The
current level of interest in the Arya Sanghata Sutra is the highest it
has been in at least one thousand years.
To read about how the sutra has regained a place of prominence in the
lives of Buddhists around the world in the past four years, click
here.
In the Words of the Sanghata:
Then the Blessed One spoke to the bodhisattva,
the great being Bhaishajya-séna as follows:
“Bhaishajya-séna, although sentient beings weep
and lament
at their time of death, no one will be their protector except for the
ripening of the results of good actions they have done.”
- Ārya Sanghata Sutra
Guide for Readers
How the Sanghata Affects its Readers (continued)
Page 2
Thus we have a text called the Sanghata
Sutra, and inside it there is a
story told by the Buddha about a sage who teaches someone a text called
the Sanghata.
At this point, we have a text within a text within a
text, and they are all the Sanghata.
Then it turns out that even the
sage who taught the Sanghata
in one of those texts was himself the
Sanghata.
At this point, we the readers of this text seem pushed into a position
of irredeemable perplexity as to what and where exactly the Sanghata
is. Is it something inside the text? Does it exist outside
the text, and then just manifests within the text as a character? Is it
in front of us as we read or hear the text? Is it all around us in the
world?
We may say tentatively that the Sanghata
Sutra creates this existential
perplexity in the process of addressing an ethical perplexity that is
also raised by the text. We’ll have to look at this more
closely in a moment, but briefly, the ethical perplexity has to do with
the kind of agency that is implied for persons by Buddhist theories of
karma. Specifically, the laws of karma suggest that all our actions
will have consequences, and that what we experience is a result of
previous actions. Yet the past is infinitely long, and the present is
very, very short, so that persons continually find themselves arriving
after much of their karma has been created. As a result, although karma
seems to place tremendous responsibility and personal power in the
hands of individual persons, it also takes that power out of their
hands, and displaces it into their past, over which they no longer have
any power.
In other words, while we are told by these theories that our actions
are the source from which our future experiences spring, we are also
told that we are living already after many of those actions have been
created. Each of us is understood to have a very long and quite likely
checkered personal history, spanning multiple lives of which we have no
awareness, and in which we have committed various negative actions.
Although we neither remember or condone those actions, we still have to
experience their devastating results.
The two characters whom the sage meets are caught in the grips of
precisely this ethical dilemma. They had both committed heinous crimes
in the past, and then become paralyzed later by remorse. By the time we
meet them as characters in the story, those crimes are already over and
done with, but we see how they are overwhelmed by the very idea that
those actions, irretrievably passed, will determine their future
experiences. They are suffering in the narrative present, because the
teachings on karma tell them that their past mistakes absolutely
guarantee them future suffering, and time is carrying them forward
inexorably toward that suffering. The sage’s response to
these two guilt-ridden characters is to say, effectively, that the
total power they had exercised in the past was not as total or final as
it seemed. The guarantee of karma is not absolute, because there is a
text that can intervene to alter a person’s karmic
composition—and apparently all one has to do it is sit back
and hear it. In other words, the sage claims tremendous power for the
text, more power than persons themselves seem to have.
So far our discussion has been limited to the characters within the
text. But the Sanghata
is saying that it has this effect on anyone who
hears or reads it. To substantiate that claim, the text must argue that
it can transform not merely characters appearing within it, but the
world around it. That argument is made quite forcefully through the
narrative structure, which frustrates any effort to contain the text
within its own borders or even to identify just what sort of thing the
text is. In that sense, we may say that the Sanghata Sutra’s
narrative structure creates an experience of existential
dilemma—in which we are utterly unable to determine what the
text is—to relieve an ethical dilemma—the less
comfortable anxiety of suspecting that we may already have squandered
the control we have over our own lives.
To see just how this dilemma-swapping works, let’s move
through a series of questions, to see first what sort of thing this
text imagines itself to be, second, what it does to its readers, and
third, what sort of agency it is thereby claiming for itself.
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