by Hsuan Hua
At the heart of the Sutra is the Śūraṅgama Mantra. The Sutra promises that the practice of reciting this mantra, in the context of the other practices taught in the Sutra, can succeed in eliminating whatever internal or external obstacles may lie in the way of spiritual progress. To this day, monks and nuns in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, as well as many practitioners among the laity, recite the mantra every morning as an essential aspect of daily practice.
2. The Sutra’s Literary Style
Despite its importance in Buddhist tradition, and despite its intrinsic value as a masterpiece of spiritual writing, the Śūraṅgama Sūtra continues to be little known in the West. The reason for the Sutra’s relative obscurity outside of Asia is in part due to aspects of the Chinese text itself. In the first place, no Indic original of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra survives. It is preserved only in its eighth-century translation into Chinese,9 and this translation, while widely appreciated among Chinese readers for its literary elegance, is also well known as being unusually difficult to understand. The text is expressed in a succession of four-character phrases.10 in what amounts to a metered prose — a format that imbues the entire discourse with a vigorous and stately rhythm. But to maintain the four-character meter, the Chinese translators were often forced to omit characters necessary to the meaning, and this resulted not infrequently in an extreme terseness of expression. For such passages, the exegetical tradition is essential for understanding. In addition, the Chinese translators resorted frequently to rare characters, often allowed themselves ambiguities of grammar and word usage, made allusions to doctrines without explaining them, and left many technical terms in a transliterated Sanskrit. The result has been that even devout and erudite Chinese readers are sometimes puzzled as to the meaning of the text. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that relatively few attempts have been made to produce even a partial English translation.11
In undertaking this new English rendering of the complete text of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, the present translators’ first priority has been to ensure that the difficulties of the text are reduced as far as possible for the Western reader. To that end we have striven for clarity, transparency, and naturalness of expression. We have been ready to sacrifice any attempt to emulate the complex literary elegance of the Chinese whenever it seemed to us that to do so would interfere with a plain statement of the meaning in English. We have translated many of the Sanskrit technical terms that the Chinese translators left in Sanskrit. We have also interpolated chapter and sub-chapter headings and have occasionally inserted numbering to mark the succession of topics in the Sutra’s argument.12 Further, we have provided interlinear explanatory commentary wherever we judged that it might be helpful in clarifying the meaning of the text. To this end we have chosen excerpts from a commentary that was redacted from lectures given in 1968 by the Venerable Master Hsüan Hua (1918–95),13 an eminent Chinese monk and teacher who was a pioneer in bringing the Buddhist tradition of scriptural exegesis to Western audiences. Finally, we have added explanatory footnotes to supplement the present introduction and commentary. The footnotes also provide occasional references to other commentaries. In most cases, without giving special notice, we have followed the interpretations given in his commentary by the Venerable Master Hsüan Hua.
Fortunately, the difficulties imposed by the Chinese translators’ rhetorical choices are somewhat mitigated by the manner in which the Sutra unfolds. Much of the discussion of samādhi is presented in the form of a dramatic dialogue between the Buddha Śākyamuni and his young cousin and attendant Ānanda. To the Western reader, the Sutra’s dialogic format suggests a rough similarity to the dialogues of Plato. But Plato’s manner of uncovering truth by means of Socrates’ sly cross-examinations of his hapless interlocutors is in fact very different from the pattern we encounter in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. For much of the first part of the Sutra, both the Buddha and Ānanda make use of the syllogism as it later came to be used in the tradition of Buddhist logical argument.14 In constructing a syllogism, mere reasoning was not considered to be sufficient. It was necessary to establish a proposition’s truth by citing, as an instance or example, some evidence of the proposition at work in the ordinary experience of daily life. The presence of these examples is a significant aspect of the Sutra’s distinctive style. As the argument progresses from point to point, the reader is given a series of glimpses into the daily routines of the monastic community and the life of ordinary citizens of the nearby city of Śrāvastī.15 We read of the monks seated with their almsbowls, busy eating food with their 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 into 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 sometimes seem, then, it is always deeply colored with a sense of time and place, with the sights and sounds and people of Northern India as it was some twenty-five hundred years ago.
3. A Synopsis of the Sutra
Prologue: The Occasion for the Teaching
As the Sutra opens, Ānanda is alone on the road, making the traditional monastic almsround. Passing unwittingly by a house of courtesans, he is confused by a young woman’s recitation of a spell. She attempts to seduce him, and he is soon on the brink of breaking his vow of celibacy. The Buddha Śākyamuni senses from a distance his cousin’s distress. He thereupon causes a Buddha to appear seated above his head, and this Buddha proceeds to recite the Śūraṅgama Mantra.16 The Buddha Śākyamuni then sends the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī17 to wield the mantra’s powers in order to defeat the young courtesan’s spell. The Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī then returns to the monastic grounds with both Ānanda and the courtesan. Amidst the assembly of monks and a throng of lay adherents, Ānanda now finds himself face to face with the Buddha. Deeply mortified by his own behavior, Ānanda requests instruction so that he can avoid further error. This is the “request for Dharma” with which most of the Buddha’s discourses begin.
