The Buddha is in the Universal Light Palace. Innumerable Bodhisattvas are with the Buddha. Universal Worthy Bodhisattva enters a vast samadhi. The worlds quake in six ways. Universal Wisdom Bodhisattva requests for Dharma. What are the practices, powers, wisdom, liberations, conduct, qualities, and states of Great Bodhisattvas?
Universal Worthy Bodhisattva says:
Bodhisattvas Mahasattvas have ten great undertakings. They think, ‘I should serve and honor all Buddhas.’
‘Bodhisattvas Mahasattvas are full of Great Compassion and do not abandon living beings; they accept suffering in place of living  beings: the sufferings of hell, the sufferings of animals, the sufferings of hungry ghosts.’
ANNOTATION
The Great Bodhisattvas honor and make offerings to all Buddhas, have indestructible faith in all Buddhas, are delighted to hear the Buddhas speaking Dharma, and so forth.
The Bodhisattvas attend to and honor all Buddhas. In the Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra, it lists out the qualities that a practitioner needs to have in order to quickly master that meditation. One of them is, ‘Constant loyalty towards good teachers.’ That Sutra emphasizes being filial towards one’s teacher. Bhikshu Cloud of Virtue, who appears later in the Avatamsaka Sutra has attained the Pratyutpanna Samadhi, that is, ‘the Dwelling of Bringing forth the Resolve.’ He practices the concentration of mindfulness of the Buddha.
How does one serve the Buddha? Let us take a look at the Buddha’s best personal attendant, the Venerable Ananda. Once the Buddha was in Rajagrha. Devadatta wanted to kill the Buddha by releasing an intoxicated wild elephant to harm the Buddha. At that time, all the five hundred Arhats flew into the sky. Only the Venerable Ananda stayed behind with the Buddha in order to protect the Buddha. Tripitaka Master Hsuan Hua said, ‘The Buddha’s heart of Great Compassion subdued the drunken elephant.’
The Buddha said that even in a previous life, the Venerable Ananda who was then a geese was the only geese who stayed behind to protect the geese king (the ‘future’ Buddha) from the hunter.
In the book on the ‘Great Disciples of the Buddha,’ it says, ‘If we look at the world’s literature for examples of a great man’s confidant who accompanied him constantly, nowhere would we find one comparable to Ananda…his untiring solicitude for the Master and for the community of monks, his unperturbable friendliness, his patience, and his readiness to help..’
The Buddha praised Ananda saying,
‘All the Buddhas of the past had had such excellent attendants, and all Buddhas of the future will have them too. His skill in dealing with people is admirable.’
The Buddha has entered Nirvana. So, how can we serve the World Honored One? The Tripitaka Master Hsuan Hua says, ‘When there is no Buddha dwelling in the world, you should be filial to your parents.. If a person is filial to his parents, the Buddhas will be happy.’
Whether or not one’s parents are still living or have departed, studying and practicing the Avatamsaka Sutra can benefit them.
How else can we serve the Buddha? The Buddha said that if one wants to look after the Buddha, one should look after the sick. Therefore, if we wish to serve the Buddha, we can do that by serving the sick. If we look at it from a deeper level, that also means that we should take care of all living beings, because those who are sick includes all living beings who still have the sickness of afflictions, sickness of change, sickness of aging, sickness of old age, and the chronic sickness of revolving in the wheel of birth and death.
Universal Worthy Bodhisattva vows that he will take care of all the many different kinds of living beings in the same way as he would treat his own parents, Teachers, Elders, Arhats, and even the Buddha. That is the practice of supreme filiality by a Bodhisattva Mahasattva.
A Great Bodhisattva wishes to universally benefit and rescue all the living beings who are suffering in the lower realms of animals, hungry ghosts and the hells. When the Bodhisattvas pervasively respond to aid and save all living beings, they do that based on Great Compassion, not on guilt. If one helps someone out of guilt, one does not really want to do it but feels obligated to do so. However, if one helps someone out of compassion, then one is doing it because one wants to. In Buddhism, the practice of compassion extends to all sentient beings. Hence a practitioner of the Way would prefer to be a vegetarian. One cannot nurture one’s compassion if one devours living beings. Mencius said,
‘When I see those who are alive,
I do not wish to see them die;
When I hear their sounds,
I cannot bear to eat their flesh.’

