འཕགས་པ་འཇམ་དཔལ་གནས་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.6

intro.6

The Dwelling Place of Mañjuśrī (in Sanskrit Mañjuśrīvihāra) is a discourse that plays on the Sanskrit word vihāra, which can variously mean (1) dwelling place, (2) condition of existence, (3) walking about,¹³ (4) monastery, (5) pleasure ground, (6) sport, (7) arrangement, or distribution.¹⁴ The Chinese translators understood the title of the term in the sense of (3), with Bodhiruci translating the title as Mañjuśrī’s “going around” (巡行) and Jñānagupta translating the nearly synonymous Mañjuśrī’s “wandering” (行).¹⁵ This connotation refers to the opening scene, in which Mañjuśrī wanders about the monastic residences. This sense is not captured in the Tibetan translation gnas pa, which corresponds only to connotations (1) or (2) among the possibilities listed above. Without a Sanskrit manuscript of the text, we cannot be sure of the exact connotation of vihāra, but the context throughout the sūtra implies that the “dwelling place” of Mañjuśrī is not a determinate place. The dwelling place that Mañjuśrī explains to Śāriputra and the five hundred monks is the realm of reality, which is beyond time, unlocalized, immovable, and inaccessible to conceptual thought. Awakening in this sūtra is characterized as the nonconceptual awareness of the infinite realm of reality.