The Enlightened One Who Refuted the Śūraṅgama Sūtra

To establish knowing upon knowing is the root of ignorance; when knowing is without knowing, that is nirvāṇa. In the past, someone repunctuated these two lines from the Śūraṅgama Sūtra as follows: "When knowing is established, that knowing is the root of ignorance; when knowing is absent, seeing that is nirvāṇa," and thereupon attained enlightenment. What did he awaken to? The meaning of the first line is this: when there is the knowing that knows the six sense objects, and this knowing is established as true, that is ignorance.

This knowing is a conditioned, illusory dharma subject to arising and ceasing; it is the knowing of the seven consciousnesses, including the knowing that knows the various states of meditative concentration—mental sense objects—which is the knowing of the mind consciousness, the knowing of knowing that one has entered samādhi. If one believes that at this time the mind has become empty, and that this emptiness is the same as the emptiness of the tathāgatagarbha, and that this is the state of enlightenment, then one has misunderstood. This mistaken apprehension is precisely ignorance. The meaning of the second line is this: there is a mind that has no knowing or seeing, 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 in nature. 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 "Breaker of the Śūraṅgama."