This translation of "A Mahayana Scripture" by Uma Thurman's more famous dad fits into the recent penchant I've had for exploring related spiritual traditions via things sitting on the shelf at the cat bookstore. I believe it caught my eye because at one point I started the Michael Taft & M.C. Owens lecture series (before finding M.C. Owens intial overview a bit long-winded). It's the first Mahayana scripture I've read other than the Heart Sutra. And I guess it confirms me as 'Theravadan', at least for the moment, because I didn't find it particularly approachable or revelatory.
In fact, it leads me to reiterate the same question I asked in the case of Tantra Illuminated -- if the philosophy is so simple, why is its exposition so ... gaudy. The basic idea is so profound and straightforward that it is almost totally summed up in the five short pages of Chapter 9, "The Dharma-Door of Nonduality". ALL PHENOMENA ARE EMPTY. Thank you for you attention to this matter. And yet this scripture has an elaborate literary structure that spans multiple universes and involves uncountably large contingents of boddhisattvas doing various magic tricks. On top of that, it rather condescendingly uses all the Buddha's 'Hinayan' disciples as whipping boys to illustrate the superiority of the Mahayana path. I get that all this is supposed to expand our mind in trans-rational ways, and there is doubtless a profound teaching in that. But I simply don't have the background to find this stuff helpful. I think I better stick with the Early Buddhism I'm familiar with and that makes sense to me.
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