Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra — Translation Notes
These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra (勝鬘師子吼一乘大方便方廣經, “The Sūtra of Queen Śrīmālā’s Lion’s Roar on the One Vehicle, Great Skillful Means, and the Vaipulya”), Taishō T0353, translated into Chinese by Guṇabhadra (求那跋陀羅) of the Liu Song dynasty in 436 CE. They exist so that vocabulary stays consistent across all ten parts, and so that terminology without precedent anywhere else on this site is recorded for any later text to inherit rather than re-coin.
The text, and why it matters
No complete Sanskrit manuscript of this sūtra survives, though substantial Sanskrit fragments have been recovered and a full Tibetan translation exists alongside two Chinese ones — Guṇabhadra’s (T0353, translated here) and an earlier, longer version embedded as the forty-eighth assembly of the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra (大寶積經, T0310). This sūtra is one of the earliest and most influential sources for tathāgatagarbha doctrine in the entire Buddhist tradition: it is here that the paired terms “the empty tathāgatagarbha” (空如來藏) and “the not-empty tathāgatagarbha” (不空如來藏) are first set out, here that the tathāgatagarbha is identified outright with the dharmakāya, and here that the famous, endlessly-quoted paradox appears — that the mind, inherently pure by nature, is nonetheless defiled by affliction. Every later tathāgatagarbha text on this site quotes or leans on this sūtra: the Awakening of Faith, the Treatise on Buddha Nature, the Laṅkāvatāra, and the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment all cite it directly or build on its architecture.
The base text runs to roughly 10,200 Chinese characters (the sūtra’s own narrative and doctrinal content; not counting the CBETA colophon and donation notice at the close), spread across fifteen chapters of very uneven length — the shortest, Chapter Eleven, is three sentences; the longest, Chapter Five, runs to nearly a third of the whole sūtra. This collection therefore does not translate one chapter per page, the way this site’s Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment collection does; instead it splits at natural topic boundaries within and across chapters, aiming for pages of comparable length. See Structure below for the resulting map.
Reading-note sourcing
Per this site’s commentator-vetting convention, reading notes are grounded in a named commentator. This collection follows Jizang (吉藏, 549–623), founder of the Sanlun (Three Treatises) school of Chinese Madhyamaka, whose commentary Shengman Baoku (勝鬘寶窟, “The Treasure Cave of the Śrīmālā [Sūtra]”, T1744) is one of the two great surviving Sui-dynasty commentaries on this sūtra (the other being Huiyuan’s). Jizang was chosen deliberately: his own Treatise on the Three Treatises school of thought — the Middle Treatise, the Twelve Gate Treatise, and the Hundred Treatise, all already translated on this site — makes him the natural bridge between this sūtra’s tathāgatagarbha doctrine and the Madhyamaka reading already established here, and his commentary repeatedly makes exactly that bridge explicit: he glosses the sūtra’s “empty and not-empty tathāgatagarbha” directly against his own school’s non-being/non-nonbeing middle way, and dissolves the sūtra’s collapse of the three refuges into one refuge with the same rhetorical move his school uses to dissolve apparent doctrinal multiplicities into a single underlying reality. Jizang’s own preface to his commentary divides the sūtra’s fifteen chapters into fourteen chapters of “self-benefiting practice” (自利行) and one final chapter of “benefiting others” (利他行) — a division this collection’s ten parts respect in its own final part. Both author and commentator died well over 1,300 years ago; neither the sūtra’s translation nor Jizang’s commentary carries any modern copyright.
