A Practitioner’s Guide to the Diamond Sutra

Ken McLeod: Buddha is setting up these absurd comparisons. You know, uncountably uncountable eons ago, I served eight-four thousand million billion buddhas and served them faithfully. I mean, that’s just completely over the top. And then he says that quantity doesn’t even form a hundredth, a thousandth, or a hundred thousandth of the merit or goodness that comes from reading the sutra. Now, did your mind just stop right there? And you go, well, why? Why is that so much better or more important or whatever? Why? Because it stops your mind. That’s why. And in that moment, that natural knowing, which takes expression as compassion, comes forth by itself. It’s a shortcut to what we actually are: this clear, empty knowing that takes expression as compassion. That’s what the sutra is trying to bring out of us, and that’s why I translated it.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Ken McLeod. For the past forty years, Ken has worked as a teacher and translator of Tibetan texts, practices, and rituals. With his new book, This Unexpected Jewel: Reading the Diamond Sutra, he presents a fresh and accessible translation of the Diamond Sutra, one of the most revered texts in the Buddhist tradition. In my conversation with Ken, we talk about how his first encounter with the Diamond Sutra caused his mind to stop, why he frames his translation as a practitioner’s translation rather than an academic’s, how the Diamond Sutra cuts through our tendency to rely on conceptual understanding and points to a different way of experiencing life, and the transformative power of reading the sutra aloud. Plus, Ken reads a few passages from the Diamond Sutra. So here’s my conversation with Ken McLeod.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with Ken McLeod. Hi, Ken. It’s great to have you back.

Ken McLeod: Thank you very much for having me, James. It’s good to see you.

James Shaheen: We’re here to talk about your new book, This Unexpected Jewel: Reading the Diamond Sutra. So if I’m correct, this is your first translation of a sutra, is that right?

Ken McLeod: I have translated the Heart Sutra, and there’s a little controversy whether the Heart Sutra is a real sutra or not. But this is my first time that I’ve taken a straight sutra, and a highly esteemed or revered sutra at that, and translated it directly from the Tibetan.

James Shaheen: So what led you to translate the Diamond Sutra? You had so many to pick from.

Ken McLeod: Well, that’s a long story. I’ll try to keep it brief. It started with a student of mine, a woman in Los Angeles named Agnes Lin, who’s a retired clinical researcher at UCLA in psychology and has always found the Diamond Sutra perplexing. So sometime around 2011 or so, we started to read the Diamond Sutra in Red Pine’s translation together. We would meet about every month or so depending on our schedules, and we got up to chapter four or five. But around 2012 or so, I was growing increasingly irritated with not having the Tibetan and the technical terms right in front of me. I was guessing at Red Pine’s translation. I think Red Pine has done an extraordinary job and given a very good idea of the depth and scope of the Diamond Sutra. But I wanted to have access to the actual text. So I did procure a copy through a friend of mine from the Tibetan Kanjur. But about the same time my living situation in Los Angeles started to fall apart, and I ended up putting all my stuff in storage and going off for a couple of months to sort things out and figure out what I wanted to do next in my life. That two months turned into a kind of odyssey, I suppose, and I never really returned to Los Angeles and I wrote three books in the interim including Reflections on Silver River and The Magic of Vajrayana. And when I finished all those books, I felt a debt of obligation to Agnes, and I wanted to think how I could fulfill this. I taught a course at the Alembic on the Diamond Sutra in 2023, I think, which was actually very successful. And that just made me want to translate, to put together a translation by practitioners, by a practitioner, for practitioners, because I read several other commentaries and many, many other translations. And it was just very dissatisfied with what I felt was everybody skirting the issue here from a practice point of view. And I really wanted to put that front and center for people. And that’s what I tried to do in this. And the reason I called it This Unexpected Jewel is because in the course of working on the translation and teaching it, I realized that the Diamond Sutra had had as profound an effect on me as any other significant shift in my practice over the last thirty or forty years. So it really was like a jewel that fell out of the sky into my hands.

James Shaheen: Well, you say that this is a practitioner’s translation for practitioners. It’s not a scholarly translation. So you make that distinction. And related to that, you say that when you were reading the sutra, when you first read the third chapter, your mind stopped. So one, tell us about that moment, and two, make the distinction between a practitioner’s translation and, say, a more scholarly translation.

Ken McLeod: Boy, that really opens up a lot. Can I talk for the next three hours?

James Shaheen: Yeah.

