Just found an article -- briefly read through and think it's
good, but haven't got the time to read indepth.
http://dharmamirror.org/feature/221drounds.asp
Rescuing
Ananda: The Conceptual Framework and Instructions
for Practice in the Śūrangama
Sutra By David Rounds
1. General Characteristics of the
Śūraṅgama
Of the world’s religious masterpieces, the Buddha’s discourse known
the Śūraṅgama Sutra[1]
is perhaps the least familiar to Western readers. Unlike such
discourses as the Lotus Sutra, the Heart Sutra,
and the Diamond Sutra, which survive in their original
Sanskrit versions, and which have been studied in the West for well
over a century, the Śūraṅgama is no longer extant in an
Indic original, and the text is preserved only in an eighth-century
translation into Chinese. The text as we have it, consisting of
some 63,000 characters in ten rolls, is tersely expressed, densely
argued, and subtly allusive, resorting often to rare characters and
to transliterations of Sanskrit terms, such that even devout and
erudite Chinese readers are not infrequently puzzled as to the
meaning. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that there have been
few attempts at translation of this text into the European
languages.[2]
Buddhists in the Chinese tradition, however, have long considered
the Śūraṅgama to be of central importance. The Sutra is
valued, first, for a unified sequence of teachings that elucidate a
series of fundamental religious questions. The text first develops
a philosophy of mind and of perception, and then bases on that
foundation a series of instructions in spiritual practice, in
particular in the deep mental absorption known as samādhi. To this
end the sutra offers in great detail a precise prescription for the
systematic withdrawal of the sense-faculties from engagement with
the physical world. Such a disengagement, when carried out
correctly, can result in lasting illumination -- a teaching that is
central to Buddhism and that appears in some form in the esoteric
traditions of all the other great religions.[3]
The philosophical density of the Śūraṅgama discourse is
lightened by the manner of its general presentation. The first two
thirds of the Sutra consist of a dramatic dialogue between the
Buddha and his young cousin and attendant Ānanda. Other
interlocutors intervene at critical moments, each speaking in a
distinct voice as they give testimony to their experience with
spiritual practice, or as they pose a question that Ānanda does not
yet have the spiritual depth to ask. But most of the philosophical
argument, and the spiritual guidance that follows it, are conveyed
to the reader through the drama of Ānanda’s personal story. During
the long hours of his conversation with the Buddha, we see the
young monk seesaw between impertinence and remorse, between
astonishment and gratitude, between bewilderment and enlightened
understanding. His plucky earnestness adds to the discourse the
unexpected element of charm. Despite the focus on Ānanda, however,
his story is explicitly presented merely as an example; it is
itself a parable. From the beginning, the Buddha makes it clear
that his instructions are meant not only for Ānanda but for “beings
of the future” – that is, for us. Accordingly, Ānanda’s gradual and
successful struggle to understand and to awaken brings to dramatic
life the struggle that can still be expected by anyone who sets
foot on a spiritual path.
To the Western reader, the Śūraṅgama’s format suggests a
similarity to the dialogues of Plato. But Plato’s manner of
uncovering truth through Socrates’ sly cross-examinations of his
hapless interlocutors is in fact very different from the pattern we
encounter in the Śūraṅgama. The Buddha and Ānanda engage
for much of the Sutra in formal debate, according to the rules of
what is now called Buddhist logic. In the monastic universities of
classical India, Buddhist monks were trained in logical debate in
order to sharpen their minds and also to win over adherents from
other schools and sects. To some extent it was an intellectual
sport. Buddhist debate was transmitted to Tibet, where young monks
are still trained in it. In China it was championed by the great
seventh-century translator Xuan Zang, who brought back
several texts on logic from India.[4]
Briefly, Buddhist logic (Skt. hetu-vidyā; Ch. yin
ming 因 明, literally, the
clarification of causes), originally followed five steps:
1. A proposition that one is undertaking to prove;
2. The reason that the proposition is claimed to be true;
3. One or more instances of the proposition at work in ordinary
experience;
4. Application of the instances to the proposition;
5. Conclusion, usually by restatement of the proposition, now
demonstrated.[5]
These five were later reduced to three, in effect leaving out the
last two of the five:
1. Thesis
2. Reason
3. Examples
a) positive instance
b) negative instance [6]
The Buddha uses elements of both these procedures in the
Śūraṅgama.
