What This Concept Is About
Most English renderings flatten 瑞应 into something like "auspicious omen" or "miraculous sign," and in doing so they lose what is most distinctive about it. The two characters of the word are doing different work, and they need to be held together.
瑞 is a sign that fits — a sign whose very character is appropriate, harmonious, "as it should be." It is not merely good news; it is a sign whose goodness is structurally appropriate to the situation. A bud opening in spring is 瑞 for a tree; a fever breaking is 瑞 for a body. The "auspiciousness" is not stamped onto the event from outside; it is the event's own rightness.
应 is response, correspondence, resonance. It marks the event as an answer — something that has been called forth by what came before. In Chinese philosophical and religious vocabulary, 應 (also written 应) sits inside a larger pattern called 感应 (gǎnyìng, "responsive resonance"): one thing calls, another thing answers, and the answering is neither random nor magical but follows from the relation between them. A well-tuned string answers when its neighbor is plucked. The heat in a room answers the fire. The blooming of a seed answers the rain. None of these are "miracles" in the theatrical sense; all of them are responses within a relational structure.
So 瑞应, in its full weight, names a phenomenon in which the world answers sacred presence (圣人/贤圣 dwelling in the world, or virtue become manifest) with signs that are appropriate to that presence. The sign is not imposed on the world by an external agent; the world itself, in its own texture, responds. This is the canonical intuition we need to hold onto, because most contemporary misreadings come from losing one of these two characters: treating the sign as mechanical luck (losing 瑞's "fitness"), or treating it as a staged miracle (losing 应's relational ground).
The two foundational passages in the Āgamas — the only two places in this early stratum where the term 瑞应 is used, with no alternate translations like 奇瑞, 灵瑞, or 祥瑞 appearing in either text — frame the concept from two complementary angles.
The Fourfold Portrait in the Saṃyuktāgama (T0099)
In the *Saṃyuktāgama* (杂阿含经, trans. Guṇabhadra, Liu-Song dynasty), the occasion is a king who has just witnessed a monk rising into the air, palms joined in reverence before the awakened ones. He turns to a deity and asks, in the words preserved in the canon:
「佛生有何瑞应？」 — "What auspicious portents accompany the Buddha's birth?"
The deity's reply is a four-line portrait of what responsive signs look like. Each of these four 端 (aspects) must be held in its own place — they are not four flavors of the same thing, but four distinct dimensions in which the world answers sacred presence:
1. 光明能彻照 — Light that penetrates and illuminates. The first dimension is luminous clarity: an awakened presence does not enter the world opaquely. Something becomes lucid. Things that were previously obscure, double-edged, ambiguous, become transparent. This is the cognitive/atmosphere-level response.
2. 身体具相好 — The body bearing the marks (lakṣaṇa). The second dimension is bodily rightness: how the awakened one carries themselves, the proportion and dignity of their form, the way their posture, gait, voice, and gesture all express a settled cultivation. This is the form-level response, visible to anyone who watches.
3. 令人喜乐见 — Inspiring joy in those who behold. The third dimension is the witness's own response: those who see are glad. Not impressed by arguments, not converted by logic — simply made glad by the encounter. This is the affective response in those who are present.
4. 感动于天地 — Moving heaven and earth. The fourth dimension extends beyond the human witness: even the weather, the season, the earth itself responds. The frame is no longer interpersonal; it is cosmic.
Notice the progression: from the awakened one's own clarity (light), to the awakened one's own form (marks), to the human response (joy), to the cosmic response (heaven and earth moved). The signs are not all on the same level; they radiate outward through increasingly wide circles of responsiveness. To collapse them into "miraculous phenomena" or "spiritual aura" misses the precise ordering.
The "Small Part" Caveat
Immediately before reciting these four lines, the deity says:
「我不能宣说妙胜诸事，今略说少分。」 — "I cannot proclaim all the wondrous and supreme matters; let me speak only a small part."
This single sentence is doing more work than it appears to. It is a remarkable moment of epistemic humility in the canon: a deity, answering a king, openly admits that the phenomenon under discussion exceeds his capacity to articulate. What this caveat accomplishes:
- It marks 瑞应 as belonging to a register of experience that outstrips verbal description. - It warns the listener not to confuse the four named forms with the totality. - It implies that the canonical list is exemplary, not exhaustive — an opening, not a closing.
