Mission Statement

The Sutra Pagoda Institute is the academic division of Matrix Mandala Garden, established to preserve the story of Buddhism as told through the narrative of its texts. Unlike many other religious traditions, Buddhism has no single book, such as the Christian Bible or the Islamic Koran, that all practicing Buddhists regard as authoritative. Rather, there is a standard scriptural format, called a sutra, which is considered sacred. Through the ages, the Buddha’s teachings, and the sutras that contain them, have been most diligently and elegantly preserved in the Chinese language.  As scholars, teachers and students of Buddhism, we recognize that of the thousands of sutras in the Chinese canon, only a fraction have been reliably translated into the English language. And, while the amount of secondary literature on Buddhism increases each year, we fear the Buddha’s message is becoming obscured by the profusion of commentarial literature. Therefore, our mission is to create an intellectual and artistic environment to research, translate, and publish Chinese sutras for a new generation of students, teachers and scholars of Buddhism. The Sutra Pagoda Institute will combine traditional methods with new technologies to develop innovative approaches to the study of Buddhism, and, through our efforts, we hope to reach a wider audience by allowing greater accessibility to the original texts.  

The e-Pitaka Project

The oldest known Buddhist canon was traditionally stored in baskets, called pitakas in the Pail language, which allowed for easier mobility as the Buddhist community moved from place to place. As Buddhism settled into more permanent monastery environments, the pitaka became synonymous with any repository of Buddhist texts or information.       Staying within the long tradition of Buddhist sutra and canon studies, SPI is working to create a new catalogue and electronic database, or e-Pitaka, of Buddhist sutras and sutra translations. In the future we hope the e-Pitaka will become the world’s #1 on-line source for information regarding Buddhism. To initiate the e-Pitaka project, SPI is in the process of making available audio recordings of sutras in English to download for free. In this way we hope to utilize the power of modern technology to bring the teachings of the Buddha to a wider audience.       

Download free audio recordings of the Sutras

What is a Sutra Pagoda?
 
The hallmark of Chinese Buddhism is the multi-tiered pagoda structure. Originally pagodas were the Chinese adaptation of the Indian stupa, a memorial structure used to house the mortal remains of the Buddha or a Buddhist saint. In the Buddhist traditions of East Asia, however, the sutra book itself is considered a metaphorical stupa worthy of reverence, containing remnants of the Buddha through his teachings. Thus, sutras can be seen as more than just storehouses of knowledge, they can also be seen as metaphysical reliquaries, or syllabified stupas. In China, where this way of the thinking has been prevalent for millennia, pagodas are used to store sutras and other sacred texts. During the Tang Dynasty (618~907 AD) it became popular to arrange the Chinese characters of a sutra to form a pagoda shape. One of the most famous examples of this is a scroll found in the caves at Dunhuang with a version of the Heart Sutra in the shape of a pagoda.