The Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra is one of the main sources for buddha-nature theory in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (in China the "Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra" was of much greater importance). This article summarizes what is known about the textual tradition, author, and date of its composition and translations.
The Titles
The title Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra[1] is attested in the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts. It roughly translates as “The Highest Teaching (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.
The Chinese title of the combined verses and prose is Jiu jing yi cheng bao xing lun[3], which Takasaki has reconstructed as Uttara-ekayāna-ratnagotra-śāstra[4] and which translates to something like “Treatise on the Superior Jewel Family of the Single-Vehicle.”[5] Kano, however, suspects that the yicheng 一乘 is a mistake for dacheng 大乘, or Mahāyāna.[6] If this is the case then the title would back translate to a more familiar form (note that the Chinese does not contain the word "tantra.") In the standard edition of the Chinese canon, the extracted verses come first, after which the complete text is given (see below for references), without a new title. Both translations are credited to Ratnamati in the early sixth century.[7] It is not known why he—or someone else—separated the text into two, although one might speculate that it was done to make memorization easier.
The Tibetan tradition names the extracted verses Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma'i bstan bcos, which back-translates into Sanskrit as Mahāyāna-uttaratantra-śāstra, and might be rendered in English as something like “Treatise on the Superior Mahāyāna Tantra.” The complete text, however, is titled Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma'i bstan bcos rnam par bshad pa, which reconstructs as Mahāyāna-uttaratantra-śāstra-vyākhyā, and translates to “A Commentary on the Treatise on the Ultimate Continuum of the Mahāyāna.” It is important to note that the title Ratnagotravibhāgavyākhyā—or any version with "vyākhyā"—is not attested in any surviving Sanskrit manuscript. Kano surmised that the root verses were extracted by a disciple of the Tibetan translator and given the title of the work, at which point the entire text was deemed to be a commentary and therefore given the title of “vyākhyā.”[8] Note that the Tibetan tradition dispensed with the phrase “Ratnagotravibhāga” in the title; it is commonly known as the Uttaratantra. Western scholars on the Ratnagotravibhāga have largely followed Tibetan tradition and divided the text in two, abbreviating the root verses as RGV and the entire text as RGVV.
Authorship[9]
The identity of the author of the Ratnagotravibhāga is not known. We have names, but the Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions differ so radically that scholars have been unable to reach a consensus. The Sanskrit manuscripts found in Tibetan libraries in the 1930s do not identify an author, nor do the Chinese translations, which date to the early sixth century; only later catalogs provide a name. In brief, the Chinese tradition points to a man named Sāramati, a member of the kṣatriya clan from Central or Northern India. The later Indian and Central Asian traditions point to Maitreya as the author of the entire text, while Tibetan tradition credits the verses to the Bodhisattva Maitreya and the prose commentary to Ārya Asaṅga.[10]
The earliest Chinese attribution comes from the important treatise Mohe zhiguan 摩訶止觀 written in 594 by the Tiantai patriarch Zhiyi 智顗 (538-597), who identifies the author of the Ratnagotravibhāga as Jianyi 堅意. Two texts from the seventh century both name the author Jianhui 堅惠.[11] Jianyi and Jianhui can both be rendered as Sāramati or Sthiramati; yi 意 and hui 惠, which both mean "wisdom," were used at the time to render mati.[12] The issue is over the jian 堅, meaning "firm," and whether it transcribes sāra or sthira; both sthira and sāra can have the meaning of "strong" or "firm."