Ken McLeod: Okay, let’s do the passage first, because it really was very significant for me. Unlike many of the other translations, Red Pine gets this one right, which I think is one of the reasons why it had such a profound effect on me. And I was working from Red Pine’s. One second. Yes. Here is the abbreviated version of Red Pine’s. When I say abbreviated, there’s a big ellipsis here. “However many beings there are, I shall liberate them all. And though I thus liberate countless beings, not a single being is liberated. Further, although sentient beings beyond measure come all the way to nirvana, no sentient being comes all the way to nirvana.” 

Now, what does the sentence mean, or how is one to understand it? Here we have a device that is used frequently in the Diamond Sutra, which is to juxtapose seemingly contradictory statements: Countless sentient beings are freed in nirvana. Not a single being is freed in nirvana. What is crucial here is that that sentence is part of the bodhisattva vow that is being expressed here. And this is something that many translators miss. So it is saying that I am going to free countless beings beyond measure without ever conceiving of any one of them as a sentient being. So these two seemingly contradictory statements are not contradictory at all. One is saying, in the world of what is apparently true, I’m going to be freeing lots of sentient beings. In the world of what is usually translated as ultimately true, there’s nothing going on in my mind when I do this. And this links up to a lot of other themes. And one of the stories I’ve related to you is this little scenario that I developed in connection with teaching the Diamond Sutra. That is, you’re dreaming, you’re in a park, you know that you were dreaming, and there are people walking around and there are ducks and swans and trees and it’s a lovely summer day. This person, a woman, comes staggering up, and obviously she’s distraught, and you’re sitting on a bench, and she comes up and sits down beside you sobbing, and she says, “They killed my daughter.” Now, you know this is a dream. You know that you’ve never met this woman in your actual life. She’s a complete stranger to you. What do you do, James?

James Shaheen: I express empathy or sympathy.

Ken McLeod: Yeah. And this is what I found. Whenever I put this scenario in front of people, that’s what they say. And I would say, okay, but you know it’s a dream. Why do you do that?

James Shaheen: Because I moved to do that.

Ken McLeod: Yeah. That’s the response I get over and over again, which is you just do it. And I realized that this little scenario brings out what Buddhism is really talking about, or at least Mahayana Buddhism, this immediate compassionate response to the presence of pain and suffering. And there’s no thinking behind that. As you just said, you just do it. And that is why that sentence floored me and just stopped my mind because it says in this strange grammatical way, it just brings out the juxtaposition of the opposite stops the mind. And then you realize how incredibly rich this is. And that there’s this possibility of relating to life from a mind that isn’t caught up in concept or with a knowing that doesn’t depend on conceptual knowing. And that’s what’s being expressed in that.

James Shaheen: So how would a practitioner’s translation differ, say, from an academic translation, if this is what you’re trying to convey?

Ken McLeod: Well, I’ve looked at several academic translations, and I don’t have them here in front of me, but when you talk about nirvana as extinction, which is an accepted academic translation of nirvana, that doesn’t give the flavor of nirvana at all. When you don’t understand that those two sentences together are an expression of the two aspects of bodhicitta, then the whole point of that sentence is missed in the translation, and I can give many, many other examples.

James Shaheen: Well, why don’t you just briefly tell us what bodhicitta is for those listeners who don’t know?

Ken McLeod: Bodhicitta is a Sanskrit word. It’s made of two words, bodhi, which is usually translated as awakening, and citta, which is mind or intention. So probably the best English translation is “awakening mind,” and something like that is what most people use now. As my teacher used to say, what is bodhicitta? It is the union of compassion and emptiness, which is to say that we enter the mystery that we do not know what this experience of life is. And our fundamental response is compassion.

James Shaheen: So is that dream scenario an expression of the union of emptiness and compassion?

Ken McLeod: Well, by setting up the scenario the way that I did with you just now, what comes out of that is an instance of bodhicitta. That’s how you responded.

James Shaheen: Right. Ken, you describe a sutra as a record of a meeting in which a student’s mind and a teacher’s mind come together. So can you tell us about that I would say somewhat unconventional definition?

Ken McLeod: Oh, I don’t think it’s unconventional. That is the standard definition.

James Shaheen: Okay. Could you explain?

Ken McLeod: Well, the word sutra comes from the same root as the word suture in English. And what is a suture? You’re bringing the skin together to heal a wound, right? You’re sewing it together. So a sutra is where the mind of the teacher and the mind of the student join in a third space in which both have to leave behind their habitual patterns and meet each other. And it’s that third space in which real learning takes place.

