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164-502: The Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra ( Sanskrit ; traditional Chinese : 大般涅槃經 ; pinyin : Dàbānnièpán-jīng ; Japanese : Daihatsunehan-gyō , Tibetan : མྱ ངནལས་དསཀྱི མྡོ ; Vietnamese: Kinh Đại Bát Niết Bàn ) or Nirvana Sutra for short, is an influential Mahāyāna Buddhist scripture of the Buddha-nature class. The original title of the sutra was Mahāparinirvāṇamahāsūtra ( Great Scripture of

328-407: A Buddha (tathāgata): the space at the center of a stūpa, where lies hidden that which is essential to a Buddha and most precious to the world after his (apparent) departure from it." The term “chamber for a relic” (dhātugarbha) is attested in many Buddhist texts. Due to this, Radich argues that the term tathāgatagarbha also developed as an internalized buddha relic which came to refer to the presence of

492-457: A buddha's qualities, mode of being or body which was not located in a stupa but in sentient beings. Another key aspect of the buddha-nature as taught in the Nirvana sutra is that it can only be directly perceived by a fully awakened Buddha, though the sutra says that a bodhisattva at the tenth stage (bhūmi) can also perceive buddha-nature in an imperfect and indistinct manner. Since according to

656-442: A dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock's notion of the "death of Sanskrit" remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that "most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead." Mah%C4%81bheri S%C5%ABtra The Mahābherisūtra focuses on buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha), describing it as luminous, pure, permanent, eternal, everlasting, peaceful, and as

820-417: A feature of buddha-nature is also found in the Śrīmālādevī sūtra . Paul Williams also notes that while we can speak of the tathāgatagarbha as a Self, this is a much more complex issue since the sutra also speaks of the importance of the not-self teaching, saying that those who have notions of a self cannot perceive buddha-nature. The Nirvana sutra is aware that there are numerous non-buddhist accounts of

984-433: A focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had

1148-591: A language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages ( prākṛta - ). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth . The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to

1312-658: A limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit

1476-454: A natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This

1640-479: A negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder, On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be

1804-479: A normal human body (nor did he gestate in a normal womb), he must have had some other transcendent type of body (which requires a transcendent womb, the tathāgata-garbha, "buddha womb"). The doctrine of the "buddha-dhātu" (buddha-nature, buddha-element, Chinese: 佛性 foxing , Tibetan: sangs rgyas gyi khams ), which refers to the fundamental nature of the Buddha, is a central teaching of the Nirvana sutra . According to

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1968-494: A number of stages in its composition. Masahiro Shimoda discerns several main stages: The Nirvana sutra is an extremely influential work for East-Asian Buddhism . It was translated various times and two major Chinese translations are extant. The translation by Dharmakṣema (c. 385–433) is significantly longer and this has led some scholars to argue that the latter portions of this edition were composed in China. This longer edition

2132-546: A pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given

2296-492: A principle of salvation: the Buddha-nature . Sasaki states that a key premise of Shimoda's work is that the origins of Mahayana and the Mahāparinirvāṇa are entwined. Scholars like Shimoda as well as Michael Radich argue that the Nirvana sutra might be the earliest source for the tathāgatagarbha doctrine. Scholars believe that the compilation of the core portion (corresponding to the six fascicle Chinese translation and

2460-578: A refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini . The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa , wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and

2624-538: A restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond

2788-545: A self ( ātman ). According to C.V. Jones "the MBhS is committed to the idea that the liberation of Buddhas is a kind of enduring existence, and advances the tathāgatagarbha of sentient beings as that aspect of them which will eventually enjoy this status." The Indian Sanskrit MBhS was translated into Chinese by Guṇabhadra (c. fifth century) as Dà fǎ gǔ jīng (T. 270). It was translated into Tibetan (Derge no. 222; Q. 888) by Vidyākaraprabha, Dpal gyi limn po, and Dpal brtsegs in

2952-471: A self are rejected in the Nirvana sutra (including some of the theories taught in the Upanishads ), in which the self is "some kernel of identity hidden within the body" which is a "person" (pudgala), a jīva , a "doer" (kartṛ) or a "master" (zhu 主). According to Williams, the "Self" taught in the Nirvana sutra "is not a Self in the worldly sense taught by non-Buddhist thinkers, or maintained to exist by

3116-408: A self which might sound similar to its own self theory and it argues that if they seem similar, this is due to two reasons. The first is that non-buddhist ātmavāda theories are often misinterpretations or misrememberings of what was taught by a bodhisattva and the second is that they may be skillful means taught to non-buddhists by Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Furthermore, numerous non-buddhist doctrines of