For contemporary readers, this matters because it refuses the very thing most modern readers want: a tidy inventory. We want to know: what are the signs? How many? Can I check them off? The canon's answer is: what has been said is a small part. The rest must be encountered, not listed.
The Expanded Range in the Ekottarāgama (T0125)
The *Ekottarāgama* (增壹阿含经, T0125) uses the same term, 瑞应, but stretches its range in two important directions that we must not flatten.
First direction — responsive wonders in the present moment. The longest and most concrete portrait appears in the story of King Bimbisāra (频毘娑罗王). When the king smells celestial sandalwood fragrance extending twelve yojanas around the city, he sends his ministers to investigate. They return with a specific report: in an iron kitchen where five hundred people are cooking, an unprecedented grand lecture hall has appeared, and the fragrance fills the city. The ministers' diagnostic statement is direct:
「此是鸡头梵志在食厨中，然天栴檀香，是其瑞应。」 — "This is Ketu the Brahman ascetic cooking in the kitchen; the celestial sandalwood fragrance is his auspicious response."
What is crucial is the causal structure: the Brahman ascetic has invited the Buddha and the Saṅgha to a meal. Because of that invitation, because of the sacred presence that the meal hosts, the kitchen itself answers. The iron kitchen produces fragrance; the ordinary city produces the extraordinary. The world is not being overridden — it is being *evoked*.
The king, on seeing all this, says:
「今蒙如来有奇特之变，出现于世……后生人民不睹圣兴。」 — "Now we are blessed that the Tathāgata has appeared in the world with these wondrous transformations… future people will not see the rise of sages."
Two things are being tied together here: the visible sign (瑞应) and the sacred event (圣兴, the rise of sages). They are not two separate things. They are the inside and the outside of one phenomenon: the sage's virtue arising in the world, and the world's response to that virtue. The relationship is structural: 圣兴 is the inner ground, 瑞应 is the outer manifestation. The canon states this co-arising explicitly: 瑞应 与 圣者之德 共出共没 — "the auspicious response and the sage's virtue arise together and cease together." When the virtue withdraws, the signs withdraw. The diagnostic criterion is precisely this tracking.
Second direction — predictive dream-portents. The same *Ekottarāgama* records King Pasenadi's (波斯匿王) ten dreams, and the Buddha's interpretation of them. The framing is:
「王所梦者，乃为将来后世现瑞应耳。」 — "What the king dreamed are auspicious responses showing forth in future ages."
This is a critical expansion. 瑞应 here is not good news. The Buddha's interpretations include:
- Three cauldrons with the two outer ones full and the middle empty → people will not support their parents. - A horse eating from both mouth and rear → officials will endlessly tax. - A great tree flowering but no fruit → people will age before their time. - A small tree fruiting → women will marry young. - A person leading a rope with a sheep following → wives will be with other men.
None of these is a celebration. Each is a warning. And yet each is called 瑞应 — an "auspicious response." The term is being used in its strict sense: a sign whose character is appropriate to what is being prepared. Here, the patterns being prepared in the kingdom are patterns of decay, exploitation, neglect, and unfaithfulness; the dreams respond with images appropriate to those patterns. The dream is the world's (or the psyche's) way of making the future visible in compressed symbolic form, so that a sage can interpret it.
This is why collapsing 瑞应 into "good omen" is a serious error. The term names the *responsive* character of the sign, not its evaluative valence. A warning can be a 瑞应; an exposure of rot can be a 瑞应; a confirmation of health can be a 瑞应. What makes the sign 瑞 is its structural appropriateness to what called it forth — not whether the news is pleasant.
The Inner Ground: 贤圣 as the Fertile Field
The relational ground of 瑞应 is set out explicitly in the same *Ekottarāgama* through a series of agricultural metaphors:
「观察施第一，知有贤圣人，施中最为上，良田生果实。」 — "Observe that giving is first; know that there are worthy sages; among gifts this is most excellent — the fertile field bears fruit."
「四向成就人，四者成果实，此名贤圣众，惠施获福广。」 — "The four who have attained the path, the four who bear the fruit — this is the community of worthy sages; giving to them yields abundant blessing."
