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.”

In When the Clouds Part Brunnhölzl also surveys the literature to which the earliest Indian treatise on tathāgatagarbha, the Ratnagotravibhāga, makes reference. These include the Dhāraṇīśvararājasūtra and the Ratnadārikāsūtra, among others. Although these scriptures do not use the term tathāgatagarbha, they provided the treatise’s author with much of the doctrinal basis for the explication of the theory.

One such concept on which tathāgatagarbha theory relies is gotra, a Sanskrit term that refers to family unit by bloodline and is used metaphorically in Buddhism to refer to “class,” “lineage,” or “disposition.” Buddhist teachings since the early days of the religion discussed the various predilections of followers, a way of separating the children of the “noble” class—those who are sincere in their renunciation and diligent in their austerities—from the rest of humanity. In the Mahāyāna three basic classes of Buddhist practitioners were said to exist: śrāvakas, who will become arhats by following the Hīnayāna path; pratyekabuddhas, who will become arhats without being taught; and bodhisattvas, or those destined to become buddhas on the Mahāyāna path. An additional gotra was posited in some sūtras: that of the icchantika, who does not possess tathāgatagarbha and therefore has no possibility of becoming enlightened. Whether or not such a class of beings truly existed was one of the earliest controversies in buddha-nature theory.

Tathāgatagarbha Scripture

A handful of texts that are sometimes collectively labeled “tathāgatagarbha sūtras” are generally agreed upon as the initial group of literature that developed the concept of buddha-nature as we know it today. These stand distinct from the Yogācāra scriptures such as the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra, and from the Prajñāpāramitā literature that provided the foundation for the Madhyamaka; so much so that some historians have posited the existence of a third Indian Mahāyāna school alongside them: the Tathāgatagarbha school. Among the most important of these texts are the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra, the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta, the Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa, the Mahābherīsūtra, and the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra. While later Mahāyāna scriptures such as the Laṅkāvatāra and the Lotus Sūtra also teach tathāgatagarbha, the above-named scriptures predate the popular Ratnagotravibhāga, a fourth- or early fifth-century Indian treatise that systematized tathāgatagarbha theory, and so are considered the first wave of the doctrine. The dates of their creation are unknown, and there is as yet little consensus concerning the sequence of their appearances.

The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra and the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra are the likeliest candidates for the earliest surviving instance of the term tathāgatagarbha used in the sense that it has come down to us. Michael Radich dates the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra to as early as the second century CE and claims that it is the earliest of the group, while Michael Zimmermann dates the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra to the third century; he once argued that this sūtra was the earliest of the group but has since backed away from that assertion in light of Radich’s findings.

The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, like the Hīnayāna sūtra of the same name, is ostensibly a narrative about the final days of the Buddha, but this one extends into a discourse of Mahāyāna doctrine. The Buddha is depicted not as dying but as entering a nirvāṇa that is an enduring presence rather than an extinction. This seems to be the main thrust of the sūtra: to proclaim that the Buddha is ever-present and to equate parinirvāṇa with the eternal and all-pervading dharmakāya, which eventually came to be equated in the sūtra with tathāgatagarbha. The sūtra in fact inverts what are known as the four viparyāsas, or wrong views: that any phenomenon can be described as being free from suffering, permanent, pure, or endowed with a self. The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra instead states that the Buddha, his enlightenment, and the buddhadhātu should all be properly described as blissful, permanent, pure, and endowed with a self. That permanent buddhahood, which is only masked by temporary stains, is tathāgatagarbha. (In typical parochial Mahāyāna fashion, the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra reserves complete enlightenment for only those who have completed the Mahāyāna path; the nirvāṇa of the arhat is merely free of the stains, lacking the awareness of the buddhadhātu and bliss.)

The Mahāparnirvāṇa’s liberal use of the term self (ātman) to describe tathāgatagarbha was controversial, flying in the face of one of the central doctrines of Buddhism, that of no-self, or anātman. As Christopher Jones points out, two additional tathāgatagarbha sūtras do the same, the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra and the *Mahābherīsūtra (both of which will be introduced below), leading him to speculate that opposition to these sūtras from within Buddhist communities was the reason later tathāgatagarbha sūtras dropped the use of the term ātman.

