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.