A Fistful of Sand

Ajari Mui Ananda (Sensei Mui)

The Śūraṅgama Sūtra has the impossibly long title of “The Sūtra on the  Śūraṅgama  Mantra Spoken from above the Crown of the Great Buddha's Head, and on the Hidden Basis of the Tathagata's Myriad Bodhisattva Practices Leading to Their Verification of the Ultimate Truth.” It never quite lives up to the title – but what could? The title alone seems to promise great wisdom or great confusion with its talk about myriad practices, verification and ultimate truth. So where did this jewel of Mahayana come from? No one knows for sure but some intelligent guesses can be made. The Buddha is not on the list of likely suspects. The first person that gave an account of the  Śūraṅgama Sūtra  was Zhi-sheng, a Chinese monk of the  Tang Dynasty . Zhi-sheng said this book was brought back from Guangxi to Luoyang  during the Kaiyuan era. He gave two different accounts of its travels in two different books of his, both of which were published in 730 CE. First he s...

The mental exercise known as meditation is found in all religious systems. Prayer is a form of discursive meditation, and in Hinduism the reciting of slokas and mantras is employed to tranquilize the mind to a state of receptivity. In most of these systems the goal is identified with the particular psychic results that ensue, sometimes very quickly; and the visions that come in the semi-trance state, or the sounds that are heard, are considered to be the end-result of the exercise. This is not the case in the forms of meditation practiced in Buddhism. There is still comparatively little known about the mind, its functions and its powers, and it is difficult for most people to distinguish between self-hypnosis, the development of mediumistic states, and the real process of mental clarification and direct perception which is the object of Buddhist mental concentration. The fact that mystics of every religion have induced on themselves states wherein they see visions and hear voi...