Book Review: The Lankavatara Sutra

The lovely folks at Counterpoint Press sent me a copy of the latest translation by Red Pine for review.  The Lankavatara Sutra is said to be the only Zen sutra given by the Buddha.  It’s billed on the back of the book as being the ‘holy grail’ of Zen, passed down through Bodhidharma, etc.  In the introduction, Red Pine goes through some fairly extensive historical data lending some power to this.  I have no formal education on Buddhist history, so I’m ok taking it all at face value.  It does certainly read very Zen like with a lot of pointing and nudging towards non dual thinking as being the highest drive fo the practice.

The sutra itself is very dense and it was a tough read.  It is most certainly a text to study slowly.  One reading barely exposes you to all it has to say.  My first read through did not include the extensive notes either.  Red Pine’s notes are included along with the text and often take full pages themselves.  This is definitely a text I will have to go back through slowly taking and reading the commentaries with it.  It is also written to an audience of serious practitioners.  From my experience reading other shorter sutras, this one is not talking to casual practitioners.  The concepts are not watered down and don’t end in dualistic examples. The entire thing is presented as 108 questions and 108 answers with extensive explanations and summaries presented in verse.

If I had any idea how much this text would make my head hurt trying to get through it, I would have thought twice about agreeing to reviewing it.  Now that I’m through it, however, I do look forward to going back through it slowly including the notes and commentaries.  It is not something you can rush through.  Reading this as if the Buddha decided to explain the intricacies of the Heart Sutra and then smoked some crack before he got started.

Not to be excluded from this review is the introduction itself.  Red Pine talks about his reservations on tackling this enormous translation and how it actually took time for him to mentally get to the place where he actually committed to taking it on.  He also expounds quite a bit on the historical basis for the sutra itself.  Normally I don’t find this kind of thing very interesting, but it actually held my attention and made the reading of the text feel more personalized.

So if you are up for a challenge and enjoy sutra reading, give the Lankavatara Sutra a spin.