The sages are a fertile field; offerings made to them are seeds; 瑞应 is the harvest. The metaphor is precise: response is not automatic, it is conditional on the field. A seed cast on stone produces no harvest; an offering made to a merely nominal teacher produces no sign. The response depends on the relational structure being real — on there actually being 贤圣 (worthy sages), actually dwelling, actually present, and on there being a genuine offering (food, attention, sincerity, a question) that meets them.
This is why the king's lament — that "future people will not see the rise of sages" — is structurally tied to the further remark: "they will not even hear the name of this wondrous treasure." When the field disappears, the harvest is not merely reduced; it is impossible. The sign and the sage's virtue co-arise and co-cease.
Life Investigation: Walking Through 瑞应 Today
To walk through this concept in contemporary life, we need to honor its canonical structure. Let's translate the four Saṃyuktāgama aspects, the Ekottarāgama expansions, and the "small part" caveat into scenes people actually inhabit — and along the way, point out where the mapping tends to slip.
Scene 1 — Encountering a Genuine Teacher
Imagine you meet, for the first time in person, someone whose life has been organized around genuine contemplative practice for decades. Not a content-creator; not an influencer; not someone whose "presence" is a performance. A teacher in the old sense — someone who has done long, patient work.
Within minutes, without anything being said about miracles, you may notice the four classical aspects quietly appearing:
- 光明能彻照 — Light that illuminates. The first thing you notice is a kind of clarity in the air around them. Not brightness in the visual sense; a quality in which things become more legible. Your own questions stop being tangled. Half-formed thoughts settle. This is the contemporary, subjective face of 光明.
- 身体具相好 — Body bearing the marks. The way they sit, the way they hand you tea, the way they tilt their head when listening — there is a quality of *rightness* that you can't quite account for by their résumé or their charisma. Years of practice are written into their posture, their gaze, the unhurriedness of their hands. The marks are not the thirty-two physical signs of the canonical Buddha; they are the marks of cultivation visible in any genuine practitioner.
- 令人喜乐见 — Inspiring joy in those who behold. You feel glad simply being near them. Not entertained, not impressed, not converted — *glad*. This is a different affect from admiration. It has a quality of being met, of being recognized, of your own fundamental okayness being confirmed without anything being said.
- 感动于天地 — Moving heaven and earth. This is harder to describe, and the canon warned us it would be: "only a small part." But you might notice something about the room itself — the way conversations quieten, the way the light through the window seems to slow, the way time feels different after the encounter. You might find, weeks later, that you remember the afternoon with an emotional weight disproportionate to what was said.
The contemporary pitfall is to import the four signs and look for them externally — to expect dramatic light, exotic bodily marks, theatrically moved crowds, dramatic weather. The classical text is clear that 瑞应 is responsive, not theatrical. The signs follow the relational structure. A living teacher in a quiet room produces quiet signs; a teacher who is also an artist, orator, organizer, will produce signs that include the response of audiences and atmospheres. The form of the sign follows the field.
The second pitfall, just as common, is to experience one or two of the four and conclude you have "found the real thing." The four are not a checklist where any one is sufficient; they are dimensions of a single phenomenon. A teacher who inspires great joy in you but whose own form is unsettled and whose own clarity is partial is, classically, not a field in which full 瑞应 will arise. Conversely, a teacher whose form is dignified but whose presence does not gladden you may be a person of cultivation but may not, in this encounter, be evoking response. The diagnostic is the whole pattern.
Scene 2 — The Dream as Warning
Contemporary life is saturated with anxious dreams: dreams of unprepared exams, of teeth falling out, of being chased, of arriving too late, of missing flights. Most contemporary frameworks treat these as noise — stress leakage, neural housekeeping, random firing. The canonical 瑞应 framework offers another reading, fully consonant with how the Buddha interpreted King Pasenadi's dreams: these are responsive portents showing forth the patterns being prepared.
