Astus wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 8:03 am
The Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra was translated to Chinese in the early 7th century by Prabhākaramitra, and it uses the term four Dharma seals (四法印; T31n1604_p0646a15). The same term is also found in the Vimalakirti sutra commentary (T38n1776_p0442a25) by Huiyuan 慧遠 (523~592, a disciple of Kumarajiva), and that seems to be the earliest occurrence of 四法印 based on a simple CBETA search, but probably there are texts preceding it.
nyanasagara from the Buddhist subreddit (not sure if they're on this forum at all) sent me some screenshots a week or two ago from Bhaviveka, where in a series of argumentations for the validity the Mahayana sutras, he mentions the Mahayana teachings do not conflict with, and accord with, the dharma seals.
So that's another 6th century CE reference to the seals, independently of the Chinese canon.
Several years ago, I read a Jan Nattier paper where she argued that perhaps the Three Marks of Existence was mistranslated into 'seals' and that the Chinese developed this concept. It seems users here could've debunked that immediately, but seeing it referenced unambiguously as dharma seals to verify buddhavacana outside of the Chinese textual tradition convinced me Nattier's wrong on this.
Spurred by your mentioning of the Chinese translation of the Mahayanasutralamkara, I wanted to check if we might be able to check this usage against the Tibetan version, if it wasn't translated from the Chinese, and if so, I think we could make a case for the four dharma seals being dated to
at least the 4th century with Asanga.
http://lirs.ru/lib/Mahayanasutralamkara ... n,2004.pdf Thurman's translation of the Tibetan.
The intro establishes the Tibetan appears to have been translated from the Sanskrit, not the Chinese. And on page 194 of hte text, we have:
The remedies taught for these (false habits) are the three concentrations on voidness91
and so on, and the four epitomes of the Dharma.92
The footnote reads:
Sthiramati gives his version of the four epitomes (P Mi 2147 ff): all created things are
impermanent; all contaminated things are suffering; all things are selfless; peace is Nirvana
So very clearly the four seals here. I don't think that's open-and-shut, and we'd have to look at the datings of the Sanskrit versions and if there are any differences there, but it looks to me like this may be an early-ish concept in the northern transmission.