Intro to the Lankavatara Sutra

*transcript generated by AI

Well, hi everybody.

Glad to have you all here.

Thanks for making it.

After our last discussion, which was super fun, by the way, thank you for those of you who participated in the On Zen conversation.

Robyn dropped into the Discord chat the idea of working with the Lankavatara Sutra. And I thought that was a darn good idea. It does align very much with kind of what I was thinking in terms of the Dhammapada not really being a great fit, where the Lankavatara is in fact a great fit for this particular group. It’s a little bit more closer to the thumb for what our practice is and a lot of the teachings that we experience.

And so we’ll go through it. We’re not going to go through it page by page. But for priest training, I did develop an outline, a way to work with the Lankavatara Sutra that kind of skips some chapters and digs into others and bounces through it. So I figured we would use that, something similar to that method over here for this.

And it’s a lot of work. It’ll take a while and we might end up not doing it all. But I figured that it would be fun and I’d love to explore this sutra in depth with you all. It’s another one of my, hopefully before I die, “do my own translation projects.”

So before we get started with that, I have a little bit of intro material that I’d like to use to just make sure we’re kind of all on the same page about what this sutra is. Because some of us may have already read it a dozen times and be in love with it, and some of us may have never heard of it.

So let’s just get oriented.

There are, now actually I don’t know if there’s more than these two English translations. I’m sure there probably are and I just don’t know them, but these are the two big ones.

So this one is kind of the original English translation by D.T. Suzuki. And it’s fine. This was originally published in 1932 by a non-English speaker. So you can imagine that there are some challenges.

The texts that he had to work from were not of the highest fidelity. He had to go into the Tibetan literature and translate from Tibetan. So there’s, you can only get one copy and it’s this copy, it’s fine.

But Red Pine, I think in the early 2000s, took a stab at it.

In 2012, took a stab at it and he had a much higher fidelity reconstruction of the Chinese text. And being a native English speaker and a little bit more closer to our time, he was able to produce a much higher, in my opinion, a much higher quality, much more readable translation.

So this is the one that I will be referencing as we go through this study on our own.

So if you wanted to grab a copy of it, it’s just called the Lankavatara Sutra, Translation and Commentary, Red Pine. Originally published in 2012.

That’s that.

You know, excuse me, every time you mention it, I can’t hear.

What sutra?

Lankavatara.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Thank you.

L-A-N-K-A-V-A-T-A-R-A.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

Thanks for asking.

Even though I’m going to just kind of some basic intro material here, definitely jump in. Hope that this turns into a discussion here in just a little bit. But for orientation, I think there’s some interesting things to know about this.

It is believed to be compiled around 400 CE, which is kind of a golden era of getting scriptures written down.

Right.

So it’s kind of part of that parallel development and human history of writing down sacred texts.

And it seems like it came from a tradition that was around long enough to be something that was interacting with the Prajnaparamita literature, like the Diamond Sutra and the Heart. Probably not the Heart Sutra, but Nagarjuna and the Mahayana er the Madhyamika school.

I think the Yogacara school, which is what the Lankapatara Sutra belongs to, and the Madhyamika school were interfacing for several hundred years before this ended up getting written down.

So there’s some evidence of cross-pollination, which I think is really interesting because one way to understand Zen practice or Mahayana practice in general is that the Yogacara and the Madhyamika schools kind of pushed together.

And from that emerged what’s called the Tathagatgarbha literature, which is like the… Well, how would you say that in English? The womb of the Buddha literature, the Buddha nature literature.

And that ends up being something like the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, which is a very seminal text, the Avatamsara Sutra, which is a seminal text in Mahayana Buddhism.

So there’s all kinds of work interacting.

Another Yogacara Sutra that’s really good to read is the Samdhinirmokana. Thomas Cleary has a good translation of that called Buddhist Yoga. There’s other works by Vasubandhu, who’s kind of the main Yogacaran guy, kind of the founder of the Yogacaran school.

What’s that book by Ben Connolly, Yoshin, Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara?

Inside Vasubandhu’s. It’s also, I think it’s got a subtitle of 30 verses or something.

That’s another excellent resource that kind of builds off these same concepts.

But the main thing about the Yogacaran school is that they’re kind of the…

They are the school of Buddhism that really investigated consciousness. They really dug into what’s going on here. What are the layers of consciousness? What is the phenomenology of meditation?

They looked at questions like how does karma really work?

