[This is a section from the introduction to my work in progress of a new translation of The Sutra of Queen Srimala's Lion's Roar.]
How to Read a Sutra
A Sutra
should be read with reverence and faith, not preconceived beliefs. Reverence means to read with an open
mind. Faith means to read with the trust
that the Sutra has a purpose and reading with an open mind will make that
purpose real in our lives. There are two
kinds of preconceived beliefs that will hinder our receiving the Sutra: the
preconceived beliefs of true believers and the preconceived beliefs of
doubters. Academic scholars come to the sutra with the preconceived belief that
reverence and faith are to be put aside in order to be able to read the Sutra
objectively. However, this academic view
is itself a subjective preconceived belief that also prevents reading the Sutra
objectively. The academic scholar misses
the forest for the trees.
On the other hand, it is just as
wrong to read the Sutra with the uncritical views of a fundamentalist true
believer. Faith does not mean to be uncritical of what is heard, but to listen
critically knowing that the meaning is not contained in the words but in the
import that the words are pointing at.
Faith in Buddhist Sutras means the trust that the Sutra is speaking of
our own mind, not something foreign to us or outside of our own mind. A fundamentalist reading is not a faithful
reading because it posits a literal meaning outside our mind and calls this the
literal objective truth. Reading like that misses the trees for the forest. That
is not objectivity any more than the academic.
The reverential open mind means to
read the sutra in a manner to receive it and hear it on its own terms and the
faithful mind means to read it critically with an ear to hear and to become
aware of the nature of mind that the speaker is actually pointing toward. Thus to read a Sutra requires reading form
perspective the Middle Way
A Sutra is
always spoken to an audience that always has preconceived ideas and views that
characterize and distinguish them. That
is, a Sutra is always responsive, and if there were no preconceive ideas, there
would be no need to speak the Sutra. The
Sutra is addressed with the purpose of articulating the corrective medicine for
the audience’s specific imbalance or one-sidedness of antithetical conceptions
(vikalpa). The Buddha is the Great Doctor.
For
example, the first “Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma,” that is, the initial
articulation of the Dharma after the Buddha’s enlightenment, was given to the
Five Companions, who were his immediately preceding practice partners before he
left them to meditate alone. The
practice they shared was the practice of austerities, which the Buddha had
turned to after succeeding with two previous teachers but finding their ways
and teachings lacking. Upon finding the
practice of austerities lacking as a lopsided approach, the Buddha realized the
meaning of the Middle Way
Upon his
enlightenment, the Buddha sought out the Five Companions and addressed their
preconceived idea that human suffering of the imbalance or off-centeredness (duhkha) of life could be remedied and
relieved by the practice of the one-sided embrace of extreme suffering through
austerities. The teaching of the Four
Noble Truths was the medicine that the Buddha taught the Five Companions for
their disease of practicing austerities. It is in that context that the
teaching of the Four Noble Truths culminates in the articulation of the
Eightfold Path as the alternative path to their prior path of attachment and
grasping at austerities.
Similarly,
Bill Porter, known as the translator Red Pine, points out in talks about his
translation of the Heart Sutra[1]
that the Heart Sutra is spoken by Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva to the Bodhisattva
Shariputra who is the representative stand-in for the Early Schools’ abhidharma
practitioners, specifically in Shariputra’s case, the Sarvastavadin school of
abhidharmists. In the Heart Sutra,
Avalokiteshvara presents the emptiness (sunyata)
teachings as the medicine to practitioners who have the preconceived notions of
the abhidharma obstructing their views by applying the view of emptiness to the
abhidharma’s analytical categories, in the Sarvastavadin order, of the Five
Skandhas, the Twelve Ayatanas, the Eighteen Dhatus, the Twelve Linked Chain of
Causation, the Four Noble Truths, and the attainment of innate-knowledge (jnana).
To view the
Heart Sutra as an exegesis or exposition asserting the doctrine of emptiness is
the kind of mistake made by academic scholars who are blind to the purpose of
the Sutra as medicine for a preconceived idea and perverts the Sutra into the
assertion of a doctrine to be made into a subsequent preconceived idea. This is
turning the medicine into a disease, like becoming addicted to morphine after
using it as a pain medication.
Any
aspect of universality in the Buddha’s Dharma is not discovered by turning the
medicine into a “doctrine” as the academic scholars do, but by seeing the
application presented in the sutra to other similar disorders. Thus, while the
Heart Sutra applies the medicine of emptiness to the disorder of taking the
abhidharma as doctrine, the Heart Sutra’s medicine of emptiness may be applied
to other similar disorders of mistaking Dharma as doctrine. Likewise, the
medicine of the Four Noble Truths as applied to the disorder of attachment to austerities, may be
applied to other similar disorders of one-sided attachment to mistaken methods
of treating the suffering arising from the imbalance and off-centeredness of
living, such as treating suffering by addiction to pleasures, rather than by
clinging to austerities.
The
medicine that is applied by The Sutra of
the Lion’s Roar of Queen Srimiala is the One Vehicle, not the
Tathagatagarbha. The One Vehicle is
applied to the views of the Tathagatagarbha, as well as to the Four Noble
Truths, Emptiness, etc., to treat the underlying bias of separate vehicles that
were leading to sectarian views of these most important topics of Buddha Dharma.
[1]
Heard personally by the translator in a talk given at Zen Center of Los Angeles
on July 22, 2012, and also heard in a recorded talk sponsored by the Bodhi Mind
Center
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