Introduction

i.1Teaching the Practice of a Bodhisattva opens in a forest on the outskirts of the city of Vaiśālī, where the Buddha Śākyamuni has been living with a great assembly of worthy ones and bodhisattvas. One morning the Buddha and his assembly proceed to Vaiśālī to beg for alms, and as Śākyamuni crosses the threshold of the city a number of miracles take place. Suddenly blind people can see, deaf people can hear, and all beings in all realms of existence are filled with joy. A three-year-old boy named Ratnadatta witnesses these miracles and asks his mother how they have come to pass, and his mother responds with a set of verses that outline the precious qualities, inconceivable realization, and physical marks of the Buddha.

i.2This piques the boy Ratnadatta’s sense of devotion and adoration toward the Buddha, so he asks his mother to place him in the window so he might see the Thus-Gone One himself. As Śākyamuni and his assembly make their way to Ratnadatta’s door, he devises a plan to make an offering to the Buddha. Ratnadatta holds his toy, a thousand-petal golden lotus, in his hand and throws himself out of the window. Using his miraculous power, the Buddha halts Ratnadatta in midair, and, hovering there, the child tosses his golden lotus as an offering. The Buddha then performs another miracle by transforming it into a jeweled lotus parasol as Ratnadatta recites a short set of verses explaining his offering.

i.3This opening narrative sets the stage for a sequence of dialogues between the three-year-old Ratnadatta and the Buddha’s close disciples Maudgalyā­yana and Śāriputra as well as the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī. Much in the same way that famous works such as the Vimalakīrti­nirdeśa­sūtra and Saddharma­puṇḍarīka­sūtra frame Mahāyāna doctrine within an inversion of traditional hierarchies of authority, Teaching the Practice of a Bodhisattva places such esteemed elders as Maudgalyā­yana and Śāriputra on the receiving end of a critique delivered by a three-year-old boy. This is a startling inversion and can be interpreted as a bodhisattva’s critique of the path leading to the attainment of a worthy one. Additionally, with its primary interlocutor being a small child, Teaching the Practice of a Bodhisattva can be classified together with a number of other works in which a young boy (dāraka) or girl (dārikā) boldly challenges one or more of the elder disciples of the Buddha and defeats them in philosophical debate.

i.4The dialogues that unfold between Ratnadatta, Maudgalyā­yana, Śāriputra, Mañjuśrī, and the Buddha Śākyamuni proceed through a series of critiques of the ābhidharmika theory of phenomena and the assumption that any object of apprehending can be the foundation for the attainment of unsurpassed and perfect awakening. At the center of this critique is Ratnadatta’s assertion that the true practice of a bodhisattva rejects any religious view or practice that involves grasping founded upon the mental activity of apprehending (dmigs pa, ālambana). Those who continue to engage in such grasping, the child Ratnadatta tells us, are nothing but “childish beings.” Ratnadatta delivers a critique of Buddhists who reject the doctrine of emptiness, construct a distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa by imputing entities and their cessation, and mischaracterize insight (prajñā) as a “seed.” Ratnadatta’s teaching then concludes with a final bit of advice to Mañjuśrī on how to teach beginner bodhisattvas. This final teaching constitutes a complete inversion of the foundational elements of the cultivation of virtue in traditional Buddhism.

i.5Teaching the Practice of a Bodhisattva appears to have been cited only once in the extant Indian commentarial literature, in the Sūtrasamuccaya attributed to Nāgārjuna. It appears in both the Denkarma and Phangthangma royal Tibetan inventories of translated works, indicating that the first Tibetan translation of the text was completed by the early ninth century. The translators’ colophon to the text tells us it was translated by the Indian preceptors Jinamitra (ca. eighth century) and Prajñāvarman (ca. eighth century) along with the chief editor-translator Yeshé Dé (ca. eighth century) and others, which pushes the date of the Tibetan translation back to the late eighth century. The text was translated into Chinese twice; the first translation (T. 1583) was produced by the Kaśmīri monk Guṇavarman in 431 ᴄᴇ and the second (T. 488) was completed by Fa-hsien several centuries later in 989 ce.

i.6This translation was prepared based on the Tibetan translation in the Degé Kangyur in consultation with the Comparative Edition (Tib. dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace Kangyur. The translators and editors also benefited from consulting Jens Braarvig’s, edition, study, and translation of this text.