How does what I say and do show up in my unconscious and how does that re-pollinate my choices for what I’m saying and doing?

They looked at if cessation is real, then how come when I come back from my cessation experience, I still have a memory of an identity?

How can that be possible?

So the Yogacarans were really invested in this process. And as a consequence of that, they had a very strong emphasis on cross-linked meditation. They were Dhyana masters that really pushed the limit of state training and introspective meditation.

Which shows up a lot in our Zen practice and our Zen tradition as the combination of stopping and seeing.

So stopping the mind and then seeing what happens. To think of it pretty simply.

And part of that is like after emptiness is realized, after you cut off everything that you typically associate with being a conscious being, what’s left?

And so through that, they ended up coming up with kind of a framework that says there’s an imagined reality.

Which is other dependent.

And that’s kind of like what we’re experiencing right now all the time.

The imagined reality is like most of what we’re experiencing right now.

And the other dependent is like the truth of interpenetration.

And then when we complete the practice, then we have simultaneous ability to hold the imagined reality, which is all of our regular relative consciousness.

And our other dependent interpenetrating non-state experience.

And then these two come into correct knowledge, which is known as the perfected reality.

And that’s kind of the point of the Yogacara model of awakening.

So the whole book has a lot to do with like what is emptiness, what is the Dharma, what is the self, what is the emptiness of the self, what is the role of language, all that kind of stuff.

And it kind of walks an arhat, which is a typical Mahayana theme, it walks an arhat through the later stages of realization so that they can become a Bodhisattva.

Meaning that the whole frame of the Mahayana is that an arhat is somebody who has trained themselves to be able to enter into nirvana or enter into a state of altered state of cessation at will. But they have not come back and reintegrated the non-dual state experience with life.

And that’s kind of the push of the Bodhisattva.

So it’s kind of you go through the stages, become an arhat, further training makes you a Bodhisattva, further training makes you a Buddha. That’s kind of the arc presented here.

Before I get into the next section, which is about layers of consciousness and a really pivotal idea of projection that I think will be the meat of our Dharma discussion today.

Does anyone have any questions, comments, concerns around the overall or the general framing for what this text is? Does it still seem interesting before we spend more time digging into the Dharma teachings?

I’m curious about sort of the hierarchy that I hear of arhat, Bodhisattva, Buddha. And I realize on the one hand, there is no hierarchy. But at the same time, there sort of seems like this sort of a little bit of like school one-upmanship almost. And I’m just curious to hear you talk about that.

Yeah, I don’t necessarily see the school one-upmanship. I see it more as it’s almost kind of like any other developmental model. You know, you would say that there’s an integral model and there’s red, orange, green, you know. Well, they’re basically saying that this depth of insight is at this level and there’s a later depth of insight that’s at this level. And then there’s a later depth of insight that’s at this level. And so they’re not really saying that one’s better than the other or one supersedes the other.kThey’re just saying that, like, these are the milestones on the path.

And part of the tension was that from an arhat perspective, the reintegration of the non-dual state into dualistic reality kind of re-honors a sense of selfing that is very anathema to what it takes to train to get to the arhat perspective.kSo there’s like a whole huge detachment that has to happen from the basic motivation that fueled practice up to that point.

And so there’s a little bit people who didn’t get on that train saw what the Mahayanas were saying.kIt’s like, no, you’ve got more work to do as kind of saying, well, no, you’re reintroducing a self.kThe whole point was that it’s not self. And now you’re reintroducing a function of the self that’s skillful and wise and compassionate. That doesn’t make sense.

And so the Mahayanas are saying, like, we agree with you. What you just did is a necessary step on the path, but there’s more.

Right. Then so that’s kind of the arc.

And just like anything else, when people reach a certain level of expertise, they may feel like they’re complete and they don’t have anything else to learn.

And other people may be like, well, maybe you should go get a Ph.D. in that.

No master’s degree is fine.

So that’s kind of.

Anything else about that before I talk about a little bit brief intro, we’re going to go a lot in this as we study the book, but orienting material would be really good to talk about the eight layers of consciousness.

Oh, OK.

So basically the eight layers of consciousness say that there are five consciousnesses.

Layers isn’t probably the best term.

So bear with me.

There’s kind of like eight consciousnesses.

And if you think of them in layers or nested like Russian dolls or just kind of free floating things, you know, you’re you’re understanding that will change over time.

But basically there is five that associate with your regular senses.

And there’s a six that associates for your cognitive process, the ability to make meaning out of the sense experience.

