The Lankavatara Sutra

by Red Pine

  ASIA c. 450 AD

  Thus, by the middle of the fifth century, there were two translations of the Lankavatara available in China. But there was still no record of the sutra being taught or studied and no record of Zen until another monk arrived. This monk’s name was Bodhidharma. He was from South India, and he also arrived by sea. No one knows exactly when, but Tao-hsuan’s biography of him says he arrived in Nanhai sometime before 479. Following his arrival, he too traveled north, but he kept a low enough profile that we know nothing more about his life, other than what hagiographers added several centuries later, until he showed up in a cave near Shaolin Monastery. On his way there, perhaps he traveled to Chienkang, and perhaps that was where he learned about Gunabhadra’s translation of the Lankavatara. Perhaps he even arrived early enough that the two monks met. But regardless of his peregrinations, he eventually settled on the sacred mountain of Sungshan, forty miles southeast of Loyang. The cave where he is said to have meditated for nine years is still there on the mountain behind Shaolin. This was where he is also said to have transmitted the teaching of Zen and a copy of Gun–abhadra’s translation of the Lankavatara to Hui-k’o.

  Ironically, it was also in Loyang and about the same time that a third translation of the Lankavatara was made. Ever since the Northern Wei moved its capital from Pingcheng to Loyang in 494, this had become the greatest urban center of North China, with a half million residents, and thousands of foreign monks made it their home. Among them was a monk from North India named Bodhiruchi, who arrived there in 508 via the Silk Road.

  The place where Bodhiruchi lived while he worked on translations was Yungning Monastery, and it was there that he completed his translation of the Lankavatara in 513. An account of Buddhist temples in Loyang published in 547 by Yang Hsuan-chih records an Indian monk named Dharma (presumably Bodhidharma) remarking that he had never seen anything so impressive as this temple’s three-hundred-foot-high pagoda, which was built in 516 and which burned to the ground in 534. Whether or not Dharma was Bodhidharma, it still would have been strange if the two monks did not meet at some point during this period. Both Bodhiruchi and Bodhidharma are also said to have died in Loyang within a year or two of each other (circa 534 and 536, respectively) in the chaos that accompanied the division of the Northern Wei into a Western and an Eastern Wei. Some accounts even attribute Bodhidharma’s death to poisoning by jealous disciples of Bodhiruchi. Although it is very likely that Bodhidharma knew about Bodhiruchi’s translation of the Lanka (and perhaps Dharmakshema’s as well), it is clear that he and the early patriarchs of Zen preferred Gunabhadra’s version. This was the text he handed to his successor, and his successor handed to his, and his successor handed to his.

  Thus, both the teaching of Zen and the use of Gunabhadra’s translation of the Lankavatara in its transmission began in the Loyang area in the first half of the sixth century. But Bodhidharma and Hui-k’o were not the only ones using the Lanka. Among the five hundred monks whose biographies are recorded in Tao-hsuan’s Hsukaosengchuan, nearly a dozen are reported to have written commentaries or lectured on the Lanka in the second half of the sixth century or the first half of the seventh century. Although none of these early commentaries have survived, their mention attests to the importance of the Lanka among certain practitioners. And I should stress this point about certain practitioners. The Lanka is not a text that welcomes the casual reader. An understanding of its teaching requires a teacher, or incredibly good karma. And such teachers and karma have always been rare. There have been times when the Lanka achieved a certain amount of popularity, but it has never been a text whose readership was widespread—its reputation, yes, but not its readership.

  It was also during the first half of the seventh century that we see a transition in the use of the Lanka by the early Zen masters themselves. Bodhidharma had a handful of disciples, as did the Second Patriarch Hui-k‘o, and the Third Patriach Seng-ts’an. However, the Fourth Patriarch Tao-hsin (d. 651) had over five hundred disciples, and the Fifth Patriarch Hung–jen (d. 675) had more than a thousand. The cause of this sudden efflorescence was the establishment of the first Zen monasteries in China.

