Mahāmegha

Mahāmegha (T. sprin chen po), or "The Great Cloud," is a Mahāyāna sūtra that is counted among the tathagatagarbha sutras.

Joshua Capitanio states:

The Great Cloud is an important Mahāyāna sūtra, known particularly as one source of the idea that a tathāgata is permanent and does not really pass into parinirvāṇa, but strategically displays an illusory body. To exemplify religious attainment for sentient beings, this emanated body seems to take birth, strive for awakening, and eventually pass into parinirvāṇa. In this sūtra this view is not merely implied or stated without comment, as it is in many sūtras, but is set out along with the claim that orthodox Buddhist doctrines of impermanence and selflessness are merely provisional teachings imparted by the Buddha for the sake of śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas who were too trepidatious and spiritually immature to accept the realities of permanence and true selfhood.

These themes are shared with the famous Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra, which exerted a tremendous influence on doctrinal developments in Chinese and East Asian Buddhism in the fifth and sixth centuries. Indeed, Chinese bibliographers classified The Great Cloud with a handful of other sūtras that they considered to be related to the Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra, arguably the earliest extant work on buddha nature (tathāgatagarbha). Several Tibetan authors, too, beginning in the fourteenth century with Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, listed the sūtra among those related to buddha nature or those of definitive meaning.

The Great Cloud is also thematically related to The Golden Light (Suvarṇaprabhāsa, Toh 555–557), and a dialogue that occurs in chapter 37 between the brahmin Kauṇḍinya and a Licchavi youth is also found in the various Tibetan and Chinese recensions of that discourse.

Title variants

• Mahāmegha (T. sprin chen po) - "The Great Cloud"
• Mahāmeghasūtra
• Ārya-mahāmegha-nāma-mahāyāna-sūtra (T. ’phags pa sprin chen po zhes bya ba theg pa chen po’i mdo) - The Noble Mahāyāna Sūtra “The Great Cloud”

Translation

• Joshua Capitanio (2023), The Great Cloud , 84000 Reading Room