3280-406: A self! I constantly teach that all sentient beings possess Buddha-nature; is Buddha-nature not the self? Hence, I have not taught an annihilationist view." The Buddha then states the reason he teaches not-self (and impermanence, suffering, and impurity) is because sentient beings do not see the buddha-nature. Later on in the sutra, the Buddha also states: Good son, this Buddha-nature is in truth not

3444-439: A similar phonetic structure to Tamil. Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from

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3608-507: A specific intent behind them. In contrast to these expedient sutras which teach emptiness, unsurpassed sutras which teach the permanence of the Buddha and buddha-nature, like the Mahābherīsūtra , are to be seen as definitive. Those who reject these sutras are seen as lazy, corrupt and uncontrolled. The Mahābherisūtra also argues that those who do not understand the expedient nature of the sutras which teach emptiness are lead astray. For

3772-594: A tathāgatagarbha, which is also described by the terms ātman (a true self) and sattvadhātu (here meaning a basic element of sentient beings or an essential nature which is "immeasurable and pure"). The sutra shares the use of the term sattvadhātu with the Anūnatvāpurnatvanirdeśa , and the term ātman with the Mahāparinirvāṇa , and the Aṅgulimālīya . Furthermore, according to Karl Brunnholzl, "in this sūtra,

3936-484: A true self ( ātman ), a “supreme essence” (Tibetan: snying po’i mchog) and as a "great self" ( mahātman, 大我) that is eternal, pure and blissful, and is also separate from the five aggregates and beyond samsaric phenomena. For example, the sutra states: The real self is the nature of the Tathāgata ( 如來性). Know that all sentient beings have this, but as those sentient beings are enshrouded by immeasurable afflictions, it

4100-417: Is a kind of existence" (Ch: 解脱是有; Tib. thar pa yod pa nyid ) which entails the realization of the ātman. According to Jones, the MBhS presents the nirvāṇa attained by the Buddha as "a kind of a kind of permanent existence free from bondage to rebirth." Thus, the sutra states: The secret teaching [of this sūtra] is that, while it is said that the Tathāgata has completely passed over into nirvāṇa, in reality

4264-516: Is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent , particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand

4428-481: Is also depicted much more positively in the longer versions of the sutra). As such, the icchantika doctrine has caused much controversy and debate in East Asian Buddhism. According to Karashima, the word icchantika derives from the verb icchati (to claim, to hold, to maintain) and the term is thus best understood as "someone who [makes] claims; an opinionated [person]." Specifically, the icchantika

4592-419: Is an advanced being who will become a Buddha in the future. This sutra focuses on the tathāgatagarbha ("buddha-womb") doctrine, which it presents as the essential nature or element (dhātu) of all sentient beings (i.e. the buddha-nature ). It also states that this buddha-nature is the true ātman of living beings, and as such, presents a Buddhist ātma-vada doctrine. According to the MBhS, sentient beings have

4756-400: Is beyond being and non-being and is Thusness ( tathata ), the ultimate reality, the eternal Dharmakāya or "dharma body" (which is equivalent to the buddha-body). The sutra also states that the Buddha's body (buddhakaya) is an eternal, unchanging, unimpeded, and indivisible adamantine body ( abhedavajrakāya). As such, while he appears to die, his "transcendent, indestructible mode of being"

4920-495: Is cited by key Japanese Buddhist figures like Dōgen , Nichiren and Shinran . The Nirvana Sutra is among the most important sources and influences on Shinran 's magnum opus, Kyogyoshinsho . Shinran relies on crucial passages from the Nirvana Sutra for the more theoretical elaboration of the meaning of shinjin . Similarly, the Nirvana is a key source for Dōgen's view of buddha-nature. The Nirvana sutra 's setting

5084-443: Is endowed with the powers and qualities of a buddha is free of any karma or affliction ( klesha ), transcending the five skandhas and the twelve links of dependent arising . However, in order to become true Buddhas, sentient beings need to practice the six pāramitās which actualize their buddha potential into full Buddhahood. This is compared to how milk is made into cream or butter through additional conditions . As such,

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5248-472: Is eternal and unchanging. As the Buddha says in the Nirvana sutra, "at times, I show [myself entering into] parinirvāṇa in the Jambudvīpas of a billion worlds, and yet, ultimately, I do not take parinirvāṇa.” According to Radich, the tathāgatagarbha idea in the Nirvana sutra is closely related to the positive elements of this docetic Buddhology, which refers to the idea that since the Buddha did not have

5412-452: Is found in the writing of Bharata Muni , the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar". Sanskrit belongs to

5576-399: Is impermanent as permanent (nitya), they see what is not-self as a self (ātman), they see what is impure as pure (śubha/śuci) and they see what is suffering as being pleasant or blissful (sukha). The Nirvana sutra claims that while these four do apply to samsaric phenomena, when it comes to the "supreme dharma(s)" ( zhenshifa 真實法, *paramadharma, like Buddha and buddha-nature), the opposite is

