The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra.
The sūtra tradition remembers as passed from Bodhidharma to Huike at the very root of the Chan lineage — "I have the four-fascicle Laṅkāvatāra; use it to open beings' minds." Mahāmati's hundred and eight questions to the Buddha on Mount Malaya open a text that ranges further and moves faster than almost anything else in the Mahāyāna canon: the tathāgatagarbha identified with the storehouse-consciousness, the five dharmas and three own-natures, the refutation of every outsider theory of causation and permanence, the linked chain of dependent origination, and — in its final chapter — one of Buddhist literature's most forceful arguments against eating meat. This collection translates the whole of Guṇabhadra's 443 CE version (T0670) across fifty pages, with reading notes drawn throughout from the Ming-dynasty monks Zongle and Ruqi's line-by-line commentary (T1789).
How to read this collection
Three Chinese translations of this sūtra survive: Guṇabhadra's from 443 CE (T0670, four fascicles), Bodhiruci's from 513 (T0671, ten fascicles), and Śikṣānanda's from 700–704 (T0672, seven fascicles). This collection translates only Guṇabhadra's version — the oldest, the one Bodhidharma is said to have handed to Huike, and the one Chan tradition has always meant when it invokes "the Laṅkāvatāra" without further qualification. Its four fascicles run to roughly 44,400 Chinese characters of root text, read here across fifty pages so that reading notes never crowd out the translation itself.
Each page carries a continuous run of the base text, matched against Ru-Yi's English translation, with reading notes drawn from Zongle and Ruqi's own commentary wherever it addresses the passage directly — quoting their Chinese and translating it in full, never paraphrasing without the source in view. Terminology is matched to this site's existing tathāgatagarbha and Yogācāra pages wherever an established rendering already exists, and recorded in the translation notes below wherever this sūtra required a new one.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, verified character-for-character against the base text for full coverage.
- Reading notes — "after Zongle and Ruqi" wherever their commentary directly addresses the passage.
- CBETA's own textual variants and interlinear annotations preserved exactly as transmitted, never silently corrected.
- Terminology matched to this site's existing tathāgatagarbha-line pages, most closely the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna.
The Sūtra's Four Fascicles
Guṇabhadra's translation divides into four fascicles of roughly equal length. The sūtra has no chapter titles of its own within each fascicle — Mahāmati's questions simply follow one after another, sometimes returning to a topic several times from different angles across many pages.
Read by Part
All fifty parts are translated. Each links to the full bilingual text with reading notes after Zongle and Ruqi.
Fascicle 1
楞伽阿跋多羅寶經卷第一 · Parts 1–11Fascicle 2
楞伽阿跋多羅寶經卷第二 · Parts 12–22Fascicle 3
楞伽阿跋多羅寶經卷第三 · Parts 23–33Fascicle 4
楞伽阿跋多羅寶經卷第四 · Parts 34–50Translation Notes
Recurring terms, kept consistent across all fifty parts. Where a term already has an established rendering elsewhere on this site's tathāgatagarbha and Yogācāra pages, we reuse it; where this sūtra's own vocabulary needed a fresh rendering, we coined one here. See the full translation notes for the complete glossary, and also this site's note on translation method.