The Zennist: The Light of Mahayana

If any of you have tried to read Suzuki’s translation of the Lankavatara Sutra it is not easy to get a firm hold of this Sutra’s real meaning. It is not because Suzuki was a terrible translator—he was not. Yet, there is something there that reading this Sutra a thousand times will not shed any light on.

Beneath its exterior, the Lankavatara is trying to tell us that the very content or substance of our thoughts is Mind. This also means that we should understand Mind to be the substance of everything from raindrops to the milky way. Yet, we must be forewarned that we cannot intuit this Mind by means of thought.

Holding this idea before us, the difference between our thoughts and Mind, as we attempt to plumb the Lankavatara Sutra’s position, owes to the duality thinking creates which attempts to paint a picture of Mind, which is not Mind, the substance of all.

Since the activity of thinking can never ‘think’ Mind, directly coming into contact with it, we will always remain at a distance from Mind. As far as the Lankavatara Sutra is concerned we will never get to first base with Mind by trying to think our way to it. More to the point, we will never experience what the Lanakavatara describes as the “Light of Mahayana” (mahâyana-prabhâsa) described here.

“Then, Mahamati, sustained by the power of the Buddhas, the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas at their first stage will attain the Bodhisattva-Samadhi, known as the Light of Mahayana, which belongs to the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas. They will immediately see the Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones appearing before them personally, who come from all the different abodes in the ten quarters of the world and who now facing the Bodhisattvas will impart to them their sustaining power displayed with the body, mouth, and words.”

As unbelievable as this reads, the Light of Mahayana amounts to a spiritual baptism when the seeker, for the first time, dips his or her toe, so to speak, into the holy waters of pure Mind. To the seeker’s utter amazement they directly witness the entire world which stretches out before them to be Mind-only, although it is shaped into trees, rocks, buildings, people, and even the sun above.

How the Light of Mahayana came about, that the “Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones” appear before the seeker, probably owes more to the seeker’s love of trying to penetrate the mystery of Buddhism, than anything else.

While this state doesn’t last for long—maybe a week or two—it soon dawns on this new Bodhisattva who experienced it, that this extraordinary experience, according to the Tathagatas, Arhats, Fully-Enlightened Ones, will have to be back-engineered!

What, therefore, lies before the fledgling Bodhisattva who just underwent the Light of Mahayana is the daunting task of figuring out what really happened; then being able to generate this very same experience, at will, and even to a limited degree to share it with others.

What this means, in a practical way, is that one has to plow through the Sutras for many years—but the good part, they will also be mysteriously aided by a “sustaining power” which helps to bring about the proper insight which reveals the world to be Mind-only.

If all of this sounds unbelievable, it is until it happens to you, personally. For anyone to doubt the Light of Mahayana requires the same biased mental disposition as one would expect of those who are skeptical of such events as a close encounter of the fourth kind when, according to Jacques Vallee of UFO fame, “witnesses experienced a transformation of their sense of reality.”

For the sincere seeker, they can’t be daunted by the narrow limits of their culture which will try to scout such an experience. In a word, they spiritually have to leave their presuppositions behind about the nature of reality. Recalling the example of Siddhartha, he left the limitations and expectations of his own culture behind in order to achieve enlightenment.