Dàfāngděng rúláizàng jīng 大方等如來藏經
Mahāvaipulya Tathāgatagarbhasūtra (Sūtra of the Tathāgatagarbha in the Great Vaipulya [Tradition]) translated by 佛陀跋陀羅 (Fótuóbátuóluó / Buddhabhadra, 譯)
About the work
T666 in one fascicle is the earlier of the two extant Chinese translations of the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra, a short but doctrinally pivotal text of the tathāgatagarbha corpus. The text presents the central simile-cycle of the tathāgatagarbha tradition: nine famous similes for the Buddha-nature (“storehouse” of the Tathāgata) hidden within sentient beings — the buddha within the lotus, the honey covered by bees, the kernel within the husk of grain, the gold in dirty rags, the seed in the rotted fruit, the buddha statue in tattered cloth, the cakravartin foetus in the womb of the destitute woman, the gold in the rubbish, the buddha image cast in the mould.
Abstract
The translation is unanimously ascribed to 佛陀跋陀羅 (Buddhabhadra, 359–429), produced at the Dàochǎngsì 道場寺 in Jiànkāng during his Eastern-Jìn productive period. The defensible date bracket follows the documented translation activity of Buddhabhadra at Jiànkāng (after his arrival there in 413 and before the completion of his major projects, e.g. the 60-fascicle Huāyán of 418–420). T667 is 不空’s eighth-century Tang-period retranslation of the same Indic Tathāgatagarbhasūtra.
T666 — together with the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra (T374), the Śrīmālādevī-siṃhanāda (T353), and the Dasheng tongxing jing (KR6i0330) — forms the core of the East Asian tathāgatagarbha canon. The doctrine that “all sentient beings possess the Tathāgata’s storehouse / Buddha-nature” (一切眾生悉有如來藏) has its scriptural locus classicus in this text.
The Sanskrit original was lost until partial fragments and a near-complete Tibetan parallel allowed Zimmermann (2002) to reconstruct the Sanskrit text. The reconstruction confirms that Buddhabhadra’s translation is exegetically faithful to the Indic source, while T667 is closer to a paraphrase.
Related canonical texts: KR6i0324 (大方廣如來藏經 / T667), the parallel translation by 不空.
Translations and research
- Zimmermann, Michael. A Buddha Within: The Tathāgatagarbhasūtra. The Earliest Exposition of the Buddha-Nature Teaching in India. Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica VI. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2002. The standard critical edition with reconstructed Sanskrit, Tibetan, and English translation; comprehensive philological apparatus.
- Grosnick, William H. “The Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra.” In Buddhism in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, 92–106. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. English translation with brief introduction.
- Takasaki Jikidō 高崎直道. Nyoraizō shisō no keisei 如来蔵思想の形成. Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1974. The classic study of tathāgatagarbha doctrine in its Indian and Chinese formative periods.
- Radich, Michael. The Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra and the Emergence of Tathāgatagarbha Doctrine. Hamburg University Press, 2015.
Other points of interest
The nine-similes (navadr̥ṣṭānta) of T666 became one of the most-cited textual schemata of the Mahāyāna in East Asian doctrinal literature. They are explicitly extended into the Ratnagotravibhāga (where they form the core of the second vajra-pada on the garbha in chapter 1), and they ground the tathāgatagarbha exegesis of the [[KR6c0014|Dazhidulun]], [[KR6e0007|Awakening of Faith]], and the East Asian tathāgatagarbha commentarial tradition more broadly.
Links
- CBETA
- Wikipedia
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (415): CBETA, Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經, ed. Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo, 1924–1932. CBReader v 5.0, 2014. dazangthings