  Up until the seventh century, the transmission of Zen was based on a private relationship between a teacher and a handful of students. Thus, it is not surprising that Zen remained such a hidden tradition. In such a setting, a text like the Lankavatara could be used to its advantage. But with the establishment of large-scale Zen communes, Zen masters looked for something better suited to larger audiences of varying degrees of comprehension. They found their text in the Diamond Sutra. This was the sutra the Fifth Patriarch transmitted to Hui-neng, the illiterate rice-pounder (or so he has been presented), who became the Sixth Patriarch in 672. Ironically, this transmission took place with the Lankavatara forming the backdrop. It was only after Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng, the two contenders to become the Fifth Patriarch’s successor, had written their competing poems on the monastery wall previously scheduled for scenes from the Lanka that the patriarchship and the future direction of Zen was decided. For readers interested, the story of this event, putative or not, is laid out in detail at the beginning of the Platform Sutra.

  Even though the Diamond Sutra replaced the Lankavatara in terms of making the teaching of Zen more accessible to larger audiences, the Lankavatara continued to attract those who appreciated the challenge and the rewards of the more difficult text. One such person was Shen-hsiu, the loser of the poetry contest that made Hui-neng the Sixth Patriarch. He was a great admirer of the Lanka. In fact, he asked to be buried beneath a small hillock he named Mount Lanka, and where his body has remained since his death in 706. And he wasn’t the only one interested in the sutra.

  In 698, Empress Wu Tse-t‘ien asked a monk from the Silk Road kingdom of Khotan to produce a new translation of the Lanka, one that she could read. The Khotanese monk’s name was Shikshananda, and at the Empress’ request he prepared a rough draft. But when he was done, he asked and was given permission to return home, and the task of revising his draft fell to Mi-t’uo-shan, a monk from the Silk Road kingdom of Tokhara, who was assisted by the Chinese monks Fu-li and Fa-tsang.

  Their joint translation was completed in 704, and shortly thereafter Fa-tsang wrote a commentary on the sutra. Although it was only a summary, taking up but eight pages in the Taisho Canon (volume 39), it includes some interesting information. For example, Fa-tsang said that he and his fellow translators had five Sanskrit copies from which to work. He also noted that in the Silk Road kingdom of Khotan, where Shikshananda was from, the Lankavatara was said to exist in much larger versions, one consisting of 100,000 stanzas and another of 36,000, compared to the slightly more than 1,000 stanzas for the version he and his colleagues translated. Of course, similar statements were made about other sutras for which no such epic versions have ever been found. But even if this was just an account of someone’s fantasy, it does suggest that someone thought highly enough of the Lanka, either in India or along the Silk Road, to have copies made and distributed and that someone elevated it to membership in that pantheon of scriptures too stupendous for human eyes, but not for the human imagination.

  Another item of interest is an essay written in 708 by a monk named Ching-chueh entitled Leng–ch’ieh–shih–tz’u–chi (“Records of the Masters of the Lanka”). In this essay, he lists the first Zen patriarchs beginning with Gunabhadra, followed by Bodhidharma, Hui-k‘o, Seng-ts’an, Tao-hsin, Hung–jen, and then Shen-hsiu and other students of Hung–jen, instead of Hui-neng. This was the lineage of what became known as the Northern School of Zen that took exception to the selection of Hui-neng as the Sixth Patriarch, rather than Shen-hsiu. Although Ching-chueh’s account is somewhat biased—he was a disciple of Shen–hsiu—his essay is still noteworthy for honoring Gunabhadra as the man who established the teaching of Zen in China through his translation of the Lanka.