In his study of the scripture Radich argues that the term tathāgatagarbha, which he glosses as “womb of a buddha,” was used to explain how a perfectly pure being such as a buddha could arise out of a polluted and degraded human being; how, in other words, the conditioned could give rise to the unconditioned. This line of argument remains one of the more popular defenses against the claim that buddha-nature theory is non-Buddhist; if sentient beings and buddhas do not share the same nature, defenders assert, the attainment of enlightenment cannot be explained. Either saṃsāra must be wiped away to reveal what is already present, or a spark of enlightenment that is part of a saṃsāric being’s essence is brought to fruition. Otherwise nirvāṇa is the result of some action and therefore determined by causes and conditions, a view that is abhorrent to any Buddhist; nirvāṇa is precisely the absence of any conditioning.

As Brunnhölzl describes it, the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra offers an ambiguous definition of tathāgatagarbha: it is an intrinsic pure nature that all sentient beings possess and of which they will become aware once obscurations are removed, and it is a seed or potential that will ripen into buddhahood once all conditions are present. Buddha-nature, it would seem, was from the very early days a doctrine that contained both an ontological and a soteriological assertion. In the first case it is a statement about the nature of reality: sentient beings are by nature perfect, but that perfection is obscured by stains that nevertheless do not impact its essence; that perfection is moreover equated with the nature of reality itself, and therefore buddha-nature becomes the basis for both saṁsāra and nirvāṇa. In the second case it is an ethical proposal relating to salvation: the potential for perfection is present in all sentient beings, but they must each strive to actualize it. This bifurcated definition would continue through all presentations, to the delight or consternation of many commentators.

The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra appears to have been compiled in at least three stages. As described by Liu Ming-Wood and also by Takasaki, the earliest section comprises the first five chapters, which read as a complete text and end with the final days of the Buddha. Chapters 6 through 9 clarify points made in the first, a commentary of sorts in the guise of a continuation, and the final section, chapters 10 through 13, add further explanation. As Christopher Jones explained, Japanese scholar Shimoda Masahiro suggested that the earliest core of the text was concerned with the Buddha’s permanent existence; rather than vanishing into nirvāṇa, here the buddha is permanent and omnipresent. The accretion of the tathāgatagarbha doctrine represents a transition of the Buddha’s body into that of sentient beings, the Buddha’s presence becoming the true self of ordinary beings. This suggests an interesting link between the early Buddhist concern with the relics—and lasting presence—of the Buddha with the doctrine of buddha-nature. In any case, the sūtra teaches, this innate buddha-body of sentient beings, which came to be called tathāgatagarbha, represents their true self.

A primary divergence between the first and later sections of the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra is in their positions on buddha-nature and the icchantikas, the class of beings who are beset with the gravest of flaws such that they can never become enlightened; by definition they are devoid of buddha-nature. The first section of the sūtra is adamant that the icchantikas do not have buddha-nature and can never become enlightened; they are a scorched seed that can never sprout. The second section is ambiguous on the subject, and the third states unequivocally that icchantikas do have buddha-nature and therefore do have the potential to become enlightened. By bestowing buddha-nature on the icchantika the additions brought the sūtra into full conformity with the Single Vehicle (Ekayāna) teachings of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra—the Lotus Sutra—which influenced it and other early tathāgatagarbha sūtras, and concurrently into contradiction with fundamental Yogācāra doctrine of the three natures.

Whether or not it was the first tathāgatagarbha sūtra, most scholars agree that the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra was among the earliest of the group. It has been translated into English by Grosnick and again by Zimmermann, who also prepared critical editions of the Chinese and Tibetan which he published together with a lengthy study. Zimmermann explains in patient detail that there are two versions of the text, the first of which lacks much of the content of the second, later recension (see below in the section on translations into Chinese). Like the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra offers both ontological and soteriological definition of tathāgatagarbha, although “definition” is probably not the right word: the short text simply lists nine similes to describe the concept. These include a golden statue covered in mud and a seed that is destined to grow into a tree, suggesting both an already perfected nature and the potential to become something that one is presently not.

