尔时,智慧菩萨承佛威神,普观十方,而说颂言:诸法无真实,妄取真实相;是故诸凡夫,轮回生死狱。若人欲了知,三世一切佛,应观法界性,一切唯心造。诸佛悉了知,一切从心转;若能如是解,彼人见真佛。心如工画师,能画诸世间;五蕴悉从生,无法而不造。
逐句解释
诸法无真实,妄取真实相;是故诸凡夫,轮回生死狱
一切现象(诸法)本无固定的「真实」自性,但凡夫妄自执取,以为其中有真实的我、真实的得失、真实的苦乐,于是轮回在生死的牢狱中。这四句是整段偈颂的起点:点明了轮回的根本原因——不是罪恶,而是「妄取真实相」,是对空性的无知。知道这一点,才知道解脱的方向:不是逃离现象,而是看穿现象的虚妄。
All phenomena have no true reality; beings falsely grasp at a reality within them. It is for this reason that ordinary people revolve in the prison of birth and death.
These opening lines diagnose the cause of samsara with precision: not sin, not bad luck, not external punishment — but a fundamental misperception. "Falsely grasping at reality" (妄取真实相) means imposing a fixed, substantial, independent selfhood onto phenomena that are actually fluid, interdependent, and empty of inherent existence. This is what Buddhist philosophy calls "reification" — treating concepts and appearances as if they were solid things. The Avatamsaka does not say the phenomenal world is an illusion; it says our habitual interpretation of it is. Things arise; we are not wrong to perceive them. We are wrong to believe that what we perceive has the kind of fixed, independent existence our habits tell us it does.
若人欲了知,三世一切佛,应观法界性,一切唯心造
「若人欲了知三世一切佛」——若有人想真正了解过去、现在、未来所有佛陀的境界,「应观法界性,一切唯心造」——应当观察法界的本性:一切皆由心所造。这是《华严经》中流传最广、影响最深的偈句,被後世称为「唯心偈」。「一切唯心造」不是说世界是幻想,而是说:世界显现的方式,根本上由心的状态决定——清净心见清净世界,贪嗔痴心见苦难世界,觉悟之心见华严法界。
If a person wishes to fully know all the Buddhas of the three times, they should contemplate the nature of the dharma-realm: all is created by mind alone.
"All is created by mind alone" (一切唯心造) is the most quoted line in the entire Avatamsaka, and one of the most important sentences in all of Mahayana Buddhism. It is not solipsism — the verse does not say "nothing exists outside the mind." It says that the way the world manifests, the quality of one's experience of reality, is fundamentally shaped by the state of mind with which one meets it. A mind clouded by craving perceives a world of scarcity and threat. A mind resting in clarity perceives the dharma-realm's inherent luminosity. The Buddhas of the three times are knowable not by accumulating external information about them, but by purifying the mind until it can perceive what they perceive: the world as it actually is. The path to knowing all Buddhas is the same as the path to knowing one's own mind.
心如工画师,能画诸世间;五蕴悉从生,无法而不造
心就像一位精巧的画师,能「画」出(创造出、建构出)整个世间;五蕴(色受想行识,即构成「人」的五类现象)全都从心生出,没有任何现象不是由心「造」出来的。这是对「一切唯心造」的展开:画师的比喻说明,心不是被动的观察者,而是主动的建构者——不是在改变外在的物质世界,而是在决定那个世界对自己意味着什么、呈现为什么。
Mind is like a master painter, capable of painting all the worlds; the five aggregates all arise from it; there is no phenomenon that mind does not create.
The painter metaphor is among the Avatamsaka's most vivid. A painter does not create the pigments or the canvas from nothing — but the image that appears, what those materials come to mean and show, is entirely the painter's doing. Similarly, mind does not create matter from nothing — but the experienced world, the world as lived and perceived and suffered and liberated, is entirely mind's construction. The five aggregates (五蕴) — form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness — are the five "brushes" with which mind paints experience. To see this clearly is not to become passive or nihilistic; it is to become genuinely responsible for one's own experience, and genuinely free to transform it.
若能如是解,彼人见真佛
「若能如是解」——若能真正理解「一切唯心造」这个道理,「彼人见真佛」——那个人就见到了真正的佛。这不是说见到外在的佛像或佛陀的历史身影,而是见到「真佛」——法身佛,即觉悟本身的实相。当心真正了解自身的创造性,了解法界性,它就与佛的知见相应,也就「见」到了佛。觉悟不是找到一个外在的答案;觉悟是心认出了自己的本来面目。
If one can understand in this way, that person sees the true Buddha.
The chapter's culminating line ties understanding directly to seeing the Buddha — not as a distant figure to be venerated, but as a living reality to be recognised. "Seeing the true Buddha" (见真佛) is seeing the dharmakaya — the Buddha-nature that is the ultimate nature of mind and of all phenomena. When a person genuinely understands that all experience is mind-generated, they stop projecting a fixed, oppressive reality onto the world and start perceiving it as it is: open, luminous, created moment by moment by the quality of awareness that meets it. In that perception, mind recognises mind — and what it recognises is the Buddha. This is the Avatamsaka's answer to the question "where is the Buddha?": here, in this recognition, in this very mind.
总结 · Summary
第十四品以「须弥顶上偈赞」为名,汇集了十方菩萨在须弥山顶对佛陀的偈颂礼赞,其中最著名的是「若人欲了知,三世一切佛,应观法界性,一切唯心造」。这是《华严经》最核心的哲学命题之一:法界的本性是心所造;心净则见净土,心悟则见真佛。轮回的根源是「妄取真实相」;解脱的钥匙是认清「一切唯心造」,从而让心回归本来的光明。
Chapter 14 contains the Avatamsaka's most famous lines: "If a person wishes to fully know all the Buddhas of the three times, they should contemplate the nature of the dharma-realm — all is created by mind alone." This is not idealism in the Western philosophical sense; it is a practical teaching about the relationship between the quality of mind and the quality of experience. A mind that falsely grasps at fixed reality creates its own prison. A mind that sees clearly creates its own liberation. The "true Buddha" is not somewhere else, waiting to be found; it is what the mind encounters when it sees itself clearly. The entire Avatamsaka is, in a sense, a sustained meditation on this single insight.