心大如海 kokoro ōi naru koto umi no gotoshi A Heart as Great as the Sea

心大如海 kokoro ōi naru koto umi no gotoshi reads, in Japanese, the greatness of his mind is like the sea. 心 kokoro is mind or heart, 大 great or vast, 如 like, and 海 umi the sea. In the Chinese, the mind is great, and 如海 compares it to the sea.

In the sutra, Vimalakīrti is a rich householder of the city of Vaiśālī. He wears a layman's white, lives at home and shows a wife and children. The line is paired with the one before it, he dwelt in the Buddha's deportment. The same list goes on: though living at home, he was not attached to the three realms.

The commentators say what the sea stands for. Kumārajīva's own remark, kept in Sengzhao's commentary, gives it three virtues: deep and wide without bound, pure, and storing treasures without measure. Sengzhao gives five, the last that it is deep past measuring: and so the text says his mind is as great as the sea. Huiyuan reads the pair of lines as body and mind, each in its conduct the Buddha's.

Xuanzang's Chinese version of 650 reads he entered the sea of mind and wisdom. Kuiji's commentary on it reads mind as the true principle and wisdom as the wisdom of awakening, both deep and wide like the sea. He says the old version, his mind as vast as the sea, lacks this sense.

The commentary attributed to Prince Shōtoku quotes the line as 心如大海, in the other order. It reads the line as an understanding clear and penetrating to the myriad occasions. It reads Vimalakīrti's life in Vaiśālī as a trace taken on to save others. That is a commentator's reading, and the sutra itself shows a man at home in the world.

Ōtaka, governor of Iyo, called the Layman of the Seashore, had the Zen master Musō Soseki's Muchū mondō printed. In a postscript of 1344, the Chinese monk Zhuxian Fanxian records a head monk's words of him. He has entered the deep gates of the Dharma, his mind is as vast as the sea, the head monk said, and above all Ōtaka had Vimalakīrti's air. The two phrases stand in the sutra's list in that order.

Zhuxian's own recorded sayings, printed in 1702, tell a hermitage master to make his mind like the great sea, which has no bound and keeps no corpse. That the sea keeps no corpse is one of Sengzhao's five virtues of the sea.

Japanese glosses divide on the reading of 大. Printed books of 1911 and 1917 read it ōi. So does one of 1915, which quotes the four characters as Zhiyi says them of the Buddha. One of 1912 reads dai. Our romaji, kokoro ōi naru koto umi no gotoshi, follows the reading our history signs.

Two lines that look like it are neighbors, not sources. The Zen master Huangbo's verse, my mind is like the great sea, without bound, is a master speaking of his own mind, in the other order. Shin Buddhist commentators trace Shinran's word 大心海, the great mind-sea, to the sutra's line. That is their reading of Shinran's word, not of the sutra's line, which is said of a layman.

The translations from Kumārajīva's Chinese that our history read give mind: Burton Watson, in 1997, has his mind was vast as the sea. The ones it read from the Tibetan and the Sanskrit give intelligence. Our title says heart, which 心 also means in Japanese. Our history renders it mind, with vast for the breadth and the depth the commentators read in the sea.

Our history reads 心大如海 as praise of a layman's mind, to be read with its layman. In that reading the mind is wide enough to take in the world it lives in, and too deep for anyone to see its floor.

In the Vimalakīrti Sūtra the four characters are Kumārajīva's wording, from his Chinese translation of 406, where they stand in a list of the virtues of the householder Vimalakīrti; the two other Chinese versions word the place differently, and in Japan their earliest known use said of a living man is a postscript of 1344, praising a lay patron in two of the sutra's phrases.