5740-513: Is not a body sustained by various kinds of food. That is to say, it is the Dharma Body (*dharmakāya). Do not say now that the body of the Tathāgata is soft, can easily be broken, and is the same as that of common mortals. O good man! Know now that for countless billions of kalpas, the body of the Tathāgata has been strong, firm, and indestructible. The Nirvana sutra thus presents the Buddha as an eternal and transcendent being ( lokottara ) who

5904-404: Is not manifested. The Indic term "ātman" generally referred to "the permanent and indestructible essence, or an unchanging central element, of any human or other sentient being", and the idea that such a thing existed was widely rejected by mainstream Indian Buddhism . In teaching the existence of a permanent element (Tibetan: yang dag khams ) in sentient beings that allows them to become Buddhas,

6068-423: Is not the self). This is part of his skillful means (upaya) to guide beings to liberation. The Nirvana sutra states that those who see everything as empty and fail to see what is not empty do not know the true middle way . Likewise, those who see everything as not-self but fail to see what is Self also fail to see the true middle way, which is the buddha nature . According to Mark Blum, the Nirvana sutra sees

6232-409: Is presented as a timeless, eternal (nitya) and pure "Self" ( ātman ). This notion of a buddhist theory of a true self (i.e. a Buddhist ātma-vada ) is a radical one which caused much controversy and was interpreted in many different ways. Other important doctrinal themes in the Nirvana sutra include re-interpretations of not-self ( anātman ) and emptiness (Śūnyatā) as a skillful means that paves

6396-532: Is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different. The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in

6560-423: Is revealed that various phantoms made by the demon Mara are hidden among the assembly. Several sravakas and bodhisattvas, like Mahakasyapa , are unable to root them out. Then, a layman known as Sarvalokapriyadarśana or Sarvasattvapriyadarśana is shown as being capable of catching Mara's minions. The Buddha then reveals that Sarvasattvapriyadarśana only appears to be a common person (prthagjana), while in reality he

6724-578: Is said to shine forth unimpededly. The Nirvana sutra's explanation of buddha-nature is multifaceted and complex. Karl Brunnholzl argues that there three main meanings of buddha-nature in the Nirvana sutra: (1) an intrinsic pure nature that merely has to be revealed, (2) a seed or potential that can grow into Buddhahood with the right conditions, (3) the idea that the Mahayana path is open to all . The Nirvana sutra states that buddha-nature as buddhahood

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6888-527: Is seen as a wondrous liberating truth that is mysteriously hidden from the view of ordinary people. Blum notes that the two major Chinese versions of the sutra don't use the literal Chinese term for embryo or womb, but speak of the "wondrous interior treasure-house of the Buddha" which is always present within all beings. This inner treasure, a pure "buddha-relic" within, is obscured by the negative mental afflictions of each sentient being. Once these negative mental states have been eliminated, however, buddha-nature

7052-668: Is someone who rejects and is hostile to the buddha nature teaching of the Nirvana sutra . Sanskrit Sanskrit ( / ˈ s æ n s k r ɪ t / ; attributively 𑀲𑀁𑀲𑁆𑀓𑀾𑀢𑀁 , संस्कृत- , saṃskṛta- ; nominally संस्कृतम् , saṃskṛtam , IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm] ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from

7216-452: Is something that never truly dies, being uncompounded (asaṃskṛta). The Nirvana sutra further equates the Dharmakāya with the buddha-nature and states that it has four perfections ( pāramitās ): permanence, bliss, purity, and selfhood. According to Shimoda and Radich, this theme is the central theme of what is perhaps the earliest textual layer of the Nirvana sutra. Radich also notes that

7380-479: Is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases. The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet,

7544-403: Is the final hours of the Buddha's life. Unlike the early Buddhist Mahaparanibbana sutta , Ananda , the Buddha's attendant, is mostly absent from the Nirvana sutra (instead, the main interlocutor is Mañjuśrī ). The Nirvana sutra also ends with the Buddha lying down, but it does not depict his actual parinirvāṇa , nor does it depict the cremation , and other episodes after his death, like

7708-589: Is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh) . Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of

7872-460: Is the teaching of "the nature of the Tathāgata, which is the supermundane, supreme self" (離世真實之我, possibly * lokottaraparamātman ). Another important element of the relationship between not-self and true self in the Nirvana sutra is that they are seen as non-dual (advaya), as two sides of the same coin so to speak. Thus, according to the Nirvana : "the wise know that the existence of the self and absence of self are non-dual." In making this claim,

8036-490: The Aṅgulimālīya , Mahābherī , and Uttaratantra ). According to King, this can be understood as an "embryonic tathāgata" or as the "womb of the tathāgata". The Chinese typically translated the term as 如來藏 rúlái zàng ("tathāgata storehouse," "tathāgata matrix", or "tathāgata chamber"). However, according to Mark Blum, Dharmaksema translates tathāgatagārbha as Chinese : 如來密藏 ; pinyin : rúlái mìzàng or simply mìzàng, "tathagata's hidden treasury". This treasury

