The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net”

The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” is a discourse taught by the Buddha Śākyamuni to an assembly of monks at Prince Jeta’s Grove in Śrāvastī. The Buddha opens his discourse by stressing the position of importance that the training in wisdom holds among the three trainings of discipline, contemplation, and wisdom. Perfecting the training in wisdom, he states, naturally perfects the other two trainings as well. The remainder of the sūtra describes how monks should train to develop wisdom by examining the futility and folly of their emotional reactions to the objects of the five senses and mental phenomena. The Buddha then discusses the five sense objects as well as the mental objects in succession, describing how ordinary sensory and mental perceptions of them are deluded, and how getting caught up in such perceptions only causes pain and regret. The five sensory objects and the mental objects are each described with nearly identical phrasing, supplemented by individual analogies. These analogies, the sūtra states in its concluding summary, constitute the “net of illusion” to which the title of this discourse refers.