What this concept is saying
Jùshēng wēilì (俱生威力, “innate or naturally arisen majestic efficacy”; Sanskrit given in the source tradition as *sahaja-anubhāva*) is the extraordinary efficacy naturally present in a Buddha or bodhisattva because vast stores of merit (福德資糧, *puṇya-saṃbhāra*) were accumulated in former lives. The *Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra* (《瑜伽師地論》) defines it succinctly:
「俱生威力者，謂佛菩薩先集廣大福德資糧，證得俱生甚希奇法。」
“Regarding innate majestic efficacy: Buddhas and bodhisattvas, having previously accumulated vast stores of merit, attain exceedingly rare qualities that arise naturally.”
The decisive word is “previously.” “Innate” does not mean eternally built into a soul, biologically inherited, or obtained without causes. It means that when the relevant life and occasion arrive, the efficacy is already present: it does not have to be produced then through a new act of deliberation or training. Its causes were laid down through an immense history of beneficial conduct.
A familiar example may help. A concert pianist can sometimes respond to a difficult passage without consciously selecting each movement. Yet that apparent spontaneity is condensed practice, not absence of causes. The analogy is limited—俱生威力 concerns karmic merit accumulated over former lives, not merely a learned bodily skill—but it clarifies the logical structure: effort in its causal phase can appear as effortlessness in its mature phase.
This is why the concept belongs within the architecture of the bodhisattva path rather than within a catalogue of paranormal curiosities. Liberation is not presented here as private escape alone. A bodhisattva cultivates wisdom and merit so thoroughly that, at maturity, even presence, bearing, embodiment, surroundings, and encounters become conditions of benefit for beings. The path has entered the person so deeply that compassionate efficacy no longer depends entirely upon a fresh decision.
The *Yogācārabhūmi* gives two classificatory schemes.
In the threefold scheme:
1. Sacred efficacy (聖威力) arises through mastery of meditative concentration: the mind is trained, pliant, and capable of accomplishment. 2. Dharma efficacy (法威力) is the vast beneficial result of the six perfections (六波羅蜜多): generosity, ethical discipline, patience, vigor, meditation, and wisdom. 3. Innate majestic efficacy (俱生威力) is naturally present because vast merit was accumulated previously.
In the fivefold scheme, the categories are:
1. miraculous or supernormal efficacy (神通威力), 2. Dharma efficacy (法威力), 3. innate majestic efficacy (俱生威力), 4. efficacy shared with śrāvakas and solitary buddhas (共諸聲聞獨覺威力), and 5. efficacy not shared with śrāvakas and solitary buddhas (不共聲聞獨覺威力).
These schemes address different questions. The first distinguishes major causal modes; the second also distinguishes kinds of efficacy according to whether they are shared with the two lesser vehicles. The presence of 俱生威力 in both schemes shows that it is not merely another name for supernatural power.
The treatise describes its manifestations across the whole final career of a bodhisattva and Buddha. They can be organized without flattening their differences:
- Continuity of the bodhisattva career: remembering former births; enduring fierce, uninterrupted suffering for extremely long periods; and willingly accepting hardship for the benefit of sentient beings. - The final heavenly existence: birth in the fourth Tuṣita Heaven—called 覩史多天 in this translation—with surpassing heavenly lifespan, form, and renown. - Descent and birth: radiating great light before descending; clearly knowing entry into, residence within, and emergence from the womb; walking seven steps without assistance after birth and proclaiming his distinction. - Recognition and embodiment: receiving offerings of flowers, fragrances, music, clothing, banners, and canopies from devas, nāgas, yakṣas, gandharvas, asuras, garuḍas, kiṃnaras, mahoragas, and others; possessing the thirty-two marks of a great person; and having every limb endowed with Nārāyaṇa-like strength. - Protection and awakening: in the final existence, being invulnerable to enemies, Māra’s hosts, and calamities; subduing Māra while seated at the seat of awakening through the power of loving-kindness concentration; awakening alone, without a teacher, to unsurpassed complete awakening in a three-thousand-great-thousand world-system. - Natural mastery and cosmic response: mastering worldly crafts rapidly in childhood without instruction; receiving Brahmā’s spontaneous and earnest request to teach; remaining undisturbed by great thunder because of profound meditative stillness. - The response of animals and the environment: animals and crawling creatures approaching the bodhisattva in trust; branches bending so that their shade continues to cover him; and, after buddhahood, even animals coming to make offerings.
