Sublime

It turns out the sutra isn’t about emptiness. Or at least, it isn’t emptiness that distinguishes this sutra. It’s about bodies, beginning with the Buddha’s body and ending with the body of every noble son or daughter who practices this teaching. Our real body is what ties all these words together.

in the Vajrayana, the teacher introduces the student to a direct experience of his or her own buddha-nature.

The Buddha said, “Subhuti, what do you think? Does it occur to the Tathagata: ‘I teach a dharma’?”

I am not here to present a Buddhist gimmick, so that you can give your artwork a further twist, saying that you have studied with a Buddhist teacher and taken part in the Buddhist world.

The first to appear was the sutra. It arrived in the baggage of a monk from central India named Dharmakshema. He arrived in the Silk Road oasis of Tunhuang in 414, if not a year or two earlier, and he either learned Chinese quickly, or he did so earlier at one of the other oases where he stayed on his way to China.

Just as the Diamond Sutra teaches detachment from dharmas, and the Heart Sutra teaches the emptiness of dharmas, the Lankavatara teaches the non-projection of dharmas, that there would be no dharmas to be empty or to be detached from if we did not project them as existing or not existing in the first place.

Gunabhadra,

lhatong.[179]