Zimmermann and others have noted that tathāgatagarbha theory may have initially been developed more for an ethical and soteriological purpose; the Tāthagatagarbhasūtra did not have to explain the idea with complicated philosophical arguments because it was intended to encourage and inspire, not convince. It is an appeal to emotion rather than the intellect. Madhyamaka and Yogācāra schools of doctrine were then in ascendance in Mahāyāna communities, and it is reasonable to hypothesize that practitioners were put off by the seeming nihilism of Madhyamaka; emptiness is too easily interpreted to mean that the ultimate is, terrifyingly, simply a void. Yogācāra, meanwhile, advocated a theory of “class” or “disposition” (gotra) in which only certain beings were said to be able to attain enlightenment. Such a doctrine might leave some of the faithful—not to mention potential converts—feeling left out. The early tathāgatagarbha literature countered both. It offered a positive description of the ultimate—buddha-nature, the true and real nature of both a person and reality—and it guaranteed complete and perfect enlightenment to all beings who were willing to strive for it (on the Mahāyāna path, of course). Yogācāra, it should be noted, also uses positive language to describe the ultimate—mind, at least in later Yogācāra scriptures, is said to be truly existent—and this has led some scholars to erroneously label tathāgatagarbha a Yogācāra doctrine.

Another early tathāgatagarbha scripture, perhaps one of the most influential, was also an early instance of the concept of a single vehicle, merging all previous Buddhist doctrine into a single doxographical order. This was the Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa, known in English as The Lion’s Roar of Queen Śrīmālā. Although it is no longer extant in Sanskrit, it was evidently highly influential in India, judging by the many references to it in other scripture. Diana Paul argues that it was composed at least by the year 350, to give it time to gain popularity in India and be brought to China, where it was translated in 435. In the sūtra Queen Śrīmālā of Ayodhyā is prompted by a letter from her parents to supplicate the Buddha, who appears before her and inspires her to teach. The main topics of her discourse are tathāgatagarbha, the single vehicle, and the Four Noble Truths. Although the sūtra affirms that all beings share the same buddha-nature, the Śrīmālā asserts that śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas (that is, non-Mahāyāna Buddhists) cannot comprehend the steps needed to shed adventitious stains and reveal the intrinsic purity of mind; only bodhisattvas can. Thus while the sūtra proclaims a single vehicle and universal buddha-nature, it does so with some reservation, suggesting a Yogācāra influence. This inequality is probably an indication of the scripture’s early date: Mahāyāna communities were still in competition with the earlier Buddhist orders, and bodhisattvas and śrāvakas could not be depicted as equals.

In When the Clouds Part Karl Brunnhölzl draws attention to a novel conception of emptiness in the Śrīmālā: tathāgatagarbha “is empty of adventitious stains but not empty of its limitless inseparable qualities.” With this the sūtra seems to be addressing the question of how tathāgatagarbha theory is to be addressed by Madhyamikas. If tathāgatagarbha is another name for emptiness, as some Madhyamaka theorists would argue, then buddha-nature ought to conform with Madhyamaka definitions of emptiness and lack its own qualities. Instead, buddha-nature is described as empty of all but its own characteristics, an early suggestion of a philosophical view that came to be known in Tibet as “other-emptiness.”

The above three early tathāgatagarbha scriptures describe an ultimate nature that is naturally pure but is obscured by adventitious stains. The very short Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta further expands the ontological aspect of buddha-nature. The Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta, or “No-Increase, No-Decrease Chapter,” exists today only in Chinese translation, although it was eventually known to Tibetans through extensive quotations in the Ratnagotravibhāga (initial Tibetan translators of the Ratnagotravibhāga did not recognize the quotations and so failed to identify it as a sūtra). Jonathan Silk dates the text to at least before the early fifth century, after the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra and the Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa, as does Diana Paul, while Takasaki argues for it having appeared after the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra and before the Śrīmālādevī.