One item requires a careful distinction. Subduing Māra is said here to occur through the force of loving-kindness concentration, but its place in this list does not erase the distinction between meditative efficacy and innate efficacy. The treatise can describe interrelated qualities in one career while still classifying their causal and functional boundaries separately.
The text further gathers 俱生威力 under two headings.
The first is “innate efficacy comprising benefit upon being seen” (見便饒益所攝俱生威力). Merely encountering the Tathāgata becomes beneficial: those afflicted by epilepsy or mental derangement regain ordinary composure; a fetus in a transverse or reversed position turns correctly; the blind see and the deaf hear; and the compulsive bonds of greed, hatred, and delusion temporarily recede or are removed as described.
The second is “innate efficacy comprising the conduct and deportment of a noble one” (賢聖行住所攝俱生威力). It includes a distinct set of manifestations:
- the Tathāgata lies on his right side like a lion; - even on a bedding of grass or leaves, his posture remains undisturbed; - although appearing asleep, he does not turn from side to side; - sudden strong winds move neither his body nor his robes; - he walks with the bearing of a lion or bull, raising the right foot before moving the left; - high ground lowers and low ground rises, becoming level like the palm of a hand; - a narrow village gateway naturally becomes high and wide as he enters; - when he eats, every grain is broken up and none remains unconsumed in the mouth; - at his parinirvāṇa (般涅槃, final nirvāṇa), the earth trembles, stars blaze and fall across one another, the directions become suddenly hot, and celestial music fills the sky.
The treatise concludes this section with an explicit warning against misclassification:
「如是無量甚希有事，皆是如來俱生威力，非是神通威力所作。」
“These immeasurable and exceedingly rare events are all the Tathāgata’s innate majestic efficacy; they are not produced by miraculous efficacy.”
That distinction is essential. The six superknowledges belong to supernormal practice (神通行) and miraculous efficacy. Sacred efficacy comes from mastery of concentration. Dharma efficacy is the great fruit of the six perfections. 俱生威力 is the naturally matured result of formerly accumulated merit. They may coexist in one Buddha or bodhisattva, but they are not interchangeable labels.
The treatise also distinguishes the Buddha-bodhisattva range of efficacy from that of śrāvakas and independent buddhas (獨覺, the translation consistently used here rather than 緣覺) through three dimensions:
- Subtlety: knowing innumerable beings, innumerable effective means, and the appropriate benefit to accomplish for each. - Variety: fully possessing every class of miraculous, Dharma, and innate efficacy. - Scope: taking all worlds and the entire realm of sentient beings as the field of efficacy.
By contrast, the treatise assigns a two-thousand-world scope to a śrāvaka’s miraculous activity and a three-thousand-world scope to that of an independent buddha. These cosmological measurements should be presented as the treatise’s own doctrinal framework, not silently converted into modern astrophysics.
A walkthrough in everyday life
Because 俱生威力 is specifically attributed here to Buddhas and bodhisattvas, an ordinary commuter’s convenience, charisma, talent, or good luck should not be relabeled 俱生威力. A responsible contemporary walkthrough must therefore show the concept’s causal grammar without pretending that everyday events instantiate all its extraordinary claims.
Imagine a parent waking after a difficult night. A child is ill, an urgent message from work has arrived, and the parent has barely slept.
First comes a small but genuine act of beneficial intention: instead of treating the child as an obstacle, the parent attends carefully, gives medicine correctly, speaks gently, and accepts some personal inconvenience. In Buddhist terms this may contribute to merit when joined to wholesome intention and action. It is not yet 俱生威力. It is present cultivation—the laying down of causes.
