History

The History

The doctrine of buddha-nature became widespread in India in the first centuries of the Common Era. Although the ideas have roots that stretch back to the earliest teachings of the Buddha, the concept of tathāgatagarbha--"womb or seed of buddhahood"--was first taught in Mahāyāna communities. It was related to, but most likely distinct from both Madhyamaka and Yogācāra, the dominant schools of the Mahāyāna, emerging primarily from a corpus of scripture collectively known as Tathāgatagarbha sūtras and a commentary on them known as the Ratnagotravibhāga. As these scriptures circulated in India and were translated into Chinese and Tibetan, buddha-nature theory spread and was ultimately integrated--albeit with significant differences--into all philosophical schools and traditions of Mahāyāna Buddhism, from Japanese Zen to Tibetan Mahāmudrā.

The seeds of buddha-nature teachings were planted in some of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. Passages such as this one, from the Aṅguttaranikāya Sutta -- "Luminous, monks, is this mind, but sometimes it is defiled by adventitious defilements"-- suggest a natural state that is only temporarily obscured by the stains of saṁsāra. Buddhism before the rise of the Mahāyāna, however, had little use for such a notion, focused as it was on the long and arduous transformation of deluded sods into enlightened beings.

Only in the early centuries of the Common Era did scriptures teaching tathāgatagarbha--what we here refer to as buddha-nature--begin to circulate and gain attention. These were the so-called buddha-nature scriptures, such as the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra, the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, and the Śrīmaladevisūtra. Drawing on Mahāyāna doctrine of the unity of saṁsāra and nirvāṇa, and the recasting of the Buddha has a universal principle of enlightened mind, they taught that enlightenment is an essential factor of the human existence. Rather than be transformed into a buddha, these scriptures taught that one must only reveal one's true nature to become free. These scriptures belonged to neither to Madhyamaka nor the Yogācāra Schools, although the buddha-nature teachings were eventually adopted, in some form, by both.

The buddha-nature teachings spread to China starting in the fifth century where it inspired the composition of the Awakening of Faith and the Chinese doctrines such as original enlightenment and sudden enlightenment and became part of the standard doctrine of all East Asian Buddhist traditions. Tibetans knew of buddha-nature theory as early as the seventh century, but the teachings spread widely following the translation of the Ratnagotravibhāga in the eleventh century, a fifth-century treatise that was the first to systematize the teachings.

A History of Buddha-Nature Theory

Preface

The theory of tathāgatagarbha—most commonly, if not perfectly, translated into English as “buddha-nature”—is generally thought by scholars to have first appeared around the third or fourth century CE and possibly as early as the second. Many Tibetan and Chinese scholiasts found justification for the ideas in various passages in the Pāli Canon, such as this from the Aṅguttaranikāya Sutta: “Luminous, monks, is this mind, but sometimes it is defiled by adventitious defilements. . . . sometimes it is free from adventitious defilements.” The Vinaya contains a famous story in which the Buddha sends his gaze over all existence and perceives sentient beings as lotuses rooted in deep mud; the metaphor is taken as pertaining to the buddha-nature of all beings, destined as we are to attain perfectly pure enlightenment.

Traditional and modern scholars debate how much of a link can be found between early Pāli references to “luminosity” and buddha-nature. Mainstream Pāli Buddhism considered consciousness to be one of the five skandhas, the building blocks of conditioned existence. Early exegesis of luminosity passages in the scripture seems to suggest that they were not, in fact, teaching that the mind is naturally pure or that it preexists the skandhas, but only that it has the potential to be made pure. A related concept is bhavaṅga mind, meaning the substratum of consciousness that represents mind in its inactive state. This does not appear originally to have been intended as a permanent subconscious; at the moment the mind becomes active, bhavaṅga is cut off and the active mind (vīthicitta) takes over. Still, some scholars have pointed to the concept as a forerunner to the notion of luminosity.

Although over the centuries Chinese and Tibetan scholiasts have categorized the concept of buddha-nature as either Yogācāra or Madhyamaka, there is sufficient reason to believe that the tathāgatagarbha theory developed independently: it is a cataphatic doctrine (that is, it uses positive language to describe the nature of reality), which distinguishes it from the apophatic approach of Madhyamaka; and it asserts that all sentient beings have an equal capacity to awaken, which contradicts the basic Yogācāra doctrine of different potentials for enlightenment. Instead, the rise of the doctrine was likely a result of Buddhist theorists grappling with long-standing core Buddhist conundrums such as the nature of mind; how to use language to describe what is by definition beyond the reach of language; how nirvāṇa, which is unconditioned and perfect, can arise out of saṁsāra; and how to make sense of various yogic experiences.

Early Appearances of the Term Tathāgatagarbha

Scholars currently debate the earliest (surviving) appearance of the term tathāgatagarbha. The term itself appears in a handful of early scriptures but without elaboration, suggesting that the term had been coined but its meaning had not yet been fleshed out. These are documented by Karl Brunnhölzl in When the Clouds Part:

Possibly the first appearance of the term tathāgatagarbha (though not in the sense in which it is used in the tathāgatagarbha sūtras) has been traced to the Mahāsaṃghika Ekottarikāgama (the Chinese recension of the Aṅguttara Nikāya): “If someone devotes himself to the Ekottarikāgama / Then he has the tathāgatagarbha. / Even if his body cannot exhaust defilements in this life / In his next life he will attain supreme wisdom.” The term is also used once in the Gaṇḍavyūhasūtra (which is dated prior to the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra) as an epithet of Sudhana, without further explanation. Furthermore, the Prajñāpāramitāsūtra in One Hundred Fifty Lines (Adhyardhaśatikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra) contains the sentence “all sentient beings possess the tathāgatagarbha because their entire being is that of the great bodhisattva Samantabhadra.”