The Ground Every Precept Stands On.
The Brahmajāla Sūtra — the Brahma Net Sutra — is the classical source of the ten major and forty-eight minor bodhisattva precepts: a single surviving chapter of a vast lost original, transmitted because three hundred people at its own translation asked to keep it as their core text. This page is the entrance for reading it chapter by chapter.
How to read this collection
Each chapter is treated as a study unit, with the classical Chinese and our own fresh English translation set side by side, followed by reading notes drawn from the commentary tradition.
Our interpretive choices follow Elder Master Wei Sung's commentary on the sutra, translated in serialized form by Bhikshuni Heng Tao for Vajra Bodhi Sea — the only commentary on this text we have found freely available online in English in full. Where precise technical terms need checking, we cross-reference the modern scholarly translation by A. Charles Muller and Kenneth K. Tanaka, published in the BDK English Tripiṭaka.
What each essay will include
- Chinese source text beside a fresh English translation.
- Reading notes drawn from Elder Master Wei Sung's commentary.
- Consistent renderings of technical precept terms.
- Cross-references to the BDK Tripiṭaka translation where terminology is contested.
Read by Chapter
Use this as the table of contents for the sutra. The text opens with the title and the meaning of "Mind Ground," then the assembly's own narrative, the forty stages of the bodhisattva path named by Vairocana Buddha, and finally the ten major and forty-eight minor precepts themselves — the portion most communities recite in full.
Chapters 1–13
The whole sutra, start to finish — the Mind Ground's forty stages, the ten major precepts, and all forty-eight minor precepts, closing with the sutra's own final exhortation.
A Text in Two Halves
The upper fascicle sets out the bodhisattva's forty stages of practice; the lower fascicle gives the ten major and forty-eight minor precepts themselves.
The Yogācāra Precepts
Ru-Yi's translation of the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra's own bodhisattva precepts — four root violations and forty-three minor ones — makes a natural companion study to this sutra's ten and forty-eight.