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The text of the sutra the Shurangama Mantra appears was once considered a national treasure of India. The Sutra was so valued and recognized that the rulers of India forbade the Shurangama Sutra to be circulated outside of the country. According to the tradition, transmission of the Shurangama Sutra outside of India first occurred in the early 700's when an unknown Indian bhiksu Po-la-mi-ti (or "Paramiti") secretly brought ten rolls of the Sutra to China. The Sutra was translated in 705 by Paramiti and others, and then polished and edited by Empress Wu Tzu-t'ien's banished minister Fang Yung. For over a thousand years since the early Sung dynasty in China, the Shurangama Sutra was studied by all the Chinese Buddhist schools and was held in great esteem. Widely recognized and studied in China, it ranked in popularity and importance with the Lotus, Avatamsaka, and Prajna Paramita Sutras; it was also accorded imperial favor.
The Sutra is connected with the Enlightenment of the Sung Master Ch'ang-shui Tzu-hsuan and the Ming Master Han-shan Te-ching, both of the Ch'an school. Ch'an masters recognize the Shurangama Sutra as the fundamental teaching of the Buddha. See also: Mantras, Mantrams & Chants
NA MO SA DAN TUO
SU QIE DUO YE
E LA HE DI
SAN MIAO SAN PU TUO XIE
NA MO SA DAN TUO
FO TUO JU ZHI SHAI NI SHAN
NA MO SA PO
BO TUO BO DI
SA DUO PI BI
NA MO SA DUO NAN
SAN MIAO SAN PU TUO JU ZHI NAN
SUO SHE LA PO JIA
SENG QIE NAN
NA MO LU JI E LUO HAN DUO NAN
NA MO SU LU DUO BO NUO NAN
NA MO SUO JIE LI TUO QIE MI NAN
NA MO LU JI SAN MIAO QIE DUO NAN
SAN MIAO QIE BO LA
DI BO DUO NUO NAN
NA MO TI PO LI SHAI NAN
NA MO XI TUO YE
PI DI YE
TUO LA LI SHAI NAN
SHE PO NU
JIE LA HE
SUO HE SUO LA MO TUO NAN
NA MO BA LA HE MO NI
NA MO YIN TUO LA YE
The above twenty-eight lines tell us to take refuge in all the Buddhas, all the Bodhisattvas, all the Hearers, all Those Enlightened by Conditions, and all the gods throughout empty space and the Dharma Realm. The last line, "Na mo yin tuo la ye," refers to what Chinese people call the Jade Emperor. Those who do not understand the Buddhadharma say, "The Jade Emperor belongs to Taoism. We shouldn’t bow to him." They don’t realize that the Jade Emperor is just Lord Shakra. As Buddhist disciples, we should also respect him and gather him in. This first section of the Shurangama Mantra is the section for protecting and supporting the Triple Jewel. Therefore, when this section is recited, all the demons, goblins, ghosts, and other strange creatures flee far away. They retreat as far as they can go.
Therefore, in Buddhism it is said that if there is even one person in the world who can recite the Shurangama Mantra, then the demons, goblins, ghosts, and all the other weird creatures will not dare to openly show themselves in the world. If not even one person can recite the Shurangama Mantra from memory, then at that point all the demons, goblins, ghosts, and all the other weird creatures will appear in the world. They will wreak havoc, but no one will recognize them. Right now, since there are still people who can recite the Shurangama Mantra, the demons, goblins, ghosts, and all the other weird creatures don’t dare to openly show themselves in the world. There is a verse that expresses the meaning of this section of the Mantra.
A thousand red lotuses protect one’s body.
As one sits astride a black unicorn.
Seeing this, the myriad demons go away to hide.A thousand red lotuses protect one’s body. A thousand red lotuses come to protect your body. As one sits astride a black unicorn. When you recite the mantra, you are sitting astride a unicorn. Seeing this, the myriad demons go away to hide. They all flee, because they are afraid to face such awesome virtue.
We all know about the character Ji Gong in Buddhism. In his time, Ji Gong used this section of mantra, so the verse says that Dharma Master Ji Gong had this wonderful sound. This verse gives the general meaning of this section of the Mantra text. If we were to go into detail, the Shurangama Mantra is wonderful beyond words. Thus it is also said:
The esoteric wonder is inexhaustible; it is truly difficult to fathom.
The secret words of Vajra come from the inherent nature.
The Shurangama Mantra contains miraculous wonders.
Cultivators and ordinary people can open the Five Eyes and Six Penetrations.