The student asks a question which presents his or her own understanding, or where they’re stuck in their practice or what they’ve understood or whatever. And since this has to do with spiritual practice, there’s absolutely no point in trying to fool the teacher or anything like that. It’s an honest inquiry, and says, “Here’s where I am, here’s what I understand.” The student has to step nakedly into this open space. The teacher has to do likewise. The teacher has years of experience and maybe an incredible amount of knowledge from study and reading, but here’s a live person in front of them and they have to meet that person. Now, what typically happens is that the teacher draws on everything he or she has learned and their experience of the immediate experience of the student in front of them and presents what the teacher sees or feels is going to be most helpful to the student, and the student receives it. That’s the sutra.

James Shaheen: Okay, so turning to the sutra itself, you say that the name Diamond Sutra came about as an accident. So what’s the sutra called in Sanskrit and Tibetan, and how did it get the erroneous name of Diamond Sutra?

Ken McLeod: Well, the actual name of the sutra is the Mahayana Sutra Called the Noble Perfection of Wisdom: The Vajra Cutter. Now, this was first translated into English, I think, in the late 19th century, or it was first translated in German and from there into English. And the translator at that point chose to use the word diamond because nobody in Europe knew what a vajra was for a start at that point, and a vajra was often likened to a diamond because a diamond has the property of being able to cut anything without being harmed itself because it’s the one of the hardest substances. So that just became how it came to be how it’s known. The actual name of the sutra is the Mahayana Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom, and then subtitle, The Vajra Cutter. And there’s a whole myth behind what a vajra is and why it’s so powerful, et cetera, et cetera. But somehow that’s what’s caught on in English. I can’t speak for other European languages. I don’t know.

James Shaheen: You know, Ken, it occurs to me that some people may not know what a vajra is.

Ken McLeod: Well, there’s a whole myth there. As I said, vajra is a weapon. It’s like Zeus’s thunderbolt. Actually, Zeus’s thunderbolt can be regarded as a different manifestation of a vajra. It’s the thunderbolt of Indra. And Indra at one point was an Indian god. At one point, he was defeated by a very vicious titan or demigod who had a very powerful, magical spell to protect him. And Indra was unable to defeat him by himself. He called upon all the other gods to help him. And even with the combined might of all the other gods, they could not defeat the titan. And they consulted an oracle who said that the only way to defeat the titan is to forge a weapon from the bones of a person who has been virtuous, a rishi or a seer, for seven generations, seven lifetimes. And they found such an individual and told them of their predicament and asked him to give up his life so they could make a weapon from the bones. The seer agreed, and the rest is history.

James Shaheen: Well, speaking of history, let’s talk about the history of the sutra. It is the very first book known to have been printed, is that right?

Ken McLeod: That’s what I’m told, that’s what all the sources say. It was printed in the 9th century because that’s when printing was beginning to develop in China. And because it was the first print sutra or to be printed, or the first book that we can actually date the printing from, and it wasn’t done in a printing press, it was done from xylographs or woodblocks by hand. They could produce arbitrary numbers of it, and that’s one of the reasons why it just spread all through China and became so central to China and the very backbone of the Chan tradition, and by extension of Zen in Japan and Korea and Vietnam. But it also spread all through China and into Tibet because copies were available. Before then, everything was handwritten, so there were very few copies.

James Shaheen: So in the case of Tibet, it expressed itself through its influence on the development of chöd, or severance. So how did it inspire the development of chöd, the Tibetan practice of severance?

Ken McLeod: Sarah Harding, who translates chöd as severance, she’s a good friend of mine. and she says there’s actually nothing in Machig. Machig is the 12th-century Tibetan woman and mystic who developed the practice of chöd, which the common translation of Cho is to cut. That’s the verb: to cut. And the full name is cut ground. You might say it’s the clear cutting of the forest of thinking and thoughts. That’s what chöd means, the wholly clear cutting of thoughts and confusion. 

Going back to your question, Pawo Rinpoche came to visit us on retreat, and we asked him this question. He said the outer practice is chöd, or cutting severance, the inner practice is taking and sending, and the secret practice is mahamudra. So here you have, in short, you act out offering your body and all the wealth of the world and everything to gods and demons. And it’s an imagined expression of this offering, and it was very popular in Tibet because it was often viewed as a way of taming demons, even though that’s an incorrect interpretation. Taking and sending makes it a more interior practice in that you imagine taking on the suffering of others and giving away your own good fortune and happiness. It’s a very powerful way of cutting through—there’s the word cutting again—the attachment to the whole tendency to cherish oneself above all others, or self-interest, I should say. The point of acting out this offering to gods and demons is to cut through hope and fear. And then the secret practice is mahamudra, which is cutting through the entanglement of what we often get or we always fall into when the mind starts to move. As soon as we sense something or think something or feel something, we make something of that. And that’s how you fall into confusion in mahamudra. You cut through that so you have cutting at these three levels.

