Essay 23. Reading the Mahāyāna sūtras: a guide¶

Where this essay stands. The first ten essays of Part II deal with treatises. In a treatise, someone speaks on behalf of the sūtras. Abhidharma draws up an outline for the Āgamas; Madhyamaka establishes forms of proof for prajñā; Yogācāra supplements emptiness with an account of mind and consciousness; Tiantai and Huayan arrange groups of sūtras into graded classifications of the teachings. Treatises have their strength in making claims that can be checked. They also have a cost. The sūtra passages readers encounter have often already been selected and put to use by the authors of treatises. This essay turns to the sūtras themselves, looking directly at what their words say, without passing through a treatise author's hands.

What this essay sets out to do. There are two common ways of reading Mahāyāna sūtras. One praises the text as it goes, finding profundity in every sentence. The other dismisses it outright as empty talk, finding rhetoric in every sentence. Both save effort, and neither provides information. This essay takes a third approach. It restates a sūtra's literal content in plain language to see how much remains after the restatement. It then asks what the text suggests to its readers beyond its literal wording, and where those suggestions have led people as the text has circulated. Each chapter accordingly has four sections: its origins, what it actually says, what it implies, and where it might lead people.

Where the impression of profundity comes from. The sources of the profundity readers sense in Mahāyāna sūtras can usually be identified, and there is nothing mysterious about them. The first is the density of negative statements. The body of the standard circulating Heart Sūtra has 260 Chinese characters. 无, "no," occurs twenty-one times; 不, "not," nine times; and 空, "empty" or "emptiness," seven times. The dense negations leave readers no time to dwell on any single item. Reverence arises before understanding does. The second is the repetition of a short sentence pattern within constantly changing frames, as with 即非, "is precisely not," and 是名, "is named," in the Diamond Sūtra. Repetition itself is a general feature of the sūtra genre. Early sūtras repeat whole sets of stock passages to aid memorization and recitation. What concerns us here is a short pattern that reappears embedded in a different frame each time. Readers assume that a rule lies hidden within it, and turn to guessing the rule instead of asking what the sentence says. The third is the cancellation of an entire inventory of categories at once. The Heart Sūtra cancels the whole Abhidharma outline of the teachings, placing "no" before each item in turn: the five aggregates, the twelve bases, the eighteen elements, the twelve links of dependent origination, the four truths, knowledge, and attainment. The more complete the inventory, the weightier the act of cancelling it appears. All three are stylistic arrangements. A stylistic arrangement is itself a claim, and deserves an account grounded in what the text does, without first being judged profound or shallow.

Some constraints on the reading. First, this essay reads Chinese translations, and reads them as Chinese translations. Sanskrit texts, Tibetan translations, and other Chinese translations differ substantially at certain crucial points. Where those differences affect a judgment, I note them as they arise; where they do not, I do not collate the texts word by word. Second, to say that a sūtra may mislead is not to judge that it says something false. Its literal wording is often rigorous. Misleading effects mostly arise beyond that wording, in the part readers supply from their everyday sense of the language. Distinguishing the two is this essay's main task. Third, this essay does not smooth over difficulties on a sūtra's behalf. Where a text is inconsistent with itself, I describe the inconsistency as it stands, without stitching it together.

Length and conventions. This essay provides analyses, restating each text paragraph by paragraph rather than offering brief explanations. Quotations follow the Taishō canon. Variants in commonly circulated versions are noted where they occur. Chinese sūtra quotations are given in simplified characters, following the established practice of Essays 4 and 5 in Part I and Essay 18 in Part II. Each chapter ends with references.

The course of the two chapters. Chapter 1 takes up the Heart Sūtra. It consists of a cancellation inventory and a mantra. The structure of the whole text is simpler than people usually imagine. The difficulty lies in how far the inventory's cancellation extends, and in the relation of the mantra section to what precedes it. Chapter 2 takes up the Diamond Sūtra. At its center is the sentence pattern known as the "three statements." The chapter first sets out the five forms this pattern takes in the sūtra, and judges from the actual text that it is not a single, uniform logical operator. It then addresses the comparisons of merit, which occupy a substantial part of the sūtra but are seldom discussed. These are the first two chapters of the essay. Important chapters from other widely circulated Mahāyāna sūtras will be added later; given their length, those sūtras will not be treated in full.

A seam shared by the two chapters. Both chapters so far concern prajñā sūtras. The two texts share a seam of the same shape, which is worth noting at the outset. Both make radical denials while still promising results. In the Heart Sūtra, "no knowledge and no attainment" is followed by "because there is no attainment," which leads straight to "the mind is unobstructed," "there is no fear," and "ultimate nirvāṇa." The Diamond Sūtra says that "in reality, no sentient being attains liberation," while devoting ten passages to comparisons of the merit of upholding the sūtra. If denial never reaches the side on which results can be delivered, these two sūtras add nothing to the early teachings. If it does reach that side, a further explanation is needed, and neither sūtra supplies one. The Heart Sūtra lacks a distinction between levels of truth; the Diamond Sūtra lacks a distinction between the functions of encouraging people to uphold the text and of the content they are to uphold. Drawing on Chapter 6 of Essay 5 in Part I, Chapter 1 judges the former to be the first type of slippage in argument. Chapter 2 records the latter only as a juxtaposition of two orientations, without judging it self-contradictory. Neither chapter answers for the sūtra at this point. This feature belongs to the prajñā tradition's manner of exposition, and is not a general rule for Mahāyāna sūtras. The texts added later will have crucial points of their own, which need not resemble this one.