STEALING OUR DELUSIONS
Introducing the Diamond Sutra and the Prajnaparamita
A Dharma Talk by James Ishmael Ford, Roshi
26 November 2001, Boundless Way Zen


The Diamond Sutra is one of the central documents of the Zen way. Its complete title is actually the Vajrachehedika-prajnaparamita-sutra, which can be roughly translated as the “Sacred Text of the Diamond Cutter of Delusion of the Perfection of Wisdom.” It is also sometimes called the “Perfection of Wisdom in Three Hundred Lines.” It is one of about forty sacred texts belonging to the Prajnaparamita cycle, a special spiritual literary phenomenon associated with the emergence of the Mahayana, the Great Way. The Mahayana is the mother of all the Zen schools.

The Diamond Sutra opens with how the Buddha, after begging for food and eating, is approached by the Venerable Subhuti, one of the ten great disciples, who asks the world-honored one to speak on the perfection of wisdom. In this introductory talk, I want to address the general nature of that response. This introduction is intended to orient you to the general themes of the Prajnaparamita and particularly the Diamond Sutra.

So, let’s consider what the Buddha taught Subhuti and all who would listen. This is a gathering that includes us, today. This teaching lives near the heart of our tradition, and if you come to some understanding of it, you will not be far from wisdom. The Diamond Sutra addresses the nature of reality. It reveals the Buddha eye, an eye which we all possess, but which we rarely open. The Sutra is an invitation to our opening that eye, and gazing upon the world and our very selves in a manner that can save all the suffering beings of the world.

The Diamond Sutra is one of the great spiritual classics of our common human heritage. It also touches on other areas of culture and human history. About a thousand years ago, fearing advancing barbarian hordes, someone hid a vast collection of spiritual documents in caves outside the walled town of Dunhuang in what are now the deserts of Gansu Province in the central Asian region of China. In 1879 a Hungarian explorer, Professor L. de Loczy described these caves as containing astonishingly beautiful frescos and carvings. Attracted by these reports, in 1907 a British archeologist, Marc Aurel Stein arrived to explore the caves. Unexpectedly he stumbled upon an astonishing cache of documents, the first person to see them in almost a millennium. The collection he found was breathtaking in its scope, revealing the vast range of contact that the Silk Road provided the peoples of Asia.

The texts ranged from Hebrew to Taoist and Confucian scriptures, representing the entire range of Asian wisdom literature. But principally the collection contained Buddhist spiritual writings. Following the traditions of the time, and true to the fears of the people who originally hid the documents, Stein stole twenty-nine packing cases of these precious documents. A year later a French archeologist stole nearly the same amount of additional materials. The barbarians had arrived and looted, hauling away an amazing treasure trove of spiritual literature.

Among those treasures there was one particular jewel. It was a printed edition of the Diamond Sutra. It has an astonishingly beautiful frontispiece portraying the Buddha on a lotus throne and containing a colophon stating that the scroll had been printed on the 11th of May, 868. It is the oldest extant printed book, published seven hundred years before Gutenberg set up his printing press. (You can do a web-search and see it for yourself.)

It seems to me to be particularly interesting that this text so central to the Zen way is also, in the shape of that printed edition, a treasure of human culture. And there is something else in this story that might be useful to us as we reflect on the sutra and its meaning. If we don’t hold this too tightly, there are aspects to the theft itself that suggests something we might reflect on as students of the Zen path.

As anyone who has lived for any length of time knows, there are any number of ways the human spiritual quest can manifest. Of all these various ways, and drawing upon two Greek divinities, I want to reflect briefly on two primary spiritual paths. They might be characterized as Apollonian and Dionysian. In truth most developed religions contain elements of each. Indeed, I think a fully developed way needs to acknowledge and support both, braided together into something strong and useful. But first let’s unravel the individual strands and examine them before we explore how they might weave together.

The Apollonian way is the path of the sun: bright and clear and straight. It is the way of most world religions, with particular attention being given by its followers to the details of correct behavior and attention to the small details of life. It is the noble way, the path to the mountaintop. Here we have precepts, liturgies and priestly practitioners guiding communities.