A few examples translated into the canonical register:
- The dream of three vessels with the outer two full and the middle empty maps remarkably onto contemporary life: middle-generation adults are squeezed, parents and children are better provided for, and the relational bond between generations is starving. The dream image is structurally appropriate to a society where elder-care and child-care have been institutionalized and the middle generation has outsourced what used to bind them vertically. *This is a 瑞应 of relational atrophy.*
- The dream of the horse eating from both mouth and rear — taking in at one end while excreting at the other, never satisfied, never storing — maps onto contemporary work-life patterns where income arrives and immediately departs into subscriptions, debt service, rent. *This is a 瑞应 of a flow pattern with no accumulation.*
- The dream of a person leading a rope with a sheep following — the rope-puller is led by what they think they lead — maps onto contemporary algorithmic life: we believe we are using our phones, our feeds, our recommendation systems, but the patterns of attention are being shaped by what we encounter, and we are walking where the rope pulls. *This is a 瑞应 of a reversed agency.*
The classical framework's insistence that these dreams require a sage to interpret them is also alive today. Most contemporary people do not have a sage in their life who will sit with them and unpack their dream-images. But many have a friend, a therapist, a meditation teacher, a long-time companion whose cultivated attention can hold the symbolic register long enough for the warning to be heard. The interpretive function is real even when no canonical sage is present.
The diagnostic question, in the canonical spirit, is: *does the dream track the pattern actually being prepared in the dreamer's life?* If yes — if the dream's image is structurally appropriate to the trajectory — then it is 瑞应 in the strict sense: the psyche responding to what is being cultivated. If no — if the dream is purely random neural firing unrelated to any pattern — then it is not 瑞应, however vivid it may be.
Scene 3 — The Kitchen, the Lecture Hall, the Atmosphere
In the *Ekottarāgama*, when the Buddha and the Saṅgha are invited to a meal, the iron kitchen answers with celestial fragrance, and a lecture hall appears where none was. Translated into contemporary life, this is the phenomenon of *household and community atmosphere*.
Think of a home where a genuine practice has been taken up — daily meditation, weekly study, regular service, a shrine or altar in a corner. People who visit such homes often report, without prompting: "It feels different here." Children seem calmer. Conversations shift toward more honest topics. People slow down on entering. The refrigerator hums the same hum, but something in the air has changed.
In the classical framework, this *is* 瑞应 — the world answering the presence of awakened activity. The kitchen (the most ordinary domestic space) produces celestial fragrance; the ordinary home becomes an unprecedented lecture hall. The transformation is not in the walls but in the relational field.
The contemporary mistake here is to mistake the form of the sign for the sign itself. People sometimes think: "I should get some incense for my apartment so it feels more spiritual." That is aesthetic mimicry, not 瑞应. The classical pattern is the reverse: when there is genuine practice (the offering made to sages, the sage's presence received), then the world answers. Trying to engineer the answer without the field is the magical inversion of 瑞应 — putting the cart before the horse.
A second contemporary mistake is to assume 瑞应 must be sensed only by the practitioners themselves. In the canonical story, the fragrance was noticed from twelve yojanas away; the lecture hall was seen by everyone. 瑞应 is, by classical definition, observable by witnesses. The fact that visitors to a practice-centered household spontaneously notice the atmosphere is, classically, part of the diagnostic — not just a private feeling of the practitioner.
Scene 4 — Micro-瑞应 in Ordinary Beauty
Not every responsive sign requires a sage. The principle of 瑞应 — the world answering what enters it with signs structurally appropriate to what entered — operates at every scale. There is a micro-瑞应 in the way a clean room answers careful cleaning; a micro-瑞应 in the way a child's face answers being seen; a micro-瑞应 in the way a difficult conversation answers the willingness to stay.
These are not "spiritual signs." They are moments where the world answers a real presence with a real response. The classical concept helps us see that such moments are not isolated. They are instances of a continuous pattern: real things call forth real answers, and the answers are appropriate to what called them. We live inside this pattern every day; the concept of 瑞应 just makes it visible as a pattern.
The "small part" caveat is essential here. The four aspects in T0099 are about the Buddha's birth. But the principle — light, form, joy, cosmic movement — is at work in every genuine encounter. The canon's admission that it can speak only a small part is the canon's admission that the principle is everywhere, while the canonical vocabulary is calibrated to the most extreme cases. Most contemporary 瑞应 is small. That doesn't make it less 瑞应; it makes it less spectacular.
A Note on AI, Neuroscience, and Analogy
When someone encounters a genuine teacher, certain measurable things happen: heart-rate variability changes, mirror-neuron systems activate, oxytocin is released, attention networks reorganize. These are the contemporary scientific correlates of "光明能彻照" and "令人喜乐见." They are real. They are also a small part.
