Sūtras and treatises of the Great Vehicle大乘經典
The Mahāyāna — the "Great Vehicle" — is the stream of Buddhism that spread north and east into China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Vietnam. Its scriptures turn on two ideas: the bodhisattva, who vows to awaken for the sake of all beings, and emptiness (śūnyatā), the seeing that sets that vow free. These are the texts recited in the great monasteries of East Asia, the source of Chan and Zen, Pure Land and Huayan.
Each scripture here is presented as a plain-English doorway: what it teaches, why it matters, and how to begin reading it. Some entries lead directly to a full reading guide; others are prepared as study paths so the collection can grow one text, one chapter, and one life-question at a time.
Not doctrine but narrative — the story the teachings all presuppose. Aśvaghoṣa's Sanskrit court epic on the Buddha's life, from birth to the distribution of his relics.
Not the Buddha's life, but his countless lives before it — past-life stories of the bodhisattva working toward buddhahood one act of virtue at a time. A separate Chinese narrative tradition from the Pāli Jātaka collection, sharing its basic premise and a handful of episodes while diverging in most of its actual content.
Three short texts long paired together as a Chinese monastic's very first reading — none more than a page or two, meant to be read before anything longer or more technical. The Forty-Two Chapters is traditionally the first sūtra ever brought to China; the Bequeathed Teaching is the Buddha's own final instruction between the twin śāla trees; the Eight Realizations compresses the whole path into eight short paragraphs meant for daily recitation.
The scriptures of emptiness — the foundation of the whole Mahāyāna.
The middle way between existence and non-existence — one of the oldest Mahāyāna sūtras to teach it directly, Nāgārjuna's root treatise, its short companion in twelve gates, Āryadeva's debate manual that completes the Sanlun three, Candrakīrti's own guide into them, and Nāgārjuna's own extended commentary on the ten bodhisattva grounds.
The systematic account of the whole path, from the five senses to full liberation.
Where Buddha-nature meets the Yogācāra map of mind — the tradition Chan, Tiantai, and Huayan all grew out of.
The formal rules of proof and refutation behind Yogācāra's own arguments — how to build a valid three-part argument, and every way one can go wrong.
The classical Mahāyāna vinaya: the precepts a bodhisattva undertakes, for monastics and householders alike.
Scholastic Vinaya literature — the technical apparatus behind precept-keeping itself, rather than a precept-sūtra on its own.
Zhiyi's own account of dhyāna as a graduated pāramitā — not a single technique, but a path walked step by step.
Ānanda's fall to a sorceress's spell, and the Buddha's long search for exactly where the mind is — read as a bare sūtra, or alongside Master Yuanying's classical commentary.
The vast "Flower Garland" scripture — the source of the Huayan school. The pieces below were each translated from whichever version or excerpt best suits them; a separate, ongoing project is now also translating Śikṣānanda's complete eighty-fascicle edition straight through from its opening fascicle.
The scriptures that shaped the schools of East Asian Buddhism.
Three founding texts of the sudden-awakening tradition: the earliest surviving Chan poem, the only Chinese work ever granted the title "sūtra," and the ecstatic song of a single night's exchange that produced it.
Hell, filial devotion, and the great vow to save every being sit beside a second, very different teaching from the same bodhisattva — a method of divination and repentance opening onto mind-nature itself. A bodhisattva's own school of teaching, distinct from any single sūtra tradition above.
Short texts on the specific debt owed to parents — a rescue story that became the scriptural root of the Ghost Festival, one of the very earliest Buddhist texts translated into Chinese, and a widely loved apocryphal sūtra the canon itself catalogues among the doubtful and dubious.
Twelve vows aimed at ordinary suffering — illness, poverty, injustice, doubt — and a name said to reach even a dying person's consciousness before King Yama.
Mantra, dhāraṇī, and ritual practice — a school distinct from doctrinal exposition. The Great Compassion Dhāraṇī Sūtra belongs to the earlier "miscellaneous esoteric" (雜密) current centered on Avalokiteśvara devotion; the Mahāvairocana and Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha are the twin root scriptures of the later, systematic Tang tradition (唐密) — the Womb and Vajra Realm maṇḍalas later Japanese Shingon teaching holds as one complete and inseparable path. All three are gathered under one heading here, following the conventional grouping of Chinese Buddhism's "eight schools."
The path of faith — the recollection of Amitābha Buddha. All three of the "three Pure Land sūtras" (淨土三經) are complete, along with the fourth and fifth of the "five Pure Land sūtras" (淨土五經) — joined here by the "one treatise" (一論) that completes the "five sūtras and one treatise," and by a further treatise, traditionally attributed to Tiantai Zhiyi, answering ten common objections to the whole practice.
Not sūtra, treatise, or story, but a script for a rite — words meant to be bowed to and chanted aloud rather than only read, walking a practitioner through confession one obstruction at a time.
Not sūtra or treatise — a monk's own running notebook, entry by entry.
