11/03/2026
On March 12th at 10 a.m. (HST) Dr. Christopher Jones (ISTB) will offer a lecture at the University of Hawaii, as part of the Numata Conference "Intrinsic Perfection. Buddha Nature: Its Discovery in the Sinosphere and Its Universal Appeal".
The lecture focusses on the most impactful text concerned with buddha-nature translated into Chinese produced in the third decade of the fifth century: Dharmakṣema’s 曇無讖 version of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra, the Dabanniepanjing 大般涅槃經 (Taishō no. 374). It is Dharmakṣema’s text that shaped early Chinese teachings about buddha-nature (foxing 佛性), but most of what the text says cannot be traced back to any Indian source. It has long been acknowledged that the vast majority of Dharmakṣema’s text is unattested in any other version of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra: it is indeed plausible that the majority of Dharmakṣema’s magnum opus is not translation at all but was produced for a Chinese audience.
In his paper, Christopher Jones will introduce a larger project to finally tease open what the Dabanniepanjing consistently calls ‘the Buddha’s secret store’ (如來密藏): a phrase used by Dharmakṣema, in reference to the Dabanniepanjing, which creatively reimagines the referent of the Indic term tathāgatagarbha. Jones will explore how much of this vast work is doctrinally unique, and how so much of early Chinese thinking about buddha-nature is indebted to perhaps just one, rather creative, ‘translator’.