Like other tathāgatagarbha scriptures, this one is ambiguous as to whether tathāgatagarbha is a womb/seed or an intrinsic nature, a currently nonexistent potential or an already existent presence. Silk argues that the text understands the term in the latter sense. The title of the scripture comes from the discussion of whether the number of ordinary beings decreases when someone becomes a buddha. Such a question reveals dualistic thinking, the Buddha chides in the narrative, and is therefore flawed, because ordinary beings and buddhas are not fundamentally different in nature. As Brunnhölzl puts it, the text teaches that

when the dharmakāya is obscured by adventitious stains, it is called “sentient being.” When this very same dharmakāya becomes weary of saṃsāra and practices the ten pāramitās and bodhisattva conduct, it is called “bodhisattva.” When it is free from all stains, it is called “buddha.”

In other words, there is no essential difference between an ordinary being and a buddha, and to ask whether there is a change in population when a person attains enlightenment is nonsensical, not unlike asking whether there is a change in the number of water molecules when ice melts. It is simply that ordinary beings are afflicted by stains and a buddha is not, similar to a golden statue wrapped in rags compared to a statue on display in all its glory. (Note how in the above passage buddha-nature and dharmakāya are treated as synonyms.)

One of the main contributions of the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta is the emphasis on faith as a necessary—though not sufficient—condition of enlightenment. Such a rhetorical move might suggest an admission that tathāgatagarbha is a notion that is not available for logical proof—it does, after all, raise the specter of a quasi-Hindu transcendent self, not to mention a mystical presence that is beyond the reach of language. The use of positive terms to describe tathāgatagarbha, much less its use of the word ātman, required a lot of exegesis to convince many that the doctrine was in accordance with current understandings of emptiness and did not violate the Buddha’s teaching of no-self.

The Mahābherīsūtra, another tathāgatagarbha sūtra that like the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta is concerned with the issue of whether the sum total of sentient beings can increase or decrease, also makes extensive use of the term ātman. The sūtra was translated into Chinese in the fifth century by Guṇabhadra and was influenced by the Lotus Sūtra, which it mentions by name. Christopher Jones proposed that because the presentation of the issues in the Mahābherīsūtra is less sophisticated than in the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta, it should be considered to have been composed earlier. Jones also argues that with the Mahābherīsūtra and the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta came an important expansion of the meaning of tathāgatagarbha: earlier scriptures posited that all beings have buddha-nature in them and that they had the potential to become a buddha. Jones writes that these two sūtras were responsible for equating tathāgatagarbha with dharmakāya (as we saw above), the all-pervading true nature of all reality. Buddha-nature in this way is no longer just a potential or nature of the individual; it is the fundamental nature of reality shared by all beings.

A final early tathāgatagarbha sūtra, if it can fairly be included in the category, is the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra, which like the Mahāparinirvāṇa examines earlier material through a Mahāyāna lens. Here is the story of the conversion of a bandit who has killed so many people and fashioned such an impressive necklace of their fingers that he has earned the epithet Aṅgulimāla, “Rosary of Fingers.” Like the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra and the Mahābherīsūtra, the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra equates tathāgatagarbha with ātman, distinguishing it from non-Buddhist conceptions of the term. As Jones pointed out, referencing Kazuo Kano’s Japanese-language scholarship, the message of the scripture is not, as one might think, the universality of buddha-nature, even for those who commit heinous crimes. Aṅgulimāla is not actually converted in the Mahāyāna version of the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra; rather his killings are presented as illusory and the violence is justified as a defense of the dharma. Buddha-nature is rather incidental to this message.

