Reading Śikṣānanda’s Chinese Version of the Laṅkāvatārasūtra: Reflections on Key Doctrines, Influences, and the Challenges of Translation.

The proposed panel draws upon a current translation project, of Śikṣānanda’s 實叉難陀 early eighth-century Chinese version of the *Laṅkāvatārasūtra* (Taishō no.672: *Dasheng rulengqie jing* 大乘入楞伽經). The *Laṅkāvatārasūtra* is well-known as an influential if also somewhat unorthodox source of Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda thought, which was particularly impactful in East Asian Buddhism. More developed than Guṇabhadra’s translation, and featuring less interpolation than that by Bodhiruci, Śikṣānanda’s text is the Chinese *Laṅkāvatārasūtra* that perhaps most faithfully preserves content of a mature Indian form of this famously challenging work. The *Laṅkāvatārasūtra* introduces and unpacks a number of ideas drawn and sometimes modified from earlier Buddhist thought, of a Yogācāra orientation and otherwise, that are key to its doctrine, including the substratum consciousness (*ālayavijñāna*), karmic ‘seeds’ (*bīja*) that burden it, and the role played by some idea of ‘buddha-nature’ (*tathāgatagarbha*). The speakers on this panel will present on relevant material drawn from the text, primarily its second and sixth chapters, which will be presented to the room for discussion. Features of what is taught in the *Laṅkāvatārasūtra*, such as those named above, will be unpacked with reference both to the text’s (Indian) influences and (Chinese) works that drew upon it. Attending to both this and other versions of the *Laṅkāvatārasūtra*, the panel will then reflect on questions that arise from translating Śikṣānanda’s Chinese into English: how best to render its philosophical and doctrinal profundity (and, in places, obscurity); what distinguishes it from the versions of our other two Chinese translators, and the perennial difficulties surrounding how to translate to English what are already translated Buddhist texts.