8200-626: The Aṅgulimālīya Sūtra , Mahābheri Sūtra , and the Nirvāṇa indicates that these texts initially circulated in South India, but then gradually began to be propagated in the northwest (especially in Kashmir ). Hodge notes that the Nirvana sutra contains prophesies of its own emergence during a period of Dharma decline (which can be calculated to be in around 220 CE) along with prophesies that

8364-540: The Bhagavata Purana , the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside

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8528-550: The Lotus Sutra (Saddharmapuṇḍarīka), including: a similar presentation of dharmabhāṇakas (dharma reciters / preachers), both include incredulous hinayana monks who leave the assembly before the sutra is taught, both texts say that "the recitation of the sūtra constitutes the Buddha’s recurring presence in the world", both texts contain the parables of the illusory city and the lost son as explanations of hinayana, both texts teach

8692-480: The Tathāgatagarbhasūtra , which is cited by name in the Nirvana sutra ). These similes suggest a more immanent understanding of buddha-nature in which the buddha element is merely something to be revealed . Furthermore, other similes reject the idea that buddha-nature abides in sentient beings at all, stating that buddha-nature abides nowhere, like how the sound made by a lute is not located in any part of

8856-580: The Dalai Lama , the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet. The Sanskrit language created

9020-613: The Indo-European family of languages . It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European : Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages ), Gothic (archaic Germanic language , c.  350 CE ), Old Norse ( c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan ( c.  late 2nd millennium BCE ) and Younger Avestan ( c. 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in

9184-461: The Mahābherisūtra, emptiness and not-self are teachings which only apply to samsaric phenomena and the afflictions, but not to the basis of samsara - great nirvāṇa which is eternal and peaceful. The Buddha further states in this sutra that he only teaches not-self in order to overcome the worldly notion of self and to develop people in faith and insight. After someone has trained in emptiness, then

9348-421: The Nirvana sutra refers to itself by alternative titles, including Tathāgataśāśvata-sūtra/Tathāgatanityatva-sūtra, which indicate the eternity of the Tathāgata. A key element of the doctrine of the eternal buddha-body is a kind of Mahayana docetism , the idea that the Buddha's physical birth and death on earth was a mere appearance, a conventional show for the sake of helping sentient beings (a doctrine which

9512-411: The Nirvana sutra criticizes those who think that buddha-nature means that all beings are already full Buddhas and do not need to practice the bodhisattva path . However, other similes in the Nirvana sutra contain slightly different characterizations of buddha-nature. For example, one simile compares the buddha nature to a treasure buried under the earth, or a to a gold mine (both which are found in

9676-419: The Nirvana sutra , "all sentient beings possess buddha-nature without distinction" (Chinese:一切眾生皆有佛性而無差別) . According to Sally King, the sutra speaks about Buddha-nature in many different ways. This led Chinese scholars to create a list of types of buddha-nature that could be found in the text. The Nirvana sutra also equates buddha-nature with the term tathāgatagarbha (which is also done by other texts like

9840-467: The Nirvana sutra , "the nature of the Tathāgata is difficult to see", the sutra emphasizes the importance of faith ( śraddhā ) in both the Nirvana sutra itself and in the buddha-nature, saying that "only one who follows the teachings of the Tathāgata, faithfully committing oneself to them, after that sees their equality [to the Buddha]." The Nirvana sutra describes Buddhahood and buddha-nature as

10004-753: The Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha 's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages. The formalization of the Saṃskṛta language is credited to Pāṇini , along with Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'), which became

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10168-531: The Rāmāyaṇa , however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language. The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to

10332-512: The ekayāna (one vehicle) doctrine and both discuss a revered monk named Sarvalokapriyadarśana. Regarding the teaching of the ekayāna (one vehicle), the MBhS links this with the teaching of tathāgatagarbha and buddha-nature. As such, Jones argues that the Mahābheri shows a marrying of ideas from the Mahāparinirvāṇa and the Lotus sutra. The sutra begins with King Prasenajit coming to see

10496-406: The sandhi rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature. Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of

10660-500: The verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta - ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined

10824-414: The 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and

10988-532: The 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to

11152-654: The 9th century CE. The Tibetan translation is slightly longer with minor alterations. According to Jones and Suzuki Takayasu, the MBhS is related to the Mahāparinirvāṇa , Aṅgulimālīya and Mahāmegha Sūtras , all of which form a group of related sutras sometimes termed "the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra- Group". Jones also argues that the MBhS is an earlier text than the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta , with which it shares some features . The MBhS also shows doctrinal similarities with

