Ratnamati

From Buddha-Nature


रत्नमति
Ratnamati(5th Century - 6th Century)
勒那摩提

In Sanskrit, "Bejeweled Intelligence," name of an Indian scholar and Chinese translator who lived during the fifth and sixth centuries CE. He was especially renowned for his prodigious memory of a great many sūtra verses. In 508 CE, Ratnamati traveled from India to the Northern Wei capital of Luoyang, where he began to work on a translation of Vasubandhu's "Treatise on the Ten Stages" (S. Daṡabhūmivyākhyāna; C. Shidijing lun) with Bodhiruci and Buddhaśānta (d.u.). However, disagreements between the collaborators over the nature of the ālayavijñāna (viz., whether it was pure, impure, or both) led them to produce different translations. Those who studied Bodhiruci's rendering came to be known as the Northern Di lun zong, while the followers of Ratnamati's version were known as the Southern Di lun zong. The Southern Di lun school was represented by Ratnamati's foremost pupil, Huiguang (468–537), who advocated that the ālayavijñāna was an ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) and coextensive with the buddha-nature (foxing), which thus was in fact innate. Ratnamati subsequently went on to collaborate with other scholars on the translation of other works, including the Ratnagotravibhāga, and the Saddharmapuṇdarīkopadeśa attributed to Vasubandhu. Ratnamati is also the name of a bodhisattva who appears in various Mahāyāna sūtras. (Source: "Ratnamati." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 703. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)

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Other names

  • རིན་ཆེན་བློ་གྲོས · other names (Tibetan)
  • Rin chen blo gros · other names (Wylie)