The Lanka Avatar

Lucaya National Park, Freeport, Bahamas, 2003

Recently, I've started studying the Lankavatara Sutra, a notoriously difficult teaching supposedly delivered by the Buddha in ancient Sri Lanka (the title of the sutra can be loosely translated as The Sri Lanka Avatar).  It is so difficult to grasp, that it's been said that the Diamond Sutra, no easy read itself, was devised as a means to better teach the wisdom of the Lankavatara.    

To study the sutra without the assistance of a teacher, I'm relying on side-by-side comparisons of D.T. Suzuki's translation as edited by Dwight Goddard in his anthology A Buddhist Bible, along with Red Pine's recent and much expanded translation with voluminous and extremely helpful footnotes.

Since this blog is, at times, nothing but musings on my study of the buddha-dharma, be prepared to find passages, comments, and reactions to passages from the Sutra here in the next several weeks, as well as views of the world as seen through the looking glass of this particular sutra.

For starters, one of the earliest passages, as translated by D.T. Suzuki, starting on the bottom of the first page of the sutra in A Buddhist Bible (page 277), seems to both foreshadow and summarize what I understand the principal teaching of the sutra to be, namely:    

All that is seen in the world is devoid of effort and action because all things in the world are like a dream, or like an image miraculously projected.  This is not comprehended by the philosophers and the ignorant, but those who thus see things see them truthfully. Those who see things otherwise walk in discrimination and, as they depend on discrimination, they cling to dualism.  The world as seen by discrimination is like seeing one's own image reflected in a mirror, or one's shadow, or the moon reflected in water, or an echo heard in a valley.  People grasping their own shadows of discrimination become attached to this thing and that thing and failing to abandon dualism they go on forever discriminating and thus never attain tranquility.  By tranquility is meant oneness, and oneness gives birth to the highest samadhi which is gained by entering into the realm of noble wisdom that is realizable only within one's inmost consciousness.