11316-465: The Buddha and his vajra body. According to Shimoda, the authors of the Nirvana sutra, as advocates of stupa worship, would have known how the term buddhadhātu originally referred to śarīra or physical relics of the Buddha. According to Shimoda's theory, these figures used the teachings of the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra to reshape the worship of the śarīra into worship of the inner Buddha as

11480-459: The Buddha is not subject to the processes of birth and death, but abides forever in an undying state. While the Buddha will appear to die (and manifest parinirvāṇa , his final nirvana, the apparent death of his body), he is in fact eternal and immortal, since he was never born, and had no beginning or end. The sutra states: The body of the Tathāgata is an eternal body (*nityakāya), an indestructible body (*abhedakāya), an adamant body (*vajrakāya); it

11644-568: The Buddha uses the terms tathāgatagarbha , tathāgatadhātu , and buddhadhātu interchangeably." Like the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra , the Mahābherī also teaches the simile of the refinement of milk into butter and then ghee as a way to explain the manifestation of buddha-nature. According to the sutra, ordinary people are like a mix of milk and blood, those who have taken refuge are like pure milk, new bodhisattvas are like cream, bodhisattvas on

11808-466: The Buddha, accompanied by the beating of drums and sounding of conches. The Buddha is then said to "beat the great drum of the dharma" and "blast the great conch of the dharma". The sutra also compares the power of the Dharma Drum to remove the three poisons (lust, hatred, and delusion) to a magical drum which can extract poisoned arrows from soldiers when beaten. Towards the end of the sutra, it

11972-455: The Buddhist doctrine of not-self as "a very important doctrine to be expounded when the listener is attached to his or her notion of selfhood or personality, because it deconstructs that object of attachment, revealing its nature as a fantasy." However, the sutra understands both the not-self and emptiness teachings as being skillful means , not ultimate truths. The Nirvana sutra also affirms

12136-425: The Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on

12300-532: The Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with

12464-521: The Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language. Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of

12628-585: The Great Amarāvati Stupa . During this time, the Śātavāhana dynasty also maintained extensive links with the Kuṣāṇa Empire . Hodge argues that it is likely that the text was composed "in a Mahāsāṃghika environment" like Karli or Amaravatī - Dhanyakaṭaka . Hiromi Habata likewise associated the sutra with the Mahāsāṃghika - Lokottaravāda school. According to Stephen Hodge, internal textual evidence in

12792-490: The Great Perfect Nirvāṇa ) and the earliest version of the text was associated with the Mahāsāṃghika - Lokottaravāda school. The sutra was particularly important for the development of East Asian Buddhism . The Nirvana sutra uses the backdrop of the Buddha's final nirvana to discuss the nature of the Buddha , who is described in this sutra as undying and eternal, without beginning or end. The text also discusses

12956-476: The Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit . The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda , a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that

13120-519: The Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages . Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages. Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of

13284-532: The Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire . Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression. With the fall of Kashmir around

13448-496: The Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire , reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support

13612-499: The Saṃskṛta language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World , Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison): The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of

13776-578: The South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire , so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar . Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with

13940-423: The Tathāgata is permanent, abiding, and without destruction: parinirvāṇa is not characterized by destruction. The sutra also speaks of the Buddha's "permanently abiding dharmakāya manifesting great supernatural powers." It also argues that the Buddha's nirvana cannot be a non-existent state nor a reality that completely lacks self, since: The Tathāgata is a god among gods. If parinirvāṇa were complete annihilation,

14104-447: The Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into

14268-451: The Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language. The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to

14432-436: The a Śātavāhana king (a prophesy placed in the mouth of the Buddha himself in some sources). According to Hodge, Sarvasattvapriyadarśana may have been a historical figure connected to the Nirvana sutra lineage (even its founder) in south India. After the situation in the south became unfavorable for this tradition, it was taken to Kashmir, where later parts of the text were written, reflecting the decline narrative of some parts of

14596-459: The alphabet, the structure of words, and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold" as an integral language they called Saṃskṛta . From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound

14760-458: The associated doctrine of buddha-nature ( tathāgatagarbha ) which is said to be a "hidden treasury" within all living beings that is eternal (nitya), blissful, Self ( atman ), and pure (shudda). Due to this buddha nature, all beings have the capacity to reach Buddhahood . Some scholars like Michael Radich and Shimoda Masahiro think that the Nirvana sutra might be the earliest source for the idea of buddha-nature. The Nirvana sutra also discusses

14924-440: The capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi . A section of European scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language. However, evidences shows that Sanskrit was a spoken language, essential for oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. The textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini, and Patanajali affirms that Classical Sanskrit in their era

