A Queen Is Promised Buddhahood
This page opens Ru-Yi's translation of the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra (勝鬘師子吼一乘大方便方廣經), translated into Chinese by Guṇabhadra in 436 CE. It carries the sūtra's nidāna — a letter from King Prasenajit and Queen Mallikā that summons their daughter Queen Śrīmālā to faith — her verses of praise when the Buddha appears to her in the sky, and his prediction that she will one day become the Tathāgata Samantaprabha.
Translation Method
The Chinese source is Guṇabhadra's translation (求那跋陀羅, an Indian monk who arrived in China in 435 CE), completed the following year under the Liu Song dynasty. No complete Sanskrit manuscript survives, though substantial fragments have been recovered and a full Tibetan translation exists; a second, longer Chinese translation also survives as the forty-eighth assembly of the Ratnakūṭa Sūtra. This sūtra is the locus classicus of tathāgatagarbha doctrine — the source of the paired terms "the empty tathāgatagarbha" and "the not-empty tathāgatagarbha," and of the sūtra's most quoted line, that a mind inherently pure by nature is nonetheless defiled by affliction. This collection reads it with the commentary of Jizang (吉藏, 549–623), founder of the Sanlun school of Chinese Madhyamaka — the lineage behind this site's Middle Treatise, Twelve Gate Treatise, and Hundred Treatise — whose Shengman Baoku (勝鬘寶窟, "The Treasure Cave of the Śrīmālā," T1744) repeatedly draws this sūtra's tathāgatagarbha doctrine back toward his own school's Madhyamaka reading. Classical text is set in the left-hand column below, our English in the right. See also this site's note on translation method.
The Letter That Summoned a Buddha
如是我聞：一時，佛住舍衛國祇樹給孤獨園。時，波斯匿王及末利夫人信法未久，共相謂言：「勝鬘夫人是我之女，聰慧利根，通敏易悟，若見佛者必速解法，心得無疑。宜時遣信，發其道意。」夫人白言：「今正是時。」王及夫人與勝鬘書，略讚如來無量功德，即遣內人名旃提羅，使人奉書至阿踰闍國，入其宮內敬授勝鬘。勝鬘得書歡喜頂受，讀誦受持，生希有心，向旃提羅而說偈言：
Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha was dwelling at Śrāvastī, in Jeta Grove, in Anāthapiṇḍada's park. At that time King Prasenajit and Queen Mallikā, having come to faith in the Dharma not long before, said to one another: "Queen Śrīmālā is our daughter — wise and sharp-minded, quick to understand and easily awakened. If she could see the Buddha, she would surely grasp the Dharma at once, her mind free of any doubt. We should send word to her now, to rouse her aspiration for the path." The queen said, "Now is exactly the time." So the king and queen wrote a letter to Śrīmālā, briefly praising the Tathāgata's immeasurable virtues, and sent a palace attendant to carry the letter to the kingdom of Ayodhyā, to enter the palace there and respectfully present it to Śrīmālā. Śrīmālā received the letter with joy, bowed her head to it, and read and recited it, upholding it with a mind that had never known anything so rare. She said to the messenger, in verse:
A Buddha Appears in the Sky
「我聞佛音聲， 世所未曾有；
所言真實者， 應當修供養。
仰惟佛世尊！ 普為世間出；
亦應垂哀愍， 必令我得見。」
即生此念時， 佛於空中現；
普放淨光明， 顯示無比身。
勝鬘及眷屬， 頭面接足禮；
咸以清淨心， 歎佛實功德：
「如來妙色身， 世間無與等；
無比不思議， 是故今敬禮。
如來色無盡， 智慧亦復然；
一切法常住， 是故我歸依。
降伏心過惡， 及與身四種，
已到難伏地， 是故禮法王。
知一切爾焰， 智慧身自在，
攝持一切法， 是故今敬禮。
敬禮過稱量， 敬禮無譬類，
敬禮無邊法， 敬禮難思議。
哀愍覆護我， 令法種增長；
此世及後生， 願佛常攝受。」
「我久安立汝， 前世已開覺；
今復攝受汝， 未來生亦然。」
「我已作功德， 現在及餘世；
如是眾善本， 唯願見攝受。」
"I have heard the Buddha's voice — something the world has never known before. What it speaks is true; I ought to make offerings in return.
