The Lankavatara Sutra: Translation and Commentary (NONE)

Magic and prophecy were the major reasons why those in power financed sutra translation—the powers associated with sutras and mantras had political and military applications.

“Lord of Lanka, this teaching is the pinnacle of Mahayana understanding, for it enables practitioners to achieve self–realization and to enjoy higher levels of existence.

For all its unusual syntax, Gunabhadra’s translation, I decided, was the momma bear of texts.

Written in language that would later become part of the Yogacara school of Buddhism, the Lanka provides a view of how the mind works and how the path to enlightenment works, but it uses such devices to get our attention. They are not the teaching. Think of the Lankavatara as Zen tea in a Yogacara cup.

And once the perceptions of their own minds are free of projections, they are able to dwell in the perfection of wisdom and to let go of their life and their practice and to enter the Diamond Samadhi that accompanies a tathagata’s body and that accompanies the transformation of suchness.

The Buddha is denying the validity of impermanence. Te-ch‘ing says, “The broken jug is a metaphor for no effect, the burnt seed for no cause.”

Essentially, all dharmas are non-dharmas. That is, they are nothing more than arbitrary designations behind which nothing is real. In the Diamond Sutra (Chapters 8 and 17), the Buddha says, “As for dharmas, Subhuti, only as non-dharmas can we speak of dharmas.”

They were simply different ways of dividing any given moment of awareness into a manageable matrix to demonstrate to anyone willing to wander around these matrices that they contained the universe of our awareness, its inside and its outside, and yet they contained no self. That was their function: to show practitioners that there was no self.

Bodhiruchi,