Illusion Web: Locating the Guhyagarbha Tantra in Buddhist Intellectual History

by Dan Martin

He who knows well the interdependent origination equally knows the Void.
He who knows not the interdependent origination will not comprehend the Void.

The work from which this statement is extracted is an Old Tibetan translation from the Chinese which was not preserved in the Tibetan canon. Nevertheless, the idea that Mahāyāna replaced the interdependent origination (rten-'byung/pratītyasamutpāda) of the Elder Vehicle with their notion of the Voidness (Stong-pa-nyid/Sünyatā) has long been an axiom of Japanese Buddhology. I will not be speaking so much of Voidness, but of its close synonym, "Realm of Dharmas" (Chos-kyi Dbyings/Dharmadhātu) as the Mahäyāna equivalent of interdependent origination. This I will do less on philosophical grounds and more by way of tracing the continuity and development of the literary images of the Web and the Palace which show, perhaps better than any philosophical argument, that the Buddhist thinkers themselves perceived the essential identity of the two conceptions. Thus, while my approach may be primarily literary and my aim broadly hermeneutical, I have done my best to keep the analysis grounded in a sense of historical development.

47 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Daniel Preston Martin, Ph.D. (Tibetan Studies, 1991; M.A., Inner Asian Studies, 1986) is a literary translator for The Institute of Tibetan Classics

Reviews

[Keith]

The last half of this is typeset Tibetan uchen of the sources used in the first half, which is what it says in the title: an analysis of the place of The Guhyagarbha Tantra in Buddhism, starting from the Brahmajālasūtra, through the development of Mahãyāna and particularly the Gaṇḍavyūhasūtra—the final book of the Avataṃsakasūtra, which "the Chinese retitled… 'Entering the Realm of Dharmas'"—and thence situating it within the "nine yanas" system of the Nyingma "old school," as well as within the Nyingma Gyudbum and the Peking and Derge Kanjur collections. Particular attention is paid to the development of the web metaphor across this history.

Insofar as this emphasizes historical development, it did not much enhance my study of the tantra itself. However, a reference to Sūryasiṃhaprabha's commentary—to which I have no other access—clarifies the development and meaning of the 11th–13th bhumis, as well as the tantric Five Perfections (phun-sum-tshogs-pa lnga). A diagram from the collected words of the Gelugpa Klong-rdol Bla-ma (1719–1794) elucidates the esoteric meaning of Evam. And the several lists of Nyingma textual collections provide a wealth of tangentially useful information that I have not seen (or failed to notice) elsewhere.

All in all, quite worthwhile to the right, rare, kind of nerd.