Sacred Texts: Buddhism

A Buddhist Bible: The Lankavatara Sutra: Chapter III. Right Knowledge or Knowledge of Relations

Dwight GoddardTaoism and ZenZen Buddhism

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This is an excerpt from the *Lankavatara Sutra*, a Mahayana Buddhist scripture structured as a philosophical dialogue between the Bodhisattva Mahamati and the Buddha (the "Blessed One"). The central argument is that both realism (clinging to the notion of being) and nihilism (clinging to non-being) are traps that obstruct liberation, because both still depend on dualistic discrimination rather than direct recognition that the external world is nothing but a manifestation of mind. The Buddha presents a taxonomy of seven kinds of emptiness, ranging from a crude relational emptiness (something absent from a particular place) up to the highest emptiness of Ultimate Reality, which is the complete absence of habit-energy from erroneous conception in the state of Noble Wisdom. A distinctive and recurring claim is that all things are "un-born" not in any naive sense but in the deep sense that, being mind-made, they have no self-nature, no inherent individuality—like the horns of a hare or a phantom city conjured by the Gandharvas. The text explicitly distinguishes the Buddha's teaching from contemporary Indian philosophical schools (which posit unborn primary elements such as Ishvara or atoms), arguing that those schools still fall into the dualism of being and non-being, whereas Buddhist non-birth transcends that opposition entirely. It would appeal to readers interested in Mahayana metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and perception, or comparative Indian philosophy.

A Buddhist Bible: The Lankavatara Sutra: Chapter III. Right Knowledge or Knowledge of Relations

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