法威力 is one of those Buddhist compound terms that sounds, on first hearing, far more dramatic than it is. It sounds like the kind of power a thunder deity has. In fact, the Yogācārabhūmi Śāstra (《瑜伽师地论》, T1579) uses the term to name something far closer to home: the real, observable, this-life power that lives inside a virtuous practice when it is actually being cultivated. The foundational sentence of the chapter is plain.
诸胜法有广大果，有大胜利。
The excellent dharmas have great fruit, great victories.
The whole concept can be unpacked by taking that sentence literally. "Great fruit" doesn't mean supernatural reward. It means the practice does four observable things at once, and the YBh names each one. We'll get to that. First, we need to know where 法威力 sits in its own neighborhood, because the treatise will not allow it to be read as miracle.
这个概念在说什么
1.1 The three cousins: 圣威力, 法威力, 俱生威力
The YBh classifies 诸佛菩萨威力 (the powers / might of buddhas and bodhisattvas) three ways, and the differences between them matter.
- 圣威力 (ārya-prabhāva) — "the power of the sage," named for the mastery of meditative concentration (samādhi) on which it rests. When the mind is utterly pliant and gathered, it can act with an efficiency ordinary minds cannot. This is the power source for many of the "supernatural" capabilities associated with adepts in Buddhist literature. - 俱生威力 (sahaja-prabhāva) — the "innate power" that comes from being born with an already-large storehouse of past-life merit. Some people walk into a room and the room adjusts; that kind of weight was stocked long before the present life. - 法威力 (dharma-prabhāva) — the power that lives inside the practices themselves when they are actually cultivated. This is the power you can begin to acquire this week.
The three are listed as cleanly distinct:
三种威力：圣威力、法威力、俱生威力。
The bodhisattva path is, in significant part, the deliberate and patient cultivation of 法威力, because it is the one of the three that is fully under your control in the present. 圣威力 depends on deep samādhi; 俱生威力 depends on a long prior ledger. 法威力 depends on what you do today with the six pāramitās.
The same treatise also offers a five-fold classification at another point:
神通威力、法威力、俱生威力、共诸声闻独觉威力、不共声闻独觉威力。
Two things matter here. First, 法威力 is listed as its own item, separate from 神通威力 — so we are never permitted to read 法威力 as "miraculous display." Second, 法威力 is one of the very categories by which the buddhas and bodhisattvas are declared *not shared* with sravakas and pratyekabuddhas in their full range; the same section specifies that sravakas' siddhi-reach covers "two thousand worlds," pratyekabuddhas' covers three thousand, while the bodhisattva's reach is "一切世界、一切有情界" (all worlds, all sentient-being realms). That scope comparison is specifically about the *fullness* of these powers; 法威力 belongs inside that same conversation about what the bodhisattva fully realizes that the two vehicles do not.
1.2 The four-aspect anatomy of 法威力
This is where the concept earns its weight. 法威力 is not a single effect. It is a fourfold anatomy, and *each pāramitā, when genuinely practiced, exhibits all four aspects at once*. The YBh sets them out as four 相 (aspects).
1. 断所对治相 — "the aspect of cutting what it counteracts." Every pāramitā exists because there is an opposing affliction. The YBh walks the examples directly:
- 布施 (dāna, generosity) cuts 悭吝 (miserliness, the tight-fisted reflex). - 持戒 (śīla, ethical holding) cuts 犯戒 (transgression, the slippage past one's own stated line). - 忍辱 (kṣānti, forbearance) cuts 不忍 (intolerance, the strike-back reflex). - 精进 (vīrya, courageous effort) cuts 懈怠 (laxity, the discouragement that freezes effort). - 静虑 (dhyāna, meditative settling) cuts 散乱 (scatteredness, the runaway attention). - 般若 (prajñā, discriminating wisdom) cuts 无明 (ignorance, the belief that appearances are the things themselves).
The first aspect of 法威力 is the most concrete: this practice can actually *interrupt* a reflex. Not in theory — in lived behavior.
