ABSTRACT
It would probably be a mistake to think of the Tathagatagarbha tradition in Buddhism as a school in the way that the Madhyamika and Yogacara traditions are schools.1 The work which came to be seen (at least in Tibet) as the root treatise (ZAstra) of the tradition, the RatnagotravibhAga, together with its commentary, the VyAkhyA, seems to have been composed in India by the fifth century CE.2 But if we can judge by quotations in other works it is debatable how far the RatnagotravibhAga and its commentary exerted any obvious or direct influence on the development of Indian Buddhist philosophical thought prior to about the eleventh century. In Tibet, where there are said to be only two Mahayana philosophical schools, Madhyamika and Yogacara (Cittamatra), scholars have differed sharply over the allegiance of the RatnagotravibhAga. The very fact of their disagreement suggests that the Tathagatagarbha tradition cannot be obviously and immediately equated with either of the two schools. In China, where the Tathagatagarbha teaching was of crucial importance, Fazang (Fa-tsang) in the seventh century saw the Tathagatagarbha doctrine as a distinct tradition from Yogacara and Madhyamika, and spoke of the Tathagatagarbha setras as representing a fourth turning of the ever-mobile Dharma Wheel.3 There may be some doctrinal connection, as yet unclear, between the Tathagatagarbha tenets and the teaching of Paramartha’s Shelun Yogacara in China, and also the ‘without-form’ Yogacara. Nevertheless, a number of important Yogacara doctrines, such as the Three Natures and the substratum consciousness, are missing from our earliest Tathagatagarbha sources. It must be admitted, however, that the history of early Yogacara in India is obscure in the extreme and largely unknown. Takasaki has argued that Tathagatagarbha started as a distinct Buddhist tradition but was prevented from forming a separate school through subsequent absorption into the Yogacara, particularly through a simple equation of the tathAgatagarbha – understood as the Buddha-essence, or Buddha-nature – with the substratum consciousness (AlayavijñAna). This suggestion is asserted most notably and influentially in the LañkAvatAra SEtra.4 In spite of this, the importance of the Tathagatagarbha teaching is sufficiently great, and its doctrinal allegiance sufficiently obscure, to warrant here, perhaps, a separate though cautious treatment.