It was permissible, when using the five-step sequence, to omit the
first step, and the Buddha does so often in the Sutra. He merely
hints where he is headed by raising an issue in terms of a
question. The result is that the last two of the five steps – the
application of the examples and the conclusion – frequently come to
Ānanda and the others in the Buddha’s audience as a surprise, which
may be accompanied by astonishment, confusion, or delight in
finally understanding. Here is a summary of one of many instances
of the “clarification of causes” in the Śūraṅgama:
1. Proposition: it is the mind, not the eyes, that see (in the text
this step is implicit rather than stated);
2. Reason: our visual awareness is active even if nothing is being
seen.;
3. Instance found in ordinary life: In the Buddha’s words, “If you
asked a blind man on the street, ‘Do you see anything?’ he would no
doubt answer, ‘All I see is darkness’.”
4. Application of the instance: “Reflect upon what that might mean.
Although the blind man sees only darkness, his visual awareness is
intact.”
5. Conclusion: “The eyes themselves simply reveal visible
objects; it is the mind that sees, not the eyes.”
This sequence comes early in the discussion, and Buddha does not at
this point explain its implications. Later he will point out that
since seeing is actually a function of the mind, not the eyes, our
visual awareness is fundamentally independent of the presence of
visible objects. Therefore it must be possible to withdraw our
visual awareness from the grip of visual objects – and the same
must be possible for all the other senses as well. Awareness, thus
freed, may become purified, and may eventually be transmuted into
illumination.
One aspect of Buddhist logic in particular lends to the
Śūraṅgama much of its distinctive style. This is the
reliance on positive and negative instances as proofs of a thesis.
While the positive instances, like the encounter with the blind man
in the street, serve to prove an assertion by showing how it is at
work in daily life, the negative instances are given as proof that
any assertion contrary to one being defended would result in
absurdities. Most important here is that the rules of logic
required that the instances be drawn not from doctrine or theory,
which one’s opponent in debate might find unpersuasive, but rather
from the experiences of ordinary life -- experiences which an
opponent could not plausibly discount. It is to this requirement
that we owe many of the glimpses that the Sutra gives us into the
daily routines of the monastic community and of the citizens of the
nearby city of Śrāvastī.[7] We
read of the monks seated with their alms-bowls, busy rolling up
their food into balls to be eaten with the fingers, in the Indian
manner. We hear of householders digging wells for new dwellings and
local healers holding up bowls to the full moon to collect dew that
they will mix inito their herbal potions. We meet a monk who has
spent his life repairing potholes in the public roads and a king
who despairs because he is growing old. However abstract or subtle
the discourse may frequently seem, then, it is deeply colored with
a sense of time and place, with the sights and sounds and people of
Northern India in its early classical era. This underlying Indian
tint keeps seeping up into the Chinese surface of the translated
text -- reminding the reader that the nearby river, often invoked
in the flow of argument, is not the Yangzi but the
Ganges.
Considered as a whole, the entire edifice of the Buddha’s discourse
is a masterwork in the architecture of logical argumentation. Each
level of theory established by the Buddha elegantly supports the
next level. The entire discourse is girded together by
cross-references, parallelisms, reiterations of previous
assertions, and anticipatory summaries of what is to come. The
present essay is a preliminary attempt to read the plans of this
exemplary scriptural edifice.
Many generations of Chinese readers, Buddhist and otherwise, have
admired and esteemed one further aspect the Śūraṅgama
Sutra, namely, the virtuosic literary elegance of the
translation itself. Except for a few verses, the entire Chinese
text unrolls in a sequence of four-character phrases, which are in
effect a metered prose. This four-character pattern imbues the
discourse with a vigorous and stately majesty. For all these
reasons, then, in China the Śūraṅgama Sutra has for many
centuries been the subject of written commentaries by illustrious
monastic scholars,[8] a
topic for public lectures and spoken exegeses, and the object of
devout private study, recitation, and memorization.
It should be noted, before proceeding further, that the
authenticity of the Śūraṅgama has been challenged by some
modern scholars, who have held that, since no Indic original is
extant, the text is no translation at all, but rather an original
composition in the Chinese.[9] The
timing of the translation has been questioned, and textual
anomalies that might suggest the interpolation of purely Chinese
cultural elements have been identified. There are strong reasons to
believe, however, that the original text can only be Indian. It is
true, for example, that during Buddhism’s earliest centuries in
China, spurious or corrupted Buddhist texts were circulated; but by
the early eighth century, when the Śūraṅgama
translation appeared,[10]
Chinese monastic scholars had become sufficiently vigilant to
denounce inauthentic texts.[11]
Further, while some details in the text do seem to arise from a
Chinese context, these could merely represent choices made by the
translators to substitute Chinese equivalents or analogues for
unfamiliar Indian elements that were present in the
original.[12]
There are, besides, a least an equal number of details that point
to an Indian substratum beneath the Chinese surface.[13]
The most persuasive internal trace of a South Asian original,
however, is the presence of two indisputably Indian elements that
play leading roles in the text. One of these, already mentioned
here, is the “clarification of causes” in Indian Buddhist logic.
