History
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[edit]
Preface[edit]
The theory of tathāgatagarbha—most commonly, if not perfectly, translated into English as “buddha-nature”[1]—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.”[2] 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.[3]
Traditional and modern scholars debate how much of a link can be found between early Pāli references to “luminosity” and buddha-nature.[4] 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.[5] 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.[6]
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[edit]
- Buddha-nature is actually an English translation of a Chinese term, foxing 佛性. This term appears to have been invented in China to translate buddhadhātu, possibly also buddatā, tathatā, prakṛtivyadadāna, and other terms. See King, Buddha Nature, 173–74, n5. The most common Sanskrit term, tathāgatagarbha, means something like “womb/essence/seed (garbha) of the one who has gone/come (gata / āgata) to thusness (tathā; i.e., enlightenment).” The Chinese translation of tathāgatagarbha is rulaixing 如來性. The Tibetan equivalents of buddha-nature include rang bzhin gnas rigs and sangs rgyas kyi snying po. Tathāgatagarbhais translated as de bzhin gshegs pa’i snying po: “the essence of those who have gone/come to thusness.”
- Morris, The Aṅguttara-Nikāya, i.10, 11–16, as quoted in Silk, Buddhist Cosmic Unity, 39. For more early scriptural passages on the mind’s natural luminosity, see Skorupski, “Consciousness and Luminosity.”
- NEED A REFERENCE
- Jonathan Silk, for example, (Buddhist Cosmic Unity, 39) points out that the compilers of the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta appear to have been aware of the Aṅguttaranikāya passage, as they integrated it into that Mahāyāna sūtra nearly verbatim.
- For scholarship on luminosity in early Buddhism, see Shih, “The Concept of ‘Innate Purity of Mind’ in the Agamas and Nikayas”; and Williams, The Reflexive Nature of Awareness.
- See, for example, Collins, “Momentariness and the Bhavaṅga Mind,” in Selfless Persons; Harris, “The Problem of Idealism” in The Continuity between Madhyamaka and Yogācāra in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism; and Harvey, “The Brightly Shining Bhavaṅga Mind,” in The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness and Nirvāṇa in Early Buddhism.