I look up in reverence to the World-Honored Buddha, who has arisen for the sake of the whole world. May he too show me his compassion, and surely let me see him."
At the very moment this thought arose, the Buddha appeared in the sky, sending out pure light on every side, showing a body beyond compare.
Śrīmālā and her retinue bowed their heads to his feet, and with minds entirely pure, praised the Buddha's true virtues:
"The Tathāgata's wondrous form has no equal in the world — incomparable, inconceivable; for this I bow in reverence now.
The Tathāgata's form is inexhaustible, and so too is his wisdom; every dharma abides forever — for this I take refuge.
He has subdued every fault of mind, and the four kinds of fault of body as well; he has reached the ground so hard to subdue — for this I bow to the King of Dharma.
He knows every object there is to know, his body of wisdom is sovereign and free, he holds and sustains every dharma — for this I bow in reverence now.
I bow to what surpasses all measure; I bow to what has no likeness; I bow to the boundless Dharma; I bow to what defies all thought.
Have compassion, shelter and protect me, so that the seed of the Dharma may grow — in this life and every life to come, may the Buddha always embrace me."
[The Buddha answered:] "I established you long ago; in a former life you had already awakened. Now I embrace you again, and in lives to come it will be the same."
[Śrīmālā said:] "I have already done good work, in this present life and in others; may these many roots of goodness — I wish only to be embraced."
A student raises what looks like a real contradiction: "Tathāgata" (如來, "thus-come") implies motion, so how can the term apply to a dharmakāya that never moves at all? Jizang's answer becomes his general key for this whole sūtra: "as what was originally concealed is now revealed, this too may be called 'coming'" (如本隱今顯，亦得稱來). The Buddha does not travel through space to reach Śrīmālā — he "appears" the way something hidden becomes visible, and that counts as a coming in its own right. This is the same move Jizang will later use to explain how the tathāgatagarbha and the dharmakāya can be one and the same reality under two names, concealed or revealed.
Jizang also notices something easy to read past: Śrīmālā's praise puts the Buddha's visible form first, his wisdom second, and the eternal Dharma last — the reverse of the standard order used in the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, which lists liberation, then dharmakāya, then prajñā. His explanation: Śrīmālā is not reciting a doctrinal outline, she is looking up at an actual golden body in the sky and reasoning backward from what she sees — "she is facing the golden countenance, and tracing the trace back to its root" (仰對金容，就迹尋本). The order of her praise follows the order of her own gaze, not a fixed theological sequence. He also reads the verses against the Laṅkāvatāra's scheme of four buddha-bodies — noting the poem's own four moves (the initial vision, "his form is inexhaustible," "his wisdom likewise," "every dharma abides forever") track the response-body, the form-body, the wisdom-body, and the suchness-body in turn, one line doing the work of an entire technical category.
Underneath the praise verses sits a genuine dispute Jizang records rather than resolves outright: does the dharmakāya have form, or not? One camp — he names three Jiangnan teachers by title — cites scripture for "formless," quoting a passage that calls the Tathāgata's body "without form or mark, without root, without abode, since it is unborn and unceasing." Another camp cites scripture just as directly for "has form," quoting a passage praising the Buddha's "wondrous form, ever radiant and at peace, never changing with the passage of time." Jizang declines to pick a winner. Instead he reaches for Nāgārjuna's own move in the Middle Treatise on self and non-self — "the buddhas speak sometimes of a self, sometimes of no self; within the true mark of all dharmas, there is neither self nor non-self" — and applies the identical logic to form: neither "has form" nor "is formless" is the fixed truth being asserted; both are provisional praise, pitched at whatever a given passage needs to correct.
He raises one further puzzle before moving on: if the Buddha's own wisdom "cuts off" every possible predicate about itself, as the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra insists, how can anyone worship him at all without falsely predicating something? His answer leans on a paradox he will use again and again in this sūtra: worship remains real not despite this cutting-off but alongside it — "not two, yet two; two, yet not two." The relationship between the one who bows and the one bowed to is, in the same breath, empty of any fixed ground and perfectly functional as devotion. Neither side cancels the other.
