Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra.
A queen, not a monk, delivers the sūtra's entire teaching — and the Buddha confirms every word of it. Queen Śrīmālā's "lion's roar" is where two of the most quoted phrases in all of Mahāyāna Buddhism first appear: "the empty tathāgatagarbha" and "the not-empty tathāgatagarbha," and the paradox that a mind inherently pure by nature is nonetheless defiled by affliction. This collection translates the whole sūtra across ten pages, with reading notes drawn throughout from Jizang's commentary, the Shengman Baoku (勝鬘寶窟, T1744) — the founder of this site's own Sanlun/Madhyamaka lineage turning his attention to the doctrine that would shape everything Chinese Buddhism built afterward.
How to read this collection
This is a short sūtra by the standards of this site — roughly 10,200 characters of root text, shorter than the Awakening of Faith or the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment — but its fifteen chapters are wildly uneven in length: Chapter Eleven is three sentences, while Chapter Five alone runs to nearly a third of the whole text. Rather than force one chapter onto one page the way this site's Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment collection does, this collection splits at natural topic boundaries, so that Chapter Five becomes three pages of comparable length to everything around them, and several of the sūtra's shortest chapters share a single page.
Each page carries a continuous run of the base text against Ru-Yi's English translation, with reading notes drawn from Jizang (吉藏, 549–623), founder of the Sanlun school — the Chinese Madhyamaka lineage behind this site's Middle Treatise, Twelve Gate Treatise, and Hundred Treatise. His commentary repeatedly draws the sūtra's tathāgatagarbha doctrine back toward his own school's Madhyamaka reading, most strikingly where he maps "empty" and "not-empty" tathāgatagarbha directly onto the non-being/non-nonbeing middle way.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, verified against the base text for full coverage.
- Reading notes — "after Jizang" throughout, drawn from his Shengman Baoku.
- Cross-references to this site's Awakening of Faith, Treatise on Buddha Nature, Laṅkāvatāra, and Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment collections, wherever those texts quote or build directly on this sūtra.
- Terminology coined here for concepts this sūtra introduces first on this site — the two kinds of death, the four dwelling-grounds of affliction, and the ignorance-dwelling-ground.
The Sūtra's Own Structure
Jizang reads the fifteen chapters as one continuous argument moving from cause to fruit. Chapters One through Four establish the causal practice: Śrīmālā's praise of the Buddha and his prediction of her own future buddhahood, her Ten Great Vows and Three Great Vows, and her explanation of what it means to "embrace the true Dharma." Chapter Five delivers the resulting fruit — the One Vehicle — and is by far the sūtra's longest chapter, so this collection splits it across three pages. Chapters Six through Fourteen then unfold what that fruit consists of: the tathāgatagarbha, examined from progressively deeper angles, ending in the sūtra's hardest claim, that a mind pure by nature is nonetheless defiled. Jizang's own preface marks the fifteenth and final chapter as a deliberate turn outward — from Śrīmālā's "self-benefiting practice" (自利行) in the first fourteen chapters to "benefiting others" (利他行) in the last.
Read by Part
All ten parts are translated. Each links to the full bilingual text with reading notes after Jizang.
Translation Notes
Recurring terms, kept consistent across all ten parts. Where a term already has an established rendering elsewhere on this site's tathāgatagarbha pages, we reuse it; where this sūtra's own vocabulary — the two kinds of death, the four dwelling-grounds — has no site precedent, we coin one here. See the full translation notes for the complete glossary, and also this site's note on translation method.