Leo Tolstoy deplored, ‘This is dreadful!… that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity - that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself, and by violating his own feelings become cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!’
Annie Besant exhorted, ‘People who eat meat are responsible for all the pain that grows out of meat-eating, and which is necessitated by the use of sentient animals as food; not only the horrors of the slaughter house, but also the preliminary horrors of the railway traffic, of the steamboat and ship traffic; all the starvation and the thirst and the prolonged misery of fear which these unhappy creatures have to pass through for the gratification of the appetite of man… All pain acts as a record against humanity and slackens and retards the whole of human growth.’
Mohandas Gandhi said,
‘Cow protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in all human evolution, for it takes the human being beyond his species. The cow to me means the entire sub-human world. Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives… The cow is a poem of pity. The appeal of the lower order of creation is all the more forcible because it is speechless.’
George Bernard Shaw says, ‘While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?’
In the past, I saw a video tape on ‘Chain Massacre,’ which was a show based on actual events: In a small town in the United States, there once dwelled a mad killer who had brutally butchered many people with his chain saw. One of his tortured lady victims managed to escape and exposed this hellish nightmare which had been going on. There was a particular scene that really shook me up profoundly inside. The madman took the mangled corpse and hung it on the hook in a room which resembled an abattoir. That scene was a powerful and shocking revelation of the same kind of insanity that occurred in all the slaughter-houses too. After that, I found the habit of eating flesh food nauseating and revolting.
In his book, ‘A Buddhist Case for Vegetarianism,’ Roshi Philip Kapleau explains that, “We invent euphemisms like ‘ham,’ ‘pork,’ ‘steak,’ ‘beef,’ ‘veal’ and ‘mutton’ so we won’t be reminded that we are ingesting the scorched flesh of dead pigs, cows, calves, and sheep, slain for the pleasures of our palates. In fact the word ‘meat’ itself is a euphemism.”
In the book ‘Diet for a New America,’ John Robbins wrote,
‘The pain we feel is not ours alone. Many of us, conditioned to take seriously only those feelings which pertain to our individual needs and wants, may not realize that we can suffer on behalf of others. But we can, and we do. We suffer on behalf of the animals when we learn of their plight. We suffer on behalf of the people who in their blindness are the instruments of such cruelty. We suffer on behalf of a society that perpetuates such tragedy. And we suffer on behalf of life itself.
‘Our pain arises from our kinship with life. We hurt because we are not separate from animals, nor from the people who are the agents of such suffering. We hurt because these animals are our fellow mortals; and because the people administering such cruelty are our fellow human beings. We hurt because we are part, as they are, of the great web of life.
‘Our pain is not something to fear, for in the heart of our grief we can find our connection to each other, and our power to act. Our power lies in our connection to all life. Our power lies in our deepest human responses. Our power does not lie in looking the other way.’
The T’ang poet Po Chu I wrote,
‘Walking around the pond I watch the fish swim about.
Yonder a young lad lets down the hook on his fishing rod.
You could say we share a love for fish,
But with different aims in mind.
I came to feed these aquatic beings;
He came to take their lives.’

Edward O. Wilson described Robert Nozick’s argument in favor of vegetarianism as follows,
‘Human beings justify the eating of meat on the grounds that the animals we kill are too far below us in sensitivity and intelligence to bear comparison. It follows that if representatives of a truly superior extraterrestrial species were to visit earth and apply the same criterion, they could proceed to eat us in good conscience.’
Dr. Herbert Shelton said, ‘The cannibal goes out and hunts, pursues and kills another man and proceeds to cook and eat him precisely as he would any other game. There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favor of flesh eating that cannot be offered, with equal strength, in favor of cannibalism.’
Tripitaka Master Hsuan Hua admonished,
‘If we want there to be peace in the world, we all have to stop killing and stop eating meat. Not killing is true peace. If you don’t kill others, others will not kill you. If you don’t eat others, they will not eat you. No matter what our religion is, if we can all be vegetarian, there will be peace in the world…
‘Actually it’s not true that meat is nutritious and good for health. In the modern world many meat-eaters are developing cancer. This is because the flesh of living beings contains certain toxins, which may or may not be perceptible. These toxins come from accumulated enmity of living beings mutually killing and devouring one another. Because living beings have no place to release their hatred, it is transmitted back and forth.
‘When the toxins pass from the animals’ bodies into human bodies, people have no resistance against them. So they develop strange ailments. That’s why so many meat-eaters have all sorts of bizarre diseases now. Such diseases were not so common before, because science was not as advanced. Modern chemical toxins, scientifically produced toxins, and the poisonous enmity in people’s minds, have combined to create a poisonous energy that has polluted the air and contaminated animal flesh. The combination of chemical toxins and by-products, along with pollution of the air, land, and water, have resulted in all kinds of strange diseases.’
In the Lankavatara Sutra, the Buddha says to Mahamati,
‘Mahamati, the food for my Sravakas, Pratyekabuddhas, and Bodhisattvas is the Dharma and not flesh-food…
‘Meat is not agreeable to the wise: it has a nauseating odor, it causes a bad reputation, it is food for carnivorous; I say this, Mahamati, it is not to be eaten.
‘To those who eat meat there are detrimental effects, to those who do not, merits; Mahamati, you should know that meat-eaters bring detrimental effects upon themselves.’
The Great Bodhisattvas also want to help the hungry ghosts and beings in the hells. In the Petavatthu, it lists the four groups of pathetic ghosts.

1. Those who suffer from severe burning sensations.
2. Those who suffer from unquenchable thirst and unsatisfiable hunger.
3. Those who struggle for survival in dirty and filthy places.
4. Those who wait and depend on others’ meritorious deeds to get rid of their sufferings.

There are countless kinds of ghosts.
The Buddha spoke the Ullambana Sutra to rescue those in difficulty, to benefit both the living and the dead, to help living beings’ parents and their parents of seven lives past.
There are also evil and powerful ghosts.

There are thousands of kinds of hells. The different kinds of hells are created by the evil karma of living beings. One can have a glimpse of what the hells are like by visiting the hospitals and witnessing the intense sufferings of cancer / terminally ill patients and those who were involved in serious accidents or wars. One could also visit the slaughterhouses.
The various kinds of hells and their implements of tortures are described in the Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva.
Earth Store Bodhisattva has  made great vows to save all the suffering living beings in the hells. He is known for his supremely compassionate vows and great filiality. The Bodhisattvas Mahasattvas are Greatly Kind and Compassionate. They never abandon living beings. In the Avatamsaka Sutra it says that when a Bodhisattva makes a resolve to save a living being, he will follow him / her for several great eons in order to influence him/her to become good. One cannot really understand or imagine how much toil and difficulties the Bodhisattvas have to undergo for the sake of teaching and rescuing countless living beings. Their supreme compassion is inconceivable.

A verse from the Ten Transferences chapter says,
Universally for the sake of all living beings,
Throughout inconceivably many kalpas he dwells in the hells.
In that way he increases his mind of non-retreat
His decisiveness is heroic and he constantly makes transference.