A retelling of Sudhana’s story from the Avatamsaka Sūtra, this book chronicles a child’s quest to seek spiritual wisdom from fifty-five bodhisattvas. Each chapter focuses on a different bodhisattva, with accompanying images from a 12th-century Japanese painted scroll.

What does it mean to dedicate yourself to the spiritual path with the innocence of a child? The answers to that are revealed in the story of a child named Sudhana, protagonist of the longest chapter in one of the oldest and most prominent Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras. In Search of the Bodhisattva Way is Kōsei Morimoto’s summary of “Entering the Dharma Realm,” the final chapter of the Avatamsaka Sūtra, which also circulated separately as the Gandavyūha Sūtra. The story is illustrated with images from the twelfth-century Painting Scroll of the Fifty-Five Avatamsaka Sites, a National Treasure of Japan. Morimoto’s detailed introduction and annotations reveal the religious, literary, and economic dimensions of the sūtra’s place within South Asian history.

The early Indian Mahāyāna cosmology and doctrine represented in these narratives are grounded in the idea of emptiness but also an expansive, infinite notion of enlightened mind illuminating everywhere. The core of the book consists of fifty-five short chapters, each of which centers around a different “wondrous friend,” from whom Sudhana seeks guidance on the bodhisattva path. It is only at the end of his journey that Sudhana is shown the direct path to enlightenment by the bodhisattvas Maitreya and Samantabhadra.

In Search of the Bodhisattva Way: The Child Sudhana’s Journey to Enlightenment from the Avatamsaka Sutra, Kosei Morimoto, Shambhala Publications, Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.95

Kosei Morimoto (1934–) entered Tōdai Monastery at age fifteen and served as the abbot of Tōdai Monastery and the head of the Kegon (Japanese Avataṃsaka) School from 2004 to 2007. He received his PhD from Kyōto University in Islamic studies and is the author of several publications on Avataṃsaka Buddhism in Japan and the Nara period of Japanese history, as well as Islamic history, economics, and Ibn Khaldun.

Susan O'Leary (Editor) is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has studied calligraphy with Kazuaki Tanahashi for many years. She is the author of several books, and as part of a team of writers and historians, in 2009 received the Independent Press Book of the Year Award for best book in education for Wisconsin: Our State, Our Story.