Articles/On the Ratnagotravibhāga

On the Ratnagotravibhāga

Alexander Gardner

2018/09/12

Original content written for the Buddha-Nature Project.

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Gardner, Alex. "On the Ratnagotravibhāga." Buddha-Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative, September 12, 2018. https://buddhanature.tsadra.org/index.php/Articles/On_the_Ratnagotravibh%C4%81ga.

Abstract

The Indian treatise that this website identifies as the Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra is also known by a handful of other titles in multiple languages. It is fairly common for ancient works of literature to be known by many names, especially if, like the Ratnagotravibhāga (to give it its abbreviated name), it has been translated into many languages. This essay will explain the multiple names, discuss what is known of its authorship, and briefly survey the existing recensions and translations.

The Titles

The title Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra is attested in the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts. It roughly translates as “The Superior Continuum (uttaratantra) of the Mahāyāna, A Treatise (śāstra) Analyzing (vibhāga) the Source (gotra) of the Three Jewels (ratna).” One surviving Sanskrit reference, Abhayākaragupta’s Munimatālaṃkāra, gives the name as Mahāyānottara: [Treatise] on the Superior Mahāyāna [Doctrine]. Western scholars only became aware of Sanskrit versions in the 1930s (see below); prior to this, they knew the text only in Chinese or Tibetan translation, and this was complicated by the fact that both the Chinese and the Tibetan traditions divide the text into two. Where in India the Ratnagotravibhāga was a single work comprised of root verses, explanatory verses, and prose commentary, the Chinese and Tibetan translators and commentators considered the root and explanatory verses to be one text and the complete text, including the prose commentary, to be a second. Thus not only do we have multiple names in multiple languages for the treatise, but multiple names in Chinese and Tibetan for its different parts.

The Chinese title of the combined verses and prose is Jiu jing yi cheng bao xing lun 究竟一乘寶性論, which Takasaki has reconstructed as Uttara-ekayāna-ratnagotra-śāstra and which translates to something like “Treatise on the Superior Jewel Family of the Single-Vehicle.” Kano, however, suspects that the yicheng 乘 is a mistake for dacheng 大乘, or Mahāyāna. If this is the case then the title would back translate to a more familiar form (note that the Chinese does not contain the word "tantra.") In the standard edition of the Chinese canon, the extracted verses come first, after which is the complete test is given (see below for references), without a new title. Both translations are credited to Ratnamati in the early sixth century. It is not known why he—or someone else—separated the text into two, although one might speculate that it was done to make memorization easier.

The Tibetan tradition names the extracted verses Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma’i bstan bcos, which back-translates into Sanskrit as Mahāyāna-uttaratantra-śāstra, and might be rendered in English as something like “Treatise on the Superior Mahāyāna Tantra.” The complete text, however, is titled Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma’i bstan bcos rnam par bshad pa, which reconstructs as Mahāyāna-uttaratantra-śāstra-vyākhyā, and translates to “A Commentary on the Treatise on the Ultimate Continuum of the Mahāyāna.” It is important to note that the title Ratnagotravibhāgavyākhyā—or any version with "vyākhyā"—is not attested in any surviving Sanskrit manuscript; Kano surmised that the root verses were extracted by a disciple of the Tibetan translator and given the title of the work, at which point the entire text was deemed to be a commentary and therefore given the title of “vyākhyā.” Note that the Tibetan tradition dispensed with the phrase “Ratnagotravibhāga” in the title; it is commonly known as the Uttaratantra. Western scholars on the Ratnagotravibhāga have largely followed Tibetan tradition and divided the text in two, abbreviating the root verses as RGV and the entire text as RGVV.

