Jnanasutra

Jnanasutra (Wylie: ye shes mdo ,^[1] 5th-6th century) was a Dzogchen practitioner of Vajrayāna Buddhism who was a disciple of Sri Singha. Jnanasutra was a spiritual brother of Vimalamitra, another principal disciple of Sri Singha.^[2] Another Jnanasutra was about three centuries later.

Disambiguation

There appear to be two Jnanasutras with different Tibetan orthographies for their names. The first, Wylie: ye shes mdo , flourished from the 5th-6th centuries and was a disciple of Sri Singha; the other was a lotsawa, Wylie: ye shes sde , of the 8th-9th century of the first wave of the Nyingma school, which began in the 7th century and continued until the time of Atiśa.

In Jigme Lingpa's terma of the ngöndro of the Longchen Nyingthig he writes what approximates the phonemic Sanskrit of 'Jnanasutra' in Tibetan script as Tibetan: ཛྙཱ་ན་སཱུ་ཏྲ, Wylie: dznyā na sū tra , rather than his name in Tibetan and this comes just after a sentence to Sri Singha and before mentioning Vimalamitra.

Biography

According to Tarthang Tulku (1980),^[3] Jnanasutra was the principal lotsawa of the first wave of translations from Sanskrit to Tibetan.^[4]

Jnanasutra died 994 years after Gautama Buddha's parinirvana.^[5]

See also

• Menngagde

Texts

• Madhyamākalaṃkāra

References

1. Dharma Dictionary (2008). Jnanasutra. Source: (accessed: January 29, 2008)
2. Dowman, Keith (undated). Legends of the Dzogchen Masters. Source: (accessed: January 29, 2008)
3. Tarthang Tulku (1980). Guide to the Nyingma Edition of the sDe-dge bKa '-'gyur/bsTan-'gur. Vol. 1, California, USA, 1980.
4. Rhaldi, Sherab (undated). 'Ye-Shes-sDe; Tibetan Scholar and Saint'. Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library. Source: (accessed: Wednesday April 1, 2009)
5. Dharma Dictionary (2008). ye shes mdo. Source: (accessed: January 29, 2008)