The ''Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha sutra'' (

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the la ...

, ''Compendium of the Reality of All Tathāgatas'')'','' also known as the ''Tattvasaṃgraha Tantra'', is an important seventh century Indian Buddhist tantric text.Silk, Jonathan A. (editor) ''Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume I: Literature and Languages,'' p. 373. Although the scripture refers itself as a

Mahayana sutra The Mahāyāna sūtras are a broad genre of Buddhist scriptures (''sūtra'') that are accepted as canonical and as ''buddhavacana'' ("Buddha word") in Mahāyāna Buddhism. They are largely preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon, the Tibetan ...

, the content is mainly tantric in nature and thus is sometimes called a

tantra Tantra (; sa, तन्त्र, lit=loom, weave, warp) are the esoteric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism that developed on the Indian subcontinent from the middle of the 1st millennium CE onwards. The term ''tantra'', in the India ...

. This work is an important source for the

Shingon Shingon monks at Mount Koya is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asia, originally spread from India to China through traveling monks such as Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra. Kn ...

tradition. This text was very important for the development of the

Vajrayana Vajrayāna ( sa, वज्रयान, "thunderbolt vehicle", "diamond vehicle", or "indestructible vehicle"), along with Mantrayāna, Guhyamantrayāna, Tantrayāna, Secret Mantra, Tantric Buddhism, and Esoteric Buddhism, are names referring t ...

Yoga tantra Classes of Tantra in Tibetan Buddhism refers to the categorization of Buddhist tantric scriptures in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism inherited numerous tantras and forms of tantric practice from medieval Indian Buddhist Tantra. There wer ...

traditions in India, Tibet, China, Japan and Sumatra, amongst others. The ''Tattvasaṃgraha'' is extant in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. Weinberger (2003: p. 4) holds:

The ''Compendium of Principles'' marks the emergence of mature Indian Buddhist tantra at the end of the seventh century, and it immediately spawned a body of literary progeny that has played a central and enduring role in the development of tantric Buddhism in India, Tibet, China, and Japan. Consolidated over time into traditions known in some Indian circles as Yoga Tantra, they spread as widely as Śrı Lanka, Southeast Asia, Khotan, Mongolia, and Sumatra.

Etymology

Tattvasaṃgraha may be

parse Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lati ...

d into 'tattva'+'saṃgraha'.

Tattva According to various Indian schools of philosophy, ''tattvas'' () are the elements or aspects of reality that constitute human experience. In some traditions, they are conceived as an aspect of deity. Although the number of ''tattvas'' varies d ...

may be parsed into 'Tat'+'tva' and may also be orthographically rendered in English as Tattwa and means 'thatness', 'principle', 'reality' or 'truth'. 'Saṃgraha' may be parsed into 'saṃ'+'graha'. 'Saṃ' may be spelled as either 'sam' or 'san' as the

anunasika Anusvara (Sanskrit: ') is a symbol used in many Indic scripts to mark a type of nasal sound, typically transliterated . Depending on its location in the word and the language for which it is used, its exact pronunciation can vary. In the context ...

ṃ indicates a nasalization of the preceding vowel before unpronounced "m" or "n". sam refers to origin, birth or dependent origination; sambodhi, sambhava.

Graha Navagraha are nine heavenly bodies and deities that influence human life on Earth according to Hinduism and Hindu astrology. The term is derived from ''nava'' ( sa, नव "nine") and ''graha'' ( sa, ग्रह "planet, seizing, laying hold of, ...

(Devanagari: ग्रह) means 'seizing', 'laying hold of', 'holding'.

History and dissemination

Tucci inaugurated scholarship in a western language on the ''Tattvasaṃgraha'' with his exploration on the Maheśvara subjugation myth it holds. Snellgrove continued to stake a foundation of western scholarship in both his publication of the facsimile reproduction of one of the extant Sanskrit manuscripts, a publication opened by a scholarly introduction and also his presentation of tantra in volume one of '' Indo-Tibetan Buddhism''.Snellgrove, David (1987). ''Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors.'' Volume One: pp.117-330 Boston, USA: Shambhala Publications, Inc. (v.1). Todaro has provided a translation of the first section of the tantra, accompanied by a study of the role of the ''Tattvasaṃgraha'' and associated texts in the tradition of

Kūkai Kūkai (; 27 July 774 – 22 April 835Kūkai was born in 774, the 5th year of the Hōki era; his exact date of birth was designated as the fifteenth day of the sixth month of the Japanese lunar calendar, some 400 years later, by the Shingon sec ...

, founder of Japanese

Notes

References

*Weinberger, Steven Neal (2003). ''The Significance of Yoga Tantra and the Compendium of Principles (Tattvasaṃgraha Tantra) within Tantric Buddhism in India and Tibet''. Dissertation. University of Virginia, USA: Department of Religious Studies. Source
Internet Archive
*{{cite journal, last1=Weinberger, first1=Steven Neal , title=The Yoga Tantras and the Social Context of Their Transmission to Tibet, journal=Chung-Hwa Journal of Buddhist Studies, date=2010, volume=23, pages=131-166, url=http://chinesebuddhiststudies.org/previous_issues/chbj2306Steve%20131-166.pdf Buddhist tantras