The other is the Śūraṅgama Mantra, which the Chinese text leaves
untranslated, and which lies at the heart of the Sutra’s
instructions for spiritual practice. Last, and most important of
all in this dispute as to the Sutra’s authenticity, is the fact
that the Śūraṅgama has been widely accepted in China as
canonical for well over a thousand years. Such acceptance reflects
the view that a religious text’s authenticity must be measured by
its effectiveness as a guide to spiritual and moral practice.
From this orthopraxic point of view, the Śūraṅgama may be
correctly deemed to be authoritative simply because generations of
advanced practitioners have revered it, have followed its
instructions, and have explained it to others as a reliable
prescription for moral purification and spiritual advancement, even
as far as enlightenment.[14] To
the Śūraṅgama’s many admirers, then, the history of the
text is, in the end, of no great importance, and the dispute
surrounding its origin is irrelevant.[15]
2. The
Conceptual Framework of the Discourse
As the Sutra opens, Ānanda, alone on the road, falls under a spell
that is recited by a courtesan, and he is on the brink of breaking
his vow of celibacy. The Buddha senses from a distance his young
cousin’s distress, and, having made a transfiguration of a Buddha
appear above his head, he recites through this transfiguration a
mantra[16] --
the Śūraṅgama Mantra -- which defeats the courtesan’s spell.
The Buddha then sends a senior member of his assembly, the
Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, who in the Mahayana tradition embodies
wisdom, to rescue Ānanda and to bring both monk and courtesan
before the Buddha. Amidst the assembly of monks and a throng of lay
adherents, Ānanda now finds himself face to face with his teacher.
Deeply mortified, he requests instruction so that he can avoid
further error. This is the “request for Dharma” with which most of
the Buddha’s discourses begin.
In his answer, the Buddha makes clear that Ānanda’s error was not
entirely that he permitted sexual desire almost to overwhelm his
monastic resolve. Equally in error was his laxity in his practice
of mental concentration, a laxity that left him vulnerable to
enticement by the courtesan’s spell. What Ānanda lacked was
samādhi, a concentration firm enough to resist disturbance and
intrusion. The Buddha proposes, then, to answer Ānanda’s request
for instruction by teaching him how to perfect his samādhi. The
Sutra says,
Then the World-Honored One, before the great assembly,
extended his golden-hued arm, [comforted Ānanda by] passing
his hand over the crown of Ānanda's head, and said to Ānanda and to
all gathered there, "There is a samādhi called 'The Great and Royal
Śūraṅgama that is Proclaimed from Above the Buddha’s Head
and is the Perfection of the Myriad Practices.' It is a wondrous
and magnificent Path, the unique portal through which the Buddhas
in all ten directions have passed in order to transcend the
conditioned world.”[17]
The Buddha then launches a dialogue which continues on throughout
most of the Sutra. He begins by asking Ānanda to consider where his
mind is located. Ānanda offers the evident answer that his mind is
to be found in his body. The Buddha, however, with his superior
command of logic, quickly disposes of this widely held supposition,
and of six more possibilities that Ānanda offers. The young monk is
left with the bewildering conclusion that his mind is neither
inside his body, nor outside it, nor somewhere between, nor
anywhere else. The Buddha then compounds his cousin’s confusion by
stating that there are fundamentally two kinds of mind – first, the
ordinary quotidian mind of which we are aware and which is
entangled, lifetime after lifetime, in the snare of illusory
perceptions and random thoughts; and, second, the everlasting true
mind, which is our real nature, and which is the state of the
Buddha.
“Ānanda, what are the two fundamentals? The first is the mind
that is the basis of death and rebirth and that has continued for
the entirety of time, which has no beginning. This mind is
dependent on perceived objects, and it is this that you and all
beings make use of and that each of you consider to be your own
nature.
The second fundamental is enlightenment, which has no
beginning; it is the original and pure essence of nirvana. It is
the original understanding, the real nature of consciousness.
All conditioned phenomena arise from it, and yet it is among those
phenomena that beings lose track of it. They have lost track of
this fundamental understanding, though it is active in them all day
long, and because they remain unaware of it, they make the mistake
of entering the various destinies.
Ānanda will at first have none of this. Here he speaks for all who
pride themselves, as he does, on their discursive intelligence.
