Gandavyuha Sutra..

Atul Bhosekar

IDEAL FRIEND AS DEFINED IN THE GANDAVYUHA SUTRA Friendship and qualities of friends have been written in volumes; however true friend is all that is needed to complete the circle of life. A beautiful Zen story is worth mentioning - Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they notice a scorpion that was drowning. One monk immediately scooped it up and set it upon the bank. In the process he was stung. He went back to washing his bowl and again the scorpion fell in. The monk saved the scorpion and was again stung. The other monk asked him, "Friend, why do you continue to save the scorpion when you know its nature is to sting?" "Because," the monk replied, "to save a life is my nature." This draws parallel with the perquisites required to be an ideal friend- a friend who does not care for materialistic wealth, but one who guides his friend to the ideal path. The ideal friend could be called a kalyanmitra in the language of Gandavyuha sutra. There is a difference between a friend and a

kalyanmitra. A friend is any acquaintance who is a neighbor, co-worker, partner or layperson who helps you around in difficult situations.

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

However, in the Buddhist concept, Kalyanmitra is a spiritual friend whose main objective is to motivate, teach and sustain the Dhamma for you. i.e the other person. The kalyanmitra introduces teachings of the Buddha to benefit others. Being compassionate, an ideal friend understands the need of others and adjusts himself accordingly. A good friend in Buddhist concept provides spiritual comfort and sustenance for the Dhamma. Such ideal friend is described in the Gandavyuha sutra -the 31st chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Gandavyuha in Sanskrit means adornment of flowers. The Gandavyuha sutra a Mahayana text composed sometime in the first several centuries A.D., relates the tale of a young laymans quest for enlightenment in ancient India during the time of the Buddha. The narrative begins with an elaborate introduction glorifying the historical Buddha

Shakyamuni as the resplendent Vairocana. After this, the story shifts to an encounter between the bodhisattva Manjushri and Sudhana (Good Wealth)-the son of a merchant-banker from the city of Dhanyakataka. Manjushri encourages the young hero to seek out spiritual guides (good friends) in order to learn how to carry out the course of conduct of a bodhisattva and obtain

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

omniscience. After travelling far and wide across India visiting fifty-two of these guides, Sudhana has his final visionary experience of and merges with the supreme bodhisattva

Samantabhadra (Universal Good). Editions & Translation of Gandavyuha: The earliest datable evidence of the Gandavyuha is in the Chinese catalogues of the Buddhist canon composed in the 6 th, 7th & 8th A.D.(Selected Verses from the Gandavyuha: Text, Critical Apparatus
and Translation, (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1967).

According

to

these

catalogues,

the

monk

Shengjian

first

translated the Gandavyuha into Chinese sometime between 388 and 408 A.D. Compared to the extant Sanskrit text, this is only a partial translation. The first complete Chinese translation of the Gandavyuha soon followed in 420. Entitled the Chapter on the Entrance into the Dharma Realm it was translated by

Buddhabhadra and his team of translators as the final chapter of the immense Avatamsaka sutra. The Khotanese monk

Siksananda and his team translated the Avatamsaka once more into Chinese between 695 and 699. The translation of the Gandavyuha within this work is substantially the same as the

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

earlier one. The fourth and final Chinese translation of the Gandavyuha was completed in 798 entitled The Vow Concerning the Course of Conduct of Samantabhadra and the Entry into the Range of the Inconceivable Liberation, by the Kashmiri monk, Pradnya and is based on an expanded and no longer extant Sanskrit version belonging to the king of Orissa, who sent his personal copy to China as a gift to the Emperor in 795. Pradnyas translation contains passages that are not found in the earlier Chinese translations. Some of these are found in the extant Sanskrit manuscript tradition and some are not found in any other version. This evidence suggests that the surviving Sanskrit recension may have been compiled sometime between the completion of Siksanandas translation (699 A.D) and Pradnyas translation (798 A.D). The earliest datable, complete Sanskrit manuscript of the Gandavyuha is a twelfth-century Nepalese manuscript brought from Nepal by the British civil servant, B. H. Hodgson, and presented to the Royal Asiatic Society, London, in 1835. As Gomez has demonstrated, however, except for a few passages (not relevant to the current discussion), the fifth-century translation by Buddhabhadra contains substantially the same

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

content as Siksanandas

7 th century translation, the surviving

Sanskrit recension, and the Tibetan translation in 9 th century. (E.

Steinkellner, Sudhanas Miraculous Journey in the Temple of Ta Pho: the inscriptional text of the Tibetan Gandavyuhasutra edited with introductory remarks ; Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995)

Sudhanas Ideal Friends: The Gandavyuha sutra details the pilgrimage of the youth Sudhana at the behest of the bodhisattva Manjushri. In this pilgrimage, Sudhana converses with 52 true friend in his quest for enlightenment. The ideal friend in Sudhana's pilgrimage is Maitreya who offers a hearty welcome, is hospitable and does not hold back in sincere praise and encouragement, and reminds Sudhana of the task hes set out to do the practice of supreme enlightenment. He praises him as a son of compassion and love, universally kind, and urges him not to default in practice. At that point Manjushri, having regarded Sudhana, greets him in a friendly manner and expounds the Teaching to him, dealing with all elements of Buddhahood, the cultivation and attainment of all elements of Buddhahood, the infinity of all Buddhas, the

