Aligning Chan with Dzogchen through the Śūraṅgama Sūtra: Khenpo Sodargye’s strategies for presenting and teaching a ‘Chinese’ sūtra through a ‘Dzogchen perspective’

Khenpo Sodargye is a key teacher and facilitator of the transmission of Nyingma, and in particular Dzogchen teachings, to Chinese lay and monastic practitioners, both at Larung Gar Buddhist Academy (Chinese: Wuming Foxueyuan ) and throughout China. While he has taught Chinese followers since 1987 using a range of methods, since 2019 in particular he has increasingly drawn from a repertoire of Chinese sources and traditions, including an array of Chan Buddhist texts. Among these texts used to teach Buddhism at the Academy are sūtras, which have been influential in East Asian Buddhism but less so in Tibetan Buddhism, including the Śūraṅgama Sūtra (Chinese: Shouleng’yan jing ). This article focuses on why and how Khenpo has deployed the Śūraṅgama Sūtra – given that it is a fundamentally Chan Chinese Buddhist text of allegedly spurious origins – within his lineage to give ultimate teachings on Dzogchen. Key to understanding his use of this sūtra is the philosophical backdrop of the Nyingma tradition against which he sets it, and to some degree the current political pressure to ‘sinicize’ Tibetan Buddhism and make it conform to socialist principles.