So five for your senses, a sixth for your mind, which is making meaning out of the sensory experience.

A seventh, which is called the master.

And that is the one that kind of like knits individual moments of sensing and meaning making together into what we consider a persistent sense of self.

So the seventh aspect of consciousness is the one that’s responsible for the idea that you are a separate.

And then the eighth, the storehouse consciousness is kind of that collective unconsciousness that just holds all of the karmic seeds that can be called upon as archetypal.

Forces that are going to help you make meaning of what your senses are experiencing, but also then be perfumed by the way you relate to the meaning that you’re giving your senses.

And this simultaneous perfuming and seeding quality is kind of a critical hallmark of the interpenetration of this school.

And that’s basically saying that every cause and effect and every effect is a cause.

And those things are happening at the same time, not in any sort of circle, but at exactly simultaneously.

The interpenetration of cause and effect as a critical idea here.

So, I just said a lot.

It’s actually not necessarily more complicated than what I just said.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t questions and things to discuss and unpack in there.

So what might be coming up for anybody with this idea of eight aspects of consciousness.

So forgive me, you had the five senses, sight, sound, taste, touch, right?

And then, did you say, and forgive me, I’m not getting every word you say.

So the six, seven, it was one of those perceptions and the reification of the self, did you say?

Or what is six, seven, eight?

Yeah, I’m getting a little bit choppy too, Michael, so I don’t know if you’re even still here.

Oh, you’re back.

Six is making meaning out of what you sense.

Seven is stitching individual moments together into a sense of self.

And then eight is the storehouse unconsciousness.

Hopefully you got that that time.

I’m sorry, go ahead.

No, it’s bad.

Go ahead.

But the storehouse is kind of, it’s both with us in this lifetime and afterwards.

We’re just kind of seeding what will exist after us, that kind of pervasive consciousness, perhaps.

Or is it only in our life?

So there’s varying metaphysical positions on that.

But the eighth consciousness would be the one that justifies the idea that there’s a stream of consciousness that you’re repeatedly reborn into and carries a certain quality of karma between your lives as you transmigrate.

That would be, if one takes that metaphysical position, then that would be the mechanism that accounts for it.

It’s not universal, but that’s how that works.

Okay.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

And Cixi Xie.

Yeah.

When you’re talking about the interpenetration of cause and effect, is this kind of modeled like on a grid of time?

Meaning there’s this like sequence, there’s this sort of causal chain of events, if you will?

Or are they looking at it differently than that?

Like, are they looking at it linear, like one thing causes another thing, but that thing is the cause of another thing?

So it’s like a chain?

Or are they taking it some kind of a different?

The conventional language tends to imply that there’s some sort of chain.

But when you really dig into the material, that breaks down and you realize that they’re not really saying that.

That’s more just the way we’re making sense of how they’re saying what they’re saying.

And it’s more like it’s closer to thinking that there was a big bang.

And then that big bang, like got a shell around it, and it grew in all directions.

And now that second moment was a little bit bigger, and it included everything in the first moment.

But it also had more stuff in it than the first moment because things happened.

And then that got a layer around it, which included everything in the second and the first layer, but had more things in it because more things happened.

And it’s more like this expanding sphere of interpenetrating cause and effect where everything’s the basis of everything.

But then everything goes back down to the center and reverberates back out and gets bigger.

Every single iteration, that would be closer to how I would model it than a chain.

Okay, that makes sense.

So like you’ve said, interpenetrating a few times, and I mean, I’ve heard that term, but in this context, I don’t know if I fully understand what you really mean by that.

Like, that’s a really specific distinction, isn’t it?

It is.

It’s a highly precise word that’s very difficult to understand.

But just the fact that, like, you are creating me and I’m creating you right now, what I’m saying is going into your system, bouncing around and coming back at me, even in your nonverbal language while I’m still speaking.

That’s interpenetration at a more comprehensible level.

But that’s going on on all layers at all times within us and between us and between you and me and between us two and the rest of the group and between the whole group and us.

And, you know, the fractal nature of that is tricky.

Okay, thanks.

I think that’ll satisfy me for now, but I’m definitely looking forward to exploring the nuances of what that is pointing at.

Yeah, me too.

So on the senses, I think I’ve often said, and maybe I’ve just heard it, that like in Buddhist philosophy, there are six senses with the fifth being or the sixth being mind.

Is this where that comes from?

Or was that before this?