2. 资粮成熟相 — "the aspect of provision and ripening." The same practice does two things at this level. It becomes 菩提资粮 (provision for the agent's own awakening), and through 成熟有情 it ripens the lives of those around the agent. The YBh uses one word-pair (资粮 / 成熟) deliberately: the practice is simultaneously investment in oneself and soil-tending for others.
3. 饶益自他相 — "the aspect of benefiting self and others." Two things happen here, internal and external. Internally, the practitioner comes out with sustained gladness — 心常欢喜 — and no regret, no leftover residue of guilt. Externally, the practitioner becomes a source of relief for others; the YBh's catalog of what others are relieved of is worth preserving because people often misread the list as too grand:
饥渴、寒热、种种疾病、怖畏众苦。
Hunger, thirst, cold, heat, the various kinds of sickness, fear, and the many forms of suffering. These are bodily, household-size, this-worldly reliefs. The YBh is not promising sainthood; it is naming what a steady practice actually does in a household, an office, a clinic.
4. 与当来果相 — "the aspect of bringing future-life fruit." The practice leaves deposits that mature over time, in this life or later, as 富乐 (abundance and ease), 善趣 (good rebirth), or 天世界 (heavenly-world states). The YBh uses the dāna example most concretely: such giving eventually yields 大禄位 (a great position), 财宝 (material treasure), 朋党 (a circle of companions), 眷属 (a community of one's own).
These four aspects are not a sequence. They are not stages. They are four *registers* of the same event. The YBh doesn't say "first you cut, then you store, then you benefit, then you harvest." It says each pāramitā shows all four. When you give, something is interrupted, something is stored, something is relieved, something is deposited — all in one gesture.
1.3 The worked example: dāna across three time-stamps
The YBh uses dāna to make the anatomy tangible, and gives the time-stamps with care:
施先意悦、施时心净、施已无悔。
Before giving, the mind is already glad (意悦) — the contraction that goes with holding has already started to loosen. While giving, the mind is clean (心净) — there is no calculation running. After giving, there is no regret (无悔) — no twinge of "did I give too much." That is the internal, self-benefit face of 饶益自他相. Externally, that same dāna relieves another person's 饥渴 (hunger, thirst), 寒热 (cold, heat), 种种疾病 (the various sicknesses), 所欲匮乏 (the specific things they lack), 怖畏众苦 (fear, the many dreads). And on a longer arc, that same dāna stores 大禄位、财宝、朋党、眷属 — through whatever causal texture this world has, generosity seems to find its way back.
Three time-stamps of one practice. One gesture. Four aspects running concurrently.
1.4 What 法威力 is *not*
This is worth slowing down over. 法威力 is not 神通威力. They are separate items in the YBh's own five-fold listing. The treatise does not sneak the powers of the practice into the powers of samādhi or the powers of siddhi; the practices have a power *of their own kind* — namely, that they cut, store, relieve, and ripen. The 神通 of an arhat or a bodhisattva is a separate thing, with its own mastery path. Confusing the two is the earliest misreading, and almost everyone makes it.
Equally, 法威力 is not identical to 福德 (merit). Merit is the stored-up goodness that accrues from wholesome action; it overlaps with the *资粮* and *当来果* aspects of 法威力, but does not encompass the *断所治* aspect (cutting an active reflex) or the *饶益他* aspect (relieving another person in real time). 法威力 is a wider grammar than 福德 / 功德.
1.5 法威力 in the act of teaching
The YBh extends 法威力 across not just what one *does* but what one *teaches*, and lists five great fruits that come from hearing a bodhisattva or buddha proclaim the dharma:
1. 法眼生起 — the arising of the dharma-eye (the experiential seeing of how things actually are). 2. 得尽诸漏 — the exhaustion of all *āsrava* (outflows, the leaks of the heart). 3. 发无上正等菩提正愿心 — the arising of the bodhicitta, the directed mind of unexcelled complete enlightenment. 4. 证得菩萨最胜法忍 — the attainment of the bodhisattva's supreme dharma-*kṣānti* (an enduring acceptance that can hold the dharma without breaking). 5. 正法眼久住不灭 — the dharma-eye's long abiding, the cause of which is 受持读诵、修习正行 (taking up, reciting, and training in the practice).