Structure
| Part | Base text covers | Chinese length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 如來真實義功德章第一 (the nidāna; Śrīmālā’s letter and verses of praise; the Buddha’s prediction of her future buddhahood) | 698 characters |
| 2 | 十受章第二 (the Ten Great Vows); 三願章第三 (the Three Great Vows) | 867 characters |
| 3 | 攝受章第四 (Embracing the True Dharma: the cloud, water, earth, and treasure-store similes; the six pāramitās; the three renunciations of body, life, and wealth; factionalism as the Dharma nears extinction) | 2,003 characters |
| 4 | 一乘章第五, opening portion (the One Vehicle; the Lake Anavatapta simile; why arhats still have fear; why arhat/pratyekabuddha “nirvāṇa” is only the Buddha’s skillful device) | 825 characters |
| 5 | 一乘章第五, middle portion (the two kinds of death; the four dwelling-grounds of affliction and the ignorance-dwelling-ground’s supremacy; the three kinds of mind-made body; “a fraction of nirvāṇa” versus complete nirvāṇa) | 1,332 characters |
| 6 | 一乘章第五, closing portion (the Tathāgata’s own lion’s roar; three kinds of boundlessness; why refuge in Dharma and Saṅgha collapses into refuge in the Tathāgata alone) | 805 characters |
| 7 | 無邊聖諦章第六 (the boundless noble truths); 如來藏章第七 (the tathāgatagarbha, named); 法身章第八 (the dharmakāya) | 917 characters |
| 8 | 空義隱覆真實章第九 (the empty and not-empty tathāgatagarbha); 一諦章第十 (the one truth); 一依章第十一 (the one basis); 顛倒真實章第十二 (inverted views, and what is real) | 906 characters |
| 9 | 自性清淨章第十三 (the naturally pure mind, and how it comes to be defiled); 真子章第十四 (the true child of the Buddha) | 938 characters |
| 10 | 勝鬘章第十五 (Śrīmālā’s own lion’s roar; the sūtra’s fourteen names; its transmission to Śakra and Ānanda) | 877 characters |
Total: roughly 10,200 characters, split at natural topic boundaries — most chapter divisions are the sūtra’s own, but the very long Chapter Five is split into three parts (4, 5, 6 above) at the points where its own subject shifts from the One Vehicle itself, to the two kinds of death and four dwelling-grounds, to the closing lion’s roar and the one refuge.
Core terminology
Renderings are matched first to this site’s existing tathāgatagarbha and Yogācāra pages (the Awakening of Faith, the Treatise on Buddha Nature, the Laṅkāvatāra, the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment) wherever the same term already appears there; where this sūtra’s own vocabulary has no site precedent, a rendering is coined fresh and recorded here.
| Chinese | English | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 如來藏 | tathāgatagarbha | Left untranslated as a loanword, matching every prior tathāgatagarbha-line text on this site. This sūtra is the doctrine’s own locus classicus. |
| 空如來藏 / 不空如來藏 | the empty tathāgatagarbha / the not-empty tathāgatagarbha | Matched to this site’s Treatise on Buddha Nature (which already quotes this sūtra’s “not empty” line directly) and anticipated by the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment’s reading notes, which named both terms in advance of this collection’s existence. “Empty” describes the store as separate from, free of, and different from every affliction that conceals it; “not-empty” describes the identical store as inseparable from, and never different from, the Buddha’s own qualities beyond the sands of the Ganges. Per Jizang, “empty” and “not-empty” both describe what is stored, never the storing wisdom or the tathāgatagarbha’s own existence — neither term suggests the tathāgatagarbha itself might or might not exist. |
| 法身 | dharmakāya | Kept as a loanword, matching this site’s Treatise on Buddha Nature and Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment pages. |
| 常樂我淨 (as applied to the dharmakāya) | the pāramitā of permanence, the pāramitā of bliss, the pāramitā of self, and the pāramitā of purity | Matched verbatim to this site’s Treatise on Buddha Nature, which already quotes this exact passage of this sūtra. |
| 意生身 | mind-made body | Matched to this site’s Laṅkāvatāra translation, which treats this term at length; this sūtra uses it for the transformation-bodies of arhats, pratyekabuddhas, and great-power bodhisattvas rather than for a bodhisattva’s own attainment at the eighth ground, but the underlying term and image (a body that moves as unobstructed as thought) are identical. |
| 攝受正法 | embracing the true Dharma | Coined fresh for this collection; the sūtra’s own central practice-term, appearing so often that Chapter Four is named for it. 攝受 by itself (of beings, rather than of the Dharma) is rendered “embracing” as well, kept deliberately parallel to 折伏 “subduing” wherever the sūtra pairs them, since the sūtra treats “subduing-and-embracing” as one compound method for causing the Dharma to abide long in the world. |
