LANKAVATARA SUTRA

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra figured prominently in the development of Chinese, Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism. It is notably an important sūtra in Chinese Chán and its Japanese version, Zen.  Bodhidharma, the founder of Ch'an Buddhism, taught this sutra.  Indeed, Ch'an Buddhism was originally called the Lanka Sect after the Lankavatara sutra.

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra draws upon the concepts and doctrines of Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha.  According to the Yogacara school, called the consciousness-only school, only mind exists, and the objects of its thought are ideas only.  The doctrine of Tathagatagarbha, meanwhile, states that a human being has an inborn potential to become fully enlightened and that it is the purpose of a human being to awaken this innate intelligence.

The most important notion issuing from the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra is, again, that of the primacy of consciousness and the teaching of consciousness as the only reality. The sūtra asserts, in the way of Yogacara, that all the objects of the world, and the names and forms of experience, are merely manifestations of the mind. The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra describes the various tiers of consciousness in the individual, culminating in the "storehouse consciousness," which, as in Tathagatagarbha, is the base of the individual's deepest awareness and his tie to the cosmic.