The neuroscience tells us something about the *correlates* of the response in the witness. It does not tell us anything about the *ground* of the response in the one evoking it. The canonical concept of 瑞应 is structured around the relational whole — the sage's virtue as the inner ground, the world's response as the outer manifestation. Neuroscience can map the witness's side of the relation; it is silent on the sage's side. To say "neuroscience proves 瑞应" would be a category error: confusing the witness's response with the phenomenon itself. But to say "neuroscience has nothing to say about 瑞应" is also a category error: the witness's side of the phenomenon is part of the phenomenon, and contemporary science is illuminating it.
The honest position is that contemporary science offers a partial, complementary account of certain correlates of certain aspects of 瑞应, calibrated primarily to the witness. The classical concept offers a fuller relational account of the whole phenomenon, calibrated to the field. Neither substitutes for the other. Anyone who claims that neuroscience "proves" or "disproves" 瑞应 is doing the thing the canonical deity warned against — mistaking a small part for the whole.
Why Contemporaries Need This Concept
Contemporary life, in many parts of the world, operates inside a frame that is philosophically thin in a specific way. The default picture is either pure mechanism (everything is determined by prior causes, and meaning is a story we tell after the fact) or pure randomness (everything is chance, and pattern-seeking is a cognitive bias to be corrected). In a fully mechanistic world, signs cannot be appropriate to anything, because there is no "fitting" — only sequences. In a fully random world, signs cannot answer anything, because there is no caller.
瑞应 belongs to a third option, which is neither mechanism nor randomness: a relational world, in which real presences call forth real responses, and the responses have a structural appropriateness to what called them. This third option is not a retreat from science; it is a way of taking seriously the world's responsiveness without falling into either reductionism or superstition.
Several concrete contemporary situations reveal why this matters:
Discernment of teachers and traditions. In an age of abundant spiritual content, the question "is this real?" is asked constantly. The relational frame offers a diagnostic: not "does this tradition produce spectacular phenomena?" (which can be engineered), but "does the world respond to this presence with signs that are structurally appropriate to genuine virtue, and do those signs co-arise and co-cease with the virtue?" The classical criterion of 共出共没 — arising and ceasing together with the sage's virtue — is harder to fake than miracles. If a community's signs outlast its virtue, or precede its virtue, or are unrelated to it, the diagnostic fails. This is a serious tool for navigating contemporary spiritual marketplaces.
Reading one's own inner weather. Most contemporary frameworks pathologize interior signals. Anxiety is a disorder to be medicated; dreams are noise; intuitions are cognitive bias. The relational frame treats interior signals as potentially responsive — the psyche answering the patterns being prepared in one's life. This doesn't mean every feeling is meaningful; it means that the diagnostic question is worth asking: *is this signal tracking a real pattern, and is its form appropriate to that pattern?* If yes, the signal is 瑞应, and it may be carrying information worth attending to.
Cultivating household and community life. In a fully scheduled contemporary life — calendars, deliverables, metrics — the relational dimension of household and community can be quietly lost. The kitchen becomes a place of food preparation, not of fragrance; the dinner becomes a logistics event, not a relational field. 瑞应 offers a way of seeing that the form of life one cultivates is itself calling forth responses. If the field is genuine — if there is real presence, real attention, real offering to what is worthy — then the response is being cultivated as well, whether or not anyone notices.
Reading the warning signs of an age. King Pasenadi's dreams were diagnostic for a whole kingdom. The contemporary parallel is everywhere: climate patterns, civic breakdown, mental-health epidemics, attention fragmentation. These are not random. They are 瑞应 in the predictive sense — the world showing forth, in compressed symbolic form, the patterns being prepared. The diagnostic question is whether we have the cultivation to read them. The Buddha interpreted King Pasenadi's dreams; we need analogous interpretation for our own era. The concept of 瑞应 supports this practice without requiring us to claim prophetic authority.
Recovering a vocabulary for the meaningful coincidence. The concept of 瑞应 gives us a way to honor the meaningful coincidence without inflating it into miracle or deflating it into chance. A conversation that arrives at exactly the right moment, an encounter with a book at exactly the right time, a question that someone asks just as you were thinking it — these are not random. They are also not stage-managed. They are responsive. The relational frame has a vocabulary for them; the mechanistic frame does not.