Part I: The Nature and Location of the Mind
In responding to his cousin’s request, the Buddha makes clear that Ānanda’s error lay not only in his jeopardizing of his practice of celibacy. Equally serious was his laxity in his practice of meditation and of samādhi. Because of this laxity, his mental focus was not firm enough to resist the influence of the courtesan’s spell. It is this failure that the Buddha will address in his teaching. He undertakes first to show Ānanda what might be involved in transcending the conditioned world — that is, in transcending the stream of sense-impressions that we take to be our external environment and the stream of inner thoughts that we cherish as characteristic of our identity.
To approach this topic, the Buddha 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, with his superior command of logical argument, quickly disposes of this widely held supposition and of six other possibilities that Ānanda offers. Ānanda 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 mind of which we are aware and which is entangled, lifetime after lifetime, in the snare of illusory perceptions and deluded mental activity; and second, the everlasting true mind, which is our real nature and which is identical to the fully awakened mind of all Buddhas. The Buddha adds that it is because beings have lost touch with their own true mind that they are bound to the cycle of death and rebirth.
Part II: The Nature of Visual Awareness
Now that the existence of a true mind has been established, the Buddha undertakes next to explain, in dialogue with Ānanda, a way of practicing samādhi that leads to the true mind. The Buddha begins by bringing 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, though things move in and through and out of the field of our visual awareness, the essence of our awareness itself does not move. Our awareness teems with objects but is not itself an object. Even blindness, strictly speaking, does not mean that there is no visual awareness at all. Ask any blind person what he sees, the Buddha suggests to Ānanda, and the blind person will answer that he sees darkness. In short, the essence of our visual awareness is unchanging. It does not arise and disappear in response to visible objects that enter its scope. The same may be said of our awareness of sounds, odors, flavors, tangible objects, and also of our awareness of the thoughts in our minds. The Buddha explains later that the essential capacity to hear is never absent, no matter whether there is sound or silence.18 The logical implication is that, given that our various awarenesses exist independent of their objects, it ought to be possible to disentangle those awarenesses from their objects. Then we will be free to redirect our attention inward, separate ourselves from the conditioned world, and establish ourselves in the highest level of samādhi, that is, in the Śūraṅgama Samādhi.
Part III: The Matrix of the Thus-Come One19
The question remains: why would we want to stop paying attention to the conditioned world? The answer is twofold: first, our involvement in that world is fraught with dissatisfaction and suffering; and second, that world is not real. It is this second point that the Buddha now turns to. He begins by declaring:
Fundamentally, everything that comes and goes, that comes into being and ceases to be, is within the true nature of the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, which is the wondrous, everlasting understanding — the unmoving, all-pervading, wondrous suchness of reality.20
He then undertakes to demonstrate the truth of this proposition by means of a series of syllogisms. He shows one by one that each of the elements of the physical world and each of the elements of our sensory apparatus is, fundamentally, an illusion. But at the same time, these illusory entities and experiences arise out of what is real. That matrix from which all is produced is the Matrix of the Thus-Come One. It is identical to our own true mind and identical as well to the fundamental nature of the universe and to the mind of all Buddhas. It is beyond the psychological concatenation we call the self and beyond the mirage of sense-data that we call the world.
Part IV: The Coming into Being of the World of Illusion
Now Pūrṇamaitrāyaṇiputra, a senior disciple, poses questions of his own. If, as the Buddha’s logic has just shown, the primary elements of the psycho-physical world and the constituent elements of perception are illusory in the form we experience them, while nevertheless being fundamentally identical with the Matrix of the Thus-Come One, how is it that they come into being as separate, illusory entities? How is it that we forget our grounding in true reality and become lost in the maze of illusion? In dialogue with Pūrṇamaitrāyaṇiputra, the Buddha explains that everything flows from our initial error of dividing reality into self and other. This process begins with what the Buddha calls “adding understanding to understanding,” and it leads to a division of what was originally a unified awareness into an observer who is separate from what is observed. Our fundamental unity with the Matrix of the Thus-Come One is obscured, as a bright sky is obscured by clouds. To emphasize how unnecessary the division into self and other is, the Buddha relates a parable. A villager named Yajñadatta runs through his village looking for his head, which he foolishly thinks he has lost. His head, of course, has been on his shoulders all along, just as our own true mind, which we have forgotten, is, even so, always accessible within us.