When the Buddha, seeing Ānanda’s skepticism, asks him what he takes
to be his mind, Ānanda answers,
“The [Buddha] has just now been asking me about my mind’s
location, and my mind is what I have been using to determine where
it might be. My mind is that which has the capability of
making such determinations."
The Buddha exclaimed, "Ānanda! That is not your
mind!"
Ānanda protests:
“If this activity of comprehension is not the mind, then I have
no mind, and I am the same as a clod of earth or a piece of
wood.”
The Buddha reassures his cousin that there is indeed another kind
of awareness. It is the true mind that “original and pure essence
of Nirvana” just mentioned. It is given a number of other
designations in this discourse, among them the Buddha-nature, the
Matrix of the Thus-Come One (that is, of the Buddha), and the
Suchness of Reality. This ultimate reality is also the enlightened
mind inherent in all beings. However, it has remained outside
of Ānanda’s calculations. He has simply not been aware that he is
endowed with it, because he is immersed in the disordered
activities of his mundane thoughts and is distracted by his
unrelenting interactions with the sense-data that he takes to be
the world. Absorbed in his own drama, he cannot enter samādhi, much
less proceed through samādhi to awakening. In this he stands in for
us.
Since Ānanda is someone who proudly identifies himself with his
ability to think, he is at a disadvantage in his search to awaken
to his true mind. One cannot think one’s way into enlightenment,
because the awakened mind is beyond thought. Put otherwise, what is
most worth understanding is beyond conception; what most needs
describing cannot be described. Nevertheless, the Buddha in the
Śūraṅgama discourse is willing to take exception to this
generally recognized conundrum. Since words are what Ānanda trusts
and understands, and since thinking is what Ānanda relies on, the
Buddha is willing to make use of words and thought to wake his
cousin up. The Buddha concludes this first section of the Sutra
with this promise:
“I now will raise for all of you a great banner of Dharma, so
that all beings throughout all ten directions can gain access to
what is wondrous, subtle, and hidden: the pure mind that
understands.”
The Buddha proceeds by bringing to our attention to the simple fact
that we are aware. Taking visual awareness as the paradigm, he
examines awareness through a series of illustrative vignettes,
several of them involving other speakers. He demonstrates that,
while things move in the field of our visual awareness, our
awareness itself remains still. The body ages, but our awareness
endures. What lies within our field of awareness may be in daylight
or in darkness, may be obscured or clear, but our awareness itself
is unchanged, no matter what conditions appear within its scope.
Our field of visual awareness encompasses visible objects but is
not itself an object; it lacks both shape and extension. Still, it
cannot be said to be clearly distinct from the things which are in
it, at the same time that it is cannot be said to be identical to
them. Our visual awareness is active even amidst total darkness, as
the Buddha shows with the already cited example of the blind man
who is nevertheless aware of the darkness around him.
All this applies not only to visual awareness but also to the five
other kinds of awareness: our awareness of sounds, of smells, of
tastes, of tangible objects, and of the thoughts in our minds. A
plenitude of sense-objects exists within each of these fields of
awareness, but the awareness itself is independent of them. As the
Buddha says later, “The essential capacity to hear is never absent,
no matter whether there is sound or silence.”
Gradually during this investigation, the Buddha gives hints that
our capacity for awareness is more central than we may have
supposed. Having shown Ānanda that his visual awareness is
independent of the phenomena of which it is aware, the Buddha
concludes that this awareness must be at least an aspect of that
true mind that Ānanda has lost track of. “What is not affected by
conditions must be what you fundamentally are. If that is not you,
what is?” For one thing, as he gently reassures the aging King
Prasenajit, who is frightened at the prospect of his mortality,
since our visual awareness is independent of conditions, it must
belong to what survives the traumas of death and rebirth.
Ānanda, surrendering to the force of the Buddha’s logic, grants,
“My awareness is indeed my wondrous true nature.” But, of course,
it is not that simple. It is the essential nature of awareness that
is the enlightened mind, not our ordinary awareness that we
experience day after day. This ordinary awareness has been
distorted; it is diseased. The Buddha compares us to a man who sees
circles of color around a lamp because he suffers from a disease of
the eyes. Yet it is possible for the man’s eye-disease to be
corrected, so that he can see clearly, and it is possible for our
distorted awareness to be purified, so that we see the world as it
really is.
It is probably worth noting at this point that the radical
skepticism expressed in this ancient document is, in modern times,
no longer radical at all. The speculations of David Hume and
Immanuel Kant – not to mention the invention of the microscope and
telescope and every other device that sees and hears better than we
do – have long made it clear that the world we see with the
naked eye and hear with the unaided ear is not the world as it
really is. We do not hear the high and low frequencies and do not
see beyond the visual spectrum. Our visual and aural fields are
distorted by the limitations to our visual and aural awareness.