Common Misreadings and Clarifications
Misreading 1 — 瑞应 means "miracles that prove religion." This is the apologetic reading: 瑞应 as evidence for Buddhism, performed for skeptics. The classical text directly contradicts this reading. The deity in the Saṃyuktāgama says: "I cannot proclaim all the wondrous and supreme matters; let me speak only a small part." The whole point is that the phenomenon exceeds argument. 瑞应 is not a public demonstration; it is a response within a relationship. Reducing it to proof-text strips it of its relational ground and turns it into something it was never meant to be. The signs are given to those who are already in relation, not staged for those who are not.
Misreading 2 — 瑞应 means "lucky coincidence." This is the naturalist reduction. The difference between 瑞应 and coincidence is precisely the relational structure. When Ketu the Brahman ascetic invites the Buddha and the city smells of celestial sandalwood, that is 瑞应: the fragrance is appropriate to the sacred presence. When a stranger opens a perfume bottle across the street, the same molecules in the air are not 瑞应. The diagnostic is not the substance of the event but the structure of the relation. To flatten the distinction is to lose the concept entirely.
Misreading 3 — 瑞应 means only good news. The *Ekottarāgama* explicitly contradicts this reading. King Pasenadi's dreams are 瑞应, and most of them are warnings. Empty cauldrons, horses eating from both ends, ropes with sheep following — these are not auspicious. They are responsive. The concept's diagnostic is structural appropriateness, not positive valence. A dream that warns of decay, an atmosphere that signals danger, a body whose symptoms track a developing illness — all of these are 瑞应 in the strict sense. To use the concept only for pleasant signs is to keep the word but lose the idea.
Misreading 4 — 瑞应 is superstition. Superstition assigns causation where there is no relational structure: knocking on wood, lucky numbers, avoiding black cats. 瑞应 depends on the relational structure. Remove the field (the genuine sage, the genuine virtue, the genuine offering), and the sign is meaningless — and the canon says so explicitly: 瑞应 与 圣者之德 共出共没. If the sign doesn't track the virtue, it's not 瑞应. Superstition is the parody of 瑞应 — a sign cut loose from its relational ground, floating in air. The classical concept is the opposite of superstition precisely because it insists on the relational ground.
Misreading 5 — 瑞应 proves the supernatural. This is the supernaturalist inflation. The canonical texts do not use 瑞应 to argue against naturalism. The signs are presented as the world's responsiveness, not as violations of natural order. A faithful naturalist could, in principle, accept that the world responds to the presence of awakened beings without conceding anything to a dualistic supernaturalism in which sacred beings occasionally break natural laws from outside. The 感应 (responsive resonance) framework is closer to ecological interdependence than to divine intervention. To use 瑞应 as an argument against science is to lose its relational character and turn it into something the canon never claimed it was.
Misreading 6 — 瑞应 is a static historical event. The canonical examples are historical (the Buddha's birth, the Buddha's dwelling, the dreams of Pasenadi). But the principle is not historical. Wherever there is genuine virtue, genuine awakening, genuine offering — the world continues to respond. The canonical lament — "future people will not see the rise of sages" — is precisely the warning that when the relational ground withdraws, the signs withdraw too. The concept is alive wherever genuine cultivation is happening, and the diagnostic (共出共没) applies as much to a contemporary meditation teacher as to the historical Buddha. Treating 瑞应 as a past-tense phenomenon is to lose its capacity to orient the present.
Misreading 7 — 瑞应 is a checklist. The four aspects in T0099 are not four items to tick off. They are four dimensions of a single phenomenon, and the phenomenon exceeds them. The deity's "small part" caveat is precisely the canon's refusal of the checklist reading. Someone who has experienced one or two of the four and concludes they have "verified" 瑞应 has missed the caveat. Someone who has experienced all four and concluded they have "exhausted" 瑞应 has also missed it. The phenomenon is bigger than the canon's vocabulary for it, and the canon says so.
The deepest lesson of 瑞应, perhaps, is that we are not living in a world of either mechanical sequences or random noise. We are living in a responsive world — a world in which what enters calls forth what is appropriate to it, and what calls forth what is appropriate is the world's way of saying *yes, that is real*. The signs are everywhere, large and small, celebratory and warning. What is asked of us is not to manufacture them, not to deny them, not to inflate them, but to read them — with the cultivated attention that the canon itself says is required, since the signs are "妙胜诸事," wondrous and surpassing, exceeding any vocabulary that can be made for them.