FINISHED READING - Inside The Flower Garland Sutra by Ben Connelly

The Avatamsaka Sutra, is literally a vast text fifteen hundred pages in length. it is by its very Mahayana nature frequented by baroque levels of spiritual embellishment that can be intensely flowery in their expression. It is a central Buddhist text of Chinese. Japanese and Korean Buddhism. Uisang, a Huayan Buddhist monk from seventh century Korea, created a succinct text called The Seal Of The Huayan One Vehicle Dharma Realm, which is a summation of the main themes of the Avatamsaka. The Huayan approach to Buddhism has attempted to make a working synthesis of early Buddhist teachings with those of the Mahayana, hence why it refers to itself here as the One Vehicle.

Over the centuries it has formed the text into the pictographic form shown below. They took its full name, The Seal Of the Huayan One Vehicle Dharma Realm, and shortened it to The Ocean Seal Chart.This displays the thirty lines of the The Seal in one continuous arrangement, designed to start at the centre with the Chinese character for Dharma, cycling around a twisting maze of lines to end up back at the centre concluding with the character for Buddha. This I find really appealing, as it is both a representational and a spiritual pattern. It gives cogent visual form to a central concept of the Avatamsaka of the completeness and interdependency of all phenomena.

"Dharma Nature is all pervading harmony, without duality."

'While Early Buddhist teachings emphasize the path from suffering to non-suffering, from samsara to nirvana, Mahayana teachings emphasize that samsara and nirvana are inseparable. They are both here now. The Dharma that is the end of suffering is reality. The compassion that the Buddha embodied is never separate from this moment, and in fact is simply seeing that it isn't separate. It's not an object apart from you. It isn't somewhere else, some other time, some other better person. This is it!'

Ben Connelly has kept to a simple rubric here. He takes each of the thirty lines of The Ocean Seal Chart and writes a four or five page explanation, giving personal examples and reflections on it. He writes in a manner which generally eschews complex jargon, and tries to maintain a readily coherent clear style of expression. Given the potential here to bask in the false security of possessing an intellect, Connelly maintains a welcome degree of perspective and humbleness. 

"The minds first aspiration for awakening is true awakening"

This direct quote from the Avatamsaka Sutra directly confronts a common misconception of awakening as a destination rather than an awakening process we are engaged in from the moment Beginners Mind first inspires us. This means none of our many decades of practice are remiss, we are all in a process of ripening and maturing that primary awakening.We may find ourselves trying to drown out our 'first aspirations to awakening' with personal doubts and distractions, but we cannot erase it from our experiential memory altogether.

" An inexhaustible treasure adorns the Dharma realm, a true jeweled palace.

Just sitting in the bed of the Middle Way, the ultimate reality.

This stillness is Buddha."

' In our lives we travel, sufferings and joys come and go, and we can also realise that we have always been right here. We may think that the dream is fake and the waking is real, but both of these matter, for they are our lives.'

There are many, no doubt hard won, useful and practical insights within Connelly's commentary, born from years of his own practice, mistakes and misconceptions, as well as what he has evidently learnt. I found it a perceptive and accessible interpretation of the Huayan philosophical approach to the Avatamsaka Sutra, which does sort of make me want to actually read it, rather occasionally encountering amputated extracts. Mahayana Sutras can be a challenge to read I know, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

All quotations taken from Inside The Flower Garland Sutra by Ben Connelly.
Published by Wisdom Publications.