Wang phab zhun

From Buddha-Nature


ཝང་ཕབ་ཞུན
Wangpabzhun 

Wangpabzhun (wang phab zhwun) is the Tibetanized version of the name of a man who collaborated on the translation of the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra (D119) from the Chinese. His Tibetan colleagues in the task were Gewai Lodro (dge ba'i blos gros) and Gyatso De (rgya mtsho'i sde), who presumably were Tibetan. They likely worked from the earliest Chinese version (T374), translated around 421–432 by the central Indian monk Dharmakṣema (385-433) in the northern kingdom of Beiliang 北涼.

No details of his life are known, and no other translations of his appear to be extant. Based on what is known of his collaborators, he most likely lived during the eleventh century.

The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, a refashioning of the similarly-named Pāli sutta, is narrative of the final days of the Buddha according to Mahāyāna doctrine. It is one of the earliest and most important sources for the doctrine of tathāgatagarbha, or buddha-nature. Two other translations of the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra were made it Tibet. The first of these (D120, corresponding to T376) was done in the early ninth century by Jinamitra, Jñānagarbha, and Devacandra. The second (D121) was made in the eleventh century by Kamalagupta and Rinchen Zangpo (rin chen bzang po, 958–1055).
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