These limits are not merely those of scope, but of value and of
perspective. As the Buddha will explain to Ānanda later on in the
Śūraṅgama discourse, we also allow ourselves to be fooled
in that we interpret everything we perceive as good, bad, or
indifferent, assigning it a value measured by what it will mean to
us. In this way, we distort the world by responding to it with
desire or revulsion. Further, we divide the contents of our
experience into what is us and what is not us – what is self and
what is other. Everything is colored by the perspective of self,
just as the lamp is distorted by the eye-disease of the viewer in
the Buddha’s analogy
What, then, is this enlightened mind that is the purified essence
of our awareness, and what might it mean to purify it? To prepare
Ānanda for an answer to these questions, the Buddha turns next to
one of the doctrines that is most distinctive to Buddhism – the
doctrine of emptiness. All the things that we perceive in this
world are impermanent, and, furthermore, all things are merely
concatenations of ingredients and circumstances. They exist, but
they have no reality that is their own. They are constructs;
ontologically they are empty. Our very selves are merely mental
constructs, which – as modern developmental psychology confirms –
we put together as children in order to navigate among our
experiences. In the Śūraṅgama Sutra, the Buddha approaches
this doctrine through our sense-apparatus. In a series of arguments
that follow the pattern of the clarification of causes, he
briefly examines in turn our six senses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue,
skin, and mind), then the six kinds of sense-objects (visual
objects, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile objects, and thoughts –
that is, objects of mind); also the six kinds of
sense-consciousnesses that arise when the sense-faculties encounter
sense-objects (that is, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,
touching, and awareness of the mental contents); and finally the
elemental qualities that characterize the world of sense-objects
(fire, or heat; earth, or solidity; water, or liquidity; wind, or
movement; space; living beings’ ordinary sense-awareness; and
beings’ consciousness). All these, the Buddha says, are illusory
and unreal. They do not exist as independent natures with their own
being. Thus the universe of objects that we perceive is, in this
sense, empty.
And yet, at the same time that mind and world are empty, in that
they are unreal and have no independent being, one cannot say that
they do not exist. The universe is empty, but this emptiness is not
the same thing as a void. It is not only that the universe teems
with all manner of sentient beings and insentient things,
contingent and impermanent thought they may be. It is also that, at
a more profound level, this empty universe, and all beings in it,
are suffused with an ultimate reality. In the Śūraṅgama
Sutra and elsewhere, the Buddha calls this ultimate reality
“the Matrix of the Thus-Come One” – in Sanskrit, the
Tathāgata-gharba, literally, the womb of the Buddha.
It is from this Matrix that the world and the mind come
forth.[18]
Enlightenment, then, brings not only an awakening of the
fundamental Buddha-nature within one’s own mind – that original
true mind which we have forgotten. It brings also an apprehension
of ultimate reality, because these two—the true mind and the
reality of the universe – otherwise named the Buddha-nature and the
Matrix of the Thus-Come One – are one and the same. Thus in the
Śūraṅgama, numerous terms of praise apply equally to the
true mind and to the reality of the universe: wondrous
(妙miao), original
(元yuan,) fundamental
(本ben), true (真zhen),
genuine (實shi), enlightened
(覺jie), illuminative understanding
(明ming), luminous
(光guang), unchanging
(常chang), pure (情淨qing
jing), the “suchness of reality”
(真如zhen ru); and -- most important to the
Śūraṅgama discourse -- the enlightened nature of our
awareness (見性jian xing). The Buddha tells
Ānanda:
“In the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, the nature of your visual
awareness is your enlightened understanding, and the essence of
enlightenment is your awareness that understands. Fundamentally
pure, it extends throughout the Dharma Realm. The extent to which
beings are aware of its real nature depends on the capacities of
their minds. Just as the awareness of one sense-faculty, the eye,
extends throughout the Dharma Realm, so also do the wondrous,
resplendent powers of hearing, smelling, tasting, tactile
awareness, and mental awareness extend throughout the Dharma Realm.
They fill up the entirety of empty space.” [19]
How, then, is it that we have lost sight of our origins in this
Matrix, which is it say, how is that we have forgotten our true
minds? Another of the Buddha’s senior disciples,
Pūrṇa-maitrāyani-putra, now rises to ask this question.
