Laughing Buddha Nirvana

This site is the world's first-ever website centred on an exploration and appreciation of the Buddha's final Mahayana scripture, the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra. This site also provides a complete English translation of the entire sutra (the 36-fascicle "Southern" version).

The website is dedicated with enormous gratitude and admiration to the memory of Kosho Yamamoto, the first man to earn the inestimable merit of translating the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra into English.

Inspired by this superlative sutra, I have created this website to encourage the accurate study and practice of what may be called "Nirvana Sutra Buddhism" or "Tathagatagarbha Buddhism" - a very positive, balanced, faith-promoting and spiritually affirmative manifestation of Buddhism, which recognises the hidden reality of the unconditioned, ego-free Buddha-Self (Buddha-atman) or Buddha Principle (Buddha-dhatu) in all beings. That Self (Atman) of the Buddha is a mystery, the non plus ultra of all spiritual Truth, beyond the reach and range of the worldly intellect: while the Buddha-Self is real, it is certainly not comparable to our mundane, ignorant little ego-self and cannot truly be captured within the net of words or concepts. Yet it is the only enduring Truth that can ever be found. Ultimately names fail it and concepts have to fall silent in the face of a transcendental , noumenal and immanent Reality that is beyond all grasping and confining. Its nature is non-dual, as it alone is Real, whereas samsara is illusory. There can be no dualistic relationship with what in fact does not truly exist (samsara)! Yet words can point towards Ultimate Truth and indicate the Path to tread for an Awakening into Reality's presence, which is all-pervading and eternal. That eternally present Truth is the Buddha, who is the sole genuine Reality. As the Mahayana Angulimaliya Sutra insists: "The Tathagata [Buddha] is the single Way, the single Refuge, and the single Truth."

It is important to recognise that the Mahaparinirvana Sutra is, in its own words, an uttara-tantra (definitive explanation of the Buddha's teachings given by the Buddha himself) - indeed an uttarottara-tantra, according to the Buddha: the most supreme explanation of his doctrines that the Buddha ever enunciated (coupled with that found in the great Lotus Sutra). Some Buddhists feel unsettled and even frightened by this sutra's cataphatic (positive) and affirmative teachings on the immortal reality of the Self or Soul (the atman) of the Buddha, present in all beings, and like to pretend that the scripture is of relatively low spiritual grade (in diametrical contradiction of the Buddha's own insistence that these teachings are definitive and final); but perhaps this unhappy resistance to the Sutra or the attendant wish (increasingly encountered amongst those with only a shallow knowledge, and even less practice of, Tathagatagarbha Buddhism) to pervert the Sutra's clear and cataphatic meaning stems from an unfortunate clinging and grasping at pre-conceived, narrow and rigid little notions of what Buddhism "must be" and from a needless, almost neurotic terror of certain word-labels ("Self" or "Essence" in this case), rather than issuing from any problematic nature of this great spiritual text itself. Whether one terms ultimate Truth the "Self", the "Tathagata", "Buddha-dhatu", "Tathagatagarbha", or Mahaparinirvana (and the Buddha uses all of these terms and more), the ineffable Reality towards which these words point remains itself unchanged and ever the same. At all events, entry into the Buddha-dhatu (Buddha Principle), also called the Tathagatagarbha (Buddha Matrix), is not for those who are frightened by certain words and their transcendental referents, or by such a subtle and recondite Truth as the Buddha Nature (and who cling to the provisional, contingent, incomplete "non-Self" teaching) - it is for those Bodhisattvas who have conquered all fear. The Buddha states this explicitly, when he declares: "you should know that the Tathagata-dhatu is the refuge of Bodhisattvas who have attained fearlessness ...", ("Tathagatagarbha" chapter, Faxian's Nirvana Sutra). Many Mahayana Buddhists who encounter this final scripture of the Buddha's display veritable symptoms of panic and terror in the face of a term they cannot brook, let alone embrace: the 'True Self'! Such people believe that only the prajna-paramita and sunyata (Emptiness) teachings of the Buddha have final validity and refuse to recognise that the Buddha did in fact teach an ultimate doctrine - that of the Tathagatagarbha ('Buddha Nature') - beyond those earlier forms of Mahayana Dharma. That the Buddha-dhatu doctrine is ultimate and definitive is what the Buddha himself insists upon in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra and other Tathagatagarbha sutras, and yet numerous disappointingly blinkered and pre-conditioned Mahayana Buddhists sadly and unjustly suppress or deny this truth; whether this is out of genuine ignorance of these scriptures or out of sheer dread at what does not fit into their pre-conceived, cosy (for them) yet constricted little world-view is not quite clear.

The plain fact, however, is that the Nirvana Sutra complements (and clarifies) the prajna-paramita doctrines. The teachings of the Nirvana Sutra represent the final elucidatory step within the sutras towards Nirvana and full Awakening: they (in alliance with the doctrines of the Lotus Sutra and the astonishingly cosmically dimensioned Avatamsaka Sutra) are definitive and full revelations by the Buddha of his ultimate Dharma. Other (earlier) teachings, such as those on prajna-paramita and Emptiness, did not present the total picture. They lacked the revelation of the Tathagatagarbha. Yet they helped lay the ground for the revelation of a selfless (i.e. ungraspable, untouchable, unselfish, all-compassionate, unconditioned, suffering-free, conceptually unfixable and non-dual) Self (the Eternal Buddha) that is far from being a mutating, time-bound ego or tangible entity - but is rather the ego-free, unconditioned, everlasting Buddha as the Dharmakaya (Body of Truth) - a mystery that only a Buddha (solely real being) can fully know and comprehend. Yet all beings can become Buddha - since they contain within their very body, here and now, the Buddha Principle which makes Awakening possible. Here, in this great Mahaparinirvana Sutra, we are given the final pieces of the spiritual jigsaw puzzle of the Dharma which reveals this truth. The picture thus becomes complete, and Dharma reaches its culmination and consummation.