Tathāgatagarbha Sūtras in China

Translation of the Scriptures

All the above tathāgatagarbha scriptures were translated into Chinese between the fifth and sixth centuries, during a period of intense translation activity. As evidence of the availability of Sanskrit manuscripts, forty-one Sanskrit fragments of the Mahāparinirvāṇa have been found in Central Asia, a primary region through which Buddhism was brought from India to China. Dunhuang in particular, it is believed, was a hub of buddha-nature transmission in China. Of the six scriptures described above, five were done in the fifth century. Three were translated by Guṇabhadra and two by Buddhabhadra. Dharmakṣema translated one of these, the Mahāparinirvāṇa, a second time, and may have also translated the Śrīmāla. Bodhiruci (of the Wei) translated the sixth scripture in the early sixth century.

There are three recensions of the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, although only two are technically translations. The first, the Dabannihuan jing 大般泥洹經 (T376), was translated into Chinese in the southern capital of Jiankang 建康 around 416–418 by Buddhabhadra and Faxian 法顯. This consists of only the first five chapters (said to be the original core) of the sūtra. The second is the Dabanniepan jing 大般涅槃經 (T374), done around 421–432 by Dharmakṣema in the northern kingdom of Beiliang 北涼. This was revised in the 430s as Dabanniepan jing 大般涅槃經 (T375), also known as the “Southern Version,” produced in Liu Song 劉宋 by Huiyan 慧嚴, Huiguan 慧觀, Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385–433), and others. This is not technically a translation, as they did not consult a Sanskrit original. According to Diana Paul the prolific translator Guṇabhadra also later corrected Dharmakṣema’s translation.

The Tathāgatagarbhasūtra may have been translated into Chinese as early as the late third century by a man named Faju 法炬 who was active at least between 290 and 306. This information is based on a catalog called the Chu sanzang ji ji 出三藏記集 by Sengyou 僧祐 (445–518), but it is far from certain, and the assertion has been discounted by some scholars; it would certainly push back the date of the sūtra’s creation. The early surviving recension of the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra is the Dafangdeng rulaizang jing 大方等如來藏經 (Taishō 666), which was translated into Chinese in the early fifth century by Buddhabhadra. A second recension, Dafanghuang rulaizang jing 大方廣如來藏經 (T667), was translated by Amoghavajra around the middle of the eighth century.

The 'Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa' was translated twice, first in 435 by Guṇabhadra as the Shengmen shizi hou yicheng da fangbian fangguang jing 勝鬘師子吼一乘大方便方廣經 (T353). Guṇabhadra worked with a disciple of the great Central Asian translator Kumārajīva named Baoyun 寶雲, who was also a companion to Faxian. The second is Shengmen furen hui (T310), done by Bodhiruci (of the Tang) (572–727) between 706 and 713 as part of his translation of the Ratnakūṭa scriptural collection. Paul mentions that Chinese catalogs record two translations made prior to Guṇabhadra’s, one by and Dharmakṣema and the other done in 320 by a monk named Seng Fani 僧法尼. She suspects that the records may in fact point to the presence of Sanskrit manuscripts circulating in the region and several failed attempts at translations. Paul lists six commentaries to the Śrīmālādevī, the first being done before the year 500 and the last in 722, which attest to its popularity. The Mahābherīsūtra was also translated by Guṇabhadra, circa 435–436, as Dafa gu jing 大法鼓經 (T270), as was the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra, with the title Yang jue mo luo jing 央掘魔羅經 (T120), between 435 and 453. Finally, the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta, which, as mentioned above, exists only in Chinese, was translated by Bodhiruci (of the Wei Dynasty) in 520 in Luoyang with the title Foshuo bu zeng bu jian jing 佛 説不増不減經 (T668).

