ABSTRACT
Piecing together what has been said in the past few chapters, what can we conclude about the understanding of Mahāyāna from the core section of the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines? The first thing to notice is that the sutra was primarily about the practice of attenuating or ceasing conceptualization, not just during meditation but all the time. We might think that it would be difficult for Subhūti to talk about the fact that he did not perceive any bodhisattvas if his mind in fact was “mindless,” but as we have seen from the Brahmanimantanikasutta even when the Buddha is identified with the anidassana viññāṇa, he can be heard even when not seen. This sermon, then is not just about stopping the mind, it is about such stopping rendering the bodhisattva invisible to gods and even to death itself. In the second chapter, this practice becomes associated with the term “emptiness” by way of the “emptiness samādhi.” But we should probably not interpret the emptiness intended here to be necessarily understood as a proprietary doctrine of “Buddhism.” It could very well be that it was prestigious as a Buddhist attainment precisely because these ideas were already prestigious as a yogic attainment. Whether one was a Buddhist or a non-Buddhist may have been less important at the time than the degree of yogic attainment one could claim.
