ABSTRACT
In approaching the Mahayana setras we immediately confront presuppositions concerning the nature of the book which these texts put into question. The setra is not one object among others, but rather may be seen as a body of the Buddha, a focus of celebration and worship on the model of relic worship.1 The book is not a free-standing, self-explanatory item, but an entity embedded in religious practice, a product of and a guide to spiritual experience. Those of the modern westernized world expect a book, perhaps, to lead through systematic and clearly defined stages from a beginning through a middle to a conclusion. Reading, we think, is a private, solitary affair, requiring peace, leisure, and silence. But the landscape of the Mahayana setras is quite extraordinary, space and time expand and conflate, connections seem to be missed, we move abruptly from ideas so compressed and arcane as to verge on the meaningless, to page after page of repetition. If we approach books as a consumer, regarding texts as goods to be devoured one after the other from cover to cover, then all too often we find the Mahayana setras boring – about as boring as a board game for which we have only the rules, lacking pieces and the board.