Influence of the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtras in China

Of these six scriptures, the Mahāparinirvāṇa had the widest impact in terms of buddha-nature. Not long after its appearance in China, scholiasts merged its teaching of universal enlightenment with the indigenous Chinese Buddhist doctrine of Sudden Enlightenment (dunwu 頓悟). At the center of this synthesis was the Six Dynasties monk Daosheng (道生 360/375-434), a disciple of Kumārajīva. Daosheng had earlier developed the theory of Sudden Enlightenment based initially on Abhidharma teachings he received from the hermit Saṅgadeva in Lushan at the end of the fourth century and later expanded based on Ekayāna and Madhyamaka doctrines. Sudden Enlightenment holds that enlightenment is not causal; rather than being the result of a path requiring effort over innumerable eons, one need only recognize one’s own natural state. Universal buddha-nature, defined as that natural state, therefore had obvious appeal to Daosheng. His community, however, initially had access only to Faxian’s version of the Nirvāṇasūtra, in which icchantikas are not endowed with buddha-nature. In preaching universal buddha-nature Daosheng was accused by his colleague Huikuan 慧觀 of heresy, and in 428–429 he was banished from Qingyuan Monastery 青园寺 in Jiankang 建康, the capital of the Southern Dynasty. The following year, in 430, Dharmakṣema’s translation of the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, which extended buddha-nature to the icchantikas, became available in Jiankang and Daosheng was exonerated.

Daosheng was not the first to link Sudden Enlightenment with the buddha-nature theory of the Mahāpanirvāṇasūtra. This honor goes to Hengrui 慧叡, also known as Sengrui 僧叡, who in his polemical Mahāyāna tract Treatise Clarifying Doubts (Yuyi lun 喻疑論), linked those who criticized Sudden Enlightenment to those who rejected universal buddha-nature and, somewhat incongruously, alluded to such people as icchantikas. Nevertheless, it was Daosheng who popularized the idea. There was, of course, resistance to Daosheng and his followers’ cataphatic embrace of buddha-nature. Jizang 吉藏 (549-623), the founder of Chinese Madhyamaka, wrote in his Treatise on the Mystery of the Mahāyāna (Dacheng xuanlun 大乘玄論) that “always it is necessary to oppose any definition of buddha-nature.”

The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra’s teaching of universal buddha-nature found congress with another, related, Chinese Buddhist doctrine: Original Enlightenment. As explained by Jacqueline Stone, Original Enlightenment theory was first articulated in three apocryphal Chinese scriptures: Jingang sanmeijing 金剛三昧經 and Renwangjing 任王經 (both of which were said to have been translated by Amoghavajra but were likely composed in China in the sixth century) and, most important, the wildly popular Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna, or Dacheng qixinlun 大乘起信論. In these works and their commentaries Chinese scholiasts adopted buddha-nature theory as a tool to explore the ontological basis on which ordinary sentient beings become buddhas. The author of Awakening of Faith merged buddha-nature theory with the Yogācāra doctrine of ālayavijñāna, which attempts to explain the nature of ignorance. This was done in order to, as Stone puts it, “clarify the relation between the mind, understood as originally pure, and ignorance.” Awakening of Faith treats originally pure mind and ignorance as merely two different perceptions of the same reality: buddha-nature, originally pure, is the ultimate reality of things—that is, emptiness; ālayavijñāna, the storehouse of saṃsāra, is reality as perceived through the lens of delusion and corresponds to conventional reality. And because even deluded perception is grounded in the dharmakāya, ignorance can be said to share the same fundamental nature as original purity

Both tathāgatagarbha and ālayavijñāna theory describe the process of buddhification in terms of adventitious stains that must be cleansed over untold eons of ardent practice. In a cultural setting such as India, where a seemingly endless string of deaths and births was taken for granted, this probably was not a problem. Chinese audiences, however, appear to have been dismayed at the length of time needed to arrive at the goal of full enlightenment. The Awakening of Faith, by redefining ignorance and wisdom, shifted the nature of the path from the one to the other. There is, ultimately, no ignorance to purify. To attain buddhahood one needs only to recognize the original purity of one’s own mind, to realize the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena, including one’s own crass thoughts and experiences. The successful practitioner actualizes an enlightenment (shizhue 始覺) that is no different from the “original enlightenment” (benzhue 不覺).