“World-Honored One, if in fact the skandhas,[20]
as well as the twelve sites, which consist of the sense-faculties
and their objects, and also the eighteen capacities [for
perception] and the rest, are all the Matrix of the Thus-Come One,
which is itself fundamentally pure, then how is it that the
mountains, the rivers, the earth, and everything else in the world
of perceived objects -- all conditioned phenomena— suddenly come
into being?”
The Buddha’s answer focuses on one essential event: the separation
of the perceiver from the perceived, of the self from the other. He
describes it as adding an understanding to an already existing
understanding.
“Although nothing need be added to enlightenment, once an
understanding is added, that understanding must understand
something. Once the category of ‘something understood’ is
mistakenly established, the category ‘that which understands’ is
mistakenly established as well.”
As a result, the original, enlightened awareness, which had been a
single unity, divides into six sense-faculties and their six
objects. What is now a perceived universe is further divided into
the desirable, the undesirable, and the neutral, and as a result
there is disgust and desire. Karma is now in play, and with it
emerge the various levels of being and the cycle of death and
rebirth.
This account, summarized here, of the separation of ultimate
reality into subject and object is all the Buddha is willing to
offer as the original impetus for the coming into being of mind and
world. He gives us no Creation myth and imagines no Creator. If the
primordial separation into subject and object is our fall, it is a
psychological one, a rift at the foundation of consciousness, not a
moral fall. There is no original sin; there is only the original
loss.
While the Buddha is willing to explain how this loss
comes about, he does not offer a similar explanation as to
why it comes about. Pūrṇa-maitrāyani-putra requests that
the Buddha shed light on this mystery:
“I venture to ask the Tathāgata why all beings are
deluded.”
The Buddha replies with a parable. In nearby Śrāvastī, a
neighborhood idiot named Yajñadatta thinks that the head he sees in
the mirror one morning is not his own. In a panic he concludes that
the head he does see in the mirror belongs to a ghost. He runs
madly out into the street. The Buddha asks Pūrṇa:
“What do you think? What caused this man to run madly about for
no good reason?”
Pūrṇa replied, “He was clearly insane. That and nothing else
was the cause.”
The Buddha said, “Wondrous enlightenment is perfect
understanding, a wondrous understanding that is fundamentally
perfect. How then could it be the basis of the delusions we have
been discussing? … This, then, is the cause of delusion: it arises
from delusion. Merely realize that your delusion has no ultimate
basis, and the basis of your delusion will disappear … The same may
be said even more emphatically of Yajñadatta. What he experienced
that day in the city had no basis and so was fundamentally unreal.
Was there any reason for him to have become afraid that he had lost
his head and to have rushed madly about?...The same is true of
delusion. How could it be based in reality?
There can be no reason for our slipping from enlightenment into
delusion. First, it contradicts logic to suppose that perfect
understanding could be the cause of delusion; and, second, delusion
would not be delusion if it had a rational basis. And that is all
the Buddha will give us here. The Sutra does not offer an elaborate
account of cosmological origin. The Buddhist view is that the
universe is created not by a deity but by karma. Unlike the Western
religions, Buddhism does not see the universe in terms of a finite
and linear narrative guided by the purposes of an ultimate
purposer. The impetus of the Buddha’s ministry was simply the plain
fact that we are caught up in an unsatisfactory existence, and he
offers nothing more nor less than a way out. Thus in the
Śūraṅgama, the Buddha concludes his parable of Yajñadatta
with a prescription:
All that is needed is for you not to follow after the
distinctions you make concerning the … world, beings, and
retribution in accord with karma.”
3. Instructions in
Practice
“Not to follow:” this prescription to declare our independence from
sense-objects leads us back to the occasion for the Sutra itself.
Ānanda’s lack of samādhi left him vulnerable to disaster because he
permitted his hearing to take in the courtesan’s spell. He
shouldn’t have been listening to the spell. He should have been
focusing his hearing inward. The Śūraṅgama discourse has
now reached its second stage. The Buddha has erected a conceptual
framework, and he is ready to clothe the framework with
instructions for practice. Ānanda does not immediately perceive
this, and he now speaks up to challenge the Buddha’s argument that
no cause can be ascribed to the primordial division between self
and other. Briefly the Buddha revisits the parable of the foolish
Yajñadatta, and then he gives Ānanda a sound scolding:
“Despite your many eons of accumulated learning, you were not
able to escape your difficulty with the young Matanga woman [the
courtesan]. Why did you need me to recite the Śūraṅgama Mantra for
you? In the young Matanga woman the fires of lust have been
extinguished, and instantly she has become a Sage who must return
only once.”[21]
In other words, the courtesan has surpassed Ānanda in her level of
enlightenment. Listening to the Śūraṅgama discourse has lifted her
quickly to the third level of the Sage. Ānanda has long been stuck
at the first stage.[22]
This is sufficiently mortifying to sap the young monk’s appetite
for argumentation. For the remainder of the Sutra, he largely
confines his remarks to requests for further teaching. The young
intellectual is now ready to be taught how to practice the
Śūraṅgama Samadhi. He tearfully confesses:
“The Thus-Come One has also admonished me for pursuing
erudition at the expense of spiritual practice. Now, therefore, I
am like a wanderer who unexpectedly meets a celestial king, who
bestows upon him a magnificent house. The house is his, yet in
order to go in, he will still need to find a door. I only hope that
the Thus-Come One will not withhold his compassion from all of us
in this assembly who are covered in darkness, and that he will show
us the road that leads from our original resolve to certain
attainment of the Thus-Come One’s complete nirvana.
