The Awakened One Who Broke Through the Śūraṅgama Sūtra

"Where knowledge and view establish a knower, that is the root of ignorance. Where knowledge and view are without seeing, that itself is nirvāṇa." In the past, someone repunctuated these two lines from the Śūraṅgama Sūtra as: "Where knowledge and view are established, the knower is the root of ignorance; where knowledge and view are absent, seeing that is nirvāṇa," and upon doing so, he became enlightened. What did he awaken to? The meaning of the first line is: when there is the knowledge that knows the six sense objects, and this knowledge is established as real, that is ignorance.

This knowledge is a conditioned, illusory dharma subject to arising and ceasing; it is the knowledge of the seventh consciousness mind, including the knowledge of the various states of dharma objects within meditative concentration — it is the knowledge of the mind consciousness, knowing that one has entered samādhi. If one believes that at this point the mind has become empty, identical to the emptiness of the tathāgatagarbha, and that this is a state of enlightenment, then one has misunderstood it; this mistaken apprehension is precisely ignorance. The meaning of the second line is: there is a mind that has no knowledge or views, that does not know the six sense objects and does not see the six sense objects; this mind is the nirvāṇa mind. Nirvāṇa neither arises nor ceases; He does not engage with the six sense objects, does not give rise to afflictions, has no ignorance, and is intrinsically pure. Finding this mind and realizing this mind is enlightenment — realizing the intrinsically pure nirvāṇa mind. Thereupon that person awakened to the Way, and later generations gave him the name "Śūraṅgama Breaker" (Po Lengyan).