Māyājāla-sūtra: A Canonical Proto-Yogācāra Sūtra?

Abstract

In our study of the development of Buddhist ideas over time, one of the major problems is the absence of the links, connecting different strata, strands or schools of the Buddhist thought. Perhaps, the most extreme example of this is the origin of the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition, a complex teaching that emerged almost “full-grown” in the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra. Our knowledge of the historical antecedents of Yogācāra is very scarce and, what concerns the school Sautrāntika/Dārṣṭāntika, contradictory. The Māyājāla-sūtra very likely reveals important details regarding the very origin of the Yogācāra tradition and is, therefore, a long-sought-for source. Māyājāla-sūtra is a sūtra in the recently recovered Sanskrit Dīrgha-āgama. It stands out from the other Dīrgha-āgama sūtras by its diction and unique compositional and doctrinal features. One of its unique features is that its core terminology, its passages and similes are used extensively in the Sautrāntika-Dārṣṭāntika-Yogācāra sources, especially in the Yogācārabhūmi and the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra. In the article, I summarize the sūtra, overview these features and show that the central message of the sūtra is the so-called darśana-mārga, a path of seeing, which is accompanied by supramundane insight (lokottara-prajñā), which enables a Buddhist adept to directly perceive the true reality and become an ārya, noble person. I argue that this central idea of the sūtra is textually and doctrinally (or philosophically) interwoven with the specifically Yogācāra understanding of the darśana-mārga. Moreover, I show that one of the main ideas of the sūtra, the ambivalence of the sense objects, realized at the darśana-mārga, is likely an antecedent of the specifically Yogācāra teaching on the possibility of the same object to cause opposite types of experience, and, as such, an antecedent of the cornerstone Yogācāra principle of vijñaptimātratā (the teaching that the objects of perception are mere representations of/in the mind). Another important aspect explored in this paper is the intertextuality of the Māyājāla-sūtra, its parallels and the first chapters of the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, which sheds important light on the origin of the latter text. I argue that these parallels to the Yogācāra teachings are, at the very least, their earlier precedents, and, because of that the Māyājāla-sūtra may be called a proto-Yogācāra sūtra.