The Doctrine of the Buddha-Nature in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-Sūtra

{{Article
|ArticleLayout=Academic Layout
|ArticleTitle=The Doctrine of the Buddha-Nature in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-Sūtra
|AuthorPage=Liu, M.
|PubDate=1982
|ArticleSummary=In the Buddhist Canon, there are two main corpuses of texts which go by the name ''Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra'' (henceforth abbreviated to ''MNS'') and have as their main concern the recounting of the events and dialogues of the last days of the Buddha. The first, presumably of earlier origin, is a comprehensive compendium of Hīnayāna ideas and precepts. It exists today in its Pali, Sanskrit and Chinese versions, and for its attention to factual details has been resorted to as the principal source of reference in most standard studies of the Buddha's life. As for the second, only its Chinese and Tibetan translations are still extant.<ref>Fragments of the Sanskrit original of this Mahāyāna version of the
''MNS'' have been recovered in recent years, and are recorded in Watanabe
Kaikyoku, ''Watanabe rombun shu'' 2nd ed. (Tokyo: 1936), pp. 570–585 and Takakusu Junjirō & Watanabe Kaikyoku, eds., ''Taishō shinshū daizōkyō'' 85 vols. (Tokyo: 1924–1934) (henceforth abbreviated to ''T''), vol. 12, p. 604. Also see G. M. Bongard Levin, "New Buddhist Sanskrit Texts from Central Asia: An Unknown Fragment of the Mahāyāna ''Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra'', ''Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies'' 4, 2 (1981), pp. 7–16.</ref> While it also relates some of the well-known episodes of the final months of the Buddha Śākyamuni, notably his illness and the last meal offered by Cunda, such narrations are treated in the work merely as convenient spring-boards for the expression of such standard Mahayana ideas as the eternal nature of Buddhahood and expedience as method of instruction. Both in style and content, this corpus exhibits the disregard of historical particulars and the fascination with the supernatural and the ideal which characterize Mahāyāna writings in general. As a Mahāyāna sūtra, it is of rather late date, for it mentions such influential "middle Mahāyāna" works as the ''Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra'' and the ''Śūraṃgamasaṃādhi-nirdeśa'' in its text, and so could
not have been compiled before the second century A.D.[2] It is this Mahāyāna version of the ''MNS'' which we are going to examine in our present study. (Liu, introduction, 63)
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