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 an 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.
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