James Shaheen: So you say that the sutra cuts through our tendency to rely on conceptual understanding also and points to a different way of experiencing life, and you suggest that reading the sutra aloud can be a particularly powerful way to get at this. And on your suggestion, I did that several times. So can you talk about this practice? What are some of the benefits of standing, which you advise, if you can, and reading the sutra aloud, which takes, just so our listeners know, about forty minutes? I timed it and you were right, it’s forty minutes.

Ken McLeod: But you can read it more slowly, or you can read a little faster, but it’s going to be between thirty-five and forty-five minutes. Machig, again, the founder of chöd, in a way that was unusual for a Tibetan woman at that time, learned how to read, and she was a nun. And she supported herself by reading sutras in the libraries of the wealthy, the aristocracy, which they regarded as a form of merit. So she became completely conversant with all the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, which is what led her to develop the practice of chöd.

Reading sutras aloud is something that has been practiced in the Asian traditions, and almost certainly in the Indian traditions, from a time without beginning. And there were many important reasons for it. One, because books were so scarce, when you read a sutra aloud over and over again, you memorized it and then you had the sutra. It was part of you. You didn’t actually need a copy. And I found the same thing because when I was in the three-year retreat, we chanted prayers morning, noon, and night. And I found that in the course of that I just ended up having these prayers in my memory. And they became very useful when I started to teach, because I didn’t have to look anything up in the book, just, oh yes, that’s right, there’s a passage from there. Off we go. And so that’s one very immediate benefit.

But more importantly, particularly when you stand up, when you read it aloud, the body feels the reverberation of the sutra. And so it gets you out of your head and you engage the sound and it already puts you in a frame of mind where that is more open, you can say. And then as you’re reading the sutra, you have these passages, like the one we read at the beginning of this conversation. One of my favorite passages, and you’re probably going to get to this anyway, is section nine: “Subhuti, what do you think? Do stream enterers think, ‘I’ve attained the result stream-enterer’?” “No, indeed, Most Honored.” “What is the point here?” “The point, Most Honored, is that they have not entered anything.”

Okay. What’s going on? So you have these contradictions, or seeming contradictions, coming up again and again. And because you’re engaged in reading and engaged with the sound, the conceptual mind is not operating as powerfully as it usually does in the course of our lives.

So that just comes in. And when I was teaching the Diamond Sutra two or three years ago, I found people reported, because I asked them to do the same practice during the six weeks of the course, they found themselves, you know, “I find myself frustrated and disoriented, but when I finish, my mind is just clearer.” And some of them have continued reading the sutra on a regular basis ever since they did that course for that reason. And what I find is that as you read it out loud, on a regular basis, you’re disrupting the ordinary, habitual operation of the conceptual mind. And it creates possibilities for other things to enter and to open.

James Shaheen: You know, I have a friend who’s a scholar who said, “I find the Diamond Sutra incomprehensible.” So it’s interesting that when we read something, naturally, we want to know what it means conceptually. So you treat meaning or the meaning of the sutra as a distraction. Could you say more about that?

Ken McLeod: I’d like to reword that slightly. The meaning of the sutra lies in what happens to you and in you when you read it.

James Shaheen: Well, not a conceptual understanding of the words. Is this correct?

Ken McLeod: The sutra brings out, the wording and the grammar of the sutra bring out a nonconceptual understanding in us.

James Shaheen: Right. So you’re claiming that it breaks through conceptual thought when you do this practice of reading the sutra aloud without grasping at meaning.

Ken McLeod: Yeah, I’m not the first one to claim that. I mean, in the Chinese tradition, for instance, the sutra is regarded as the three bodies of Buddha for exactly this reason.

James Shaheen: Okay, I’m not challenging this, but you’re saying the possibility of breaking through conceptual mind exists in the practice of standing and reading the sutra without trying to infer meaning or construct meaning, allowing it to just sort of wash through you.

Ken McLeod: Well, let’s be a little careful here. That is why I translated the sutra the way that I did, because I feel that is what the sutra is meant to do. The way that it is typically translated by academics and others, they are going for linguistic accuracy primarily or grammatical accuracy. But in doing so, the English that they come up with isn’t clear and direct. It doesn’t go in. I very deliberately translated this in a way that engages the conceptual mind as little as possible.