15088-595: The case. As the sutra states: Monks, whatever you mentally cultivate, repeatedly and increasingly and with full acceptance, to be in all instances impermanent, unsatisfactory, without self, and impure, amid these there is that which exhibits permanence, bliss, purity and selfhood... As such, the Nirvana sutra claims that buddha-nature (and the Buddha's body, his Dharmakaya) is characterized by four perfections (pāramitās) or qualities (which are denied in classic Buddhist doctrine): permanence ( nitya ), bliss ( sukha ), self ( ātman ), and purity ( śuddha). The four perfections as

15252-527: The close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages , vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages , and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on

15416-614: The context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana . Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects ( Prakrits ) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in

15580-613: The core portion of this sutra was compiled in South India ( dakṣiṇāpatha ), possibly in Andhra or some part of the Deccan . The language used in the sūtra and related texts seems to indicate a region in southern India during the time of the Śātavāhana dynasty , likely the 2nd century CE. The Śātavāhana rulers gave rich patronage to Buddhism, and were involved with the development of the cave temples at Karla and Ajaṇṭā , and also with

15744-402: The correct teaching about the self (i.e. the buddha-nature) could be given. This is why according to the Nirvana sutra, "the Buddha teaches that the nature of the Tathāgata (如來性) is the real self (真實我), but if with respect to this tenet one mentally cultivates [the thought] that it is not the self, this is called the third distortion." Using another medicinal simile, the Nirvana sutra compares

15908-653: The crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit. Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting

16072-467: The detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī . The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and

16236-471: The differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir. The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in

16400-460: The distant major ancient languages of the world. The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region , during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes

16564-489: The division of relics and Mahakasyapa paying respect to his body etc. According to Sallie B. King, the Nirvana sutra is somewhat unsystematic and this made it a fruitful sutra for later commentators who drew on it for various doctrinal and exegetical purposes. King notes that the most important innovation of the Nirvana is the linking of the term buddhadhātu ( buddha-nature ) with tathagatagarbha ( tathagata womb/chamber). The buddha-dhātu (buddha-nature, buddha-element)

16728-433: The exact status and nature of the icchantika in the Nirvana sutra is difficult to ascertain, as the topic is discussed in different ways throughout the sutra. In some parts, icchantikas are said to be like scorched seeds who can never sprout and thus of being incurable and incapable of Buddhahood. In other passages, they are said to also possess buddha-nature and to be able to attain buddhahood (their potential for buddhahood

16892-548: The first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to

17056-465: The first seven bhūmis are like fresh butter, arhats and bodhisattvas on the ninth and tenth levels are like melted butter and Buddhas are like ghee. According to the MBhS, the ātman is what is realized by Buddhas when they attain awakening and is characterized by "sovereignty" (自在; dbang phyug; aiśvarya) which only a Buddha can know and realize. The sutra further states that this sovereignty can only be unlocked after awakening, and that before awakening,

17220-412: The foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga . The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world". Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as

17384-537: The gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names they first set forth the beginning of Language, Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love, When the wise ones formed Language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, Then friends knew friendships – an auspicious mark placed on their language. — Rigveda 10.71.1–4 Translated by Roger Woodard The Vedic Sanskrit found in

17548-431: The historic Sanskrit literary culture and the failure of new Sanskrit literature to assimilate into the changing cultural and political environment. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead ". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with

17712-486: The intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as

17876-432: The largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. — Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama , scientific , technical and others. It

18040-412: The linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and

18204-514: The literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz , has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana , the Mahabharata ,

18368-409: The lute . The Indic term dhātu was used in early Buddhism to refer to the relics of a Buddha as well as to basic constituents of reality or "raw material" (like the eighteen "dhātus" that make up any personality). The Nirvana sutra draws on this term and applies it to the true nature of a Buddha, which is permanent (nitya), pure, blissful and resides within all sentient beings (analogous to how

18532-511: The modern age include the Samaveda , Yajurveda , Atharvaveda , along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and the early Upanishads . These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of

18696-429: The more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah . Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India

18860-401: The most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created

19024-602: The most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer . As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European . Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around

19188-409: The mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit ,

19352-477: The much-maligned ‘man in the street’", since these are considered to lead to egoistic grasping. Thus, the Nirvana sutra often portrays the teaching of the tathāgatagarbha as a Self as being a skillful means, a useful strategy to convert non-buddhists and to combat annihilationist interpretations of the Dharma. For example, in Nirvana sutra , the Buddha proclaims "I do not teach that all sentient beings are without

19516-435: The northwest in the late Bronze Age . Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism , the language of classical Hindu philosophy , and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism . It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of

19680-597: The numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule . Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants . In Sanskrit,

19844-403: The oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as

20008-431: The other." Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English: A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for

20172-529: The political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from

20336-414: The possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit". The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and

20500-439: The previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock. Scholars maintain that the Sanskrit language did not die, but rather only declined. Jurgen Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes

