The Bizarre Phenomena of Various Kinds of Great False Speech

In the Dharma-ending age, sentient beings, due to their deep self-view and self-grasping and their shallow roots of goodness and meager merit, commit the grave offense of great false speech quite frequently. These people pay no heed whatsoever to the precepts or to cause and effect; deceiving themselves and others to gratify their own vanity has become an everyday occurrence. Because sentient beings' own afflictions are heavy, they adopt a tolerant attitude toward the afflictions of others, and this has fostered an enormous amount of bad customs and encouraged violations of the precepts.

In a certain tribe, the great false speech of claiming to be an arhat or to have attained the fourth dhyāna is very common. In a certain group, the great false speech of claiming the first fruit and of claiming awakening to the true mind and seeing 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 noble ones returned again is also very prevalent and serious—so much so that various claims of noble identity collide with one another and contradict themselves. Why do these phenomena arise? It is nothing more than wanting to ride on the traffic of the noble ones, to borrow the halo of the noble ones, and thereby to overshadow sentient beings and reap the many worldly benefits in between—insatiably greedy, not hesitating to harm Buddhism and victimize sentient beings. The nature of this is especially vile.

Yet 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 the heavens led a retinue of heavenly beings to come in the dead of night to his lecture hall in the human world to pay homage to the Buddha, without expounding any Dharma, with no audio recording and no video recording—just a dry homage to the Buddha, and nothing else. I do not know what this Jade Emperor intended. How magnificent, majestic, and wondrous is the Good Dharma Hall of the Heaven of the Thirty-Three—why would he run to this crude lecture hall in the human world? On the first and fifteenth of each month, the 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 each time it is the Jade Emperor who sends some minor heavenly 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 Good Dharma Hall not majestic and extraordinary 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 the clumsy horses of the earth, which run slower than superknowledge would 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; who knows how they came to such a state.