Guide to Reciting

Understanding the Benefits 

Reciting with a clear and vivid sense of the benefits that the sutra brings can make the activity of recitation more moving and more beneficial. The Sanghāta itself works very hard to ensure that we are fully aware of the benefits it offers us. Simply reciting the sutra, one is quickly provided with a highly detailed account of the enormous range of positive results that will come about for us after we have come into contact with the Sanghāta. In addition, descriptions of transformative experiences that reciters have had as a result of their encounters with the Sanghāta offer further illustration of the sutra's power as a force for change in our lives.

This page is devoted to highlighting just a few of the vast benefits that can come from reciting the Ārya Sanghāta Sūtra.

Easy Death

In the Sanghāta Sūtra, Buddha describes what everyone who has heard the sutra will experience when they die (see quote on the right of this page). They will see many buddhas, who will comfort and console them, reminding them that they heard the Sanghāta and therefore produced a huge amount of positive karma, or merit. For us, this means that from the moment we have read the Sanghāta, this encounter with the sutra has become part of our personal biography, something that can reassure us as we move towards our own moment of death.

There is much in the Sanghāta that encourages its readers to prepare for the time of death. Even as it draws our attention to our own mortality, the Sanghāta also works to encourage us to work now to prepare, to care for the person we will be in the future. The best form of care, it shows us, is to practice Dharma now, today. This is an infallible way to assure ourselves of an easy death.

Establishing the Presence of the Buddha in one's Home or Vicinity

It is also explained in the Sanghāta that the presence of the Sanghāta in a place is equivalent to the presence of a Buddha:
 
For this reason, reciting the sutra in one's home or workplace can have a palpable effect on that environment, as many who have recited the Sanghāta have expressed. Once the Sanghāta has been recited, copied or otherwise made physically present in a space, as the sutra explains, the Buddha will always be there.
 
We invite you therefore to report your activities of reciting or copying the Sanghāta so that we can mark that precise spot on our global Sanghāta satellite map, as a spot where the Buddha;s presence has been established. To do so, click here.
 

The Entire Path to Enlightenment is There

As Lama Zopa Rinpoche comments, the practice of reciting the Ārya Sanghāta Sūtra contains the entire path to enlightenment: "When you read these sutras to yourself, everything is there: the whole path to enlightenment, including emptiness of the self, the four noble truths, and reincarnation. By reading or reciting thinking of other beings, compassion is there, and so are teachings on how to liberate sentient beings from suffering. The true path is there: there is the realization of emptiness of the 'I' and of the five aggregates, one by one. By realizing their emptiness, you attain the wisdom that ceases sufferings and is the cause to attain liberation, and then you can realize subtle bodichitta and achieve enlightenment. It is very vast. Everything is there."^*

Feeling the Buddha's Kindness

When Lama Zopa Rinpoche first picked up the sutra, he read it for a while silently, and then commented that one feels very clearly the kindness of the Buddha reading this. We find it so difficult to put the teachings into practice, he said. We meet the Dharma but become lazy and don't find time to practice, or we practice but then after a while our mind just turns away from it. Or we are born in Buddhist cultures but go looking for something else. "But here we see how the Buddha is making it so easy for us to accumulate such vast merit," Rinpoche said. "It becomes so easy to practice, so easy to benefit others, so easy to become enlightened and enlighten countless others, due to such sutras as this one. So incredibly kind."

Reciting to Repay the Buddha's Kindness

Because the Sanghāta Sūtra contains the actual words spoken by the Buddha, by reproducing that speech ourselves while reciting, we are offering our voices to serve as conduits for the presence of his teachings in the world. Thus in reciting the Sanghāta Sūtra, along with all the benefits we ourselves receive, we are acting in a very direct and powerful way to keep active the teachings of the Buddha.

In the 2,500 years since Buddha Shakyamuni first taught, reciting sutras has been a crucial way of preserving and passing his teachings on for the benefit of others. When we recite (or 'chant' as some lineages call it), we are therefore helping to repay the kindness of Buddha for his teachings, but also the kindness of the millions of other Buddhist practitioners who have maintained the teachings over the ages, so they would be available to us today. By reciting and engaging in other activities to keep the Dharma alive in the world, we are also offering our efforts, our voice and our minds for the future generations of suffering beings who will have such dire need of Buddha's compassion and wisdom. For more on why sutras are recited, click here.  

* As dictated by Lama Zopa Rinpoche to Ven Wongmo in Feburary, 2005. Edited for this site.



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