In his 1950 edition of the Sanskrit text of the Ratnagotravibhāga, Johnson asserted that the author was Sthiramati, the author of several Yogācara-inflected commentaries on Abhidharma literature known in both China and Tibet (by the name Slob dpon blo gros brtan pa, which translates to "firm wisdom").[13] Multiple Japanese and European scholars have also taken this position. Jonathan Silk, however, convincingly argues against this view, although he is more careful than others, placing an asterisk before the name (*Sāramati) to indicate that it is nowhere attested in surviving Sanskrit literature. He points out that Jianyi/*Sāramati is credited with another composition, the *Mahāyānadharmadhātunirviśeṣa (Dasheng fajie wuchabie lun 大乘法界無差別論), which Silk finds to be so closely related to the Ratnagotravibhāga to assure him that they were written by the same person. (Note the asterisk, meaning that all we have is a Chinese-language version.) Additional evidence comes from a passage in Fāzàng's commentary to his teacher *Devendraprajña's translation of the above text, in which he gives the author's name as Jianhui and also as Suoluomodi 娑囉末底, which Fāzàng glosses as “firm wisdom,." and which points to "sthira" rather than "sāra."[14] As Kano has noted, Chinese tradition after Zhiyi settled on this individual, Sāramati, as the author of the Ratnagotravibhāga.[15]
Central Asian tradition, on the other hand, credited the treatise to the Bodhisattva Maitreya. The earliest surviving example of this is a fragment of a Khotanese Hybrid Sanskrit discovered in the library cave at Dunhuang in the early twentieth century that quotes the “Ratnagotravibhāgaśāstra” and credits it to “the bodhisattva Ārya Maitreya.” The fragment quotes both root verses and commentarial verses without suggesting different authorship. Kano dates this fragment to the 840s based on the Chinese text written on the front side of the paper.[16]
While the Central Asian and late Indian tradition of the Ratnagotravibhāga credits Maitreya as the sole author of the text, the Tibetan tradition splits the authorship of the work between Maitreya (the basic and explanatory verses) and Asaṅga (prose commentary). This split dates to the very beginning of the text's history in Tibet; the colophon to Ngok's translation credits Maitreya with the verses and Asaṅga with the prose.[17] This continued to be the Tibetan tradition and is followed by most scholars who work from the Tibetan side. A few scholars have proposed that perhaps Sāramati was given the epithet "Maitreya," which would thereby unite the Chinese and Tibetan traditions, but Kano points out that there is no evidence to support this conjecture.[18] Why Ngok gave credit to Asaṅga for the prose commentary section of the text is not yet understood. As Kano points out, the Kashmiri tradition in which Ngok trained does not appear to have ascribed authorship to Asaṅga.[19] One might speculate that a Tibetan scribe separated the verses from the prose to make a more easily memorized text; if this occurred around the time that Asaṅga's star was rising in Tibet with the translation of his Yogācāra treatises, then the scribe may have felt there would be value in linking Asaṅga's name to the Ratnagotravibhāga.
Surviving recensions of the text in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan
There are three surviving manuscripts of the Ratnagotravibhāga in Sanskrit, all incomplete. All of these were located only in the middle of the twentieth century. The first, in eleven folia[20], dates to the tenth or eleventh centuries. It was discovered and photographed in the library of Ngor Monastery in the early 1930s by a Bengali scholar named Sāṅkṛtyāyana.[21] This manuscript is currently stored in the Potala Palace in Lhasa. A second manuscript of Nepalese provenance and dating to around the twelfth century was located at Zhalu Monastery, again by Sāṅkṛtyāyana.[22] Kano does not indicate where this manuscript is currently located. The third, also from Zhalu, was brought to the China Ethnic Library in Beijing sometime between the 1960s and 1990s and is now housed at the Tibet Museum in Lhasa. On the basis of the first two, Johnson prepared an edited version which was published posthumously in 1950 and continues to serve as the standard (with slight corrections) Sanskrit version.
The Ratnagotravibhāga was translated into Chinese by Ratnamati (Lenamoti 勒那摩提). It is preserved in the Chinese canon under the title of Jiujing yicheng baoxinglun 究竟一乘寶性論, Taishō no. 1611, vol 31. The first sections (lines 813a8-820c20) consists of eighteen opening verses that are not found in Sanskrit or Tibetan translation; their origin is not explained. The treatise itself is lines 820c21-848a27 complete with root verses, commentarial verses, and prose commentary.
Ratnamati is said to have come to China from Madhyadeśa (zhongtianzhu 中天竺) between 498 and 508 and translated the Ratnagotravibhāga between 511 and around 520 in Luoyang.[23] He may or may not have brought the manuscript with him, and may have been assisted by Bodhiruci.[24]
According to Tibetan histories, the Ratnagotravibhāga was translated into Tibetan six times. Only that of Sajjana and Ngok Lotsāwa Loden Sherab (rngog lo tsA ba blo ldan shes rab, 1059-1109) survives. The extracted verses are Derge 4024/Peking 5525, titled Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma’i bstan bcos. The full text is Derge 4025/Peking 5526, under the title Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma’i bstan bcos kyi rnam par bshad pa. There exist multiple manuscripts and prints of this full translation, many of which the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project has microfilmed.[25]
Sajjana and Ngok Lotsāwa were the second team to translate the Ratnagotravibhāga; before them Atiśa Dīpaṃkara[26] and Naktsho Tsultrim Gyelwa[27] had done so. Translations after Ngok were made by Patsab Nyima Drak,[28] Marpa Dopa Chokyi Wangchuk,[29] Jonang Lotsawa Lodro Pel (the basic verses only),[30] and Yarlung Lotsāwa.[31] Alongside that of Sajjana and Ngok, at least the translations by Atiśa and Naksho and by Patsab survived into the sixteenth century, as Go Lotsāwa Zhonnu Pel[32] consulted them for his famous commentary.[33]
Translations into European Languages
The Ratnagotravibhāga was first translated into a European language in 1931 by the Russian Buddhologist Eugène Obermiller, who worked from the Tibetan. It was published under the title The Sublime Science of the Great Vehicle to Salvation Being a Manual of Buddhist Monism.[34] Following Sāṅkṛtyāyana’s discovery of the Sanskrit manuscripts and Johnson’s edition, Japanese scholar Takasaki Jikidō published a second English translation, A Study on the Ratnagotravibhāga (Uttaratantra) Being a Treatise on the Tathāgatagarbha Theory of Mahāyāna Buddhism. He worked primarily from the Sanskrit, but also consulted the Chinese and Tibetan translations.[35] Ken and Katia Holmes, students of Thrangu Rinpoche (b. 1933), translated the basic verses from the Tibetan in the 1970s, publishing it first in 1979 as Changeless Nature,[36] which they revised in 1989 as The Uttara Tantra: A Treatise on Buddha Nature[37] and again in 1999 as Maitreya on Buddha Nature.[38] In 2014 Karl Brunnhölzl translated the Ratnagotravibhāga from the Tibetan in When the Clouds Part.[39]
- 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.”