A friend of mine once said, if you’re writing well, the reader isn’t thinking. The meaning is just going in. And that’s something that I’ve aimed for in all of my writing, but particularly with regard to this, because that, I think, is the key element. If you ask any Zen person, “What is the Diamond Sutra about?,” they’ll almost always say emptiness. The word emptiness doesn’t appear in the sutra once. So it’s about you. The experience of emptiness or the openness is what is being elicited by the sutra. That’s why it’s about emptiness.

James Shaheen: Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about your own understanding or ideas about translation. And you base it on a few principles. They include readability, clarity, integrity, and tone. So first, what do you mean by readability here?

Ken McLeod: It should be in English as we use it today, as much as possible. English words, not relying on imported Sanskrit or other foreign languages. I mean, you’ll come across people who will translate a sentence as “Bodhicitta is the union of karuna and shunyata.” This, to me, is not a translation.

James Shaheen: You kept it conversational in style and pretty straightforward. That was intentional, no?

Ken McLeod: In this translation?

James Shaheen: Yeah.

Ken McLeod: Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it is conversational, the way that we might sound if we were speaking, because the sutras are question and answer. The student asks a question, the teacher responds, or the teacher asks a question, the student responds. That’s what’s going on in the sutra. That’s how their minds meet, this back-and-forth. So it is actually a conversation now, and I went even further than in the Tibetan and in the Sanskrit, because they don’t have any punctuation as we understand punctuation. There are all of these phrases, “Buddha said to Subhuti,” and then the phrases, “Thus Buddha said to Subhuti,” “Then Subhuti replied to Buddha,” and then there’s a phrase. There’s all of this wording, which is for punctuation purposes. I just cut all of that out and use quotation marks and paragraphing, et cetera, et cetera. So who’s saying what is very clear in the English, and now it really reads as a conversation.

James Shaheen: Okay. The second principle you cite is clarity. So how did this principle guide your translation? I think you pointed to that when you said karuna and shunyata.

Ken McLeod: Well that was probably an unfair example on my side—

James Shaheen: A little poke.

Ken McLeod: A little poke. Yes. But I did refer to this earlier when I said don’t make the reader think. That is, it should be so clear that the meaning slips into the reader before the conceptual mind is engaged. That’s what I aim for.

James Shaheen: Okay. And you aim also to preserve the integrity, another principle, of the sutra by letting it stand on its own two feet. So how does this influence your approach?

Ken McLeod: Well, I don’t resort to any ideas outside of the cultural framework in which the sutra was originally taught or developed, I suppose, written to justify things that the sutra says. I don’t appeal to other sources from Western philosophers or anything like that, and in particular, I don’t resort to their vocabulary or such to make it more acceptable. This is to the best of my ability. When I read the sutra in Tibetan to the best of my ability, this is how I would say it in English. I’m not making any apologies or justifications or anything like that. This is what the sutra says. You have to deal with it yourself in the same way that I have to deal with what the sutra says when I read it in Tibetan.

James Shaheen: Well, I’m going to get to the last principle that you cite before I go back and ask another question. The last principle is the biggest challenge: getting the right tone. So how did you work to convey the reverence and wonder of the sutra in conversational English?

Ken McLeod: When I first started translating, a friend of mine pointed out something about English, which has always stayed with me. He says, when you read a sentence aloud, you can immediately hear whether it is English or not. Many, many years later, I discovered or learned that this was how the King James Bible was translated. That is, there was a group of about fifty scholars. They were divided up in teams. They had portions. But when a passage was being okayed for actual inclusion as the translation of the Bible, the person who had translated that section got up and read it aloud. And all of the other people had all the previous translations in front of them and any other notes that they wanted, but they did not have a copy of the English translation under consideration. They could only listen to it. And so these people in this room heard this translation being read aloud. And if it didn’t sound right, it went back to the committee to be redrafted. And this is what I’ve tried to do, not only in all my translation work, but also in my writing. That is, it sounds like English. You have to pay attention to English grammar, English cadence, and vocabulary. You don’t want to make words stand out and use strange words like, well, the example I gave before, using the word extinction for nirvana, which just doesn’t work at all. Even if it is etymologically correct or one of the actual meanings of the term in Sanskrit, in Tibetans, the term for nirvana is nya ngen lé dé pa. It is to go beyond struggle or go beyond suffering. There’s nothing about extinction in it.

James Shaheen: Okay. You know, I just want to go back to clarity for a moment because you talked about it slipping in without the reader thinking, and it sounds a little bit like the suspension of critical thought. I mean, it almost operates the way the way propaganda works. You know, it slips in there without critical thoughts. So I guess you have to make sure that what it is you’re translating and providing is good for you or is nourishing, or is liberating, perhaps.

