Salistamba Sutra

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Javierfv1212
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Salistamba Sutra

Post by Javierfv1212 »

Just thought some of you folks would be interested in this, the Salistamba sutra is probably one of the earliest Mahayana texts, so much so that it is barely Mahayana at all. It also shares a lot of similar phrasing with the Pali canon, but also shows a few (conservative) differences from the Pali material - talks about Dharmakaya in a more metaphysical sense for example and uses language that seems to be moving towards a Mahayana view of illusion. It also combines two well known statements in the Pali canon into one:

"Whoever, monks, sees conditioned arising sees Dharma, and whoever sees Dharma sees the Buddha"

N. Ross Reat has done a study/translation on it that's been out for a while now. Anyways it is quite interesting as a point of contact between the Mahayana and the Theravada.
N. Ross Reat notes that this indicates that the early Mahayana tendency was not "self-consciously schismatic" but was simply one of the many attempts to systematize and elaborate on the Buddha's teachings. While some schools chose to incorporate these systematizations into Abhidharma texts, the proto-Mahayana chose to incorporate them into sutras.
Check out the wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salistamba_Sutra

And the actual work by N Ross Reat:
https://www.scribd.com/document/2942108 ... amba-Sutra (the introduction and sutra itself is worth a read)

Sutra translation only:
https://www.scribd.com/document/3586383 ... amba-Sutra
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