#263. THE THIRD TURNING OF THE WHEEL.  I don’t know that anyone would ever suggest that the Buddhist sutras, in the original or in English translation, are quick and easy reads.  Their ideas and preachments come from an experience, a culture, and languages profoundly different from our own; they combine the abstractions of a philosophical text with the dryness of a technical manual; they have a repetitive and phantasmagoric quality (the endless catalogues of attendant bodhissatvas, for instance, with those omnisyllabic names) as well as a complex and specialized vocabulary.   Over the last century much progress has been made in the rendering of Buddhist terminology, and some notoriously multivalent terms, dharma, for instance, have simply been incorporated into English.  But the problem doesn’t stop there.  The trick is often not just to find equivalent words in English for the Pali or Sanskrit originals; for śūnyatā, for instance, now usually rendered as “emptiness” or “voidness”.  The trick is to disentangle the very different meanings or emotional impacts such words may have in English.  It was only a few years ago, reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Other Shore, his study of the Heart Sutra, did I feel, after fifty years’ interest in and study of Buddhism, did I feel I had finally detached the term from the dismay that word provokes in most Westerners.  Here is where commentary and explication can stand helpfully next to an original text.

      I’d read two different translations of the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, an important text in the Buddhist Yogācāra school. without getting much out of it—though frankly, I have the brain of a year-old dachshund puppy when it comes to abstract thought.  The text comes to us across a considerable distance: the Sanskrit original is lost; the three existing English translations are from Chinese and Tibetan renderings.  “Its tongue-twisting Sanskrit title lends itself to many different translations, including ‘The Sutra that Explains the Profound Secret,’ ‘Explanation of Mysteries,’ and ‘Sutra Explaining the Thought.’”  So I’ve come away from Reb Anderson’s book The Third Turning of the Wheel: Wisdom of the Samdhinirmocana Sutra (Rodmell Press, 2012) feeling about Roshi Anderson’s work of explication much the way John Keats felt about Chapman’s Homer.  As well as any teacher I’ve encountered he clarifies many of the subjects I’ve found most difficult and vexing in trying to understand the Buddha’s teaching: the connection between meditation and ethical activism, for one important thing, and the notion of the trikāya, the “three bodies” of the Buddha, as well as the threefold nature of phenomena.  Like many such books, the text is from a series of lectures, but it feels written, a continuous argument, rather than like spoken bits; it’s a sustained piece of thinking on a fragmentary text.  It’s thought that the Samdhinirmocana was written in reaction to the earlier Prajñāpāramitā literature, some of the most loftily abstract pieces of the Buddhist canon; Anderson characterizes the Samdhinirmocana as an instruction on reconnecting the abstractions of Buddhist philosophy to the humane and everyday concerns of ethical acts and of teaching.  When he gets to dealing with the paramitas, the perfections of Buddhist practice, he captures the ongoing and renewing work of those concepts as opposed to any static, final state of attainment; it’s more about perfecting than perfection.  This dynamic and active aspect that he finds in the sutra he calls “the third turning of the wheel,”—“turning the wheel” being the traditional term for Buddhist teaching—and it’s what makes the book so unusually attractive and invigorating as well as penetrating and intelligent.  It’s a bit like a masterfully accomplished somersault—he gets your head into the air and then gets your feet back on the ground.  Who’d want one without the other?

The three translations of the Samdhinirmocana are Wisdom of Buddha: The Samdhinirmocana Mahayana Sutra, translated by John Powers (Wisdom, 1995), Buddhist Yoga: A Comprehensive Course, by Thomas Cleary (Shambhala, 1995), and The Scripture on the Explication of Underlying Meaning, translated by John P. Keenan (Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2000).