Śūraṃgamasūtra. (T. Dpa' bar 'gro ba'i mdo; C. Shoulengyan jing; J. Shuryōgongyō; K. Sunǔngǒm kyǒng 首楞嚴經). A Chinese indigenous scripture (see apocrypha), usually known in the West by its reconstructed Sanskrit title
Śūraṃgamasūtra, meaning "Heroic March
Sūtra." Its full title is
Dafoding rulai miyin xiuzheng liaoyi zhu pusa wanxing Shoulengyan jing, in ten rolls. (This indigenous scripture should be distinguished from an early-fifth century Chinese translation of the
Śūraṃgamasamādhsūtra, attributed by Kumārajīva, in two rolls, for which Sanskrit fragments are extant.) According to the account in the Chinese cataloguer Zhisheng's
Xu gujin yijing tuji, the
Śūraṃgamasūtra was brought to China by a śramaṇa named Pāramiti. Because the
Śūraṃgamasūtra had been proclaimed a national treasure, the Indian king had forbidden anyone to take the
sūtra out of the country. In order to transmit this scripture to China, Pāramiti wrote the sūtra out in minute letters on extremely fine silk, then he cut open his arm and hid the small scroll inside his flesh. With the sūtra safely hidden away, Pāramiti set out for China and eventually arrived in Guangdong province. There, he happened to meet the exiled Prime Minister Fangrong, who invited him to reside at the monastery of Zhizhisi, where he translated the sūtra in 705 CE. Apart from Pāramiti's putative connection to the
Śūraṃgamasūtra, however, nothing more is known about him and he has no biography in the Gaoseng zhuan ("Biographies of Eminent Monks"). Zhisheng also has an entry on the
Śūraṃgamasūtra in his
Kaiyuan Shijiao lu, but there are contradictions in these two extant catalogue accounts of the sūtra's transmission and translation. The
Kaiyuan Shijiao lu merely records that the śramaņa Huidi encountered an unnamed Western monk at Guangdong, who had with him a copy of the Sanskrit recension of this sūtra, and Huidi invited him to translate the scripture together. Since the names of this Western monk and his patron Fangrong are not mentioned, the authenticity of the scripture has been called into question. Although Zhisheng assumed the
Śūraṃgamasūtra was a genuine Indian scripture, the fact that no Sanskrit manuscript of the text is known to exist, as well as the inconsistencies in the stories about its transmission to China, have led scholiasts for centuries to questions the scripture's authenticity. There is also internal evidence of the scripture's Chinese provenance, such as the presence of such indigenous Chinese philosophical concepts as yin-yang cosmology and the five elements (wuxing) theory, the stylistic beauty of the literary Chinese in which the text is written, etc. For these and other reasons, the
Śūraṃgamasūtra is now generally recognized to be a Chinese apocryphal composition. The sūtra opens with one of the most celebrated stories in East Asian Buddhist literature: the Buddha's attendant Ānanda’s near seduction by the harlot Mātaṅgī. With Ānanda close to being in flagrante delicto, the Buddha sends the
bodhisattva Mañjuśrī to save him from a pārājika offense, by employing the śūraṃgama dhāraṇī to thwart Mātaṅgī's seductive magic. The Buddha uses the experience to teach to Ānanda and the congregation the śūraṃgamasamādhi, which counters the false views about the aggregates (skandha) and consciousness (vijñāna) and reveals the
tathāgatagarbha that is inherent in all sentient beings. This tathāgatagarbha, or buddha-nature, is made manifest through the śūraṃgamasamādhi, which constitutes the "heroic march" forward toward enlightenment. The
Śūraṃgamasūtra was especially influential in the Chan school during the Song and Ming dynasties, which used the text as the scriptural justification for the school's distinctive teaching that Chan "points directly to the human mind" (zhizhi renxin), so that one may "see the nature and achieve buddhahood" (jianxing chengfo). Several noted figures within the Chan school achieved their own awakenings through the influence of the
Śūraṃgamasūtra, including the Ming-dynasty master Hanshan Deqing (1546–1623), and the sūtra was particularly important in the writings of such Ming-dynasty Chan masters as Yunqi Zhuhong (1535-1615). The leading Chan monk of modern Chinese Buddhism, Xuyun (1840-1959), advocated the practice of the
Śūraṃgamasūtra throughout his life, and it was the only scripture that he ever annotated. As a mark of the sūtra's influence in East Asian Buddhism, the
Śūraṃgamasūtra is one of the few apocryphal scriptures that receives its own mention in another indigenous sūtra: the apocryphal
Foshuo fa miejin jing ("The Sūtra on the Extinction of the Dharma") states that the first sūtra to disappear from the world during the dharma-ending age (mofa) will in fact be the
Śūraṃgamasūtra. The Tibetan translation of this Chinese apocryphon was produced during the Qianlong era (1735-1796) of the Qing dynasty; the scripture was apparently so important in contemporary Chinese Buddhism that it was deemed essential for it to be represented in the Tibetan canon as well. (Source: "*Śūraṃgamasūtra." In
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 873–74. Princeton University Press, 2014.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)
