What is the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment?
The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment (Ch. Yüan chüeh ching š¢æSãS [SPE]) is a Buddhist scripture that has its origins within the Ch'an and Hua-yen circles of learning, probably composed in China around the beginning of the eighth century. The SPE was extremely popular and influential within the meditation-oriented Buddhist schools of East Asia: first in Chinese Ch'an, where its influence was considerable, and then later in Korean Sôn, where it grew in popularity to the extent that it was made part of the official monastic curriculum of the main Korean school, the Chogye. The SPE also had some influence in Japan, although it never received the kind of attention from the Zen schools there that it did in China and Korea.
The high degree of influence and popularity of this scripture can be attributed to two main factors. The first is the distinctly East Asian metaphysical dimension of its soteriology, as the SPE contains, in a tightly organized format, focused discussions of the most important theoretical issues concerning the nature of enlightenment that were at the fore of the East Asian Buddhist consciousness at its period of maturation. These are discussed through conceptual frameworks that have their antecedents in East Asian indigenous Buddhist texts such as the Awakening of Mahayana Faith and Vajrasamadhi-sutra, in indigenous schools such as T'ien-t'ai and Hua-yen, as well as in the pre-Buddhist thought-systems of Confucianism and Taoism.
The second is the SPE's highly practical and concise orientation: much of its content consists of direct instruction on matters of meditation and other related religious issues, such as monastic ritual, confession, the means of selecting a proper teacher, how to maintain a proper relationship with such a teacher, and so forth A large portion of the meditation-related explanations are not merely descriptive, but performative, which means that the reading of such passages is in itself a meditative exercise. The SPE does not only explain to its reader the philosophy that grounds the "as-illusion samadhi"--it directly leads him/her through an exercise aimed at its attainment in the course of reading.
The introduction to the SPE offered in the following pages will serve to frame the background of the scripture, in terms of the circumstances of its production, its doctrinal/practical content, and its seminal role in the development of subsequent East Asian, and especially Korean, Buddhist meditative practice. This introduction will be followed by the main segment of the present work: a translation of the sutra along with the full commentary by the influential Chosôn Korean monk Kihwa.