sky become full. Most contemporary paths — including most secular paths of "becoming your best self" — operate on the assembly model: take parts, assemble a better person. The Ten Bodies operate on the *reveal-and-polish* model. This matters psychologically. Many people who begin self-improvement projects are secretly afraid that underneath there is nothing; the polish model is the model for whom this fear is the wrong place to start. The Bodhisattva is not a project. The bodhisattva is a jewel that has forgotten it is a jewel.
There are, of course, real limits to borrowing a sūtra's map into contemporary life. The Ten Bodies are described in the context of a specific cosmology and a specific pedagogy, and to treat the ten grounds as a literal developmental psychology would be a forced fit. The sūtra is doing several things at once — describing the structure of awakening, marking stages of deepening, praising a particular liberation, and locating it in the vast *Avataṃsaka* vision of mutual interpenetration. Pulling the Ten Bodies out as a self-help sequence flattens all of that. What contemporary readers can *usefully* take from it is not the literal ladder but the *grammar* of maturation it implies: that embodiment comes in ripening, that ripening has integrity at every stage, that the deepest ripening is *uncovering*, and that the bodhisattva and the Buddha are not two.
IV. Common Misreadings and Clarifications
Misreading 1: "Ten Bodies" as ten personalities or ten spiritual identities. This is the most common contemporary translation, and it is wrong. The text is not asking you to cultivate ten different "you"s (the Artist, the Warrior, the Healer, the Sage, etc.). It is naming ten dimensions of *one* dharma-body as it ripens through ten grounds. The plural is a pedagogical enumeration, not a multiplication of self.
Misreading 2: "Ten Bodies" as ten supernatural powers. Nothing in the source material supports this. The Ten Bodies are not siddhis, not psychic abilities, not the ten stages of heaven in Daoist-influenced folk religion. They are descriptions of how the bodhisattva's wisdom takes form — in equality of seeing, in returnability of vow, in available patience, in accumulating practice, in transparent seeing, in non-probing attention, in responsive skillful means, in freedom from kleśa, in pervading presence, in subtle wisdom. Anyone who tries to read the Ten Bodies as a list of powers will quickly be embarrassed by the text.
Misreading 3: The Bodhisattva's dharma-body and the Tathāgata's dharma-body are the same thing. This is the most subtle misreading, and the sūtra explicitly warns against it. The sūtra says the *essence* (體性) is not different — the jewel-substance is one jewel, the moon-disk is one moon. But the *fullness* of merit differs. To say "I am already a Buddha" because the dharma-body is the same dharma-body is to confuse the unpolished jewel with the polished one, the fourteenth-day moon with the fifteenth. The sūtra is firm on this: bodhisattvas possess the ten bodies, *and* the bodhisattva's dharma-body is not yet the tathāgata's. The path is not a fiction; the polish is not a courtesy.
Misreading 4: "Ten Bodies" equals "ten stages I should rush through." This collapses the sūtra's logic. Each body requires its own ground to be genuinely traversed. The Quiet Body of the eighth ground cannot be performed by someone whose fourth-ground Cultivated Body is not yet real. The Inconceivable Body cannot be manufactured by an aspirant whose sixth-ground Body Beyond Inquiry and Contemplation is still theoretical. The map is sequential *because each subsequent ripening depends on the integrity of the previous*. Treating the Ten Bodies as a checklist is the surest way to stay on the first ground forever.
Misreading 5: Collapsing the sixth body's two names into one. The text uses both *離尋伺身* and *無尋伺身*. Both are original to the *Avataṃsaka* recension. Modern expositions sometimes "standardize" to one form. This is a small textual loss, but the sūtra evidently meant to keep both — perhaps because the release (離) and the simple not-having (無) are not identical and the body holds both. Note this when you encounter the term and resist the false clarity of unification.
Misreading 6: Confusing the "Ten Bodies" with the "Vajra Indestructible Body." The *Avataṃsaka* passage in which the Ten Bodies appear also discusses, separately, a "Vajra Indestructible Body" (金剛不可壞身) arising from ten meanings. These are *not* the same list. The Vajra Indestructible Body is a different enumeration, attached to a different liberative practice. Merging them produces a confused and unhandsome hybrid.
**Misreading 7: Treating the Ten Bodies as a description of how you should *behave*.** The sūtra is not a manual of behavior; it is a description of *what becomes possible when a stage of seeing has matured*. The Pure Body is not "act purely." It is the *basic trust in one's own word* that arises when one has stopped violating the vow. The Space-like Body is not "act spaciously." It is the *un-compressive presence* that becomes available when the work of the prior grounds has been done. To read the Ten Bodies as a behavior manual is to mistake the fruit for the path. The path is the ten grounds; the Ten Bodies are what you look like when the path has ripened.
A Closing Image
The sūtra asks us to hold two pictures at once. The first is the *mani* jewel in your hand: dim, clouded, no color visible. You have had it for years. The second is the same jewel after polishing: every color blazing, the room lit by it. There was never a moment when you got a *new* jewel. There was only the slow, honest work of removing what was covering it. The Ten Bodies are the names of that polishing in its ten ripening stages — from the first moment you see, against your habits, that the dharmas are equal, to the last moment when the polish is full and the moon is the fifteenth-day moon. The bodhisattva is the one who, having seen that the jewel is already the jewel, sits down to the work.
That, at any rate, is what the *Avataṃsaka* is asking when it speaks of the Ten Bodies. It is not a creed. It is a description of what becomes visible — in you, in a community, in a long practice — when nothing is added and nothing is missing.