Māyādevī, the Buddha’s mother, appears to Sudhana in Kapilavastu, the Buddha’s hometown, even though she is traditionally said to have passed away shortly after the Buddha’s birth and been reborn as a male deity in the Trāyastriṃśa paradise. There are other temporal anomalies: the bodhisattva Maitreya, in the chapter where Sudhana meets him, is portrayed as being on earth and not yet passed away to be reborn in Tuṣita, even though he is said in the Māyādevī chapter, as is generally said in other Buddhist sources, to be already present in Tuṣita. Although the beginning of the sūtra is set at a time later than that of the Buddha’s enlightenment, further on, in the night-goddess chapters, the Buddha is depicted as being present under the Bodhi tree. The bodhisattva Mañjuśrī leaves the assembly for South India, and, rather than continuing to describe events and teachings in the presence of the Buddha, the sūtra follows Mañjuśrī to South India, where he meets Sudhana, and the narrative then follows Sudhana for the rest of the long sūtra. While the Buddha sits silently in meditation, the bodhisattva Samantabhadra gives a teaching to the assembled bodhisattvas. Human pupils are gathered around him along with a multitude of bodhisattvas that his human pupils are not advanced enough to perceive. The Gaṇḍavyūha, on the other hand, begins with the Buddha in silent meditation in his Jetavana Monastery in Śrāvastī, where he spent most of his summer retreats. The kalyāṇamitras are described as having realizations and miraculous powers that test the limits of the imagination. For example, the bhikṣu Sāgaramegha describes how he received, from a buddha who appeared out of the ocean, teachings that would take more than a kalpa to write out. These teachers are often described as having received teachings from numerous other buddhas. His teachers are both humans and deities, including eight night goddesses around the Bodhi tree and the forest goddess of Lumbinī, the birthplace of the Buddha. Another unique characteristic is that Sudhana’s teachers include children, non-Buddhists, a courtesan, merchants, and so on, among them a number of women. It follows the journey of the young Sudhana from teacher to teacher, or kalyāṇamitra (literally “good friend”), beginning with his meeting Mañjuśrī when that bodhisattva came to South India. The Stem Array ( Gaṇḍavyūha) is a unique sūtra in that most of its narrative takes place in South India, far from the presence of the Buddha. Samantabhadra and “The Prayer for Completely Good Conduct” Sarvajagadrakṣāpraṇidhānavīryaprabhā
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