The other way is Dionysian. It is the way of the moon: intoxicating, crooked and dark. It is the way of the shaman and all those who would steal fire from the gods. It is the way of negation, and forgetting, the path down into the abyss. It is the way of the solitary meditator in the mountains or desert.

Somehow there is something poetic that one of the greatest Dionysian spiritual documents would have been stolen. If the image isn’t pushed too hard, Marc Stein was, in some ways, demonstrating the Dionysian path of the Prajnaparamita, the path of wisdom of which the Diamond Sutra is a premiere expression. The Diamond Sutra is a spiritual text about the nature of that route into the abyss, into the dark and crooked ways of forgetting and not-knowing.

But let’s not spend too much time with Stein, and rather go to the heart of the matter. As I said the Diamond Sutra is a core text of the Prajnaparamita cycle, the path of the perfection of wisdom. This is a Dionysian wisdom, one that steals our delusions from us with all the subtlety and skill of a master pickpocket. One day we’re rich, comforted in our certainties. The next moment we’re bereft, deprived of every soothing lie we’d embraced as truth. This is the path of the Prajnaparamita, the way of the Diamond Sutra. And as Zen students, this is our path.

Now as a brief acknowledgement, while I’ve consulted a number of sources, the primary document I’ve drawn upon for this talk is Mu Soeng’s The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way we Perceive the World. It is a wonderful book and I commend it to anyone seeking a deeper understanding than this simple outline of mine provides. Mu Soeng suggests another division on the spiritual way we should also be mindful of. While acknowledging the complexity of the differences between the two great strands of Buddhism, the Theravada, or Way of the Elders, and the Mahayana, the Great Way, Mu Soeng posits a simple way to understand these strands.

He suggests the move from classical Theravada to the Mahayana reflects a shift from a more “psychologically” oriented to a more “visionary” oriented Buddhism. As with the division between Apollonian and Dionysian, this psychological and visionary division is somewhat arbitrary, and in fact both views are contained within both Buddhist schools. But there is also an element of truth here, and certainly a functional division that if we don’t hold onto too tightly, can help us on our own way to understanding our way and, most importantly, ourselves.
The psychological approach is concerned with the mechanisms of the mind. It allows us to track the wanderings of our imaginations and reflections. It reveals assumptions and one delusion after another. It’s a peeling of the onion of consciousness, seeking that which is most true through attention to the details of habit and longing.

In the Abhidharma, which is the systematization of early Buddhist reflections on the mind, this psychological investigation is characterized by attention to suffering, impermanence and no-self: dukkha, anitya and anatman. The key to the rise of the Mahayana is the addition of a fourth insight: emptiness, or sunyata. Here is the vision of a dynamic universe, where form, the phenomenal universe that is us; rises from emptiness. And more. The play of emptiness and form is the very shape of life and death, the play of every opposite, as well as the shades between. Here we discover meaning and purpose emerges in the mysterious interaction of form and emptiness.

Certainly within this mysterious interaction we find a vision. Here a new figure emerges, a type of our way: the bodhisattva, one who will not enter into enlightenment until all can come along. Here wisdom and compassion are revealed as two sides of the same coin, two faces of the same divine perspective. And here the Dionysian way winks at us. The bodhisattva enlists every possible means to help beings realize their true nature. These skillful means are called upaya, the primary action of the bodhisattva way.

It is in this sense that Mu Soeng notes “In the best expressions of Mahayana, both emptiness and compassion are teachings that are skillful means; each should be used in its appropriate sphere and then left behind when going beyond that sphere.” The primary teaching reveals how things rise empty, and fall empty. In this world we hold, but cannot cling. Every grasp is defeated; everything to which we cling escapes like water running through our fingers.

Certainly here we find the underlying themes of the Prajnaparamita, where every concept, even the core teachings like emptiness, and even the movements of our dreaming hearts like compassion, must be seen as contingent, partial, and incomplete. Each is a flash of the great empty, momentary, true and beautiful. And then in the next moment of thought falling away.