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

successive

appearance

of

all

Buddhas

in

the

world,

the

purification of the congregations surrounding all Buddhas, the achievement of the reality-body of all Buddhas, the magnificent arrays of wisdom and eloquence of all Buddhas, and the purification of the array of spheres of light of all Buddhas, and the equality of all Buddhas. This true friend motivates Sudhana by saying Bravo, ocean of pure virtues, who has come to me; with a mind of vast compassion, you seek supreme enlightenment. (38 th verse) It is good that you think, having set your heart on supreme enlightenment that you should find out the practice of enlightening beings. It is hard to find beings that set their hearts on supreme enlightenment. It is even harder to find beings who, once they have set their minds on enlightenment, seek the practice of enlightening beings; an enlightening being is to attain certainty through true spiritual friends, spiritual benefactors, for the realization of omniscience.(39th verse). Then Sudhana, pleased, enraptured, transported with joy, delighted, happy, and cheerful, laid his head at the feet of Manjushri in respect, circled him hundreds and thousands of times, and looked at him

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

hundreds and thousands of times, with a mind full of love for the spiritual friend, unable to bear not seeing the spiritual friend, with tears streaming down his face as he wept, and left Manjushri. This clearly shows the respect that Sudhana had for his kalyanmitra. To begin the process of obtaining wisdom, Manjushri sends Sudhana to visit the first in a series of spiritual teachers. Beginning with the monk Meghasri, each of Sudhana's "good friends" (kalyanmitras) demonstrate a single aspect of what the spiritual practice of an enlightening being entails and then sends Sudhana onward to visit another good friend who can further expand the young man's storehouse of spiritual

knowledge. During his travels from guru to guru, (kalyanmitras), Sudhana contemplates what he has just learned and then integrates each new-found piece of knowledge into his spiritual practice. The underlying message of the text is that the spiritual practice of enlightening beings is not to be found in any one place or embodied in any single individual. Sudhana says, "Bodhisattvas are navigators showing the way on the ocean of truth;

bodhisattvas are bridges conveying all sentient beings across the

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

sea of mundane life; enlightening beings are a pathway to the holy for all sentient beings." (Cleary, Thomas, tr. The flower
ornament scripture: a translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Boulder: Shambala; 1984-87:1138.)

Gladdened by Sudhana's great, pure, and noble effort, Maitreya praises the young man before the assembly - "He is assembling the ship of teaching, having learned the route of the ocean of knowledge, he is a helmsman on the sea of existence,

leading to the treasure island of peace. This again shows that the Kalyanmitra keeps on boosting and motivating the confidence of his friend. The final master that Sudhana visits is

Samantabhadra Bodhisattva, who teaches him that wisdom only exists for the sake of putting it into practice; that it is only good insofar as it benefits all living beings. According to Douglas Osto , palatial structures and human bodies are commonly used in the scripture as metaphors for the cosmos, with reality divided into a mundane or immanent realm, the various lokadhatus, and a trans-mundane or spiritualized realm, the dharmadhatu. In the same way, society is distinguishable into mundane society and the spiritual society of good friends or

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

kalyanmitras. The sutras concept is that the individual possesses both a physical body (rupakaya) and a transcendent body (dharmakaya). That the immanent and the transcendent levels of reality completely pervade one another is one of the basic ontological positions of the scripture. (Douglas Osto: Power,
Wealth and Women in Indian Mahayana 2008, Buddhism: ISBN The

Gandavyuha-sutra.

London:

Routledge,

978-0-415-

48073-4) Snellgrove summarizes well the general Mahayana

position when he writes Here the advantages of having good friends (kalyanamitra) as opposed to evil ones (papamitra) is certainly urged, and to have a good friend as ones teacher is highly recommended and it is proper that one should trust him, but for all his virtues he is but a means toward final

enlightenment. (David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian

Buddhists & Their Tibetan Successors, 2 volumes, Boston:

Shambhala, 1987, 177).

Thus it can be seen that the Gandavyuha Sutra an important Mahayana text provides the concrete example of a practitioner Sudhana who followed the bodhisattva path from beginning to end, from the first Aspiration to Enlightenment ( bodhicittotpada)

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

through a long period of training under many teachers until the achievement of final realization. When seen in this light, the Sutra itself becomes a guru, a spiritual teacher, and this is one of the qualities that make this particular text unique.

Atul Bhosekar M.A Part-1 References: 1. Selected Verses from the Gandavyuha: Text, Critical Apparatus and Translation, (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1967). 2. E. Steinkellner, Sudhanas Miraculous Journey in the Temple of Ta Pho: the inscriptional text of the Tibetan Gandavyuhasutra edited with introductory remarks ;

Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995 3. Cleary, Thomas, tr. The flower ornament scripture: a translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Boulder: Shambala; 1984-87:1138

Gandavyuha Sutra..Atul Bhosekar

4. Douglas Osto. Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahayana Buddhism: The Gandavyuha-sutra. London: Routledge, 2008, ISBN 978-0-415-48073-4. 5. Luis O. Gmez, The Avatamsaka-Sutra, in Buddhist Spirituality, ed.Takeuchi Yoshinori, Crossroad Publishing Company, New York 1993, 160-170. 6. David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian

Buddhists & Their Tibetan Successors, 2 volumes , Boston: Shambhala, 1987, 177