The esoteric wonder is inexhaustible; it is truly difficult to fathom. The Shurangama Mantra is extremely wonderful, and its transformations are inconceivable. It is very difficult to fathom. The secret words of Vajra come from the inherent nature. The secret words of Vajra, the Shurangama Mantra, is the secret within the secret. It is Vajra that supports and protects this mantra, which comes from our own Buddha-nature. The Shurangama Mantra contains miraculous wonders. The Shurangama Mantra is also known as a magical text. It is very miraculous and especially potent. That’s why it’s said, "The Shurangama Mantra contains miraculous wonders." Cultivators and ordinary people can open the Five Eyes and Six Penetrations. If you constantly recite the Shurangama Mantra with single-minded concentration, not thinking of anything else, you can attain the Five Eyes and the Six Penetrations. You can experience inconceivable states and transformations which are beyond the understanding of ordinary people. Therefore, I hope everyone will study and recite the Shurangama Sutra and will recite the Shurangama Mantra from memory.
Most scholars say the Shurangama Sutra is false and claim that it was not spoken by the Buddha. They say they have various pieces of evidence and documents to support their claim. This is all because they fear the Shurangama Sutra and have no way to deal with the principles in the Shurangama Sutra. What they fear most in the Shurangama Sutra are the Four Clear Instructions on Purity. The Four Clear Instructions on Purity serve as a demon-spotting mirror. All the demons, goblins, ghosts, and weird creatures are reflected in their true form. Furthermore, the section on the Fifty Skandha-demons exposes the celestial demons and externalists to the bone, enabling people to recognize their demonic appearance. Anyone who can memorize the Shurangama Sutra is a true disciple of the Buddha.
In the declining period of the Buddhadharma, the first Sutra to disappear will be the Shurangama Sutra. Why will it disappear? Because these so-called scholars, professors, and even left-home people all claim it is false. Over time, their theory will become widespread, and people will all believe what they say and take the Shurangama Sutra to be false. Even Buddhist disciples will consider it false, and after a while the Sutra will disappear. That’s how the Sutras become extinct; people no longer study them, so they disappear.
In the Shurangama Sutra, the Four Clear Instructions on Purity—which explain killing, stealing, lust, and lying—are absolutely accurate and definite. That’s why those scholars and professors fear the Four Clear Instructions on Purity. They only want to listen to muddled instructions, and they are terribly afraid of the Clear Instructions. If they admitted that the Shurangama Sutra is true, they would have no ground to stand upon. They would not be able to defend their smoking, drinking, and womanizing, for everyone would know them for what they are. The principles of the Shurangama Sutra are extremely accurate, extremely logical, and as clear as can be. That’s why the entire Shurangama Sutra is a demon-spotting mirror. When this demon-spotting mirror is hung up, the demons, goblins, ghosts, and weird creatures are frightened out of their wits.
ADDENDUM: Questions of Authenticity?
There has been some ongoing controversy among some people in China from early times regarding the authenticity of the sutra the mantra comes from. The first extant reference to the Sutra in China is by the anti-Buddhist Neo-Confucian Chu Hsi, who condemns the Sutra as a forgery. Then, in the thirteen century, Dogen Zenji, the celebrated founder of Soto Zen, mentions that his teacher Ju-ching didn't like it either because it was associated with the Buddhist syncretic movement (san chiao i chih). The first extant references in Chinese Buddhist works to the controversy appear in Ming commentaries.
It may be helpful at this point to give you a brief line-up on both sides of the issue. Favoring the work's authenticity we have the entire extant orthodox Chinese Buddhist tradition, part of the early Japanese Buddhist community, and, among modern scholars, Lo Hsiang-lin and perhaps von Stael-Holstein, who doesn't totally commit himself. Against authenticity we have the other part of the Japanese Buddhist community, including Dogen, and Chu Hsi and some other Neo-Confucians; and among modern scholars we find such names as Mochizuki, Demieville, and Lamotte. Mochizuki, Demieville, and Lamotte all in a row sounds very impressive, but it really boils down to a rather hasty article by Mochizuki, who obviously did not spend a long time studying the Sutra, a lengthy footnote in Le Concile de Lhasa by Demieville, who basically follows Mochizuki, and merely a brief mention by Lamotte, who concurs with Demieville. In other words none of them did any extensive systematic research on the Sutra.
(1) Mochizuki and company attempted to show in two ways that the traditional account of the Sutra's transmission and translation is a phoney coverup for a Chinese apocryphum. First, they put great stock in the fact that there was controversy over the Sutra's authenticity in both China and Japan. Secondly, they point to contradictions in the first two extant catalogue accounts of the Sutra's transmission and translation, which are found in the Hsu-ku-chin-i-ching-t’u-chi (T. 2152) and the K'ai-yuan-shih chiao-lu (T. 2154), both by Chih-sheng, a noted and generally reliable cataloguer who assumed the Shurangama was genuine. Both catalogues were published in the same year, 730. It is true that the accounts show a certain amount of inconsistency that generated subsequent confusion, but a close and careful look at the meager evidence does not really justify the charge of fabrication. Futhermore, it is difficult to see why it would be more likely for an apocryphum with a fabricated "history' to generate conflicting accounts than for a genuine work.
