Various Strange Phenomena of Great False Speech

In the Dharma-ending age, sentient beings, due to their deeply entrenched view of self and grasping at self, have shallow roots of goodness and meager merit, so those who commit the grave offense of great false speech are relatively numerous. These people pay no heed whatsoever to the precepts and to cause and effect; deceiving themselves and others to gratify their own vanity is an everyday occurrence. Because sentient beings' own afflictions are heavy, they adopt a tolerant attitude toward others' afflictions, and this has fostered a great deal of bad practice and encouraged violations of the precepts.

In a certain forum, the great false speech of claiming to be arhats and of attaining the fourth dhyāna is very common; in a certain group, the great false speech of claiming to have attained the first fruit and to have seen the mind and realized one's nature is especially severe; in a certain group, there are especially many who falsely claim to be emanations of the Buddha or emanations of the great bodhisattvas; in a certain group, the great false speech of claiming to be bodhisattvas and sages reborn into this world is also very prevalent and serious—even to the point that various claims of sagehood collide with one another and are self-contradictory. Why do these phenomena arise? It is nothing more than wanting to ride on the traffic of sages, to borrow the halo of sages, thereby to beguile sentient beings and reap the many worldly benefits from it—insatiably greedy, not hesitating to harm Buddhism and victimize sentient beings. The nature of this is especially vile.

But as for the great false speech of claiming that heavenly gods descended to the human world, in several thousand years I have heard of only one instance: it was said that the Jade Emperor of Heaven, leading a host of celestial beings around him, came in the dead of night to his lecture hall in the human world to pay homage to the Buddha. He did not expound any Dharma; there was no audio recording and no video recording; they just dryly paid homage to the Buddha and did nothing else. I do not know what this Jade Emperor was thinking—the Hall of Good Dharma in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three is so magnificent, majestic, and wondrous—why would he run to this crude lecture hall in the human world? On the first and fifteenth of each month, the celestial beings of the Heaven of the Thirty-Three come down to the human world to make a round of inspection of humanity's wholesome and unwholesome conduct, and every time it is the Jade Emperor who sends some minor celestial beings to make the rounds. Now, for paying homage to a Buddha, why would he come down in person? Are the Buddha images enshrined in the Hall of Good Dharma not majestic and wondrous enough? Truly inconceivable.

There is also the claim that five hundred earth deities and rākṣasas rode five hundred foals from the human world, galloping across their terrain—equally inconceivable. Where did the superknowledges of these earth deities go, that they should ride clumsy horses from planet Earth, which run slower than superknowledge could carry them? What would be the point? Such great false speech is like fairy tales told by naive children—laughable to hear, yet in truth saddening and lamentable. Such people are no different from the mentally deranged; one does not know how they came to such a state.