| 分段死 / 不思議變易死 | segmented death / the death of inconceivable transformation | Coined fresh for this collection. “Segmented death” names ordinary rebirth, marked by a fixed bodily form and a fixed lifespan; “the death of inconceivable transformation” names the subtle, moment-to-moment change still undergone by arhats, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas who have not yet reached buddhahood, lacking fixed form or lifespan, ending only with the attainment of buddhahood itself. |
| 住地 | dwelling-ground | Coined fresh for this collection, for the deep, standing condition that produces “arising afflictions” (起煩惱) moment to moment, as opposed to those arising afflictions themselves. The sūtra names four: 見一處住地 the dwelling-ground of view-processes, 欲愛住地 the dwelling-ground of desire-attachment, 色愛住地 the dwelling-ground of form-attachment, and 有愛住地 the dwelling-ground of existence-attachment — and then names a fifth, categorically different and incomparably more powerful than the other four combined: 無明住地 the ignorance-dwelling-ground, this sūtra’s name for what later tathāgatagarbha literature calls avidyā-vāsanābhūmi. |
| 蘇息處 | resting place | The arhat/pratyekabuddha’s own name, per this sūtra, for what they mistake as final nirvāṇa — a way-station, not the destination. |
| 一乘 / 第一義乘 | the One Vehicle / the vehicle of the first principle | “One Vehicle” matches the general Mahāyāna ekayāna sense already familiar from this site’s Lotus Sūtra and Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment pages; “the vehicle of the first principle” is this sūtra’s own further term, naming the One Vehicle specifically as what all three vehicles (śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva) turn out, on final analysis, to be. |
| 師子吼 | lion’s roar | Standard; matches the sūtra’s own Sanskrit title (siṃhanāda, “lion’s roar”), used both for the Tathāgata’s own culminating declaration in Chapter Five and for Queen Śrīmālā’s closing declaration in Chapter Fifteen. |
| 真子 / 佛真子 | the true child [of the Buddha] | Matched to this site’s Treatise on Buddha Nature, which already renders a closely related phrase from this same sūtra as “a true child at the Tathāgata’s own breast.” |
| 一諦 | the one truth | This sūtra’s term for the cessation-truth alone, considered as the only one of the four noble truths that is unconditioned and therefore ultimately true. |
| 一依 | the one basis | Deliberately distinguished from “refuge” (used for 歸依, the three refuges of Buddha/Dharma/Saṅgha discussed elsewhere in this sūtra), since 依 here names which of the four noble truths itself serves as the ground the other three depend on, not an act of taking refuge. |
| 顛倒 | inverted views | Standard rendering for viparyāsa, matched to this site’s existing usage wherever the term appears (e.g. the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment’s four marks of self). |
What Jizang’s commentary structure contributes
Jizang reads this sūtra as a single continuous argument moving from cause to fruit: Chapters One through Four establish the causal practice (arousing bodhicitta through Śrīmālā’s praise and prediction, then her vows, then her practice of embracing the true Dharma), Chapter Five delivers the resulting fruit (the One Vehicle), and Chapters Six through Fourteen unfold what that fruit actually consists of — the tathāgatagarbha, seen from progressively deeper angles, ending in the sūtra’s most difficult claim, that a mind inherently pure by nature is nonetheless defiled. His own preface then marks Chapter Fifteen as a final turn outward, from self-cultivation to benefiting others. Where his commentary explicitly ties a passage to the Madhyamaka texts already translated on this site — the Middle Treatise above all — or to the Lotus Sūtra’s expedient-means doctrine, or where he records genuine disagreement among earlier commentators (he frequently cites “teachers south of the Yangtze,” 江南諸師, against his own reading), this collection’s reading notes reproduce that material rather than treating each chapter as settled or uncontested.
A note for future tathāgatagarbha-line texts
The renderings for the two kinds of death, the four dwelling-grounds, and the ignorance-dwelling-ground have no prior precedent anywhere else on this site and were coined here for the first time, since this is the sūtra where these terms originate. Future translators working on texts that inherit this vocabulary — the Ratnagotravibhāga, or any later text quoting these specific terms — should check this glossary before coining fresh renderings for the same concepts.