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The Shurangama Sutra
The Shurangama Sutra L56 The Buddha’s Great Proclamation
In this session of the Shurangama Sutra, Khenpo Sodargye addresses the heart of the sutra's teaching on bondage and liberation. The session opens with the World-Honored One responding to Ananda's tears with deep compassion, emitting resplendent light from his crown, which is met in kind by Tathagatas in all ten directions — a spectacular moment marking the gravity of what is about to be taught. The Buddha then delivers the sutra's central revelation: the root of samsara is nothing other than the six faculties themselves. This shocks Ananda, who cannot understand how the six faculties can be simultaneously the cause of bondage and the door to liberation. Khenpo unpacks this paradox extensively, drawing on Longchenpa's Trilogy of Natural Freedom and the principle that "True Suchness is the substance of thought, and thought is the function of True Suchness" — meaning that bondage and liberation are not two different things but arise from the same ground. He then explains the teaching that "knowing is the root of ignorance": the very act of perceiving, of grasping at a knowing subject, is itself the first movement of delusion. The session closes with a series of summary verses — explaining that all conditioned phenomena are empty, that entanglement and liberation share the same basis, and that the six faculties are like intertwining reeds, mutually dependent: once this nature of mutual dependence is truly understood, one is already liberated.