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 27, note #41.
- 究竟一乘寶性論
- Takasaki, A Study on the Ratnagotravibhāga, 7.
- Brunnhölzl (When the Clouds Part, 93) gives the Chinese title as Ratnagotraśāstra, which comes from the common abbreviation of 寶性論.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 27 note #40.
- This date is not universally accepted. See Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 20-21.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 18
- This section is based on the scholarship of Silk, Buddhist Cosmic Unity, Appendix A; Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 20-31; Takasaki, A Study of the Ratnagotravibhāga, 6-9; Brunnhölzl, When the Clouds Part, 94. For a chart of modern scholars’ positions on the authorship of the Ratnagotravibhāga, see Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 29.
- It should be noted that in contemporary Tibetan communities some teachers assert that the commentary section of the Ratnagotravibhāga was composed by Vasubhandu. This claim was noted by Japanese scholar Nakamura Zuiryū in 1961. See Kano, Buddha-nature and Emptiness, 20-31. Kano considers the assertion to be "weak on evidence."
- These are a commentary on the Sandhinirmocanasūtra (jieshenmi jingshu 解深密經疏) by the Korean monk Wǒnch’ǔuk 圓測 (613-696) and the Huayan patriarch Fāzàng’s 法藏 (643-712) treatise Dacheng fajie wuchabie lunshu 大乘法界無差別論疏. Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 22.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 22
- Silk (Buddhist Cosmic Unity, 150) points out that in China, Sthiramati’s name was usually translated as Anhui 安慧 and transliterated (in contemporary pronunciation) as either xichiluomodi 悉恥羅末底 or xidiluomodi 悉地羅末底. Pronunciation of Chinese characters has changed radically over the centuries, and while scholars have made valiant attempts at reconstructing previous pronunciations, it is an imperfect art.
- Silk, Buddhist Cosmic Unity'', 152-153.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 24.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 25. Kano also suggests (page 27) that this text was unlikely to have had any impact on the Tibetan tradition of the treatise, as Tibetans universally name the text Mahāyānottaratantra. He also points to the curious fact that Devendraprajñā, the translator of the *Mahāyānadharmadhātunirviśeṣa, was himself Khotanese and yet ascribed both that text and the Ratnagotravibhāga to Sāramati rather than Maitreya.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 28.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 30.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 28.
- These are folia 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, and 26.
- Sāṅkṛtyāyana, Sanskrit Palm-leag Mss. in Tibet, 33. The great twentieth-century Tibetan scholar Gendun Chopel noted the existence of this manuscript in 1934. See Jinpa and Lopez, Grains of Gold, 42.
- Sāṅkṛtyāyana, "Second Search of Sanskrit Palm-leaf Mss. in Tibet," 34; Sferra, "Sanskrit Manuscripts," 47.
- Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 21.
- Silk, Buddhist Cosmic Unity, 7-8.
- See Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness, 19 note #4; he points out that these have yet to be studied.
- His dates are 982-c. 1055
- Nag tsho tshul khrims rgyal ba, 1011-1064
- Pa tshab nyi ma grags, born 1055
- Mar pa do pa chos kyi dbang phyug, 1042-1136
- jo nang lo tsA ba blo gros dpal, 1299/1300-1353/1364
- Yar klung lo tsA ba, dates unknown
- ’Go lo tsA ba gzhon nu dpal, 1392-1481
- See Kano, Buddha-Nature and Emptiness Chapter 6 for a survey of these six translations, including surviving passages of the five that have been lost.
- Obermiller, Eugène, "The Sublime Science of the Great Vehicle to Salvation Being a Manual of Buddhist Monism."
- Takasaki, A Study on the Ratnagotravibhāga.
- Maitreya, Changeless Nature, 1979.
- Maitreya, The Uttara Tantra: A Treatise on Buddha Nature.
- Maitreya, Maitreya on Buddha Nature.
- Brunnhölzl, When the Clouds Part.