(2) Through examination of the internal evidence, they also attempt to demonstrate that the Sutra was written in China. It is really in the area of internal evidence that the case must finally be decided one way or the other. Their argument covers four main areas: language, doctrinal inconsistencies, borrowing from other works, and what I would like to call "creeping Taoism" and other references to things Chinese.
a. Language. Both sides agree that the language is of a more classical Chinese style than any other major translation. Traditionally, it is ascribed to extensive editorial rewriting and polishing by Fang Yung, who, as mentioned above, was a minister to Wu Tzu-t'ien and who was banished to Canton in 705 where he is said to have participated in the translation process. The beauty of the language creates such an overwhelming first impression that it is often the cause of other issues being overlooked.
b. Doctrinal inconsistencies. Many of the instances which have been pointed out as such are either erroneous or equivocal. Those areas in which the Sutra does not tally with the tradition of other well-established texts are ones in which one would not expect a Chinese sophisticated enough to write such a work to make a mistake, for example, simple inconsistencies in p'an chiao (lit. "judging the teachings"), that is, inconsistencies in terms of the traditional chronology of the Buddha's teaching, or, to cite another area, inconsistencies in well-known stories about the Buddha's chief disciples. Such inconsistencies in simple matters contrast strongly with doctrinal sophistication of the greater part of the Sutra. Of course such so-called inconsistencies are far from unknown in works about which authenticity is not an issue.
c. Borrowing. Mochizuki repeatedly uses the logically inconsistent ploy of claiming that if a particular idea appears in the Shurangama that is also found in another sutra, it proves that the so-called author of the Shurangama borrowed the idea directly from the other work and that the Shurangama is therefore apocryphal. Parallelisms may help to inform us about the doctrinal relationships between works or even about their comparative historical development, but they do not in themselves prove anything about authenticity.
d. "Creeping Taoism" and references to things Chinese. With the exception of one problematic section concerning hsien, a term which in Buddhist texts can stand for rsi or siddha in addition the usual meaning of Taoist "immortal", I have been able to locate ideas which Mochizuki and Demieville have called Taoist in other Buddhist works. The hsien section in the Shurangama is very brief and terse and could easily represent an adaptive Chinese translation of Buddhist tantric ideas. The whole area of the doctrinal relationship between the Taoist nei-tan, or so-called "inner alchemy", and early Buddhist tantra is a murky one, and until we know more about both, the issue probably cannot be resolved adequately.
As to things Chinese, there are various short references to them scattered throughout the text, but, just as well as indicating the work's Chinese origin, they also could be an indication of a translation style of substitution of parallel items, which would fit right in with the highly literary Chinese phraseology.
(3) Let us now turn to the other side and take a brief look at what we can find that might seem to point at the work's Indic origin:
a. Large numbers of Sanskrit words appear in the text, including some not often found in other Chinese translations. Moreover, the transliteration system does not seem to follow that of other works.
b. The Sutra's general doctrinal position, which is tantric/tathagatagarbha, corresponds to what we know about what was going on at Nalanda during the period in question.
c. Large sections, including the greater bulk of the Sutra text, definitely seem to contain Indic materials. Some passages could conceivably have been constructed from texts already translated into Chinese, although given the bulk and complexity of the material, to account for much of the text in that way would mean that the task of authorship would have had to have been an enormous one. About other portions of the work, such as the bodhimanda and mantra, there can be no doubt about their direct Indic origin.
(4) Preliminary analysis of the internal evidence then indicates that the Sutra is probably a compilation of Indic materials that may have had a long literary history. It should be noted though, that for a compilation, which is also how the Sutra is treated by some traditional commentators, the Sutra has an intricate beauty of structure that is not particularly Chinese and which shines through and can clearly be distinguished from the Classical Chinese syntax, on which attention has usually been centered. Thus one of the difficulties with the theory that the Sutra is apocryphal is that it would be difficult to find an author who could plausibly be held accountable for both structure and language and who would also be familiar with the doctrinal intricacies that the Sutra presents. Therefore, it seems likely that the origin of the great bulk of material in the Sutra is Indic, though it is obvious that the text was edited in China. However, a great deal of further, systematic research will be necessary to bring to light the all the details of the text's rather complicated construction (source).
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
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The rest of text translated and copyright by the Buddhist Text Translation Society
The Venerable Master’s Lecture in Kaohsiung, Taiwan,
on November 9-10, 1988
