Introduction

i.1In The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” the Buddha opens his discourse by emphasizing that among the three trainings‍—in discipline, contemplation, and wisdom‍—the training in wisdom is of paramount importance. Perfecting the training in wisdom, he tells his monks, brings the other two trainings to perfection too.

i.2What needs to do done to train in wisdom is the topic of the rest of the sūtra. Essentially, it involves a continuing examination of the futility and folly of one’s emotional reactions to what one perceives, namely objects of the five senses and objects in the mind. The Buddha discusses successively these different kinds of perception. He describes how ordinary sensory and mental perceptions are deluded, and how getting caught up in them causes pain and regret. The passages on each of the six kinds of object comprise almost identical phrasing, using key terms such as the four psychophysical bonds that tie beings to cyclic existence, and the four misconceptions through which they misinterpret the real nature of their experience. Within each of these six similar passages, however, the Buddha adds two unique analogies, one illustrating the sobering shift of mindset from folly to wisdom, and the other depicting examples of perceptual illusion; the analogies are mostly not direct references to the sensory mode being discussed.

i.3The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” belongs to a corpus of texts known as the Mahāsūtras or “Great Discourses,” extracted from the Āgamas of the Sarvāstivādins and the Mūlasarvāstivādins. The Mahāsūtras’ long history has been traced in a magisterial study by Peter Skilling, who concludes that the Mahāsūtra collection, to which ten texts translated into Tibetan in the early ninth century by Jinamitra, Prajñāvarman, and Bandé Yeshé Dé belong, probably originated from a corpus of discourses important to the Kashmiri Mūlasarvāstivādin textual community. The Mahāsūtras, in addition to their practical function as a compact canon that represented the four Āgama collections in shortened form, were also employed as protective texts (rakṣā). Doctrinally, all the works in this corpus draw on an early and fundamental layer of the Buddhist canon, and set out some of the key, essential perspectives that characterize the Buddha’s teaching.

i.4The present sūtra is no exception in that regard, explaining as it does how what causes our suffering and keeps us circling in saṃsāra is our failure to perceive the world as it really is, and our tendency instead to fall prey to the perceptual distortions caused by assessing what our senses tell us in terms of our mistaken belief in a self. These distorted perceptions form the “illusion’s net” to which the title refers, trapping sentient beings in its bonds. It is noteworthy that in the final summary with which the text concludes it is the twelve analogies that are said to constitute the “illusion’s net,” although it is not clear whether the wording here refers to the whole text (i.e. as a title), or to the net itself. In either case, the summary suggests that the analogies were seen as particularly significant features of the work.

i.5More generally, the theme of a “net of illusion” (Skt. māyājāla, and here Tib. sgyu ma’i dra ba), figures widely in the Indian literature of many traditions, not just Buddhist. In the Buddhist canon, there is also a father tantra (pha rgyud) within the Unexcelled category with the Sanskrit title Māyājāla-mahātantrarāja (Tib. rgyud kyi rgyal po sgyu ’phrul dra ba, Toh 466) and an extensive cycle of Nyingma tantras of the Mahāyoga class known collectively as the Māyājāla (Tib. sgyu ’phrul dra ba or drwa ba) that includes the Guhyagarbha tantras (rgyud gsang ba’i snying po, Toh 832–834). However, the content of these tantric works has little in common with that of the Mahāsūtra presented here.

i.6The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” is found in the General Sūtra section of the Degé Kangyur as the first of the group of seven Mahāsūtras that are classified as sūtras, placed immediately following the massive Application of Mindfulness of the Sacred Dharma (Saddharma­smṛtyupasthāna, Toh 287), which marks the beginning of the “Lesser Vehicle” subset of canonical sūtras, as categorized by successive scholars from the time of Chomden Rikpai Raltri (1227–1305) and Butön (1290–1364) onward.

i.7Fragments from The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” have been identified among Sanskrit manuscript fragments belonging to the Sarvāstivādin school recovered from Central Asia. The earliest of these fragments is in “Turkestan Gupta” script, allowing it to be tentatively dated to the fifth or sixth century ᴄᴇ. More recently, a complete Sanskrit version of the text has been identified as part of an eighth-century manuscript of the Dīrghāgama produced in Gilgit, and preliminary studies suggest that it closely aligns with the Tibetan translation. Peter Skilling notes that Asaṅga references or otherwise paraphrases The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” nine times in his Yogācārabhūmi and includes a brief passage from the text in his Śrāvakabhūmi, without naming its source. These references indicate that the version of the text Asaṅga used was close to the recension that was used for the Tibetan translation. The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” is cited in the Tibetan translations of Vasubandhu’s Vyākhyāyukti and Guṇamati’s Vyākhyāyukti­ṭīkā. Despite the fact that the text itself was not translated into Chinese, references to the text occur across a handful of Tibetan and Chinese translations. Along with a number of other factors, these references to The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” suggest that the text was extant in some form no later than the third century ᴄᴇ; however, the text may have existed in a recension approximating its current form as early as the beginning of the Common Era. It appears, however, that with the contraction of Buddhism in India and Central Asia, The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” eventually fell into obscurity and the sole remaining witness to the text preserved in Tibetan was rarely studied in Tibet.

i.8This English translation is based on the Tibetan translation of The Mahāsūtra “Illusion’s Net” preserved in the Degé Kangyur in consultation with the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma), the Stok Palace Kangyur, and Peter Skilling’s comparative edition.