Ken McLeod: Well, that’s a very good point, James. You’re quite right. People who write commercials, people who write propaganda, they want their message to go into you without engaging any critical thinking, because it’s just going to be rejected. And I’m very clear about my intention here. This book is not for everybody. This book is for people who are already committed to a practice. I’m not interested in trying to convert people. I’m trying to help people who are already deeply committed to a spiritual practice and want translations and instructions, which help them further their understanding and engagement.

James Shaheen: I don’t mind being propagandized by the sutras. I’m just saying it’s a little unsettling to hear, it slips in without—

Ken McLeod: I’ve other sutras for you if you like propaganda.

James Shaheen: Okay. So, let’s go back to tone. In trying to convey tone you made some decisions that differ from many translations, and unlike some translations that keep the Sanskrit terms intact, you opted to translate most of them into plain English, like dharma as experience, cause as seed or genesis, and visualization is another word that you have taken issue with. So could you just take those three words, dharma as experience, cause as seed, and your gripe with, say, visualization.

Ken McLeod: Yeah. Okay. Let’s take the word dharma. Dharma has, depending on who you talk to, eight, ten, or eighteen different meetings in Sanskrit. It can mean law, duty, religion, instruction. And it can also mean an element of reality, or that’s not English I would use, but let’s just say that. And when it means that, it has usually been translated as phenomenon, or, in the plural, phenomena. This is derived more or less directly from Kant, where you have the noumenon and the phenomenon, which is actually a reformulation of Cartesian dualism, a perceiving self in here perceiving a world out there. So when you use the word phenomenon, you have imported Cartesian dualism, which actually has no place in Buddhism at all, because that is not the basis of Buddhist epistemology or Buddhist phenomenology for that matter. And so you have to ask, well, what is a dharma? And if you look in the abhidharma, an abhidharma is an element of experience. It can be a sensation, it can be a feeling, it can be a thought, it can be anything you actually experience. That’s a dharma. And what is the world we experience composed of? It’s composed of all of these individual elements that give rise to the experience of everything that we have now. And I’m sitting here in my room, I’ve got art on the wall, I’ve got a white ceiling, floor, window, et cetera. And then there’s the sound, taste, touch, all of these. So I found it’s very helpful to translate it as experience. Now, there’s some problems with that and there are a lot of people who will take issue with it, but I just want to do a little thought experiment with you here. If I say to you, “All dharmas are shunyata,” what happens in you when I say that?

James Shaheen: Well, there’s a distance between me and those words, because they’re not native English words.

Ken McLeod: Okay. So let’s change it a little bit then. Let’s say all phenomena are empty.

James Shaheen: Phenomena’s kind of a clunky word, but—

Ken McLeod: It is a clunky word. It’s got three or four syllables in it. Most people, when they hear a phenomenon, they think of something out there in some sense. Are you with me?

James Shaheen: Yeah.

Ken McLeod: Okay. Now let me say this. All experience is empty.

James Shaheen: Yeah. Well, that brings it right to the individual having the experience and—

Ken McLeod: Yeah. And what I found several times I’ve put that in, people say, “Oh my god, now I understand what Buddhism is talking about. They’re not talking about things out there, they’re talking about what I actually experience.”

James Shaheen: Yeah, your second part of the refuge chant throws in the word experience and I found that very compelling. Knowing that experience and awareness are not two, I take refuge in the dharma. So there’s that word experience.

Ken McLeod: I think for the benefit of the listeners, you might want to give them the whole refuge prayer, because you’re only—

James Shaheen: Let me see if I remember it exactly. Knowing that there is nothing outside or inside to free me, I take refuge in the Buddha. Knowing that experience and awareness are not two, I take refuge in the dharma. Knowing there is nothing to grasp or oppose, I take refuge in the sangha. Is that right?

Ken McLeod: Yeah. You got it.

James Shaheen: Ah, very good. Okay. I have to pat myself on the back. We still have hetu or cause as seed or genesis and visualization.

Ken McLeod: Well, one of the things I’ve come to appreciate, and this is what really set me on this track, is that the metaphors in Buddhism, the underlying metaphors are all agricultural. They’re about things growing. They’re not about manufacturing. And my teacher always explained karma in reference to a tree growing. So this word in Sanskrit is hetu, and Tibetan it’s rgyu, almost everybody translates as cause. But when you look at how it is actually used in Sanskrit and in Tibetan, it is much closer to the idea of seed than cause. And if you take an acorn, for instance, we do not say in English that an acorn is the cause of an oak tree. We say that an acorn is the seed of an oak tree, and we can also say that it’s the genesis of an oak tree. Now genesis is this Greek word for the beginning. But it carries the idea of something beginning and growing. And that’s why I often use genesis, and I will sometimes use seed to translate this because if I don’t use one of those two words, if I were to use the word cause people get a completely misleading idea of what karma means, because the word for karma in Tibetan has three words las rgyu bras. Las is the word for an action. Rgyu is the word for seed or genesis, and bras is the word for fruit or result. And the idea is that each action is the seed of something that grows in us, and we experience it sometime later. It’s not that karma causes this, it’s something that’s growing in us.

