Sacred Texts: Buddhism

A Buddhist Bible: The Lankavatara Sutra: Chapter VI. Perf...

Dwight GoddardTaoism and ZenZen Buddhism

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This is a philosophical-religious text in the dialogue tradition, drawn from the *Lankavatara Sutra*, a foundational Mahayana Buddhist scripture in which the Bodhisattva Mahamati questions the Buddha. The text expounds a framework of five Dharmas — appearance, name, discrimination, right-knowledge, and "Suchness" — as a systematic path from ordinary perception to Ultimate Reality, which is characterized as undifferentiated, imageless, and beyond predication. A central argument is that all phenomena, including the self, are mind-made projections sustained by habit-energy and discrimination, and that the ego has no substantial existence — the "twofold egolessness" applying both to persons and to things. The text presents four tiers of knowledge (appearance-knowledge, relative-knowledge, perfect-knowledge, and Transcendental Intelligence), ranking philosophical reasoning below the direct self-realization accessible to Bodhisattvas who have seen through all dualisms. Its most distinctive and self-undermining claim is a performative paradox: even the assertions "all things are empty" or "Noble Wisdom is Ultimate Reality" are themselves thought-constructions and therefore invalid — true insight dissolves not only ordinary concepts but its own doctrinal formulations. This makes it essential reading for anyone interested in Yogacara ("mind-only") Buddhist philosophy, the logic of ineffability, or the intellectual lineage behind Zen.

A Buddhist Bible: The Lankavatara Sutra: Chapter VI. Perf...

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