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Sacred Texts: Buddhism

A Buddhist Bible: The Lankavatara Sutra: Chapter XII. Tat...

Dwight GoddardTaoism and ZenZen Buddhism

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This is a translated excerpt from the *Lankavatara Sutra*, a foundational Mahayana Buddhist scripture of the Yogacara (Mind-Only) school, presented as a philosophical dialogue between the Bodhisattva Mahamati and the Buddha (the Blessed One/Tathagata). The central argument is that the Tathagata — the Buddha-nature — transcends all conceptual categories: he is neither born nor unborn, neither permanent nor impermanent, neither entity nor non-entity, because any predicate drawn from dualistic thinking falsifies what is essentially beyond thought and language. A striking claim is that the countless names humans use for ultimate reality — including Hindu deities like Brahma, Vishnu, and Indra alongside Buddhist designations like Nirvana and Dharmakaya — are all names for the same Tathagata, but those who use them "see me as the moon is seen in water," mistaking the reflection for the thing itself. The text insists that genuine understanding cannot come from scripture, teachers, or conceptual reasoning but only through direct self-realisation of Noble Wisdom, which leads to the paradoxical assertion that the Buddha has literally never spoken a word since his enlightenment, because truth is transmitted through inner realisation rather than language. This excerpt will most reward readers interested in Buddhist metaphysics, the limits of predication and language, or the Yogacara philosophical tradition that influenced Zen.

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