This is 法威力 in its propagational form: the same power, but on the receiving end of the teaching. Whatever interruption-reflex, provision, relief, and long-term deposit a practitioner experiences, a hearer also experiences — and at a magnitude that includes the propagation of the dharma itself. The fifth item is the lineage item: 法威力 is what keeps the teaching alive across generations.
生活里的走查
Below: a walk-through, with the canonical four aspects mapped onto contemporary scenes, pāramitā by pāramitā. I have flagged the most common mis-mappings as we go.
2.1 布施 (dāna): the packed morning train
Setting: you are standing in a morning commuter train. Someone with a cane or crutches boards.
断所对治相. Your reflexive contraction — glance away, bury your phone, "someone else will" — is the 悭吝 the YBh names. The actual dāna you do here is the act of seeing and standing up. That small motion interrupts the reflex.
资粮成熟相. Your own capacity to notice a person in need next time you board — that is 资粮, accumulating in you. The act of standing also makes the car marginally more honest for whoever saw it; someone who watched may notice a need tomorrow. That is 成熟, in a quiet form.
饶益自他相. 施先意悦: most people who actually stand up report a softening that already began before they stood. 施时心净: no weighing. 施已无悔: that night, no 'was I silly.' And on the other side, that person's body is no longer fighting for balance, the fear of falling (怖畏) has been lifted, their tiredness (热, exhaustion-of-standing) has been relieved.
与当来果相. Not because the universe rewards you karmically — the YBh does not require that reading — but in the plain register the treatise allows: in three months your dāna-reflex will be stronger than your 慳吝-reflex. In a year, you'll be the kind of person who sees; that is a 大禄位 not in name but in composure.
The most common mis-mapping here: dāna is read as money. It is not. The YBh's own list of what dāna relieves includes fear, exhaustion, and the felt want — not only material need. Letting a colleague have the cover story for a small mistake, giving someone your place in line at the pharmacy, putting a non-zero percentage of your honest attention into a conversation rather than your half of it: all of this is dāna. The Pāramitā is generosity, not philanthropy.
2.2 持戒 (śīla) [尸罗]: the work report that doesn't pad
Setting: it's Friday afternoon, the report is half-done, and you have two options — inflate what you did so it looks done, or send it honest. Or: you've been at work for nine hours, your partner texts, and you're too tired to answer honestly. The śīla question is small but daily.
断所对治相. 尸罗 (the YBh uses the transliteration at this point — "清净尸罗") cuts the small 犯戒 of convenient dishonesty. The relevant fact: śīla is not only "no killing, no stealing" for monastics. It is the entire posture of honoring one's own stated lines. In a contemporary register, those lines are mostly *spoken or implied agreements* — to be honest, to keep your word, to not usurp credit, to not consume what isn't yours.
资粮成熟相. Trust compounds. People who keep small agreements build a particular capital that is harder to value than money and more useful. 资粮 in the YBh's sense is provision for future awakening — and the conditions for any future good (liberation included) include a mind that knows it can rely on itself.
饶益自他相. 施已无悔. The cleanest feature of not inflating the report is the no-recoil quality on Saturday morning. That is the self-benefit. The benefit to others — colleagues who can trust the report; a partner who gets a half-tired but true reply rather than a polished lie — is the 他 part.
与当来果相. The YBh's *当来果* register here reads as: years later, in a moment of pressure, this is the person who doesn't break. That is a 大禄位 one cannot buy.
The most common mis-mapping here: śīla is read as "precepts for monastics" or as the rules of a tradition. The YBh's structure is broader: śīla has 法威力 precisely because it cuts a reflex of self-serving slippage that everyone has. The ethical self is not a monastery-only topic.
2.3 忍辱 (kṣānti): the snap that didn't return
Setting: your partner comes home and is sharp from their day. The room tightens. Your body knows exactly what to do — strike.
