Primary Sources

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The Source Texts

A note about source texts
Source literature is divided into the two broad categories of sūtras and commentaries. While traditionally both entail a wide range of internal divisions and classifications, here these two can be simply understood to demarcate the difference between scriptures orated by the Buddha or his attendant bodhisattvas, and authored works which draw upon those discourses in order to elucidate a particular aspect of the Buddhist teachings. In terms of the former, these texts are traditionally referred to as “buddhavacana,’’ literally “the speech of the Buddha,’’ and are considered to represent actual sermons that were passed down orally until they were eventually set into writing. Commentaries are generally—although not always—signed by their authors, although authorship is sometimes given divine origin or ascribed to earlier saints.


Sources for buddha-nature Teachings

The seeds of buddha-nature teachings are sprinkled throughout the sutras and tantras of the Buddhist canon. However, without doubt, the single most influential teaching that has spread the idea of buddha-nature to traditions all across the world is Maitreya's Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra or "Gyu Lama" as it is known in the Tibetan traditions.

This page provides a listing of some of the key sources for buddha nature teachings found in the sutras, as well as the key texts found in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions, as well as influential commentaries from centuries of traditional scholarship on the subject.

Jump to full source text list below


Sutra Sources[edit]

The titles of the Gyu Lama[edit]

The title Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra[1] is attested in the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts. It roughly translates as “The Superior Continuum (uttaratantra) of the Mahāyāna, A Treatise (śāstra) Analyzing (vibhāga) the Source (gotra) of the Three Jewels (ratna).” One surviving Sanskrit reference, Abhayākaragupta’s Munimatālaṃkāra, gives the name as Mahāyānottara: [Treatise] on the Superior Mahāyāna [Doctrine].[2] Western scholars only became aware of Sanskrit versions in the 1930s (see below); prior to this, they knew the text only in Chinese or Tibetan translation, and this was complicated by the fact that both the Chinese and the Tibetan traditions divide the text into two. Where in India the Ratnagotravibhāga was a single work comprised of root verses, explanatory verses, and prose commentary, the Chinese and Tibetan translators and commentators considered the root and explanatory verses to be one text and the complete text, including the prose commentary, to be a second. Thus not only do we have multiple names in multiple languages for the treatise, but multiple names in Chinese and Tibetan for its different parts.... Read the whole essay here

The Root Text: Read the root text of the Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra here
The Root Verses: Comparative multilingual edition of the root verses only
Verse I.28: "The Three Reasons" Verse

Sanskrit Recensions[edit]

Tibetan Recensions[edit]

Chinese Texts[edit]

  • Ratnamati 勒那摩提 (508 A.D.), 究竟一乘寶性論 (Chinese translation of Rgvbh), in T 1611. Attributed author is Sāramati.

Commentaries on Ratnagotravibhāga[edit]

Indian Commentaries[edit]

Tibetan Commentaries[edit]

Select Tibetan Texts[4][edit]

English Translations[edit]

French Translations[edit]

German Translations[edit]

  1. According to the Sanskrit grammatical rules associated with sandhi, the word boundaries of the “a” of Mahāyāna and the “u” of Uttaratantra combine as “o.” The title could just as easily be rendered “Mahāyāna Uttaratantra Śāstra.”
  2. Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 27, note #41.
  3. Besides this text, the only other two known Indian “commentaries” on the Uttaratantra are Vairocanarakṣita’s (eleventh century) very brief ahāyānottaratantraṭippaṇī (eight folios) and Sajjana’s (eleventh/twelfth century) Mahāyānottaratantraśāstropadeśa (a summary in thirty-seven verses). Brunnholzl, K. Luminous Heart pg 403 note 24
  4. For an extensive list of Tibetan Commentaries, see A List of the Commentaries on the Ratnagotravibhāga


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The Texts[edit]

Sutras[edit]

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Commentaries[edit]

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