The Buddha responds by returning to the subject of
sense-perception. He points out that some of the six senses have a
wider range than others; for example, we cannot see behind us, but
our hearing is omni-directional. He then reassures Ānanda that he
needs to concentrate in his practice on only one of the senses,
since when one of them is purified, all of them will be purified.
The work of samādhi, he repeats, is “not to follow.” That is, it is
to learn not to allow one’s attention to be distracted by
sense-objects, not to allow one’s mind to evaluate these objects as
good, bad, or neutral, and not to allow one’s emotions to respond
with desire or revulsion. He says:
“Extricate one sense-faculty by detaching it from its
sense-objects, and redirect it inward so that it may return to what
is original and true. Then it will radiate with the light of your
original understanding. This brilliant light will shine forth and
detach the other five sense-faculties until they too are completely
free of sense-objects.”
The Buddha then asks his son Rāhula, who has joined his monastic
retinue, to strike the temple bell, in order to demonstrate once
again that hearing continues whether there is sound or silence.
Finally, he asks the enlightened sages in the assembly to tell
Ānanda how they became enlightened.
“When you first made the commitment to realize enlightenment,
which one of the eighteen constituent elements of perception did
you waken in order to break through all obstructions? By what
method did you enter samādhi?”
Thus begins what is perhaps the most celebrated passage in the
Sutra: the testimony of the twenty-five sages, of whom the last is
the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. Each sage identifies as his avenue
to enlightenment one of the six sense-faculties, six sense-objects,
six sense-consciousnesses, or seven elemental qualities (thus a
total of twenty-five.) Each explains how, by contemplating their
awareness as ultimately independent of sense-faculties and
sense-objects, they broke their attachment to the world of the
senses. The sage Gavāmpati, for example, testifies in part:
“My contemplation was that the knowledge of flavors does not
come from the tongue-faculty and does not come from any object of
taste… Within, I let go of my mind and body, and without, I took my
leave of this world. I left the three realms of existence far
behind, like a bird escaping from its cage. I departed from all
impurity and was done with all sense-objects, and my Dharma-eye
became clear. So it was that I became a Sage. The Thus-Come One
himself verified that I needed no further instruction. The
Buddha has asked us how we broke through all obstructions. I
believe that turning our awareness of flavor around to reflect upon
itself is the best method.”
As for the seven sages who focused on one of the seven elemental
qualities, their contemplations were of the identity of body, mind,
and world, and therefore the ultimate unreality of the division
into subject and object. The youth Moonlight testifies:
I saw too that the water inside my body was no different from
the water outside of my body. Even as far away as the fragrant seas
of the Royal-Floating-Banner Buddha-land, the fundamental nature of
water is one and the same…. My body vanished. Then the fundamental
nature of the water in my body and of all the waters of the
fragrant seas in worlds throughout the ten directions merged into
true emptiness.
Finally, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara describes his practice for
purification of the ear-faculty. He says:
“First I redirected my hearing inward as if to go against a
stream ,and then external sounds disappeared. With its direction
reversed and with sounds stilled, both sounds and silence cease to
arise. So it was that, as I gradually progressed, what I heard and
my awareness of what I heard came to an end. Even when that state
of mind in which everything had come to an end disappeared, I did
not rest. My awareness and the objects of my awareness were
emptied, and when that process of emptying my awareness was wholly
complete, then even that emptying and what had been emptied
vanished. Coming into being and ceasing to be themselves ceased to
be. Then the ultimate stillness was revealed. All of a sudden I
transcended the worlds of ordinary beings, and I also transcended
the worlds of beings who have transcended the ordinary worlds.
Everything in the ten directions was fully illuminated.”