Later, during a crowded commute, someone collapses. A person who has repeatedly cultivated generosity, patience, and attention may respond before self-protective calculation takes over: making space, calling for help, staying with the stranger. Again, the spontaneous quality of the response does not make it the technical 俱生威力 of the treatise. But it offers a modest analogy: repeated wholesome formation can reduce the distance between seeing suffering and responding to it.
At work, the same person faces public criticism. Three possibilities reveal three different ideas that people often confuse:
1. They steady the mind through a learned meditative method. This resembles the causal logic of sacred efficacy, which depends upon cultivated mental mastery. 2. They answer with patience, honesty, and concern for everyone affected. This belongs to the cultivation of the perfections and illustrates the causal field associated with Dharma efficacy. 3. Compassionate steadiness appears without a fresh inner negotiation because the disposition has become deeply established. This is still not proof of a bodhisattva’s technical 俱生威力, but it helps us understand how long cultivation can mature into apparently uncontrived efficacy.
Now suppose the person becomes popular online. Their posts calm people, and followers call their presence “healing.” This is precisely where mapping usually goes wrong. Social influence may arise from presentation, status, beauty, recommendation algorithms, projection, or group psychology. None of these establishes the “benefit upon being seen” described in the treatise. Nor does an algorithm’s ability to alter behavior amount to Buddhist 威力: algorithms optimize according to designed objectives, whereas the bodhisattva path is normatively directed toward liberation from greed, hatred, and delusion.
In an intimate relationship, one partner may say, “If your practice were real, you would naturally know what I need.” That too confuses categories. The doctrine does not excuse ordinary people from listening, apologizing, learning, or making deliberate effort. “Innate” does not mean that beginners should already possess effortless wisdom. On the contrary, the concept teaches that mature spontaneity rests upon an enormous causal history.
Finally, imagine that years of ethical and contemplative practice have made someone calmer, kinder, and less defensive. Neuroscience might investigate habit formation, emotional regulation, or changes associated with repeated training; psychology might study prosocial behavior. Such work can offer useful comparisons for how deliberate practice becomes more automatic. It cannot confirm karmic continuity across lives, buddhahood, cosmic portents, or the specific taxonomy of the *Yogācārabhūmi*. The comparison illuminates one feature—acquired dispositions becoming spontaneous—without reducing the Buddhist teaching to a scientific model.
The walkthrough therefore has two levels that must remain distinct:
- In ordinary life, we can observe the planting of causes and the gradual embodiment of wholesome dispositions. - In the treatise’s strict usage, 俱生威力 names the rare, naturally present efficacy of Buddhas and bodhisattvas produced by vast stores of merit accumulated in the past.
Why contemporary people need it
Contemporary culture often imagines effortlessness as evidence that no effort was ever required. We admire “natural talent,” instant intuition, frictionless productivity, and personalities who seem born influential. 俱生威力 reverses that fantasy. What appears uncontrived may be the ripening of causes too deep or extended to be visible at the moment of their result.
This has an ethical consequence: what we repeatedly do is not merely producing isolated outcomes; it is shaping what will later arise from us without prompting. Patience practiced only as a performance remains brittle. Patience cultivated through repeated encounters with discomfort may eventually become a stable way of meeting beings. The distant horizon of the bodhisattva path is not endless moral self-coercion, but goodness so completely embodied that benefit flows without hesitation.
The concept also corrects an overly private picture of awakening. Wisdom is indispensable, but the Mahāyāna path traditionally speaks of both the accumulation of wisdom and the accumulation of merit. Wisdom sees emptiness and releases clinging; merit is accumulated through beneficial engagement with beings. 俱生威力 dramatizes the maturation of the latter: a Buddha’s presence and world are depicted as responsive to a career of immeasurable benefit.
This does not mean that merit mechanically purchases supernatural privileges. That would turn the path into a cosmic rewards program. The listed powers matter because of their relation to awakening and the welfare of beings. Endurance matters because the bodhisattva accepts hardship for others. Natural skill matters because it enables effective engagement. Protection from Māra matters because awakening is not obstructed. Benefit upon being seen matters because even an encounter becomes liberative. Brahmā’s request matters because realization proceeds into teaching rather than remaining mute.