20664-480: The problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view

20828-412: The pure buddha relics were housed inside a stupa ) . Some scholars like Shimoda and Radich have seen the buddha-nature idea as arising from an internalization of stupa and relic worship. Instead of worshiping relics externally, the buddha-nature teaching turns inward, to the inner buddha relic in all of us. According to Jones, the term tathāgatagarbha could also have referred to "the chamber (garbha) for

20992-609: The regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism , the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas , these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly

21156-497: The relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India,

21320-562: The role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal —a scholar of Linguistics with

21484-496: The same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin". The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had

21648-499: The saṅgha] in the expressions ‘there is a self’ and ‘there is absence of self’ fear the expression ‘there is a self’; they adopt the annihilationist view of great emptiness, and cultivate non-self. In this way they do not produce faith in the very profound sūtras of the tathāgatagarbha, and of the permanent abiding of the Buddhas. Furthermore, according to the Mahābheri, all the emptiness teachings should be seen as provisional, having

21812-531: The self; for the benefit of sentient beings is it called the self.… Buddha-nature is absence of self, [but] the Tathāgata teaches the self [for the sake of some audiences]: because of his permanence, the Tathāgata is the self, but he teaches absence of self, because he has achieved sovereignty [zizai 自在, possibly Skt. aiśvarya]. Thus, according to the Nirvana sutra , the Buddha uses the term self when needed (to overcome nihilistic interpretations of not-self) and teaching not-self when needed (to overcome grasping at what

21976-556: The semi-nomadic Aryans . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the " Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes

22140-539: The shorter Tibetan translation) must have occurred at an early date, during or prior to the 2nd century CE, based internal evidence and on Chinese canonical catalogs. Using textual evidence in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and related texts, Stephen Hodge estimates a compilation period between 100 CE and 220 CE for the core sutra. The Indian version of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra underwent

22304-615: The social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it

22468-748: The sutra also cites two sutras, the Sarvapuṇyasamuccayasūtra (possibly Taisho no. 381–382) and a Prajñāpāramitā sutra (the most likely candidate being the Suvikrāntavikrāmiparipṛcchā ). Despite the fact that the Buddha-nature is innate in all sentient beings, there is a class of people who called icchantikas ("extremists" or "dogmatists") which are either excluded from Buddhahood or will find it very difficult to ever reach it. The Nirvana sutra discusses this class of people often. According to scholars like Blum and Brunnholzl,

22632-486: The sutra is self consciously adopting a Buddhist version of ātmavāda (“discourse about the self”) which was popular in Indian thought, while also modifying the Buddhist doctrine of not-self ( anātman ) that completely rejected any notion of a self. The teaching that the buddha-nature is a self is one of the "four inversions" (viparyāsas), a key theme in the Nirvana sutra . Early Buddhism held that living beings have four distortions in how they perceive reality: they see what

22796-399: The sutra states: Lord, [if sentient beings] attain liberation and sovereignty, one should know that sentient beings certainly ought to have permanence. For example, when one sees smoke one knows that there is necessarily fire. If there exists a self, there must be liberation. If it is taught that there is a self, this is the liberation with a form that was already explained [above]; this is not

22960-486: The sutra, and the issue is complex, though as Blum writes the Nirvana sutra seems "ambivalent on whether or not icchantikas can attain buddhahood". The Nirvana sutra 's precise date of origin is uncertain, but its early form may have developed in or by the second century CE. The original Sanskrit text is not extant except for a small number of fragments, but it survives in Chinese and Tibetan translation. The Nirvana sutra

23124-402: The teaching of not-self to a medicine which requires a mother to stop breast feeding her infant. The mother thus smears her breast with a pungent ointment and tells her child that it is poison. When the medicine is fully ingested, the mother removes the ointment and invites the child to nurse at her breast again. In this simile, the medicine is the skillful notion of not-self, and the mother's milk

23288-412: The teachings of not-self and emptiness , and how they are incomplete unless they are complemented by the teaching of "non-emptiness" and the true self, which is buddha-nature. Furthermore, the Nirvana sutra discusses the idea of the icchantikas , a class of sentient beings who "have little or no chance of liberation." The icchantika idea is discussed in various ways throughout the different versions of

23452-513: The text will be taken to Kashmir (罽賓). Hodge also discusses an important person named Sarvasattvapriyadarśana who appears in a group of texts related to the Nirvana sutra like the Aṅgulimāla and the Lotus sutra (he is also called Sarvalokapriyadarśana in the Mahāmegha and Mahābherīhāraka ). This figure is connected with the teaching of the eternity of the Buddha and is said to have been born during

23616-401: The text. Shimoda Masahiro proposes that the earliest part of the Nirvana sutra is related to the views and practices of itinerant dharma preachers called dharmakathikas or dharmabhānakas (說法者 or 法師). These figures frequently went on pilgrimage to stūpa sites in the company of laypeople who were allowed to protect them with swords and staves. They may have also believed in the eternal nature of

