Dr. Christopher V. Jones: Reevaluating the Buddha-Nature Idea in India

8 November 2017

The tathāgatagarbha literature of the Indian Mahāyāna is unconventional for a number of reasons. At their most radical, texts of this tradition declare that the tathāgatagarbha – sometimes called the everpresent ‘Buddha-Nature’ (buddhadhātu) – constitutes the true self (ātman) of any sentient being, in apparent contravention of Buddhist commitment to the doctrine of anātman. At their least problematic – when the language of selfhood is not used – they posit still that all sentient beings at all times possess the qualities of a fully awakened Buddha, which jars with the position that every constituent aspect of a sentient being is  necessarily impermanent. This paper will review recent developments in the study of the Indian tathāgatagarbha corpus of texts.  Whereas much scholarship has marginalized those texts that couch the tathāgatagarbha as a doctrine of the self, recent research suggests that those works that  explore this idea in such terms likely reflect an earlier form of ‘Buddha-nature’ thought than those which do not. With reference to relevant Indian sūtra and commentarial literature, this paper will review the relationship between the tathāgatagarbha and the language of selfhood, and present a reevaluation of how key works of this literature – including the Mahāparinirvāṇamahāsūtra, Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādasūtra and Tathāgatagarbhasūtra – should be considered to relate to one another. Aside from exploring a relative chronology of Indian tathāgatagarbha works, I will suggest that the history of the tathāgatagarbha idea in Indian literature is
one of successive revisions and reformulations, away from what may have originally been a radical attempt at promoting a Buddhist doctrine of a permanent, unchanging self.

• Click here to download the invitation [PDF]

November 8th, 2017 - 16.00h
Universität Hamburg,
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, ESA-Ost, Raum 120