Seen from the whole path, therefore, 俱生威力 marks a late and exceptional fruition. It is not the beginner’s main object of pursuit. The practical foundations remain generosity, ethical discipline, patience, vigor, meditation, wisdom, compassion, and dedication of merit toward awakening. Chasing impressive effects would easily strengthen the very craving for identity and distinction that the path seeks to undo.
The concept also offers a demanding measure of spiritual authority. Buddhist efficacy is not adequately measured by spectacle. The deeper question is: Does this presence diminish greed, hatred, and delusion? Does it serve beings? Does it conduce toward freedom? A dazzling display may fascinate without liberating; quiet conduct may be spiritually consequential without looking miraculous.
At its deepest, 俱生威力 expresses a transformation in the relation between intention and being. Early on, one must deliberately remember compassion. Far along the path, compassion informs perception and response. At buddhahood, as represented by this treatise, the accumulated good of the path has become so complete that body, conduct, encounter, and environment participate in benefitting beings. Liberation is no longer merely something known; it has become a mode of presence.
Common misreadings and clarifications
“Innate” means causeless or eternally possessed. No. The definition explicitly supplies the cause: previously accumulated vast stores of merit. “Innate” describes how the result is present when it manifests—not the absence of a causal history. It therefore gives no support to a permanent soul endowed with eternal powers.
It is simply another word for supernatural power. No. The treatise expressly says these rare events are “not produced by miraculous efficacy.” The six superknowledges belong to miraculous efficacy; 俱生威力 has its own causal definition and range.
It means a Buddha activates powers whenever he chooses. That formulation leans toward deliberate miraculous operation. The central point of 俱生威力 is precisely that these manifestations do not require a new act of contrivance or cultivation at the time.
Anything spontaneous and beneficial is 俱生威力. Not in the strict sense used here. An ordinary person’s reflexive kindness may help us understand the movement from cultivation to spontaneity, but the treatise reserves the category for the rare efficacy of Buddhas and bodhisattvas arising from vast past merit.
Charisma, celebrity, beauty, wealth, or algorithmic reach proves spiritual attainment. No. Influence can intensify attachment, confusion, or hostility. The category is defined within a path directed toward the benefit and liberation of beings, not by audience size or social magnetism.
“Benefit upon being seen” means Buddhist practitioners should make medical promises. No. The treatise records extraordinary effects—including restoration of sight or hearing and the correction of a difficult fetal position—as features of the Tathāgata’s 俱生威力. A contemporary practitioner cannot infer from this that devotion or spiritual presence is a substitute for medical diagnosis, emergency care, obstetrics, or mental-health treatment.
The environmental responses are merely poetic metaphors. The supplied passage presents level ground, widening gates, unmoved robes, bending branches, earthquakes, falling stars, heat, and celestial music as actual rare manifestations within its Buddhist cosmology. A modern reader may interpret such accounts through different hermeneutic lenses, but should not quietly rewrite the source as “only metaphor.” Nor should the traditional cosmology be advertised as an experimentally established scientific account.
Merit alone is the whole path. No. The bodhisattva path integrates merit with wisdom. Merit without insight can remain within conditioned existence; talk of emptiness without generosity and compassion can become sterile or self-protective. 俱生威力 highlights the maturation of vast merit, but it belongs within the complete movement toward unsurpassed awakening.
The doctrine encourages fascination with signs. Its wiser use is nearly the opposite. The signs point backward to causes and forward to benefit. If one wants the prestige of a Buddha’s efficacy without the bodhisattva’s long willingness to bear hardship for beings, one has taken the ornament and discarded the path.
The teaching’s final challenge is therefore quiet and practical: do not ask first how to become impressive. Ask what you are repeatedly making natural. Every act of grasping rehearses grasping; every act of resentment makes resentment easier to inhabit. Every sincere act of generosity, patience, clarity, and care plants a different tendency. 俱生威力 stands at the immeasurably distant completion of that logic: goodness cultivated so fully that, when beings encounter awakening, benefit no longer appears as an occasional performance. It has become the spontaneous efficacy of a liberated life.