Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith

Abstract Drawing on the historical and intellectual contexts of the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith’s composition and paying sustained attention to its interpretation in early commentaries, this new annotated translation of the classic makes its ideas available to English readers like never before. The introduction orients the reader with the main topics taken up in the Treatise and also provides a scholarly resource for students, teachers, and researchers. The Treatise succinctly addresses many of the doctrines of greatest importance to Buddhists in China between the fifth and seventh centuries, in an attempt to reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas in Buddhist texts introduced from India. One reason for the popularity of the Treatise is its compelling vision of how to realize why we are deluded and then follow a path to actualize our inherent buddhahood. “Awakening Mahāyāna Faith” refers to having the initial faith or trust that the Mahāyāna Buddhist path will work and is worth pursuing. It also provides a concise restatement of the complexities of the ten-stage path of bodhisattva (enlightened being) practice in Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Treatise quickly became a foundational text for East Asian Buddhism when it appeared in sixth-century China. It profoundly shaped the doctrines and practices of the major schools of Chinese Buddhism: Chan, Tiantai, Huayan, and to a lesser extent Pure Land. Conceptual structures derived from the Treatise became a shared resource for East Asian philosophers and religious theorists over centuries.