  This status is also reflected in the commentarial tradition. Despite the more accessible Chinese of Shikshan
anda’s translation, whenever anyone wrote a commentary on the Lankavatara, he invariably based it on Gunabhadra’s version. Unfortunately, except for three pages of comments attributed to Aryadeva (according to most scholars, erroneously) that critique Hinayana doctrines in the Lanka, an eight-page summary by Fa-tsang, and surviving portions of a longer commentary by another Khotanese contemporary of Fa-tsang, no early commentaries have come down to us, except as quoted material in later commentaries. It is not until nearly six hundred years later that we get commentaries that have been passed down intact to the present day. Nowadays we have the good fortune to have more than twenty to choose from. But all are based on Gunabhadra’s translation.

  As I have mentioned, the Lankavatara can appear forbidding, and Gunabhadra’s translation certainly is not inviting. In a preface by Su Tung-p’o written in 1085 for a new edition of Gunabhadra’s translation, China’s most famous poet of the day wrote, “The meaning of the Lankavatara is so subtle and illusive and its language so unadorned and antiquated that the reader is often unable to read it, much less get past the words to the meaning or past the meaning to its heart.” What made it so difficult to read was that despite translating the text into Chinese, Gunabhadra was apparently concerned that he might misrepresent the meaning and often resorted to retaining the Sanskrit word order, rendering passages where he does this nearly incomprehensible. And yet, this is the version on which all commentaries are based, and it is the one I have chosen to translate. I am not sure how previous commentators have managed to understand as much of the text as they have. No doubt, they did what I did, which was to compare Gunabhadra’s translation with those of Bodhiruchi and Shikshananda and, when possible, the Sanskrit.

  When Suzuki translated the Lankavatara into English eighty years ago, he decided to do just the opposite. He based himself on the recension of the Sanskrit text prepared by Bunyiu Nanjio in 1923. As a recension, it was a composite based on half a dozen copies that went back no earlier than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that contained hundreds of errors. It almost appears as if these copies were not meant to be read, as if they were copied for merit and based on other copies copied for merit. Suzuki was aware of the problematic nature of Nanjio’s Sanskrit recension, but he felt that it brought him closer to the original. And whenever he couldn’t make sense of the Sanskrit, he turned to the Chinese of Shikshananda for help—and less frequently to that of Bodhiruchi, and hardly ever to that of Gunabhadra.

  Unfortunately, the Sanskrit text at our disposal has not improved. In 1963, the Indian scholar P. L. Vaidya produced a second recension, but it was only marginally different from Nanjio’s, if only because it was based on the same flawed copies. More recently, the Japanese scholar Gishin Tokiwa has produced an entirely new Sanskrit text. But it is not a new recension, nor is it based on any newly discovered Sanskrit copies. Rather, it is the result of translating Gunabhadra’s Chinese text back into Sanskrit. I should note that there are also two Tibetan translations. One is a translation made by Chos-grub around A.D. 840. But it, too, is a translation of Gunabhadra’s Chinese text. The second is a translation of unknown date by an unknown translator based on what I am told is essentially the same Sanskrit text we have today.

  In considering which text to use for my own translation, I really had no choice. My knowledge of Tibetan is non existent, and my knowledge of Sanskrit amounts to little more than the ability to consult dictionaries and follow what others have already translated. I suppose I could have looked over Suzuki’s shoulder and tried to improve on what he had done. But I saw no advantage in that, certainly no challenge. And so I turned to the Chinese. Feeling a bit like Goldilocks, I concluded Bodhiruchi’s translation was too full of glosses and digressions. And Shikshananda’s, despite being more or less readable, suffered from too many oversimplifications. For all its unusual syntax, Gunabhadra’s translation, I decided, was the momma bear of texts.

  Although making sense of it has been challenging, I am surprised how straightforward it became once I found the two threads that held this sutra together. Basically, the teaching of the Lankavatara is similar to the approach used by later Zen masters who offered their disciples a cup of tea, then asked them to taste the tea. The cup of tea in this case is the Buddha’s teaching that traces the universe of our awareness, be it mundane or metaphysical, back to our mind. This is the cup of tea into which this sutra is poured.

