As a religious and philosophical tradition works out its own stock of ideas and encounters fresh ones among its neighbours, it must very often generate responses to developing tensions and oppositions unless it is simply to turn in on itself, both ossifying and isolating itself from its intellectual and human environment. Buddhism has not ossified and isolated itself in this way, and it has met such challenges not only in its spread outside the Indian subcontinent—in Central, East and Southeast Asia, and now also in Europe and America—but also, and no less importantly, in the course of its development within historical India itself.
One way in which Buddhism has responded to these intellectual and cultural encounters can be related to hermeneutics: that is, the modes by which a tradition explains its sources and thereby interprets (or reinterprets) itself in a continuing process of reactivation and renewal of its heritage.
[1] In the case of Buddhism this process—perhaps comparable in part to what in another context is now frequently referred to as
aggiornamento—had both endogenous and exogenous causes. It was, in other words, set in train both by internal, systemically generated requirements and tensions within the Buddhist tradition as it evolved in geographical space and historical time, and by external impulses received from its intellectual and social environment, which could be, according to the case, either positive or negative in character.
The purpose of this paper is to explore this process with respect to the Buddhist hermeneutics of the ideas of non-self (
anatman) and of a spiritual matrix or germ (
gotra,
tathagatagarbha or Buddha-nature) and the relationship of this pair of ideas to Vedantic notions and Brahmanical social groups in classical India. Reference will be made also to certain exegetical developments that either originated in Tibet or were at least fully realized there for the first time. Our analysis will revolve around the fact that, however historically antithetical and structurally contrasting these two ideas are in Buddhism, they in fact have not invariably been treated by Buddhist hermeneuticians as contradictory or even as systematically exclusive of each other.
Because of its philosophical and religious significance in the fields of soteriology and gnoseology, the Mahāyānist theory of the
tathāgatagarbha—the Germ of Buddhahood latent in all sentient beings—occupies a crucial position in Buddhist thought, and indeed in Indian thought as a whole. In virtue of both their extent and their contents, the sūtras treating the
tathāgatagarbha—and the systematically related doctrines of the natural
luminosity (
prakṛtiprabhāsvaratā) of mind (
citta) and the spiritual germ existent by nature (
prakṛtistha-gotra)
[2]—are amongst the most important in the
Mahāyāna. The idea that the doctrine of the
tathāgatagarbha and Buddha-nature is one of the supreme teachings of the
Mahāyāna is explicitly stated in the
Mahāparinirvāṇa-sutra.
[3] Mahāyānist doctrine is in large part concerned with the path (
marga) of the
Bodhisattva and supreme and perfect awakening (
bodhi), that is, the state of a Buddha. The terms
tathāgatagarbha and
gotra are used to denote the base or support for practice of the path, and hence the 'cause' (
hetu:
dhatu) for attainment of the fruit (
phala) of buddhahood. Even when the texts do not employ the term
tathāgatagarbha to designate this factor as the one which makes it possible for all living beings ultimately to attain liberation and Buddhahood, the importance of the theme of the
tathāgatagarbha is basic to the soteriology and gnoseology of the
Mahāyāna. (Ruegg, "The Buddhist Notion of an 'Immanent Absolute'," 229–30)