Authorship

The identity of the author of the Ratnagotravibhāga is not known. We have names, but the Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions differ so radically that scholars have been unable to reach a consensus. The Sanskrit manuscripts found in Tibetan libraries in the 1930s do not identify an author, nor do the Chinese translations, which date to the early sixth century; only later catalogs provide a name. In brief, the Chinese tradition points to a man named Sāramati, a member of the kṣatriya clan from Central or Northern India. The later Indian and Central Asian traditions point to Maitreya as the author of the entire text, while Tibetan tradition credits the verses to the Bodhisattva Maitreya and the prose commentary to Ārya Asaṅga.

The earliest Chinese attribution comes from the important treatise Mohe zhiguan 摩訶止觀 written in 594 by the Tiantai patriarch Zhiyi 智顗 (538-597), where the author of the Ratnagotravibhāga is identified as Jianyi 堅意. Two texts from the seventh century both name the author Jianhui 堅惠. Jianyi and Jianhui can both be rendered as Sāramati or Sthiramati; yi 意 and hui 惠, which both mean "wisdom," were used at the time to render mati. The issue is over the jian 堅, meaning "firm," and whether it transcribes sāra or sthira (both sthira and sāra can have the meaning of "strong" or "firm"). In his 1950 edition of the Sanskrit text of the Ratnagotravibhāga, Johnson asserted that the author was Sthiramati, the author of several Yogācara-inflected commentaries on Abhidharma literature known in both China and Tibet (by the name Slob dpon blo gros brtan pa, which translates to "firm wisdom"). Multiple Japanese and European scholars have also taken this position. Jonathan Silk, however, convincingly argues against this view, although he is more careful than others, placing an asterisk before the name (*Sāramati) to indicate that it is nowhere attested in surviving Sanskrit literature. He points out that Jianyi/*Sāramati is credited with another composition, the *Mahāyānadharmadhātunirviśeṣa (Dasheng fajie wuchabie lun 大乘法界無差別論), which Silk finds to be so closely related to the Ratnagotravibhāga to assure him that they were written by the same person. Additional evidence comes from a passage in Fazang's commentary to his teacher *Devendraprajña's translation of the above text, in which he gives the author's name as Jianhui and also as Suoluomodi 娑囉末底, which Fazang glosses as “firm wisdom.” As Kano has noted, Chinese tradition after Zhiyi settled on this individual, Sāramati, as the author of the Ratnagotravibhāga.

Central Asian tradition, on the other hand, credited the treatise to the Bodhisattva Maitreya. The earliest surviving example of this is a fragment of a Khotanese Hybrid Sanskrit discovered in the library cave at Dunhuang in the early twentieth century that quotes the “Ratnagotravibhāgaśāstra” and credits it to “the bodhisattva Ārya Maitreya.” The fragment quotes both root verses and commentarial verses without suggesting different authorship. Kano dates this fragment to the 840s based on the Chinese text written on the front side of the paper.

While the Central Asian and late Indian tradition of the Ratnagotravibhāga credits Maitreya as the sole author of the text, the Tibetan tradition splits the authorship of the work between Maitreya (the basic and explanatory verses) and Asaṅga (prose commentary). This split dates to the very beginning of the text's history in Tibet; the colophon to Ngok's translation credits Maitreya with the verses and Asaṅga with the prose. This continued to be the Tibetan tradition and is followed by most scholars who work from the Tibetan side. A few scholars have proposed that perhaps Sāramati was given the epithet "Maitreya," which would thereby unite the Chinese and Tibetan traditions, but Kano points out that there is no evidence to support this conjecture. Why Ngok gave credit to Asaṅga for the prose commentary section of the text is not yet understood. As Kano points out, the Kashmiri tradition in which Ngok trained does not appear to have ascribed authorship to Asaṅga. One might speculate that a Tibetan scribe separated the verses from the prose to make a more easily memorized text; if this occurred around the time that Asaṅga's star was rising in Tibet with the translation of his Yogācāra treatises, then the scribe may have felt there would be value in linking Asaṅga's name to the Ratnagotravibhāga.