  The Buddha expresses this teaching by describing the world we think of as real as sva–citta–dryshya–matra: “nothing but the perceptions of our own mind.” By this, he does not mean that the mind sees or that something is seen by the mind, for any subject or object would be yet another projection of the mind. He simply means that whatever we see or think or feel is our own mind, which is, of course, a tautology. A=A. But then what Buddhist teaching isn’t a tautology?

  Having put this cup of tea into our hands, the Buddha then asks us to taste the tea, to experience the tautology for ourselves. The phrase he uses to express this is pratyatma gati: “personal/inner/self-realization,” or he qualifies the nature of such realization as sva–pratyatma arya–jnana: “the self–realization of buddha knowledge.” The importance of this, which is repeated over and over in these and similar words, was not lost on Suzuki, who noted, “The Lankavatara has come to see that the whole of the Buddhist life is not merely in seeing into the truth, but in living it, experiencing it.” (Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, pg. 105)

  Of course, the Lanka consists in more than these two phrases. But if you keep these two in view, you won’t be distracted by the attractions of the Buddha’s teahouse. 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.

  Buddhism is concerned with suffering, which is the inevitable result of desire. But the real issue is the self, which is the cause of the desire, which is the cause of the suffering. In the centuries following the Buddha’s Nirvana, instruction centered around a trio of concepts designed to focus attention in such a way that the nonexistence of the self would become evident and the liberation from suffering would follow. These included the five skandhas (form, sensation, perception, memory, and consciousness), the twelve ayatanas (six powers and six domains of sensation) and the eighteen dhatus (the ayatanas with the addition of six forms of consciousness). These were three views of the same thing: our mind. 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.

  While these three schemes dealt with the problem of a self, they didn’t help explain how we become attached to a self in the first place and how we go from attachment to detachment and thus liberation. Hence, to these were added three more schemes, all of which play a much larger role in the Lankavatara than the previous trio. The three new schemes are those of the five dharmas, the three modes of reality, and the eight forms of consciousness.

  The five dharmas divide our world into name, appearance, projection, correct knowledge, and suchness; the three modes of reality do the same with imagined reality, dependent reality, and perfected reality; and the eight forms of consciousness include the five forms of sensory consciousness, conceptual consciousness, the will or self-consciousness, and an eighth form, known as repository consciousness, where the seeds from our previous thoughts, words, and deeds are stored and from which they sprout and grow.

  As with the earlier trio of concepts, these were designed to account for our awareness without introducing a self. But they had the advantage of also providing a look at how our worlds of self–delusion and self–liberation come about, how enlightenment works, how
we go from projection of name and appearance to correct knowledge of suchness, how we go from an imagined reality to a perfected reality, how we transform our eightfold consciousness into buddhahood. These schemes were most likely developed separately among different groups of practitioners, but they eventually became the hallmarks of Yogacara Buddhism, with its emphasis on tracing everything back to the mind, back to that cup of tea. The Lankavatara operates within this universe of Yogacara discourse, and it likewise puts that cup of tea into our hands. But then the Lanka sets all of these schemes aside in the interest of urging us to taste the tea for ourselves.

  The Buddha tells Mahamati to let all conceptions go, let the five dharmas go, let the three modes of reality go, let the eight forms of consciousness go, let the tathagatagarbha go, let everything go. The Buddha’s advice in the Lankavatara is for us to drink that cup of tea and not to concern ourselves with where that experience fits into some previously constructed matrix of the mind. Of course, drinking the tea of the mind doesn’t take place in space, nor does it occur in a crowd. Hence, the Buddha offers this ancient advice: “If bodhisattvas wish to understand the realm of projection in which what grasps and what is grasped are nothing but perceptions of their own minds, they should avoid social intercourse and sleep and cultivate the discipline of mindfulness during the three periods of the night.” (Chapter Two, X) Cup of tea or not, no one said it was going to be easy. It wasn’t easy when this sutra was written, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. The modern world is so full of distractions. Why would anyone want to meditate when they can watch TV, play video games, or surf the web? Just sitting down with a cup of tea can be so hard.