26 May 2023
Set on Gayāśīrṣa, the hill near Bodhgayā from which its title is derived, the sūtra presents its teaching in the form of the Buddha’s inward examination, a conversation between the Buddha and the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and dialogues between Mañjuśrī and three interlocutors—two gods and a bodhisattva.
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20 May 2023
It’s time to REJOICE!
As we enter this auspicious month marking the birth, awakening, and parinirvāṇa of the Buddha, we invite all those who supported our recent campaign, The Perfection of Wisdom for All, to SAVE THE DATE: June 18.
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12 May 2023
In this Sūtra, the Buddha presents to the brahmin youth Śuka Taudeyaputra a discourse on the workings of karma. This is enlivened by many examples drawn from the rich heritage of Buddhist narrative literature, providing a detailed analysis of how deeds lead to specific consequences in the future.
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28 Apr 2023
“It’s in the cloud.” Though it has been less than twenty years since that metaphorical expression was first coined (by Eric Schmidt of Google at a conference in 2006), many of us are now as accustomed to understanding “the cloud” to mean a huge store of digital data, somewhere up there in cyberspace that we can access from anywhere, as we are to the real clouds up there in the sky. But Buddhist tradition has been using clouds in a similar metaphor for at least two thousand years.
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28 Apr 2023
Two new publications include, The Great Cloud—an important Mahāyāna sūtra, known particularly as one source of the idea that a tathāgata is permanent and does not really pass into parinirvāṇa, but strategically displays an illusory body; and The Great Cloud (2), a brief discourse identified more precisely in its colophon as a supplementary chapter from The Great Cloud on “the array of winds that bring down rainfall.”
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14 Apr 2023
Teaching the Eleven Thoughts takes place just before the Buddha attains parinirvāṇa, when he bequeaths his final testament to the assembled monks in the form of a brief discourse on eleven thoughts toward which the mind should be directed at the moment of death.
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31 Mar 2023
The Sūtra on Impermanence (Anityatāsūtra) is a short discourse on the impermanence of conditioned states. The Buddha explains that it does not matter what one’s social status is, whether one is born in a heaven, or even if one has realized awakening and is an arhat, a pratyekabuddha, or a buddha.
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17 Mar 2023
While dwelling on Vulture Peak in Rājagṛha, the Buddha is absorbed in the meditative concentration called wheel of meditative concentration. In response to a series of questions posed by the Buddha, Mañjuśrī explains the nature of ultimate reality.
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3 Mar 2023
In this sūtra, Mahākāśyapa poses a series of questions to the Buddha about proper monastic conduct and practice, which the Buddha answers at length. Mahākāśyapa then requests the Buddha to remain in the world in order to safeguard the Dharma, but when the Buddha initially predicts that Mahākāśyapa himself will do so in the future, Mahākāśyapa insists that for the Dharma to remain for long, it must be entrusted to a bodhisattva rather than a śrāvaka.
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21 Feb 2023
The Long Explanation of the Noble Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand, Twenty-Five Thousand, and Eighteen Thousand Lines is a detailed explanation of the Long Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, presenting a structural framework for them that is relatively easy to understand in comparison to most other commentaries based on Maitreya-Asaṅga’s Ornament for the Clear Realizations.
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