Part V: Instructions in Practice
The Buddha has now built the conceptual basis for instruction in the Śūraṅgama Samādhi. The sense-faculties — eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and cognition — are obstacles that keep us from our home in true reality. But if the direction of these faculties’ attention is reversed so that they are focused inward rather than outward, then they become the means of our return to reality. The Buddha reminds Ānanda that freeing the mind from its involvement in perceived objects is possible because our awareness of the world is independent of the world it perceives. He once again demonstrates that independence by instructing his son, Rāhula, to sound a bell. The Buddha shows that when the sound of the bell dies away, our power of hearing remains intact, since we are aware first of silence and then of the sounding of the bell once again. The Buddha says:
All that you need to do is not to allow your attention to be diverted by the twelve conditioned attributes of sound and silence, contact and separation, flavor and the absence of flavor, openness and blockage, coming into being and perishing, and light and darkness. Next, extricate one faculty by detaching it from its objects. Redirect that faculty inward so that it can return to what is original and true. Then it will radiate the light of the original understanding. This brilliant light will shine forth and extricate the other five faculties until they are completely free.21
Part VI: Twenty-Five Sages
Ānanda now asks the Buddha to instruct him as to which of the faculties of perception he should focus on in his practice. He expects that the Buddha will transmit an answer to him privately in a direct mind-to-mind transmission, but instead the Buddha turns Ānanda’s question over to the audience. He asks the sages who are present to volunteer to explain how their spiritual practice allowed them to enter samādhi and then to break through illusion and become enlightened. In response, twenty-five sages stand up one by one in the midst of the assembly to tell their enlightenment stories. Seventeen of the sages tell of practices involving one of the constituent elements of perception, and seven other sages tell of their enlightenment through contemplation of one of the primary elements.
The most extensive of these narratives is given by the twenty-fifth sage, the Bodhisattva Who Hears the Cries of the World.22 The practice that led to the enlightenment of this Bodhisattva focused on reversing the attention of the faculty of the ear. Having told his story, the Bodhisattva Who Hears the Cries of the World discusses the powers that his hearing practice has brought him. He specifies how he can fulfill the wishes of thirty-two types of human and nonhuman beings, how he protects people in dangerous situations so that they will have nothing to fear, and how he appears in various forms to teach beings and protect them.
The Buddha then asks the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī to recommend to Ānanda one of the twenty-five paths to enlightenment just described by the twenty-five sages. Speaking in verse, Mañjuśrī endorses the practice of listening within as it was described by the Bodhisattva Who Hears the Cries of the World. This practice, Mañjuśrī concludes, is the practice most suitable for Ānanda and for beings of the future.23
Part VII: Four Clear and Definitive Instructions on Purity
The Buddha next describes a second aspect of the practice of samādhi. Reversing the attention of the ear-faculty is not enough. One cannot make proper progress in any spiritual practice unless one’s moral behavior is correct. The Buddha insists on purity in four spheres of conduct, which in Buddhist tradition are addressed by the first four of the five moral precepts: one must not kill, steal, commit sexual misconduct, or speak either falsely or in a manner which may cause harm to others.24 Here the Buddha explains that in order to practice samādhi in the correct manner it is not enough to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, and false speech; one must erase any thoughts of such actions from the mind.
Part VIII: The Śūraṅgama Mantra
At Ānanda’s request, the Buddha explains in great detail how to set up a “place for awakening”25 devoted to the practice of the Śūraṅgama Mantra, and then he recites the mantra for everyone in the assembly to hear. Next he explains how reciting the mantra, especially from memory, as well as simpler acts of devotion to the mantra, can bring many benefits to the practitioner, including safet
y from harm and more rapid progress in spiritual practice. Finally, numerous beings in the assembly of listeners rise to vow that they will protect anyone who undertakes the Śūraṅgama Mantra practice.
Part IX: Levels of Being
In this section, the Buddha responds to Ānanda’s wish to learn about the levels of being. The Buddha first divides beings into twelve classes organized according to the manner of their birth. He then briefly summarizes sixty stages through which Bodhisattvas pass on their way to the full awakening of the Buddhas. Finally, he describes at greater length the sufferings of the beings consigned to the hells, and then more briefly six other destinies: ghosts, animals, humans, ascetic masters,26 gods at their twenty-eight celestial levels, and finally asuras.27 In describing the stages of the Bodhisattva, the Buddha offers Ānanda a roadmap to follow in his future practice. In describing the hells and the other destinies, he warns his listeners of the dangers of committing intentional acts that entail negative consequences. Here again he refers to the prohibitions that he has emphasized repeatedly in this text: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit sexual misconduct, and do not speak falsely.
Part X: Fifty Demonic States of Mind
In this final section of the Sutra, the Buddha once again speaks without a request for teaching, as he did in Part III. Here he undertakes to warn practitioners to be on their guard against fifty demonic states of mind that can arise during the period in which the practitioner is breaking his attachments to the five aggregates.28 Ten such states of mind are described for each of the five aggregates. The Buddha explains that if practitioners dismiss these states as of no importance, the states will disappear of their own accord. But if practitioners fall under the influence of these states, they may become stuck. They may even face insanity or demonic possession, or they may simply stray from the Path. The practitioner may lead others into error as well. In describing people whose practice has taken a wrong turn, this section also serves as a warning against falling under the influence of spiritual charlatans and their cults. The warning is as relevant today as it was when it was spoken.