断所对治相. The reflex of 不忍. Kṣānti cuts that. Notice the YBh does not name "anger" as the thing being cut. It names 不忍 (intolerance), which is the *reactive wanting to retaliate*. Anger as a feeling is allowed in many Buddhist systems; what the pāramitā cuts is the strike-back.
资粮成熟相. Every time you do not strike, the internal container of you grows. The YBh pairs this with 成熟: as you slowly become the kind of person who can hold a sharp word without recoiling, others in your household also become less reactive — they have a different kind of object to bounce off.
饶益自他相. For the other person, the snap-removed-strike is enormous. They get to find out they were tired, not bad. For you, the relief is private — the absence of a regret to carry.
与当来果相. Twenty-year relationships are built on this register. Not grandly, but reliably.
The most common mis-mapping here: kṣānti is misread as "swallow it / be the doormat." It isn't. The YBh is precise: kṣānti cuts 不忍. Not-striking is not collapsing. There is a third thing — staying — which is what the YBh is naming.
2.4 精进 (vīrya): the third night at 3 a.m.
Setting: third night in a row, sick child. You are up at 3 a.m. and there is no clean reason you should keep getting up.
断所对治相. 懈怠 (the discouragement that freezes effort). Vīrya cuts this. Note carefully: the YBh names the opposite as 懈怠, *not* as "rest." Rest is good. 懈怠 is the slump — the evening when you decide you are done.
资粮成熟相. Each 3 a.m. you re-enter is provision in two directions: for your own future capacity to show up; and, the maturity side, for the child whose body learns that someone comes. The YBh uses 成熟有情 here in a register that requires no translation for parents: the way a small person becomes trustworthy of the world has a lot to do with the texture of being held.
饶益自他相. The child is held. You, tomorrow, are not collapsing in a shame-quiet.
与当来果相. This one is hard to write about but easy to see: the kinds of human beings we trust most were built in some version of this.
The most common mis-mapping here: vīrya is read as hustle, as gritted-teeth productivity. It isn't. Its opposite is discouragement. Anything that genuinely counters discouragement — including, sometimes, the right kind of rest — is in vīrya's field.
2.5 静虑 (dhyāna): the feed, the in-box, the broken attention
Setting: phone in hand, scrolling a feed, you realize you have not absorbed a single item in the last four minutes. Your attention has been continuously elsewhere.
断所对治相. 散乱 (scatteredness). Dhyāna as a pāramitā has 法威力 here. This is the YBh locating meditation's power at the very site attention collapses — not on a cushion.
资粮成熟相. Every time you actually return attention to where you placed it (a sentence, a face, a single page), provision stores. This is the simplest "training" you can do and the most expensive: the modern attention-economy is, at a very different altitude, a useful *negative image* of dhyāna's opposite. The feed is engineered to fight 散乱's opposite with a thousand small defenses — that doesn't make dhyāna's work less real, it makes it more so.
饶益自他相. When your attention is gathered, you are with the person in front of you. That is a relief — others are not alone. A scattered partner, a scattered parent, a scattered boss: these are the people who accidentally leave others feeling unseen all day.
与当来果相. A mind that can be still is a mind that can go further in any direction.
The most common mis-mapping here: dhyāna is read as retreat, as peace-and-quiet. The YBh's anatomy places dhyāna's 法威力 exactly where attention collapses — in your hand, in your workday, in the actual fabric of the day. A retreat helps. The retreat's purpose is what you do with attention on a Tuesday afternoon.
2.6 般若 (prajñā): the flash that didn't ignite
Setting: someone cuts you off in traffic, or a slur appears in your inbox. The mind, in a flash, makes a solid story — *they are X; I am a victim of X; therefore Y* — and the body is already tensing.
断所对治相. 无明, here in its everyday meaning of taking the constructed story as the final thing. Prajñā cuts that. Not by arguing with the story (which strengthens it), but by *seeing through it while it is happening* — seeing that "X" is composed, that "victim" is composed, that the whole thing is a flickered composite. This is what the everyday YBh-style pāramitā-prajñā looks like. (The deeper versions of prajñā — into emptiness of self and phenomenon — are not contradicted; they are downstream of seeing-composition clearly many times. The YBh's taxonomy of pāramitās includes the everyday-regime prajñā on purpose.)
