Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra

It's always chanted before we receive any of, any of our precepts or take vows.

We chant, "All my ancient twisted karma from beginning, from beginning-less greed, hatred, and delusion, born of body, speech, and mind, I now fully atone." And looking this up, um, this verse that we chant, I, we've-- I realized that it actually came from the Avatamsaka Sutra, and I wanted to read you this part.

This is, um, Samantabhadra telling the young Sudhana about atonement.

He says, "Thus, when empty space is exhausted, when the realms of sentient beings are exhausted, when the karma of sentient beings is exhausted, when the afflictions of sentient beings are exhausted, then my repentance is exhausted.

But in the Zen tradition, um, it's a, a short mindfulness verse.

And, uh, tr- in traditional Zen training when you entered monastic training you would receive a little handbook of gathas, and there are many different, uh, collections, uh, beginning with the chapter Purifying Practice in the Avatamsaka Sutra.

So if you look at the Purifying Practice chapter, there's, uh, a whole list of them, um, and it's like different mindfulness verses associated with different activities.

So it's like, uh, if walking uphill, say this verse, if you're walking downhill, say this verse.

And when he was a student, one of the Dharma inquiries, one of the teachings that really caught his attention was this question about hearing the insentient beings preach the Dharma.

So there's a teaching in the Avatamsaka Sutra, one of the Mahayana sutras, that says the earth expounds Dharma.

The earth expounds Dharma.

Then it says living beings expound it throughout the three times, which is past, present, and future.

That's what the Buddha told us in the Buddhist scriptures.

If you read, uh, Mahayana scriptures, like the Avatamsaka Sutra, like Hua Yan Jing, The Lotus Sutra, Fa Hua Jing, uh, like other pure land sutras, uh, you discover so many infinite Buddhas, infinite worlds, infinite cosmos.

So I'd just like to show you a little bit to help you.

Maybe we can expand our mind a little bit.

I think that's a, a great question and, you know, I, I can't answer it.

But in a way it's reflected in a Buddhist text called the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Flower Garland Sutra.

And, um, you know, Buddha's illumination is so exquisitely described, um, for almost 1,334 pages.

[laughs]

And we're very alone in the self, and this sense of being one with something larger, um, what James called unitive consciousness, is, um, is just a wonderful, um, uh, phenomena.

We ...

You know, one of the images in the Avatamsaka Sutra is this, uh, jewel net of Indra, and in, uh ... at the node of each of the, um, intersections in the net, there's a jewel that reflects all the other jewels.

Mm.

So emptiness is empty, right? Now, of course, you can, you know, blow your mind on trying to really work this out, but it's important to see that emptiness doesn't become another kind of ontology.

The other interesting thing when it comes to Zen is that, um, uh, these ideas would become central to the Huayan or Huayan, excuse me, the Huayan school, which is what the, uh, Avatamsaka Sutra, which I talked about on, uh, Wednesday, is all about.

Um, and, uh, this is where the metaphor of Indra's net comes from.

That you have an infinite net of, of jewels, each one reflecting every other jewel within itself.

I- I've, I've a- also seen many references in reading Mahayana sutras and Mahayana material.

I've seen, like, it's in the Avatamsaka Sutra, it's in the Lotus Sutra, it's all over, these four methods.

They're often, uh, given, uh, maybe briefly and not discussed that much, but they're, they're, they're very common actually in Mahayana literature, yeah.

And, and as you point out, also in pre-Mahayana literature too.

This is episode number 2637.

It was recorded on August 19th, 2026, and it is titled Vimalakirti, the Avatamsaka Sutra, and the Bodhisattva Path.

The speaker for this episode is Adam Frank.

[bell rings] Good evening, everyone.

So the lineage I'm part of, we do koan practice, and that talk was very much a coming to the, the path talk, and then just about how much I love koans and why I think koans are weird and fun.

Um, and so this time is a little bit, this is maybe a further along the path talk because, uh, at some point, um, a number of years ago, Roshi Joan said to me, "You should read some of the early Buddhist stuff," because I'd been reading mostly Zen.

Um, and I'm not sure this is what she meant, but somehow, actually, it was probably through, uh, a talk that Rafe gave, Roshi, uh, Martin gave, I came to the Vimalakirti Sutra, and that led me then to the Avatamsaka Sutra.

And so for the past year and a half, I've been reading these and reflecting on them.

We bow our heads and take refuge in his body as dharma and flesh, the synthesis of precepts, meditation, wisdom, emancipation, and perception.

And here's a quote from the Avatamsaka Sutra, another of our major scriptures.

By cutting off pride and arrogance, he has acquired a glorious body.

Without having features, his body has features.

Difficult teaching to understand.

but good for future contemplation.

So this difficult-to-understand teaching is found throughout the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, which says that all phenomena in the world, all the elements of our lives, are the Buddha teaching us awakening and are in themselves manifesting the Buddha body because it is, in fact, In fact, it is only through the things of the world and the things and events in our lives that we are awakened.

As Dogen says, quote, a Buddha manifests a body and awakens sentient beings means that awakening sentient beings is itself the manifestation of the Buddha body, end quote.