Two months before Arwen died and just before our water disaster a box appeared on my front doorstep. It contained a book that I’d been wanting to read for about twenty five years. Rendered in English by the astonishingly prolific translator Thomas Cleary, the Avatamsaka Sutra, better known as The Flower Ornament Sutra is one of the largest books I now own. This edition is between 1,600 - 1,700 pages in total with the actual translated sutra running 1,463 pages. This massive tome is actually 39 sutras collected together. Some are very short (under 20 pages) the longest is hundreds of pages.
This is the most mind blowing religious text I’ve ever read. Words practically fail me when I attempt to relate so I’ll borrow Robert Thurman for a little bit and let him speak of it here:
“When I recommend the book to a student, I always warn them, “Don’t try to read this text, to get through it, get the message, the point, file it in your memory as saying this or that and so on. You have to swim through it, bathe in it, let your mind’s eye visualize its extraordinary visual explosions and implosions, let the text take you into it, into the realm of its inconceivable liberation itself.
The Flower Ornament is a sacred book, in the Buddhist sense. It is the doorway into the Realm of Reality, the reality witnessed by enlightened beings whose vision is no longer clouded by egocentric addictions. It manifests the sacred through its expressions, communicating from the Buddha’s mind to our minds the vision he first obtained under the tree of enlightenment.”
And further down the page he says this:
“It is said that all other sutras subsequently taught were adaptations of this overwhelming revelation, which was apparently too much for most people, gods, and other mythic beings. The revelation of this sutra is the direct encounter with the completely perfect buddha-verse of enlightened beings. It is initiatory, beyond esoteric and exoleric. It is immediate, beyond sudden and gradual. Its very existence as a text that we can read, that can empower our imagination to enter into the total goodness that embraces everything and always has and always will, is itself an inconceivable liberation.”
[both quotes from: https://tricycle.org/magazine/flower-ornament-scripture/ ]
Thank you Robert for putting it into perspective! All I can say is it is mind blowing. Thomas Cleary wrote a 55 page introduction that is essential to reading the text. He refused to footnote the text because he said the footnotes would interrupt the flow of the text and rob the effect of the rhythm of the endless descriptions and endless experiences that flow like Niagara Falls over the abyss.
This book shows that the phrase "billions and billions" existed before Carl Sagan and indeed in the Flower Ornament Sutra the universe is described in numbers well beyond billions including trillions and quadrillions. That is in terms of atoms, and atomic particles and the numerous emanations of Buddha within every microscopic and sub atomic particle.
I read this book in bites and nibbles. Each snack like meal is a virtual psychedelic feast of the imagination.
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