On the Mahāyāna sūtras

Source: Paul Williams (2009), Mahayana Buddhism, Chapter 2, pp 45-49.

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In approaching the Mahayana sūtras we immediately confront presuppositions concerning the nature of the book which these texts put into question. The sūtra is not one object among others, but rather may be seen as a body of the Buddha, a focus of celebration and worship on the model of relic worship. The book is not a free-standing, self-explanatory item, but an entity embedded in religious practice, a product of and a guide to spiritual experience. Those of the modern westernized world expect a book, perhaps, to lead through systematic and clearly defined stages from a beginning through a middle to a conclusion. Reading, we think, is a private, solitary affair, requiring peace, leisure, and silence. But the landscape of the Mahayana sūtras is quite extraordinary, space and time expand and conflate, connections seem to be missed, we move abruptly from ideas so compressed and arcane as to verge on the meaningless, to page after page of repetition. If we approach books as a consumer, regarding texts as goods to be devoured one after the other from cover to cover, then all too often we find the Mahayana sūtras boring – about as boring as a board game for which we have only the rules, lacking pieces and the board.

In fact the study of a Buddhist sūtra was neither private nor peaceful. Certainly in classical times in India the text would be copied and read, but reading was perhaps closer to chanting out loud (widespread mastery of the art of silent reading is a relatively recent development in world culture). Each Buddhist monk would probably own no more than one or two sūtras, which would rapidly be learnt by heart, not only through frequent repetition but because memory of the texts was demanded by the scholastic environment. Moreover the sūtras and their exegetical treatises were sometimes guides to meditation. Meditation cannot be performed effectively through repeated glances at a series of written instructions. It is likely that Buddhist texts were intended as no more than mnemonic devices, scaffolding, the framework for textual exposition by a teacher in terms of his own experience and also the tradition, the transmission from his teachers, traced back to the Buddha himself, or to a Buddha, or to some other form of authorized spiritual revelation. This approach to, and treatment of, the sacred text in Buddhism is not only of historical interest. In traditional cultures dominated by Mahayana these texts are still used and studied in the age-old way. The scholar who would write a study of Buddhist practice or even doctrine without bearing this in mind is like an art historian who would study architecture by ignoring the building and looking only at the bricks.

The Mahayana sūtras vary in length from a few words to, say, the Hundred Thousand Verse (Satasahasrika, 100.000 Tụng) Perfection of Wisdom. The larger sūtras are often very repetitive and although as yet adequate editions of most of the sūtras are almost entirely lacking (where the Sanskrit version has survived at all) it is nevertheless possible through careful textcritical scholarship to detect the growth of the sūtras over the centuries, although exact details are very much open to dispute. It would be wrong, therefore, to think of the larger sūtras as we now have them as necessarily historically and conceptually unitary phenomena. Because the sūtras grew and developed, often over some time, we should likewise not necessarily expect to find one consistent and systematic doctrine throughout a particular sūtra. This is not to say, however, that the Buddhist tradition has not been able subsequently to interpret a sūtra in a unitary manner.

A feature of the earlier sūtras is the phenomenon of laudatory self reference – the lengthy praise of the sūtra itself, the immense merits to be obtained from treating even a verse of it with reverence, and the nasty penalties which will accrue in accordance with karma to those who denigrate the scripture. We find similar indications of the historical reception of relatively early Mahayana in a famous passage in the Saddharmapundarika (Lotus; Pháp Hoa) Sūtra, where 5,000 of those in the assembly walk out rather than listen to the preaching of the sūtra, because of their ‘deep and grave roots of sin and overweening pride, imagining themselves to have attained and to have borne witness to what in fact they had not’ (Hurvitz, 1976). Not infrequently, as we have already seen, the sūtra itself has one group of monks declaring to another that this sūtra is not the word of the Buddha, together with the reply of the sūtra’s partisans.

Sometimes stories or sermons which must have originally circulated separately, products, perhaps, of a different intellectual milieu, are inserted into the text. It is occasionally possible to detect short insertions by comparison of the prose and the verse versions of a particular episode, for many of the sūtras have both. At one time scholars were of the view that the verses tended to be the older. The metric form prevents easy tampering, and it is possible sometimes to detect archaic or nonstandard linguistic features which indicate, together with other clues, that a number of the early Mahayana sūtras were not originally in Sanskrit at all, but in a Middle Indic dialect which has been subsequently sanskritized – not always very well from a classical point of view.

Nowadays, however, scholars are less sure that the verses are usually earlier than the prose sections of Mahayana sūtras. Jan Nattier (2003) has pointed out, for example, that the earliest Chinese translations of both the Kasyapaparivarta (Đại Ca-diếp Hội) and the Avatamsaka (Hoa Nghiêm) Sūtra lack verses that are found in the later Chinese translations or the Tibetan versions and (where available) the extant Sanskrit. This suggests that one of the ways in which these sūtras grew was through adding verses. Occasionally a number of different sūtras have been gathered together and referred to as one conglomerate sūtra, as in the case of the Maharatnakuta (Đại Bảo Tích) Sūtra, or the Avatamsaka Sūtra. There is evidence, moreover, that the Chinese in particular were so impressed with the Mahayana sūtras that they created a number of sūtras of their own, some of which have been of considerable importance in the development of Chinese Buddhism. The great Japanese Zen Master Dogen (Đạo Nguyên, thirteenth century), in his younger days in China, suspected that the Lengyanjing (Leng-yen Ching, Lăng-già Kinh), an important sūtra in Zen Buddhism, was not an authentic Indian sūtra, a point now generally accepted by scholars.

How one assesses the sūtras that originated in Central Asia and China in the light of continuing revelation is open to debate, however. After all, from the point of view of the Mainstream Buddhist non-Mahayana traditions, all the Mahayana sūtras as such had to be rejected as inauthentic.

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