James Shaheen: Okay, so let’s get to visualization. I’ve heard you gripe about that word before. So why does visualization drive you crazy?

Ken McLeod: Because it is completely and utterly wrong. Now, I’m not the only person who says this. Almost any translator I talk to, any colleague, says the same thing, anybody who’s looked into this. It has become standard usage of it. And I used it myself until I started really thinking about it, particularly in the context of my retreat practice, because I find visualization very difficult. I couldn’t visualize these things. It is in some way related to the word for sight in Tibetan, but it’s pretty tenuous. It’s not a very direct relationship. I’ve asked Sanskrit scholars, what does the Sanskrit mean? And they go, that’s a very difficult word in Sanskrit. And I’ve talked to many other translators, and they all agree that visualization is not the right word. So I thought about this very carefully, particularly when I was writing The Magic of Vajrayana because I didn’t want to perpetuate this misleading translation any further. And the best that I could come up with is it means to hold something with intention. A lot of people will translate the Sanskrit word as support, but that doesn’t quite get the meaning either. But it’s to hold something with intention. And I don’t know how much practice experience you have with deity practice, but a lot of people, you know, most people who practice Tibetan Buddhism end up doing a deity practice at some point or other. And so rather than visualize yourself as Chenrezig or Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of awakened compassion, what about holding with intention the idea that I am Chenrezig. Now, that just becomes so much more accessible to people. And it speaks to them and there’s something they can do. And you sit down, and this is how I worked with students. You sit down and you feel I am the embodiment of awakened compassion, and your relationship with your body changes, how you speak changes, how you think changes immediately. And if you keep that going, it’s going to make huge differences in how you live and how you relate to the world.

James Shaheen: You know, we’ve talked about translation here, and you also talk about the importance of reading the sutras aloud. As I told you, I actually did it myself. I think it’s a great thing to do. So I wonder if you’d be willing to read a few passages from the Diamond Sutra aloud, and since it had such an impact when you encountered it, could you read the third chapter? It starts on page 27, and it’s the Buddhist reply to Subhuti’s question of how to live.

Ken McLeod: Yes, I would be delighted to. Subhuti’s question is, “Most Honored, how should those who have entered the way of the bodhisattva live, how should they practice, and how should they hold their minds?” Now, there are differences among the different versions of the original sutra whether there are two questions in there are three. In the Tibetan, there are three. And they’re translated in different ways, and sometimes they’re how do I live, how do I practice, et cetera. But that’s the essential question: “Most Honored, how should those who have entered the way of the bodhisattva live, how should they practice, and how should they hold their minds?”

“The Most Honored said to Subhuti, ‘To your question, one who has entered the way of the bodhisattva should set their intention by thinking: “However many sentient beings are counted as sentient beings, whether they are born from eggs, born from wombs, born from heat and moisture, or born miraculously, whether they have bodies or do not have bodies, whether they conceptualize, do not conceptualize, or neither conceptualize nor do not conceptualize—however many sentient beings in the realm of sentient beings are counted as sentient beings,— shall bring them all to nirvana, to the vastness of the nirvana in which no aggregate remains. Further, although sentient beings beyond measure come all the way to nirvana, no sentient being comes all the way to nirvana.”

‘Why do I say that? Because, Subhuti, if a bodhisattva engages the concept of sentient being, they should not be called a bodhisattva. Why do I say that? Subhuti, anyone who engages the concept of sentient being, the concept of living being, or the concept of individual being should not be called a bodhisattva.’ ” He’s beating around the bush, right?

James Shaheen: Right. So another thread in the sutra is the notion of uncountability or the impossibility of comparison, and there are a series of comparisons and analogies where eventually the Buddha says that trying to describe the amount of goodness that reading the sutra would generate would leave people confused and trembling. So would you be willing to read chapter 16 so listeners can hear this dynamic for themselves?

Ken McLeod: And I’m very glad you’re asking about that passage because that is one that I found being translated somewhat misleadingly. Here we are. Okay.