From what I understand, this is where that comes from.

Got it.

If not this sutra, then this school of thought.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Oh, I heard that.

So six is cognition, like any mental activity, like thinking, thinking about intellectualizing.

And then what’s seven?

Well, I could hear you.

Seven is stitching together distinct moments into a sense of persistent identity.

Is there one word for that?

Selfing.

You can call it selfing.

Selfing, the creation of the self ego, like I come back to my ego basically.

Yeah, the reason that I don’t like using ego is because in Western philosophy, the ego is treated as a monad.

And this system doesn’t actually have space for a monad, it only has space for process.

And in a process, there can be many distinct things that are activated at any given time, which makes it insane to think that we have an ego or that we have a persistent ego structure.

It’s more like a core.

Yeah.

I think I just cut out.

Did I just cut out?

Yeah, you did.

Yes.

All right.

So it’s more like there is a stitching together thing.

There’s a selfing that happens in a moment.

And when those causes and conditions change, then the self that is present changes too.

And that is a little bit contradictory to the idea of an ego.

This actually describes the process of selfing in the context of not self and the context of not having an ego.

How do we still have a sense of self?

Right.

How does the bodhisattva actually function?

Yeah.

So what they get, again, ultimately, is that this sense of self will transform over time by interacting with the dharma.

And is it ultimately transcending, like that stitching together?

No.

So in this school, in Vasubandhu’s 30 verses, there are several conditions where the seventh ceases.

One of them is in the cessation experience.

One of them is in the state of enlightenment, which is we’ll talk about that in a second.

And another is when you’re in deep sleep.

And in the second one there, in a state of enlightenment, what happens is that you have a persistent realization of the self coming into being with contact in the sensory field.

And then changing as your causes and conditions change.

Right.

And that’s what the Yogacara enlightenment is, is that now you see the whole process of the eight aspects of consciousness in this dynamic interplay of light.

Well, now you’ve got the bodhisattva realization.

Well, really, that’s kind of the Buddha realization when that’s persistent over time.

And that’s where we see it in the Awakening of Longevity and the Song of Zazen.

You can see a lot of pointers to this being the definition of enlightenment in later and later texts and teachings.

Which is very different than the idea of liberation in the Theravadan perspective, and just getting rid of these 10 hindrances.

I wanted to offer back on the sixth sense of cognitive process.

I really like this point.

I think it’s really powerful.

And I teach it.

I talk to my coaching clients and just random people, as I tend to do.

Because it’s such a shift from the way I was taught.

I was taught there’s these five senses, like eyes see and ears hear.

And it makes sense to me that what I’m hearing through my ears doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

Or what I’m seeing with my eye, I can be deceived by my eyes.

It’s just data comes in and the eye collects the data, or the ear collects the data.

And with the cognitive process, it’s the same thing.

Which is seeing is to the eye as thinking is to the cognitive process.

And so just because I’m thinking something doesn’t mean it’s true.

Doesn’t mean it’s me.

Doesn’t mean it’s anything.

It’s just data coming in.

And it’s the way my cognitive process does its own particular sensory organ function.

And I find that really helpful.

Because it helps me detach from the thinking and the thoughts as if it’s the only thing that really matters.

Which is the way I live most of my life.

Is this also where the notion of like feelings or emotions, I suppose, as fuzzy thoughts?

I’ve heard that in the context of bones before, too.

Yes.

So that’s also happening in the sixth consciousness.

And basically those are different ways that the seeds of the alaya vijnana, the storehouse consciousness, are sprouting.

So it’s like the sixth and the seventh kind of work together.

Where the sixth gives meaning to the senses.

And the seventh is kind of pulling seeds out of the storehouse to give the sixth in order to make that meaning.

So there’s like this bridging thing that’s happening.

And that’s where the seventh stitches things together.

Because it remembers like, oh, that sensation happened before.

Let me go grab the seed that was related to that and feed that to you, number six.

And that can carry all of the cognitive and emotional data of memory and conditioning and all that.

So I think this conversation will be rounded out by adding this last piece.

And I hope it doesn’t feel too rushed.

But if you get this book and you start reading it, one of the things that you will run into is a rather heavy usage of the word projection.

And I think it’s really important to talk about this in this context, because our standard idea of projection has to do with, I have some unconditioned material in me and I see it in the world out there.

And that’s related.

It’s close.

It’s how the mechanism of projection that we talk about works.