23780-436: The truth of "non-emptiness", which is a real genuine self, the buddha-nature. The Nirvana sutra compares the not-self teaching to a milk-based medicine which is useful for certain ailments, but not for all. Because of this, a physician who only prescribed this single medicine would be an unskillful one. The Buddha in the Nirvana sutra says he taught not-self in order to get rid of certain mistaken views of self in order that

23944-653: The turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts , and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari . Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India 's Eighth Schedule languages . However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first-language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but

24108-408: The variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa , Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja , Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines

24272-564: The vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi , Paithan , Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era. According to Lamotte , Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit

24436-410: The way for the ultimate buddha-nature teachings, the doctrine of the icchantika , the eternal and docetic ( lokottara ) nature of Shakyamuni Buddha and his adamantine body ( vajra -kaya), the promotion of vegetarianism , and a teaching on the decline of the Buddha's Dharma. A key teaching found in the Nirvana sutra is the eternal nature of the Buddha. Blum notes that the sutra makes it clear that

24600-399: The world would be [gradually] destroyed. If [parinirvāṇa] is not annihilation, then it is permanently abiding and joyful. Since it is permanently abiding and joyful, then certainly there exists a self, just as [where there is] smoke, there is fire. The Mahābherisūtra criticizes certain Buddhist interpretations of emptiness which reject the buddha-nature teachings on the self: [Members of

24764-521: The worldly view of a self, nor is it expounding annihilationism or eternalism . The sutra also states that this self is not the worldly view of a self, and as such affirms the teaching of anātman (not-self), as a skillful means which does away with wrong views of a self. Like the Mahāparinirvāṇamahāsūtra, the Mahābherisūtra also teaches that the Buddha continues to exist after his final nirvāṇa , describing this as "a liberation that

24928-425: The ātman of each sentient being is like an imprisoned king which lacks sovereignty. The Mahābherisūtra also states that the ātman is a permanent element that is present in sentient beings which remains after the attainment of liberation. It compares the self (ātman) to the gold element ("dhātu", which can also mean "material element") which can be covered by impurities and yet retain its pure nature as gold. As

25092-502: The Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times

25256-408: Was a spoken language ( bhasha ) used by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region. According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit

25420-427: Was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in

25584-472: Was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE. Today, it is believed that Kashmiri is the closest language to Sanskrit. Reinöhl mentions that not only have

25748-430: Was already found in the Mahāsāṃghika school). According to the Nirvana sutra, the Buddha entered nirvāṇa aeons ago (and yet remains actively benefiting beings). As such, the Buddha merely appears to be born, practice the path, achieve nirvana and die in order to be "in accordance with the world" (lokānuvartanā, Ch. suishun shijian , 隨順世間) so that people would trust him as a human sage. However, in reality, his nature

25912-724: Was also influenced by the works of Daosheng . This school taught the universality of Buddha nature and the capacity for even icchantikas to attain Buddhahood. The school thrived in the Liang dynasty (502-557) and many of its teachings were incorporated into the Tiantai school. During the Liang, the school's teachings were supplemented by the teachings of the Tattvasiddhi-Śāstra by scholars like Pao-liang (d. 509). The Nirvana sutra

26076-600: Was also seen as a key sutra for both the Tiantai and the Huayan schools, the main doctrinal schools of Chinese Buddhism . The key Tiantai exegete Zhiyi even saw the sutra as a final teaching of the Buddha and as being of equal status to the Lotus Sutra . Due to its status in these doctrinal traditions, it also became important for numerous Japanese Buddhist schools like Zen , Nichiren and Shin Buddhism . The work

26240-686: Was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati . The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang , another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in

26404-451: Was also the most important and popular one in China, Japan and Korea, since it promoted the universality of Buddha nature and Buddhahood. The six fascicle version on the other hand was mostly ignored according to Blum. Dharmakṣema's Nirvana sutra inspired numerous sutra commentaries and is cited widely by numerous East Asian Buddhist authors. The sutra was a key scriptural source for the idea that all sentient beings have buddha-nature, which

26568-559: Was seen as an active force in the world. It was also influential due to its teachings promoting vegetarianism and its teachings on the eternal nature of the Buddha. All these doctrines became central teachings of Chinese Buddhism. In the Southern Dynasties (420-589) period, there was a Chinese Buddhist school devoted to the Dharmakṣema Nirvana sutra , which was simply called the "Nirvana School" ( nièpán-zong ) and

26732-403: Was translated into Chinese various times. The most important editions are the 416 CE "six fascicle text" and the 421 CE translation of Dharmakṣema , which is about four times longer than the earlier one. This sutra should not be confused with the early Buddhist Mahāparinibbāna Sutta which is not a Mahayana sutra . The history of the text is extremely complex, but the consensus view is that

26896-442: Was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit. Sanskrit as

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