Guide for Readers

How the Sanghata Affects its Readers (continued)
Page 3

First, what are we to understand this text to be? This is perhaps the most difficult question, as the Sanghata Sutra repeatedly slips our grasp and turns out to be all around us. The text itself, through its extraordinarily frequent references to itself by name—over 70—repeatedly calls attention to the puzzle as to where the referent of that name resides. A common reaction to reading the text is to begin to wonder, where is the Sanghata itself? In fact, our very struggle to locate this thing called the Sanghata places us in the position I find myself adopting here in describing it, in which I begin to treat it as an agent, or even as a person. Indeed, the apparently innocent ability to refer to oneself by name is ontologically very complex. Only self-aware beings are capable of referring to themselves by name. One could argue that the ability to generate self-referential discourse is a faculty unique to human beings, or at least to speakers of language. When we are confronted by the Sanghata’s facility in referring to itself by name as it unfolds, as if it were already a complete entity, it strikes us as a facility we expect only of a self-aware or sentient being. As such, the self-referentiality, or self-‘awareness’ of the Sanghata Sutra strongly inclines us to understand the text as sentient, or as a person. And once we do that, the claim that the text can have power and agency over other persons seems a bit less outrageous.

Then there is the question as to when exactly the Sanghata begins. Four long pages after the sutra has begun, Sarvashura, the bodhisattva who questions the Buddha throughout the first half of the sutra, asks:


This clearly posits the Sanghata as some other teaching apart from what we have been reading, and which lies somewhere in this character’s future. Then, just a few pages later, Sarvashua is given a seat on a throne and told that,  "Sarva-shúra, you have heard the Sangháta sutra dharma-paryáya and therefore you are sitting on this seat."  (page 12). Was the Sanghata contained in the six pages between these two passages? we might wonder.
This projection of the text ahead of and behind itself crops up again and again. The very first time the Sanghata’s name is stated in the text, the Buddha announces that:


The Buddha’s announcement of the Sanghata as an entity already existing and active in the world raises the more perplexing question of where the text has been up to the time of its circulation. If the Sanghata is not this entire set of words, uttered by the Buddha and the others who spoke at Vulture’s Peak, and then narrated as the text called Sanghata , then what is it?

This question is raised even more forcefully in a separate anecdote, when the Buddha describes how he first heard of the Sanghata Sutra many lifetimes prior, when it was being taught by a former buddha. But this entire sutra we are hearing is itself basically a record of an extended conversation, and so this implies that the Buddha who is now one of those speaking it had originally only heard it, although what he heard were the words he is now speaking. Such an entity completely defies any efforts we might still hope to make to locate the Sanghata in any kind of linear time or space.

At this point, we seem forced to admit that we cannot fully answer the first question we have been examining—what kind of thing is this text called Sanghata? Try as we might to contain the Sanghata within the boundaries of its own text, it repeatedly eludes our grasp.

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