资粮成熟相. Every clean seeing stores. Ordinary people who can do this 1% better this year are recognizably different in ten years.
饶益自他相. The conflict doesn't happen — to those around you, this is a relief they may never name. To you, the absence of an evening's worth of residue is its own reward.
与当来果相. The YBh doesn't reduce this to a future-life claim; it offers it as the same point it makes for vīrya and dhyāna: deposits that compound. And of course, in the full Mahāyāna view, those deposits are precisely what provision awakening operates on.
The most common mis-mapping here: prajñā is misread as abstract metaphysics, as a doctrine about emptiness one assents to. The pāramitā version is a *capacity in the mind that interrupts construction in real time*. Without that capacity, the doctrine is talk. With it, the doctrine names something one has seen.
2.7 One additional scene for the propagational side: teaching
The YBh's listing of five great fruits of 宣说正法 (a bodhisattva's proclamation of dharma) — 法眼生起, 得尽诸漏, 发无上正等菩提正愿心, 证得菩萨最胜法忍, 正法眼久住不灭 — corresponds to a contemporary scene that is not a pāramitā exactly but is 法威力 in another register.
Setting: a friend is going through something. They are in a frame. You don't attempt to argue them out of the frame; you say one thing. Three weeks later they tell you something shifted.
You don't know how, exactly. The YBh's framing is helpfully agnostic here too: 法眼生起, 得尽诸漏, 发菩提心, 证得法忍, 正法久住 — these name the kinds of things that can happen on the receiving end of a practice. They do not pretend to predict which happen. They are saying: when a bodhisattva says the dharma, effects of this magnitude are possible; that is 法威力 in its teaching form, and the fifth item — 正法眼久住不灭 (the dharma-eye's long abiding) — is precisely the long-arc reason lineage work is not optional.
当代人为什么需要它
Even readers who do not take themselves to be on a Mahāyāna path have a recurring problem that 法威力 quietly solves. Three pieces of the contemporary landscape make this concept useful.
1. The "spiritual bypassing" problem. Contemporary spiritual culture is saturated with techniques offered as powers that do not require much of the practitioner. Mindfulness apps promise calm without asking anything about behavior. Manifestation culture promises outcomes without asking anything about dispossession. 法威力 refuses this. It locates power inside practices that ask for something — usually to give up an active reflex. The YBh's 四相 all behave like this: cutting, storing, relieving, depositing — none of them happen without the practice actually being practiced.
2. The "merit-as-points" problem. Even within Buddhist-influenced cultures, the dominant metaphor for what practice does is "merit-accumulation" — good deeds, points, a balance. The YBh's 法威力 is wider than this: merit is a part of *资粮成熟* and *与当来果*, but the framework also includes *断所治* (an active reflex being interrupted) and *饶益他* (a real person being relieved in real time). The four-aspect grammar gives a more textured answer when someone asks "what does this practice do?" than the points metaphor does.
3. The "without me, what's the use" problem. Contemporary people often privately wonder why they should bother doing small things when the structural forces in the world are so large. The YBh's *饶益自他* aspect, named plainly, partially answers this: a person who has been *cut free from a miserliness reflex* is one person less running on contraction. That person is materially changed. The structural problems don't vanish; the practitioner does change. 法威力 is the treatise's name for the fact that this change is real, observable, and not contingent on structural victory.
4. The diagnostic usefulness for any ethical practice. Even outside Buddhist commitment, the four-aspect check is a useful one to apply to any practice one is doing: does it cut a reflex? does it store something that compounds? does it relieve someone in front of me? does it leave a deposit for later? When the answer to all four is yes, the practice has what the YBh would call 法威力. When the answer is mostly no — the practice is "feeling good," "having an experience," "belonging to the group" — the YBh's framework says so, honestly.
