Mahāyāna-śraddhotpāda Śāstra

Mahāyāna-śraddhotpāda Śāstra. ‘The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna’, a short summa of Mahāyāna thought attributed to the Indian Buddhist thinker and poet Aśvaghoṣa and translated into Chinese in the year 550 ce by Paramārtha. A second translation, by Śikṣānanda, was produced in the T'ang dynasty. In spite of these two ‘translations’, no Indian original has ever been discovered, and it is now certain that the text is an apocryphal work of Chinese origin. Despite its brevity and terseness, the work displays its author's brilliance at synthesizing many of the major ideas of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and so this treatise has exercised an enormous influence on east Asian Buddhist thought.

The text's major theme is the relationship between the noumenon (the absolute, enlightenment (bodhi), the universal, and the eternal) and phenomena (the relative, the unenlightened, the particular, and the temporal), and it poses the following questions. How are limited, ignorant beings to attain the bliss of wisdom? How shall the particular attain to the universal, the temporal to the eternal? To answer these questions, the treatise postulates a transcendent that pervades the immanent. The noumenon, called suchness (tathatā) or absolute mind, does not exist in a pristine realm above and beyond phenomena, but expresses itself precisely as phenomena. The conjunction of the noumenal and the phenomenal occurs in the concept of the tathāgata-garbha, or ‘embryonic Buddha’. The term ‘garbha’, meaning both embryo and womb, denotes the simultaneous appearance of the goal sought (the embryo) and the conditions that make it possible (the womb). Suffering beings, in so far as they are suffering, remain deluded and in bondage. However, insofar as they are beings, they display their suchness and are aspects of the activity of absolute mind, and in this sense they already contain the goal of transcendence and liberation within themselves.

These ideas are worked out in more detail through the use of the concepts of ‘original enlightenment’ and ‘acquired enlightenment’. The first symbolizes the perfect and complete presence within all beings of ultimate reality and the absolute mind. The second serves as a recognition that, on the level of phenomena, suffering and ignorance (avidyā) are real, and beings must still work to overcome them. However, because noumenon and phenomena do not exist separately, but only in and through each other, there is no unbridgeable gap between them; quite the contrary, they coincide completely. Because this is true, beings can gain enlightenment (bodhi) and liberation from suffering. The second half of the text presents practical suggestions for religious cultivation so that readers may develop faith (śraddhā) and ultimately attain liberation. These exercises serve to correct flawed or biased views, and to increase the practitioner's faith and devotion.