Original Enlightenment was hugely influential in Chinese Buddhist communities, and the Awakening of Faith became one of two main scriptures for the Huayan school, alongside the Avataṃsakasūtra. It was central in the writings of the great patriarchs Fazang (法藏 643–712) and Zongmi (宗密 780–841) and was key to the later Tiantai theory of the buddha-nature of inanimate objects: if all phenomena are in fact the dharmakāya, and the dharmakāya is the equivalent of buddha-nature, then even roof tiles have buddha-nature and can be said to preach the dharma. Sudden Enlightenment, meanwhile, came to be adopted in various degrees by most Chinese and later Japanese Buddhist schools and was contrasted with what the Chinese classified as the Gradual Path. The two were the subject of a famous eighth-century doctrinal debate in Tibet between the Indian Madhyamika Kamalaśīla (713–763) and the Chan master Heshang Moheyan 和尚摩訶衍 (discussed below). The difference between them was also given expression in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, where two monks leave dueling verses on a monastery wall: the one giving voice to the Gradual Path on which one strives to purify the obscurations, the second to the Sudden Path, with its expression of original enlightenment and admonition to not solidify the fog of saṃsāra:

The body is the bodhi tree;
The mind is like a bright mirror’s stand.
Be always diligent in rubbing it—
Do not let it attract any dust.

Bodhi is fundamentally without any tree;
The bright mirror is also not a stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing—
Where could any dust be attracted?

Tathāgatagarbha Sutras in Tibet

Tibetan translations of the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtras

Very little research has been done on the early transmission of tathāgatagarbha theory in Tibet. We know that most of the important buddha-nature sūtras were translated as part of the first transmission of Buddhism in Tibet, as they are listed in the early ninth-century Magpie Catalog (Ldan dkar ma) of all known translated scriptures. Dorji Wangchuk points to a number of native Tibetan compositions that make reference to the doctrine, such as Yeshe De’s Differentiations of Views (Lta ba’i khyad par) and Pelyang’s Lamp of the Mind (Thabs shes sgron ma), an early proto-Dzogchen treatise. Nubchen Sanggye Yeshe quoted the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra, albeit without mentioning the term tathāgatagarbha, in his Lamp for the Eyes in Contemplation (Bsam gtan mig sgron). The terms tathāgatagarbha and *sugatagarbha also appear in tantras belonging to the Nyingma classifications of Mahāyoga, Anuyoga, and Atiyoga. Despite the early appearance Wangchuk finds little evidence that tathāgatagarbha became widespread—the term appears, but there seem to have been no attempts to explain or integrate the idea until the translation of the Ratnagotravibhāga in the late eleventh century.

Regarding the translations, the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra was translated around the year 800 as ’Phags pa de bzhin gshegs pa’i snying po zhes bya ba theg pa chen po’i mdo (D258). The Tibetan Yeshe De, who was later apotheosized into one of the twenty-five disciples of Padmasambhava (his mystical ability was said to be flight) is credited with the translation, alongside Śākyaprabha. One recension of the translation alternately credits the work to Jinamitra and Dānaśīla, prolific translators who are well represented in the Tibetan canon. There is reason, however, to doubt the association—Michael Zimmermann reasonably surmised that this was an attempt on the part of the scribe to connect the translation with more established figures. The Tibetan corresponds to the Chinese T667. The sūtra inspired at least one commentary, Golden Key (Gser gyi lde mig) by the great Butön Rinchen Drub.

The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra was translated into Tibetan three times, one of which was from the Chinese. This is the ’Phags pa yongs su mya ngan las ’das pa chen po’i mdo (D119), translated by a Chinese man whose name was Tibetanized as Wangpabzhun (wang phab zhun) together with Gewai Lodro and Gyatso De, none of whose dates are known. They possibly worked from T374, as Radich states that the two correspond. A second translation, ’Phags pa yongs su mya ngan las ’das pa chen po theg pa chen po’i mdo (D120) was done in the early ninth century by Jinamitra, Jñānagarbha, and Devacandra. This translation corresponds to T376. A third, ’Phags pa yongs su mya ngan las ’das pa chen po'i mdo (D121) was done later, at the start of the second diffusion period, by Kamalagupta and Rinchen Zangpo.