Dharma Pearls Update: 2025 Week 13

MĀ 34, 36, and 190 Released

Greetings, everyone. First, apologies for things going off the rails for a couple weeks. I ran into a bout of writer’s block in the middle of this month and just didn’t accomplish a great deal other than making some corrections and improvements to the website. It was one of those unplanned vacations writers go on from time to time. It’s like the writing part of their brains goes on strike and nothing gets done until it’s gotten the rest it needs.

I did get back to some productive work in the past week, however, releasing three new translations from the Madhyama Āgama and continuing to update the tables of contents for individual Saṃyukta Āgama sections.

I will be working on getting that study of the Root of All Things Sūtra parallels completed in April. I think it was when I decided to tackle that project that my brain went on strike. But I will get back to it.

The other biggish task I will be tackling in April is to give my translations a refresh on SuttaCentral, which will include adding new translations and the updating the existing ones. I also want to include the translations that aren’t in the four major Āgama collections that I have released so far, which haven’t been added yet.

Below is a short discussion of the new translations released this month. Take care!

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This month, I received a draft translation of MĀ 190 The Smaller Emptiness Sūtra (MN 121) from a fellow translator who goes by the pen name Dōgen Sīṁsāpa. With his permission, I treated it as a draft and put it through my usual editing process, but I can’t thank him enough for putting this text in front of me. It’s an important sūtra among many that I have yet to translate for Dharma Pearls. It’s good that we have it released now.

This sūtra is important because it offers evidence of the early development of emptiness as a practice in later forms of Buddhism exemplified by the Prajñāpāramitā texts. Those texts on their face appear to be an exercise in deconstructing philosophical ideas. However, the earliest Prajñāpāramitā texts were apparently inspired by stories about the disciple Subhūti and his meditative practice.

Subhūti was best known for “always delighting in the samādhi of emptiness” (恒樂空定) in the Ekottarika Āgama. He was also known for “living without conflict” (P. araṇavihārī, C. 阿蘭那行) in the Aṅguttara Nikāya and Vajracchedikā, which is sometimes interpreted as being a forest dweller. He is the primary interlocutor in the earliest Prajñāpāramitā texts like the Vajracchedikā and Aṣṭasāhasrikā. In those texts, Subhūti engages in dialogues with the Buddha and other famous disciples like Śāriputra, during which he represents someone who is empty of concepts or perceptions. The tradition of EĀ made the direct connection between the practice of emptiness and Subhūti, which may have been true for the writers of these early Prajñāpāramitā texts, too.

Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, however, didn’t delve much into what exactly the “practice of emptiness” was, beyond detachment from concepts. It was a topic covered in early Buddhist sūtras, so it may have been considered common knowledge. MĀ 190 presents it as a meditative exercise in which the meditator gradually reduces the level of conceptual experience in their mind until it ceases altogether. In this sūtra, the idea of emptiness might be more aptly translated as “emptying” because it refers to the removal of conceptual experience, like a person choosing not to watch the news every day.

The practice of emptiness in MĀ 190 empties the mind of concepts gradually, beginning with concepts about the ordinary, external world and then about the internal world. This is presented using the concepts that dominate the experiences of a meditator as they seclude themselves from human society, practice four meditations, and then move on to the four formless samādhis.

As such, it looks very much like the progression that we see through the eight liberations or the series of nine samādhis that culminate with the cessation of conceptual experience (i.e., P. saññāvedayitanirodha, lit. “cessation of perception and felt experience”). In MĀ 190, there is a focus on the actual perceptions that a meditator experiences as they move through this sequence, beginning with living in a village and the remote wilderness, looking across the landscape around them, perceiving the vast space of the sky, and so forth. Beyond this, however, it fits into the other meditative programs mentioned above that involve a gradual reduction of experience until cessation takes place.

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A massive earthquake struck central Myanmar the day before I released MĀ 36 Earthquake. I didn’t do this on purpose; it just happened to be the next drafted sūtra to be edited. But the appropriateness of the release wasn’t lost on me as I read about the news the next day.

Massive earthquakes have likely been a regular occurrence in south Asia ever since the Indian subcontinent collided with Eurasia starting some 55 million years ago according to current plate tectonics theory. It would have been rare and destructive enough to make humans wonder that age old question that has haunted them about life: “Why?”

MĀ 36 is one of several early Buddhist texts that answer the question with a list of possible reasons. Most of these reasons for earthquakes have a mythical quality to them: A powerful sage or god using their magic, a Buddha being born, or a bodhisattva descending into his mother’s womb, to list a few examples. They also include a geological explanation, albeit one based on a flat earth that consists of elemental layers of earth, water, air, and space. They imagined that a strong wind sometimes rises beneath the layer of water that disturbs the water. The disturbance of the water in turn disturbs the earth above it, causing an earthquake. Though the exact details are not correct, the basic mechanism of waves moving through the earth is accurate. An earthquake is actually a wave that moves outward from a epicenter like waves on the surface of a pond.

Unlike its parallels in AN and EĀ, MĀ 36 only gives three reasons for earthquakes instead of eight. The second half of the sūtra is actually the conversation between Ānanda and the Buddha when Ānanda realizes that the Buddha will be entering parinirvāṇa soon. This gives away the fact that MĀ 36 is an excerpt from the Parinirvāṇa Sūtra.

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The third sūtra that was released this month is MĀ 34 Bakula. It belongs to a group of early Buddhist sūtras that are explicitly set during a time after the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa. MĀ 34 explicitly states this in its introduction, while the commentary to its Pali parallel (MN 124) says that the narrator comments praising Bakula were inserted at the Second Council, which took place about 100 years after the Buddha’s passing away.

The issues dealt with during the Second Council revolved around the Vinaya and the lifestyle of monks who lived in monasteries or villages as opposed to those who lived as hermits. This cultural split lead to conflicts over just how intense the ascetic practice ought to be. In light of this background, we can see sūtras like this one as representing the point of view of the forest-dwelling monks who held themselves to a higher standard of asceticism. It may be that this cultural divide had grown very early in Buddhist history, though the lack of archeological evidence makes it difficult to know exactly when the large monasteries were established and grew in influence in the first century or two.

Generally speaking, this sūtra seems simpler and less expanded than MN 124. It lists fewer examples of Bakula’s ascetic practice and lacks any mention of his interlocutor taking refuge or becoming an arhat. It does have the same conclusion of Bakula entering parinirvāṇa while seated in meditation.