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 gives precise instructions on the construction and consecration of a sacred space in which a practitioner can properly focus on recitation of the mantra, and he lists numerous benefits that it bestows upon those who make it part of their practice.
4. Guidelines for Advancement
With the teaching concerning the Śūraṅgama Mantra, the Buddha has now completed his instructions for entering the Śūraṅgama Samādhi. The goal of the narrative has been gained: Ānanda has been granted what he needs to avoid further error. But the Sutra itself is not complete. Confident that he can at last make spiritual progress, Ānanda asks for an explanation of the various levels of enlightenment through which he hopes to soon begin his advance. In answer, the Buddha first backs up to briefly describe twelve levels of unenlightened beings, which he categorizes according to the manner of their being born. Next, in a passage of daunting terseness, he summarizes fifty-five stages of the Bodhisattva’s progress toward Buddhahood – a topic treated expansively in the Avatamsaka Sutra. Next, having heard about the highest levels of being, Ānanda, ever curious, asks about the lowest levels, that is, about the hells, of which, he says, he and his fellow monks are ignorant. The Buddha complies by launching into a hair-raising description of the tortures of the nether regions, which beings experience as the karma incurred by their misdeeds in their lives as people. The Buddha continues by summarizing the gradual ascent through other levels of rebirth, as ghosts, animals, people, adepts, gods, and beings addicted to violence (asuras).
Finally, in a lengthy and important section that can stand alone,[25] the Buddha warns against fifty negative states of mind in which serious practitioners can become trapped if they fall prey to greed, pride, or confusion. This last teaching serves as a warning that the Śūraṅgama practice of entering samādhi through redirecting the senses inward carries with it some degree of peril. It is essential to recognize that, to avoid not only error but serious mental endangerment, any intense spiritual practice must be pursued in the context of a proper spiritual community, surrounded by others devoted to pure conduct, under the guidance of a wise and skillful teacher.
5. Conclusion
It is perhaps appropriate for me to conclude on a personal note by lamenting the obscurity into which this magnificent scripture has fallen, while, at the same time, many lesser works have been translated by Western scholars and widely circulated. The charge that the Śūraṅgama Sutra is inauthentic and apocryphal has not been without its effect. The discourse is rarely if ever taught, for example. in university courses on Buddhism, and it is probable that the great majority of Western Buddhists have neither read it nor even heard of it. To speak frankly, it is unclear what legitimate grounds there can be for scholars who are not themselves Buddhist masters, or even Buddhist practitioners, to confidently present themselves as qualified to rule on the proper place that a scripture should hold in the Buddhist canon. One can only be puzzled by the easy but unstated assumption that uncertainties concerning textual history should be sufficient to diminish the immense religious and literary stature that a scripture has maintained for 1,300 years in its own tradition. There is here a whiff of the Western cultural arrogance that Edward Said famously characterized as orientalism.[26] I can only venture to hope that the new translation being prepared by the team of which I am member will serve some small role in bringing the Śūraṅgama more into the light.
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