But when he’s talking about projection here, he’s really talking about how our sixth and seventh consciousness play to slice and dice reality that isn’t really slice and diceable.

And I want to just round out our idea of projection by giving four terms in Chinese that translate to projection in Wright-Pines’ version.

So one of them is fundia, which is the function of cognition that separates phenomena through conceptualization and abstraction.

So when we create separation of things, like I hear this and I see that and we treat them like they’re different, that’s the separation consciousness, the process of fundia through conceptualization.

There’s also wangxiang.

Wangxiang is like falsely perceived characteristics.

And characteristics here are like the idea that my body, my sensing experience ends at my skin.

Which if we just think for a second, we know that’s not true because we hear things that are beyond our skin.

We can feel the space between people.

So there’s a greater electromagnetic field that’s happening that’s part of our sensing experience.

And so the idea that I am confined to my skin is somewhat false.

My mind stops at my skin is false.

So that would be an example of an erroneously perceived characteristic.

And there’s wangxiang.

And that’s just straight imagination.

It’s just the imagined reality.

It’s like when we close our eyes and we’re thinking about something and we can create a pair with antlers, like a rabbit with antlers, we can create that.

That’s an imagined phenomenon.

Or when we turn the rope into a snake and freak out, that’s an imagined phenomenon.

And those imaginations are sometimes more powerful and more real than our direct sensory experience.

So that’s another form of projection.

And then the last one is xuangfengjie.

And this is like unfounded conceptual distinguishment, which is basically saying that somehow we got injected with the belief that this is good and that’s bad and this is pretty and that’s not.

And it’s really unfounded.

But it’s a concept that we use to distinguish and organize our reality.

And so that’s a function that’s happening.

And none of these are inherently bad.

They just lead us to be incredibly confused when we can’t see them, when we can’t account for their process.

And so all of these things are projection when we talk in the overtime world.

And you can see how projection, in the way that we typically understand it, does make sense of putting unconscious material on other things we experience, but there’s a lot of nuance that’s missed by translating all of these as one word.

So I just wanted to drop that in here for that.

So that’s the introductory material.

I’d love to hear any thoughts about the idea of projection and these different ways that we project.

Maybe a comment or two, but then also we’ll have to turn to check in because that was fast.

So the projection.

Oh, I was just going to invite Tyson and Robin to check in since we haven’t heard from them during this period.

I’ll just do some reading.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ditto to Tyson.

My brain processes things slowly.

And so just everything that’s been covered tonight, that could occupy me for like two years.

Get ready, the Lanka is a trip.

I mean, I know Yogachara is big influence in general on Madhyamaka and Zen.

Is there a particular connection to Jumpo and his teaching?

I do not know of Jumpo receiving specific Yogachara training.

I only know that when you look at the teachings of like Hakuin, it was only a few generations up the chain.

His stuff is like just riddled with Yogachara teachings.

However, he got it.

I believe that that just stayed a really strong influence on what Zen teachings became, but it actually was heavily influential in Zen all the way back from its beginnings in Chan.

In fact, it’s reported that Bodhidharma’s trip to China was the first five patriarchs all studied the Lantavatar Sutra.

And it wasn’t until the lineage of Huineng that it switched from the Yogachara sutras as primary to the Prajnaparamita sutras as primary.

So our whole lineage is founded in the dhyana practice and the dhyanas are all founded on Yogachara practice and principles, as far as I understand it.

So I think that’s why when we look into the Mando Manual and the way Jumpo taught and the way he dissected consciousness and the way he invited us to get really specific and clear on what’s happening in our experience.

That’s all the Yogachara influence.

And then the other side of it, which is just like, F all that.

Shut up, stfu.

That’s the Madhyamika influence of just, there’s nothing you can say that’s right, so don’t even try.

Well, there’s actually a lot we can say that’s pretty accurate, so let’s do that too.

And that’s how it kind of mushes together.

Thank you.

Great question.

So let’s go to Michael, and then we’ll go around the horn for a closing check-in.

Yeah, I was going to, well, I’ll give my brief comment.

I don’t know if it’s still in Jumpo’s literature, but he used to say, your ego or this stitching of the self is like an optical illusion.

It sounds like that’s his key phrase of this whole process onto the world or from pure awareness.

So that’s, I don’t know if he got it specifically from Yogachara, but that’s that whole process of just let it go, realize something else.

So would you agree with that?

He always told me a divine figment of imagination.

Divine?

Yes.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

** Closing Check-in Ensues **