“Subhuti, through my higher perception, uncountably uncountable eons ago—long, long before Dipankara, Full and Complete Buddha, Thusness, and Saint—I served eighty-four hundred thousand million billion buddhas and served them faithfully. Subhuti, of the quantity of goodness from my serving these buddhas and serving them faithfully and the quantity of someone who, in the last five hundred years of the end of times, takes up the sutra, cherishes it, reads it, and takes it to heart, the former does not remotely approach a hundredth, a thousandth, or a hundred-thousandth of the latter. The latter does not permit any measure based on counting, division, tally, analogy, comparison, or genesis.

“Subhuti, if I were to describe what a great quantity of goodness sons or daughters of noble families would earn at that time, the sheer quantity of goodness of those sons or daughters of noble families, it would leave sentient beings confused and trembling. Subhuti, know that because how these teachings are expressed is inconceivable, its karmic ripening is also inconceivable.”

James Shaheen: So could you say something about that? I like the translation of Tathagata, but people will have to listen to our conversation in August for me to go into that. So for now, just talk about what you just read.

Ken McLeod: Well, Buddha is setting up these absurd comparisons. You know, uncountably uncountable eons ago, I served eighty-four million billion buddhas and served them faithfully. I mean, that’s just almost—it’s completely over the top. And you probably have this in the back of your mind, what I’m translating this word, goodness, most people would translate it as merit. But how much goodness would you generate through the service of that number of Buddhas? I mean, it’s an incredible amount. And then he says that quantity doesn’t even form a hundredth, a thousandth, or a hundred thousandth of the merit or goodness that comes from reading the sutra. Now did your mind just stop right there?

James Shaheen: I think it does when I think of those numbers.

Ken McLeod: Yeah. Well, that’s the first thing. You have these huge comparisons, and you read one verse—

James Shaheen: And then what actually generates goodness.

Ken McLeod: Yeah, well, the goodness that generated from reading the sutra. And you go, well, why? Why is that so much better or more important, or whatever? Why? Because it stops your mind. That’s why. And in that moment, that natural knowing which takes expression as compassion comes forth by itself.

James Shaheen: It is a shortcut to a lot of merit. There, I used the word that you don’t use.

Ken McLeod: Well, no, it’s a shortcut to what we actually are: this clear, empty knowing that takes expression is compassion. That’s what the sutra is trying to bring out of us, and that’s why I translated it.

James Shaheen: Very nicely said. So finally, Ken, before we close, would you be willing to read the sutra’s famous final verse and tell us about it?

Ken McLeod: You are talking about the one in section 32?

James Shaheen: Yeah.

Ken McLeod: “How does one teach correctly? In a way that is without teaching correctly. Therefore, it is called teaching correctly.” Now, that’s how this is introduced. That’s very important. How do you teach correctly? Without thinking about teaching correctly. When you just teach but don’t think about teaching correctly, then you’re teaching correctly.

“A shooting star, hazy vision, or a butter lamp,
An enchantment, a dewdrop, or a bubble,
A dream, a flash of lightning, or a cloud,
See the conditioned like this.”

Because things, all of these in one way, are things that come and go, some very quickly, some by distorting things, but that is the nature of everything that we experience. Here we’ve had this conversation, and during this conversation, thoughts and words and ideas and humor, et cetera, have just come up. Where are they now? They’re gone. That is the nature of the conditioned. They come and go.

James Shaheen: Okay, Ken, I lied. I have one last question. So we talked about how this is a practitioner’s translation, so I have to ask, how did translating the sutra change your relationship with it or the way you practice with it?

Ken McLeod: The short answer is I don’t know. I just feel it. But in this conversation, you may notice the joy with which I talk about the sutra. Well, you know what an unhappy guy I am most of the time.

James Shaheen: Well, I’m more comfortable when you gripe about visualization, but actually I moved when you talk about the sutra.

Ken McLeod: And so that’s what I mean. You engage the sutra, and it goes back to something we said at the beginning of the conversation. The meaning of the sutra lies in what happens to you and what happens in you when you read it.

James Shaheen: Well, that certainly comes through reading this translation, standing and reading it aloud and knowing that it is forty minutes and everybody can do it. So Ken, anything else before we close?

Ken McLeod: I just want to express my gratitude for giving me this opportunity to talk with you about the sutra, because clearly it brings a great deal of joy to me. I still don’t understand why it is so meaningful to me, but it really has become an unexpected jewel for me and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you.

James Shaheen: Well, it’s been a joy for me too, and I recommend it to our readers. Ken McLeod, thanks so much for joining. It’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of This Unexpected Jewel, available now. Thanks again, Ken.

Ken McLeod: Thank you.

James Shaheen: ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Ken McLeod. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!