Here we have the esoteric teaching that is central to the
Śūraṅgama: freeing the sense-faculties from the
world of sense-objects leads first to “everything disappearing,”
and then to “illumination.” As the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara puts
it:
“Once perceived objects had disappeared from my mind as I
turned the light of my understanding inward, my body and mind and
the entire Dharma-Realm [that is, the universe] were as bright and
translucent and flawless as crystal.”[23]
When his hearing, as he says, became all-pervasive, he was able to
hear the cries of beings everywhere: thus one Chinese translation
of his name is Guan Shi Yin (觀世音, The One Who Hears
the Voices of the World). He is Buddhism’s exemplar of compassion,
and when Buddhism traveled to East Asia, he became an object of
worship and petition in his feminine form. He tells the
Śūraṅgama assembly that he is able to appear before
various classes of beings in their own forms, to grant their
wishes, and to deliver them safely from fearsome situations. The
celebrated twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra (“On
the Universal Doorway”) similarly celebrates the Bodhisattva
Avalokiteśvara’s salvific powers; the difference is that in the
Śūraṅgama, he explains how those powers were gained.
“Because I did not listen to sounds, I was able to contemplate
the listener within. Now I can hear the cries of suffering beings
throughout the ten directions, and I can bring about their
liberation.”
And,
“Once sounds were so purified that they ceased being perceived
objects, the sense-faculty and its objects were completely
interfused, so that there was nothing that perceived and nothing
that was perceived. Therefore, I can cause beings burdened by anger
and hatred to be free of their enmity.”[24]
When Avalokitśvara has finished speaking, the Buddha
asks the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī to recommend one of the methods
described by the twenty-five sages, so that Ānanda and beings of
the future can know which method “will lead them most easily to
success.” Mañjuśrī responds with a 250-line verse in summary
of the Śūraṅgama teaching and the sages’ twenty-five
methods. He concludes by recommending the hearing-practice of
Avalokiteśvara:
“I now respectfully say this to the World-Honored-One
--
Who is the Buddha that appeared here in this Sāha
World
In order to transmit the essence of true teaching
Meant for this place--: it is that purity is found through
hearing.
Those who will wish to gain a mastery of samādhi
Will surely find that hearing is the way to enter.
And a little further on:
“Great Assembly! Ānanda! Halt the shadow-play
Of your distorted hearing!. Turn your hearing round and
listen
To your true nature. Then you’ll realize the
unsurpassed
Enlightenment. This is the genuine way
To break through all obstructions.”
The instruction of Ānanda is not yet quite complete, however. One
crucial point remains to be made. How is it possible, after all, to
turn the hearing around and listen to one’s true nature? How can
one stake out an independence from the data of the senses? The
Buddha is now ready to offer a frank answer to this question.
“No matter how much you may practice in order to transcend the
stress of experiencing sense-objects, you will never transcend that
stress until you have freed yourself from sexual desire.”
In the Chinese the word is yin (淫),
literally, lust: lust not only for sexual experience, but for
sense-experience in general. What keeps us tied to sense-objects --
what prevents us from being able to liberate our awareness and gain
illumination – is simply our desire for sense-experiences, of which
sexual experience is the most compelling of all. Thus the Buddha
returns to his initial teaching, the Four Noble Truths, which he
transmitted to the five ascetics in the Deer Park soon after his
own enlightenment. These truths tell us that this life of ours is
unsatisfactory and that the root of our dissatisfaction is our
habit of craving sensation and experience. Only by extinguishing
this craving can one gain freedom..
“You must purge yourself of the most subtle promptings of lust,
both physical and mental… Then there will be hope that you may
realize the enlightenment of the Buddhas.”
To this the Buddha adds three other prerequisites necessary for
success in one’s spiritual practice. First, one must free oneself
of violence, both in one’s actions and in one’s thoughts (included
in this instruction is an injunction against eating meat). Second,
there must be no coveting and no theft; and, lastly, one must never
make prideful false claims to spiritual accomplishment.
Finally, the Buddha offers an expedient for hastening the
practitioner’s entry into the Śūraṅgama Samādhi. This expedient is
recitation of the Śūraṅgama Mantra, that same counter-spell by
which, at the outset of the Sutra, the Buddha rescued Ānanda from
what he delicately refers to as “your difficulty with the Matanga
woman.” The Buddha himself calls the mantra “The Great White
Canopy,” because it takes those who recite it under its protection.
At Ānanda’s request, the Buddha now proclaims the mantra for a
second time, and this time its 544 lines are given in the text. The
Buddha giv