The Prajnaparamita literature, the core expression of the Mahayana, is essentially apophatic. That means it approaches reality in that Dionysian way, obliquely, from the corner of the eye. It approaches reality by relentlessly rejecting any partial truth. It constantly points beyond, to our true home. In this sense, Prajnaparamita literature approaches spirituality as poetry. The essay form falls short. We need those telegrams from the heart/mind. And the Prajnaparamita is such a direct pointing rather than discursive analysis. It is an invitation rather than an essay.

The Prajnaparamita literature emerged over a long period of time, starting about one hundred years before the Common Era, and running until about the year 400. In fact there would be echoes of this spiritual explosion, this Big Bang of spiritual insight that would last until the eighth century. It is worth noting that  this is roughly the same period in which the Mahayana emerged and took clear definition. As I mentioned earlier, in some fundamental ways the Prajnaparamita literature is the sacred writing of this emerging expression of the Buddha’s timeless wisdom.

Both the Heart Sutra, which we chant at almost every conceivable Zen occasion, and the Diamond Sutra belong to the mature period of Prajnaparamita composition, each being written somewhere between the third and fifth centuries of our common era. Here we see that the Buddha is teaching us more than seven hundred years after he died. One can only say, how appropriate! The Dionysian eye reveals the Buddha eye.

The Diamond Sutra is closely connected with the Zen way as it emerged among the Chinese Buddhist schools starting in roughly the fifth century. Hui-neng, the first essentially historical figure in our movement, often remembered by his title as the Sixth Ancestor, had his initial awakening while a young wood-gatherer. He overheard a monk chanting from the Diamond Sutra, “Let your mind function freely, without abiding anywhere or in anything.” This is the first expression of how closely the Diamond Sutra is to the development of the Zen way. But by no means is it the last. From this beginning the Diamond Sutra emerges as a thematic element in many Zen stories.

So, near the end of the eighth century the Layman P'ang attended a lecture on the Diamond Sutra. When the speaker reached the phrase, “No self. No other.” He called out, “Oh, monk! If there is no self and no other, then who is lecturing, and who is listening?” Here the text itself is used to baffle and confute, and more than that, to open the heart and mind.

Probably the most famous story connecting Zen and the Diamond Sutra concerns how in the ninth century Te-shan Hsuan-chien, a renowned lecturer on the Diamond Sutra, sought to challenge the upstart Zen school. On his journey he met an elderly tea seller, and sought to purchase some refreshment. She noticed his copies of the Diamond Sutra and numerous commentaries that he was carrying with him.

She said if he could answer a question she would ask about the Diamond Sutra, then the tea was free. But, if he couldn’t then she wouldn’t serve him at any price. She then asked him, “The sutra says that one cannot get hold of the past mind, one cannot get hold of the future mind, one cannot even get hold of the present mind. So, which mind are you hoping to refresh?”

Unable to respond, he burned his copies of the Diamond Sutra and its commentaries and undertook a path that would eventually lead him to become one of the most famous Zen teachers of his day. Here we find the Dionysian wink. The very book that opened the way is rejected on the way. Still, it continues to haunt our dreams.

When the Japanese Zen master Ekaku Hakuin, the author of our koan curriculum was stricken with a mysterious illness, some terrible dark night of the soul, he sought help from a hermit Hakuyu. In his account of their initial encounter Hakuin mentions that there were three books on the sole table in the hermit’s hut. One of those books was the Diamond Sutra. While nothing more is said about the book, just that it is there becomes a theme, a hint, a whisper from the dark places of our spirits.

Here is a poem, a mysterious letter from the depths of our being. As we engage, we can move from a psychological analysis, as profound as that may be, to a new vision of the world and ourselves. If we are able to find new ways of looking, new ways of listening, then something mysterious and beautiful can present itself to us. I say new ways, but in fact this is as ancient a path as that of the first shaman, the first visionary who broke through the old certainties, stepped out of the light, and sought the luminous dark. It is finding the Buddha eye.