5. The "spiritual progress without ethics" problem. A persistent misunderstanding across traditions is that spiritual progress happens "above" or "around" ordinary ethics. The YBh places 法威力 inside the six pāramitās, and begins with dāna and śīla, which are ethics. The framework contains no path to 法威力 that detours around ordinary decency. For a culture that has plenty of high-toned spiritual vocabulary and plenty of low-toned status competition, a framework that fuses the two is genuinely useful.
常见误读与澄清
A list of the readings that most often collapse 法威力 into something it isn't, with the corrections the YBh's anatomy supports.
1. 威力 = 神通 (siddhi / miracle). The YBh's own five-fold listing already separates 法威力 from 神通威力. They are different. 法威力 is the power a practice has in its own right — that it cuts, stores, relieves, and deposits. Reading 法威力 as miracle misses almost everything substantive about it. Reading 法威力 as identical to 神通 also subtly claims the practices produce phenomena they don't promise. The two powers are real, but they aren't the same power.
2. 法威力 = 功德 / 福德 (merit). Merit is one of the four aspects — the *资粮成熟* and *当来果* parts — but the framework also has the active reflex-cutting and the immediate other-relief parts. Reducing 法威力 to merit shrinks it.
3. 法威力 = 愿力 (vow-power). Vow-power (the strength of an undertaken intention across lifetimes) is real in Buddhist literature, but it is a different category. Vow-power is what supports the practice; 法威力 is the power the practice has once engaged. The two combine — strong vows underlie strong dhyāna — but they are not the same term.
4. 法威力 is only for monastics, or only for "advanced" practitioners. The YBh uses the six pāramitās as its frame, and the six pāramitās include ordinary dāna and śīla that anyone practicing sincerity begins to cultivate. The body of the treatise never restricts the *gaining* of 法威力 to ordained people — the examples given (relieving hunger, cold, sickness, fear) are worldly.
5. The four aspects are sequential. The YBh's phrasing is not "first you cut, then you store, then you benefit, then you harvest." The four are concurrent registers of the same event, as the dāna worked example makes plain (施先意悦, 施时心净, 施已无悔 is three time-stamps of one gesture; the four aspects are operating on that one gesture).
6. 法威力 means ethical practice works mechanically. The YBh is descriptive, not mechanical. It maps what practice does; it does not produce a causal engine diagram. Reducing it to a mechanical "do X then Y happens" misses the treatise's careful craft. 法威力 is observable; it isn't a closed-system physics. (The same temperance applies to comparative analogies — modern attention-economy studies, neural-plasticity research, and so on can be suggestive parallels, but none of them is "the same thing" as 法威力, and the YBh would not claim they were.)
7. 法威力 is a static quality one has or doesn't have. The YBh places 法威力 inside an ongoing practice — *胜法* (excellent dharmas), practiced, become powerful; un-practiced, they don't. The YBh's frame, applied honestly, never stops moving. A person who *stops* practicing dāna regains 悭吝 reflexes. A person who *interrupts* their śīla work relearns what it's like to be on the wrong side of one's own line. 法威力 is *exhibited*, repeatedly, by *excellent dharmas* — that is the verb inside the noun.
8. 法威力 is about getting what you want. The five great fruits of teaching are worth re-reading here. Three of them — 法眼生起, 得尽诸漏, 证得菩萨最胜法忍 — are not about getting what the practitioner wanted; they are about a release of pressure in the practitioner and a clarification in what is seen. "Great fruit" does not mean "what I was wishing for." It means the practice reaches.
A small closing
If a contemporary reader takes only one thing away from 法威力, the YBh is offering this: every virtue has a power, and that power is not "what the universe gives back to me," but "what the virtue does when it is alive in me and around me."
The single sentence the treatise keeps returning to — *诸胜法有广大果，有大胜利* — is honest about the scale. "Great" not because the practice grants wishes. "Great" because when a reflex is cut, something in the heart loses authority it shouldn't have; when an act of generosity lands, a room rearranges itself; when someone speaks the dharma well, a being stirs toward a frame they didn't have; and the dharma you are practicing somehow stays alive after you're done practicing it this morning. None of that is small. None of it requires miracle.