Website of the Arya Sanghata Sutra


Guide for Readers

How the Sanghata Affects its Readers (continued)
Page 5

If we want to see an example of how the Sanghata works on its readers, we have only to look at how the sage works, since, as we recall, the sage is actually the Sanghata that has taken the form of the sage in order to be visible. What we do not see the sage doing is give the remorse-filled man a teaching that would put tools into his hands so that he can turn his own karma around. The sage does not even allow him to confess, initially. What the sage does instead, until the man finally sits down and takes it, is to feed him delicious foods and drink, and then tell him a story.

In this brief interaction with the suicidal man, the sage insists that the man cease acting as a powerful agent seeking out his salvation, and accept instead the role of passive beneficiary that the text has been pushing all its imagined readers into from the beginning. In the process, the man gains access to the teaching by means of which, as the sage puts it, all his negative karma will be removed. (page 20). This teaching works not because the man implements its instructions, but simply because he has heard it. How can this be? According to the idea that past actions bring future suffering, the only way that the man could stop fearing and regretting is if there were some way to undo or purify the wrongs he did in the past, and such an undoing could only be accomplished by a force more powerful than his own intensely evil deeds, or a force able to counter the uni-directional flow of time. That force, according to the Sanghata Sutra, if only the man will sit and let it do its work on him, is the Sanghata Sutra itself.

With this move, the text is arguing in favor of a far more complex understanding of personal responsibility and agency than the theory of karma might otherwise seem to suggest. It does so in large part by both asserting and demonstrating a textual power that we are not in a position to understand, much less refute. The assertions speak to us on the level of first-order readers; the demonstration takes place when we shift to a second-order reading, as the text’s repeated self-referentiality and its fabulously complex narrative structure strongly encourage us to do.

We may not be able to figure out just how the text as powerful agent of change is working, or even what sort of entity it is. But nor, the Sanghata tells us, do we need to. The bulk of the work that the Sanghata repeatedly says it does takes place on the imperceptible level of karma, which we are not in a position to perceive or assess anyway.

As if in compensation for the condition of perplexity that the Sanghata Sutra’s vision of its own power places us in, the Sanghata addresses the ethical dilemma that is rooted in the very unfolding of a human life, uni-directionally, through time. This ethical dilemma is experienced by the man and the king as remorse to the point of despair—reasonable enough responses to a bad situation for which one is responsible but that one is not in a position to change. This dilemma is created by notions of karma that demand us to assume total responsibility for actions that we no longer control, because they are already in our past and so beyond changing. The way out of this dilemma, the Sanghata suggests, leads to narrative, in the ontologically perplexing way that it acts on us and exists outside strictly linear time. And so, after the man accepts the authority of the sage and finally eats, the sage comforts him:


When the man says he has not, the sage (who, remember, is the Sanghata manifesting as the sage) proceeds to relate the anecdote of the king who had similarly committed harmful actions, and who had similarly had the karmic consequences of those actions completely removed by hearing the Sanghata. Thus the text portrays its own activity not as simply offering knowledge to empower us, but as offering stories about people much like ourselves who are cured by submitting to the text’s command that we sit down, eat and listen to more stories.

As to exactly what happens to us when we do so, well, that is another story.

The above discussion represents just one readers' attempt to come to grips with what the Sanghata was doing to her. To respond to the issues raised by this paper, or to raise others, please join the discussion forum devoted to the Sanghata.


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