The Lankavatara Sutra: Translation and Commentary (NONE)

The Buddha agrees and proceeds to instruct the king in the illusory nature of what Buddhists call dharmas, all those things we think of as real, be they tangible, intangible, or merely imagined.

if Zen originated in China, where did this text come from? If there ever was a sutra that presented the underlying teaching of Zen, this is it.

recension

Self-realization can begin anywhere, with any thought. And why not this very thought?

conditioned things / like flowers in the sky / let go deluded views / the grasping and the grasped319

With this, the Lord of Lanka felt an awakening and transformation of his consciousness, as he realized what appeared was nothing but the perceptions of his own mind,37 and he found himself in a realm free from such projections.

Here, he assumes this is already understood and turns to the doctrine of negation instead: to talk about anything is to talk about nothing.

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.

In this metaphor, this shore is samsara, the other shore is nirvana, and the river is that of the ever-flowing habit-energy that arises from projections.