The Buddha's Prediction
爾時，勝鬘及諸眷屬，頭面禮佛，佛於眾中即為受記：「汝歎如來真實功德，以此善根，當於無量阿僧祇劫天人之中為自在王，一切生處常得見我，現前讚歎如今無異。當復供養無量阿僧祇佛，過二萬阿僧祇劫當得作佛，號普光如來、應、正遍知。彼佛國土，無諸惡趣、老病衰惱不適意苦，亦無不善惡業道名；彼國眾生色力壽命、五欲眾具，皆悉快樂，勝於他化自在諸天；彼諸眾生純一大乘，諸有修習善根眾生皆集於彼。」
勝鬘夫人得受記時，無量眾生、諸天及人願生彼國，世尊悉記皆當往生。
Then Śrīmālā and her whole retinue bowed their heads to the Buddha's feet, and the Buddha, in the midst of the assembly, at once gave her this prediction: "By this root of goodness — your praise of the Tathāgata's true virtues — you shall, for immeasurable, innumerable kalpas, be a sovereign ruler among gods and men, and in every place you are reborn you shall always see me, praising me before me exactly as you do now. You shall then make offerings to immeasurable, innumerable buddhas, and after twenty thousand innumerable kalpas you shall attain buddhahood, named the Tathāgata Samantaprabha, Worthy One, Perfectly and Fully Awakened. In that buddha-land there will be no evil destinies, no old age, sickness, decline, or any suffering that disturbs the mind, nor even the name of any unwholesome path of action; the beings of that land will have beauty, strength, and long life, and every one of the five desired things in abundance, their happiness surpassing even the gods of the Heaven of Free Enjoyment of Others' Emanations. All the beings there will be of a single Mahāyāna nature — every being anywhere who has cultivated roots of goodness will gather there."
When Śrīmālā received this prediction, immeasurable beings — gods and humans alike — vowed to be reborn in that land, and the World-Honored One predicted that every one of them would indeed be reborn there.
Jizang classifies this prediction using a sixfold typology drawn from the Bodhisattvabhūmi: predictions differ by whether bodhicitta has yet arisen, and by whether they are given face-to-face or not, at a fixed future time or an unfixed one. Śrīmālā's is face-to-face, since the Buddha speaks it directly to her. Her near-term reward — sovereignty among gods and humans for innumerable kalpas — he classifies as time-unfixed, but her distant fruition, buddhahood after exactly twenty thousand kalpas under a named title, is time-fixed, because a specific count and a specific name are both given. The two halves of one prediction can belong to different categories of the same typology.
On why she is named Samantaprabha ("Universal Light," 普光) specifically, Jizang treats buddha-names as causally motivated rather than arbitrary — some come from a former clan name, some from an emitted sound, some from a simile, and some, as here, from the circumstances of the causal vow itself: "from having earlier seen the Buddha emit universal radiant light and, from that, forming her aspiration, she will therefore be named Samantaprabha when she attains buddhahood" (從前見佛普放光明起心願求，故成佛時名曰普光). The name is a record of this exact scene — the light in the sky that answered her verse — carried forward twenty thousand kalpas.
On the pure land itself, Jizang flags a real tension rather than smoothing it over: strictly speaking, "a buddha in reality has no land" (佛實無土), since a buddha's own realization has no fixed territory to it at all. The vivid description of Samantaprabha's realm — free of every evil destiny, every being of one Mahāyāna nature — is, on his reading, a provisional teaching pitched at building confidence in ordinary listeners not yet capable of the higher point: "it is only provisionally recorded, so as to draw in common trust" (既以權記，引於庸信). How richly a buddha-land gets described tracks the strength of the bodhisattva's own accumulated merit, not a literal plot of ground waiting somewhere to be occupied.
Part 1 Complete
This closes Part 1: the letter that summoned Queen Śrīmālā to faith, her vision of the Buddha and verses of praise, and his prediction of her future buddhahood as the Tathāgata Samantaprabha. Part 2 turns to what Śrīmālā does with this prediction — the Ten Great Vows she takes before the Buddha, confirmed by flowers raining from an empty sky, and the Three Great Vows that gather all ten into one.
Continue to Part 2 — Ten Vows and Three, Folded Into One →