Surviving recensions of the text in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan

There are three surviving manuscripts of the Ratnagotravibhāga in Sanskrit, all incomplete. All of these were located only in the middle of the twentieth century. The first, in eleven folia, dates to the tenth or eleventh centuries. It was discovered and photographed in the library of Ngor Monastery in the early 1930s by a Bengali scholar named Sāṅkṛtyāyana. This manuscript is currently stored in the Potala Palace in Lhasa. A second manuscript of Nepalese provenance and dating to around the twelfth century was located at Zhalu Monastery, again by Sāṅkṛtyāyana. Kano does not indicate where this manuscript is currently located. The third, also from Zhalu, was brought to the China Ethnic Library in Beijing sometime between the 1960s and 1990s and is now housed at the Tibet Museum in Lhasa. On the basis of the first two, Johnson prepared an edited version which was published posthumously in 1950 and continues to serve as the standard (with slight corrections) Sanskrit version.

As noted above, both the Chinese and Tibetan tradition extracted the verses from the Ratnagotravibhāga to create a second text. The Ratnagotravibhāga was translated into Chinese by Ratnamati (Lenamoti 勒那摩提). The Chinese canon has two texts under the title of Jiujing yicheng baoxinglun 究竟一乘寶性論: the first has only the basic verses as well as eighteen opening verses not found in Sanskrit versions nor Tibetan translation. There is no explanation as to why, or who, separated the verses from the prose. The second is the full text, complete with the prose section. Ratnamati is said to have come to China from Madhyadeśa (zhongtianzhu 中天竺) between 498 and 508 and translated the Ratnagotravibhāga between 511 and around 520 in Luoyang. He may or may not have brought the manuscript with him, and may have been assisted by Bodhiruci.

According to Tibetan histories, the Ratnagotravibhāga was translated into Tibetan six times. Only that of Sajjana and Ngok Lotsāwa Loden Sherab (rngog lo tsA ba blo ldan shes rab, 1059-1109) survives. The extracted verses are Derge 4024/Peking 5525, titled Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma’i bstan bcos. The full text is Derge 4025/Peking 5526, under the title Theg pa chen po rgyud bla ma’i bstan bcos kyi rnam par bshad pa. There exist multiple manuscripts and prints of this full translation, many of which the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project has microfilmed.

Sajjana and Ngok Lotsāwa were the second team to translate the Ratnagotravibhāga; before them Atiśa Dīpaṃkara and Naktsho Tsultrim Gyelwa had done so. Translations after Ngok were made by Patsab Nyima Drak, Marpa Dopa Chokyi Wangchuk, Jonang Lotsawa Lodro Pel (the basic verses only), and Yarlung Lotsāwa. Alongside that of Sajjana and Ngok, at least the translations by Atiśa and Naksho and by Patsab survived into the sixteenth century, as Go Lotsāwa Zhonnu Pel consulted them for his famous commentary.

Translations into European Languages

The Ratnagotravibhāga was first translated into a European language in 1931 by the Russian Buddhologist Eugène Obermiller, who worked from the Tibetan. It was published under the title The Sublime Science of the Great Vehicle to Salvation Being a Manual of Buddhist Monism. Following Sāṅkṛtyāyana’s discovery of the Sanskrit manuscripts and Johnson’s edition, Japanese scholar Takasaki Jikidō published a second English translation, A Study on the Ratnagotravibhāga (Uttaratantra) Being a Treatise on the Tathāgatagarbha Theory of Mahāyāna Buddhism working primarily from the Sanskrit, but also consulting the Chinese and Tibetan translations. Ken and Katia Holmes, students of Thrangu Rinpoche (b. 1933), translated the basic verses from the Tibetan in the 1970s, publishing it first in 1979 as Changeless Nature, which they revised in 1989 as The Uttara Tantra: A Treatise on Buddha Nature and again in 1999 as Maitreya on Buddha Nature. In 2014 Karl Brunnhölzl translated the Ratnagotravibhāga from the Tibetan in When the Clouds Part.